Listen to Borderline Personality Disorder

At any given moment Sally thinks I am either her perfect lover or her worst enemy, so I never know what to expect when she sends me a voicemail.  Is she sending a message of radiant love or of raging hatred?   Life has always been an emotional roller-coaster for the woman I call Sally.  She has struggled all her adult life with  borderline personality disorder.   [To listen to her messages, left click on the highlighted filename below.]

 

 VOICEMAILS.mp3

 
She either loved me or she hated me, and I never knew when or why her emotions would change.  In the course of our relationship, she broke up with me a dozen times.  One way to understand her mood swings is to listen to her voicemails.  In the first message she asked for her ring back just hours after she broke up with me.  Each message is a reflection of how she felt at a moment in time.  The messages are in the order I received them.  Her obscene messages are expressions of her uncontrollable rage.  She wanted to get rid of her feelings of hatred so she shared them with me.

Here is a summary of the nine voicemails:

“Hi Sweetie.  I want (my ring) back. ... Give me a call.  You know my number.”

“You are a fucking son of a bitch!  Don't ever darken my doorway..."

“You have a wife.  I am your wife.  I’ll be there for you. ...”

“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?”

“That was beautiful.  Shana Tova. ...”

“My Christmas message for you...  You are a piece of shit! ...”

“Good morning. ... I love you.”

(screaming) “Screw you!  Screw you!"

“I want to apologize for all the nasty stuff.   I'm sorry. ...”

She had the same emotional dichotomy with everybody from her past: her  parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends, lovers, husbands, and children.   She is a lifelong injustice collector.  She remembers everything her birth family ever did that upset her.  She experiences these memories as evidence of total betrayal.  She hates her mother, her father, and all her siblings.  At the same time she desperately wants to be loved and in times of crisis Sally will cry hysterically, sobbing “I want my Mommy, I wamt my Mommy.”

At no time has she ever given any indication that she can visualize another person as a three-dimensional human being.  She can talk about someone from her past for hours without ever actually describing them in a coherent way.  She doesn’t seem to understand that everyone she has ever known has a shadow.  Every person is a mixture of the good and the not-so-good.  In her mind, a lover is perfect but his shadow is evil incarnate.  She experiences each lover as if he were two separate people.

At times, she can reflect on a former lover, remember a good time, and begin to speak about him as if she was still in love.  But then she will suddenly remember his shadow and fly into a rage.  She once reflected on how much she loved her first husband.  Then she remembered their first date. Now in a rage, she recounted how he got her drunk and raped her, married her to get his green card, and plotted her murder after they were married.   I have no doubt that their first sexual intimacy was consensual because that has been her pattern throughout her life.  She falls in love immediately.  Every new sexual partner is “love at first sight.”

She feels the same love-hate dichotomy toward every man she has ever slept with.  Sometimes she says her Santa Fe lawyer and a man she hired in Argentina took advantage of her naïveté to seduce and rape her.  But at other times she says her affairs with these men were based on unbridled sexual passion.  I do not know if what she remembers in the moment creates her mood, or if her mood determines which memories she is able to recall.   She had the same emotional dichotomy with me. At various times I have been her best friend, lover, fiancé, husband, kidnapper, rapist, and murderer.
 
In a similar way, her religious feelings are passionate but temporary.  For a few months she is a devoute Roman Catholic saying her rosary and attending daily mass.  At other times she is an Orthodox Jew, keeping a Kosher kitchen and referring to her Roman Catholic family as papists. 

In Santa Fe she sometimes recites Hindu prayers and goes to worship Ama at the Ashram.  When we first became engaged she was a passionate astrologer; making sure that our marriage was in alignment with the stars was far more important than anything in the Tanach. 

One of her telephone messages to me is a “Shana Tova” greeting for the Jewish New Year.  Her emotion was very loving.  Three months later, she was a Catholic sending me an obscene Christmas message.  Her emotion was pure rage. 
 
She has a great fear of abandonment, and has always been particularly terrified that her husband would die before she did, leaving her alone and abandoned.  She once told me the voice of God had promised her that we were destined to die at the same time, which is why she wanted to marry me right away.
 
In all the years I have known her, she never once said she wanted to marry me because she loved me. She said she loved me, of course, but her reasons for wanting to marry me were always practical.   I was good for her (“You were sent to teach me things”).  I was good company (“Now I have someone to go to the movies with”).  I was a nice guy (“You make me happy”).  God sent me to her (“You are in answer to my prayers”).  She once assured the Greek neighbor that I would make a good husband because I like to pull the weeds.

With many of the ordinary people she meets in daily life she is emotionally cold and detached. Such people are little more than a means to an end.   I think she does this to avoid the oscillating love-hate emotions that rule all of her intimate relationships.  She told me once that the voice of God assured her that she is under no obligation to the people who help her.  God sends people to assist her, and when she is done with them she may discard them without a second thought. 
 
Her rage attacks are always transient and they usually vanish as quickly as they arrive.  This can be seen clearly in her last telephone message to me, in which she apologizes for her earlier obscene voicemails, for stalking me and an acquaintance of mine, and for vandalizing my house. 
 
“Hi, it’s me, and I want to apologize for the nasty stuff.  (um)  I’m sorry.  (and um)  Well, when I met you, you were a happy, sweet, cheerful person; and I just hope you can go back to being that happy, sweet, cheerful person again; with whomever you choose to be that way.  And I wish you a lot of luck finding a good person to be with.  I do.  And I really mean that.  So please forgive all the crap.  (and um )  Well, if I see you around I’ll say ‘Hi.’  Sorry.  Goodnight.”

She wanted us to get back together again, and we did, but her pattern of loving me one moment and hating me the next has never stopped. 
 
Do you think it ever will? 

Dating Madness DOT Com

Driving down San Francisco Street one December morning, I saw a friend on her way to work.  She prefers to walk, but on this bitterly cold morning she readily accepted a ride to her store on the Plaza.  I will call her Alice  because she has the same views as the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.  She thinks Santa Fe is Wonderland and everyone who lives here is completely Mad.  If we were sane we would live somewhere else.

I told her I had met a woman online and thanked Alice for telling me about her brother's success with internet dating.

She was horrified.

"But all the woman on the internet are crazy," she said.  "I never meant for you to do it."  She was serious.  Alice said her brother had met, married and divorced three different women on the internet.  All of them had been crazy.

"I've met several of those," I agreed, without mentioning that such women are my cup of tea.  One of my early love objects suffered from a personality disorder.  Put me in a room with a dozen women and I will zero in on the one with the most prominent symptoms of borderline personality organization.

At the local community college I was immediately attracted to a woman who said she had moved here from Massachusetts.  For our first date, she asked me to pick her up at her therapist's office.  I immediately recognized her therapist as a national authority on the treatment of Borderline Personality because I had read her book.  Santa Fe is Mecca for women with BPD.  They are everywhere in this city.  No wonder Santa Fe has more therapists per capita than any other city in the world, Buenos Aires included.

"Dating women on the internet is like picking up prostitutes on the street,” Alice said.  There was some truth to this as well.  Promiscuity can be a symptom of borderline personality.  The first woman my dating service matched me up with said she had hooked up with ninety-two partners online. She kept all their photographs and E-mails in a folder on her computer. She also liked to pick up men at Whole Foods.  Another early match was a state employee who said she had gone online to meet a better class of men than the ones she had been picking up at the Tin Star.   Going to bed with her was two-for-one, because she would pass your number on to her a young coworkerl at the state finance office who liked to date older men.  She had abandoned her young children in Dallas and moved to Santa Fe to discover who she really was.  In my experience, borderline women who are sexually promiscuous have all suffered horrendous childhood abuse.

I told Alice I met a local artist on the internet, whom I will call Ann. I said Ann and I were moving in together.  Naturally, I did not mention that Ann had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse or that she struggled with borderline personality organization.

We arrived at her store and I asked how she was doing.  She said the economy was not good and she had not made any new pieces, but she hoped to start a new project in the spring.  She said her partner, a carpenter, was working at a job in Artesia.  He came home every weekend.  She talked about a few of her artist friends.  Then she returned to her concerns about online dating.

“You have to be very careful with people on the internet,” she said with genuine concern in her voice. "People online really are crazy, especially if they live in Santa Fe."  

"Like you and me?" I asked.

 "Yes, just like you and me."  Alice had to move out of her family home when she was still a teenager after her schizophrenic brother literally chased her around the house with an ax.  Her mother wanted to keep her son at home and out of an institution, so she put her daughter’s things out on the front porch.  Alice definitely was on the spectrum, but she was already in a committed relationship.

 "Please be careful," Alice said, as she leaned across the center console and gave me a kiss.


Shame and Anguish



Sally (not her real name) was overwhelmed with shame whenever she became depressed.  Sometimes she was suicidal.  At other times, she felt compelled to share her shame with me and beg me to accept her as she was.
 

Laocoon, Vatican Museum, Rome, Italy

She wore a mask of unbearable anguish whenever she begged for acceptance. Her anguished face reminded me of the statue of Laocoon in the Vatican Museum. Laocoon had a right to feel anguish. Giant serpents were killing him and his children. Sally’s anguish was just as unbearable. She believed she was a whore and a prostitute, and she feared that I would leave her as soon as I realized what she really was.


Her first plea for acceptance was delivered in my living room a few months after I gave her the engagement ring.  She came over in a trance-like state and perched on the edge of my leather chair.  She presented a face of heartbreaking anguish, which remained unchanged throughout her thirty-minute soliloquy.  Her eyes were fixed.   She did not respond to anything I said or did, except to shrink away from my touch.  I don’t think she could hear me voice.  It was as if she was delivering a prepared speech from inside a dark soundproof room.

"I  am a whore and a prostitute,” she screamed in anguish.  “If you marry me you will marry a whore and a prostitute.  Can you do that?  Do you want to do that?  Can you marry a whore--a prostitute?"  She itemized all the reasons why she was a whore and a prostitute.  Did I still want to marry her? 

After she finished,  she sank back into the chair, exhausted.  I told her she had nothing to be ashamed of and that I loved her and wanted to marry her for who she really is.  The past is just the past.  I was not sure whether the affect storm itself had calmed her, or if it was my words of unconditional love and acceptance.  After ten minutes she returned to her daughters at her own home.

Recoleta Cemetery,
Buenos Aires, Argentina

She is neither a whore nor a prostitute.  She is not responsible for anything that happened to her when she was a child.  All of her adult sexual relationships have been based on her feelings of love.  Her relationships may only lasts for a few months,  but in each relationship her love is real  She doesn't pick up strangers for casual sex.  Each new love affair is genuine and meaningful for her.  But the love never lasts long, and the man who was her best friend and lover for a month or two will inevitably became her newest worst enemy.  I believe she loved her two former husbands when she married them, and they loved her.  Both men were devastated when she divorced them.  I do not know anything about the intentions of her former partners, except for one man, whose sister-in-law told me he refused to marry Sally because of his family’s opposition to his marrying a woman who had been in a mental hospital.

A second storm occurred about a month later in her kitchen.  Her daughters were at school.  This time she remained standing, facing me, with the same anguished facial expression.  She feared I would reject her because she cannot have an orgasm during sexual intercourse.   She raged about her being “cold and stiff” and was terrified that I would reject her because of it.  

In actuality, she is not frigid.  She has extraordinary clitoral orgasms.  Indeed, her orgasms are one of her few genuine pleasures.  She masturbates daily, with or without a partner, and never travels without her vibrator.  The intensity of her orgasms is the reason I call her Sally in this blog.  
 

She cannot have an orgasm during intercourse because of a medical condition that is beyond her control.   Her vaginal wall is lined with a dozen cysts.  Sexual intercourse is painful.  She sometimes talks about the pain afterwards, but struggled mightily not to show her discomfort when we made love.  When she is depressed, she views the pain as divine punishment for her sexual misbehavior.

About a month later she returned to my living room to deliver another plea for unconditional love and acceptance.  She arrived as if she was walking in her sleep and again perched on the edge of my chair with the exact same anguished expression.  This time she was terrified that  I would become so disgusted with her after we were married that I would leave her forever.  



Folk Art Museum, Guangzhou, China

“If you leave me after we are married it will kill me,” she screamed.  “I couldn’t survive being abandoned again.”   It was not clear what she meant by this, since it every one of her previous relationships the breakups were initiated by Sally.  Most people understand that we have to take people as they are, but Sally can only love someone who is perfect.  As soon as her partner disapoints her and she recognizes that her partner is less than perfect, her love is instantly  transformed into hate.  She completely abandoned her parents and all her brothers and sisters.  She ended both her marriages, carefully planning each divorce months in advance, and taking each husband for everything she could get.  They deserved it.  They were evil.  Sally is proud of the fact that she has never been dumped by a man.  Perhaps this was the reason for her overwhelming fear that I would leave her.

In a sense, she holds herself to the same impossible standard  she uses to judge other people.  When she realized that she herself was not perfect, she became terrified that I would treat her in the same way she has treated all of her former lovers.  She does not understand that I do not see the world the way she does.  I am not perfect and I do not expect perfection in her.
 

But I could not ask questions or say anything during this new affect storm.  She was delivering a prepared speech and my only job was to listen.   She went on to itemize her faults.  She screamed “Are you going to kill me?”  Again, she told me she was a whore and a prostitute.  She talked about her promiscuity, her rage, her cruelty, her frigidity.   She said she would kill herself if I left her.  She screamed “Do you want to kill me?” with such ferocity I feared the neighbors might call the police.  When she calmed down and sat back in the chair, I promised that I would never leave her.  She seemed greatly relieved.  It was very late.  After drinking a glass of water, she returned to her daughters at home.

When she was happy she talked about her previous affect storms with insight.  She said they were just another effect of her post traumatic stress disorder, which is a term she prefers to her actual diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.  Twenty-five years ago, when she was overwhelmed with shame and guilt, she would secretly destroy phone books with a hammer, or shake the headboard and beat the mattress with her fists.  When her husband bought her a dildo she took it to the basement and smashed it with a sledge hammer.   Later, after her commitment to a mental hospital in Houston, she learned how to vocalize her anguish with a living person.  She talked with psychiatrists and other therapists.  Before we met, she paid a local therapist to come to her house and listen to her affect storms.

I thought her willingness to share her deepest fears with me was a sign that our relationship was working. 

I was wrong.