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?