Originally posted 2017-07-02 14:37:37.
Borderline Personality Disorder is the most widely recognised mental disorder in the West. However, this should not make you underestimate it. Severe Borderline is excruciating for the sufferers.
More than that, Borderline heavily affects the people around them. This is because it is characterised by rage attacks, violent mood swings, irrational and dangerous behaviours, deliberate threatened or actual harm to both self and others and destructiveness.
If you are a man dating, looking for a partner, then you might encounter someone who displays the symptoms of Borderline. While we make our own decisions in life and are responsible for them, I would advise you to read this and watch the associated video. I have also added links to other sites with more information. I think you should inform yourself about this condition before you make a decision as to whether or not this person really is somebody you could make a life with.
if you think that you or someone close to you has Borderline, please consider taking this test:
https://acerahealth.com/borderline-personality-disorder-self-test/
I recently was involved with a girl who, it turned out, showed strong symptoms of Borderline. Indeed it was this relationship that made me research the topic. I put her through three different sets of standard diagnostic questions, on which she came up at 80% probability of Borderline. Here is a typical online test. This was confirmed by observation. I say this so that you know that I have direct personal experience of the condition. It is not nice.
Borderline characteristics
As I said above, Borderline is characterised by violent temper outbursts, extreme mood swings, as well as swings in the evaluation of others, and self self-evaluation. None of this is static; Borderline causes people to constantly change so that they seem fluid. It is very difficult to find out who they really are and indeed it is a classic symptom that they do not know this themselves.
Because of this constant flipping, Borderlines are regarded even by professional therapists as extremely difficult to treat and those who do, often report feelings of sheer exhaustion. No matter what you say to a Borderline, it will be wrong. If you say she looks pretty today, she will accuse you: ‘You’re saying I didn’t look pretty yesterday’.
Borderlines are on the borderline
Borderlines are not actually schizophrenic; they are on the borderline. They are not actually psychopathic, they are on the borderline. In fact, just about any mental condition you can think of, they will be on the borderline of and frequently show symptoms of. That is the reason for the name.
As a result of this, their lives are chaotic in every way. Their relationships are chaotic. Their finances are a mess. They will be chaotic students, if they are able to study at all.
Lurking behind the Borderline personality is the Narcissistic Rage attack. Borderlines are borderline narcissists, just as they are borderline everything else. But remember that they have only a feeble sense of self. This leads them to identify themselves in terms of others. This might be social group or family, but it might be partner. The point is that the Borderline’s personality is weak and ill-defined, yet they clutch at it like a security blanket. If you take it away their rage response kicks in because any threat is existential.
So when you tell a Borderline that you’ve had enough, she will destroy your home. She may attack you. She will weaponise everything. Never allow a Borderline to drive you anywhere, especially if she is in the throes of a rage attack. She may well provoke a crash. (Typically she will be an erratic, overconfident and reckless driver — but think that she’s Fangio.)
Damage to self
For the Borderline, damage to herself is inconsequential because her self-worth is so low. If she has identified herself as a person in terms of her relationship with you, then, if you break with her, her response will be to eradicate you. If that means eradicating herself at the same time, she cares not a jot, since she does not value her own self except in terms of you.
Borderlines like to hurt. If your putative partner repeatedly hurts you after you have told her it hurts and you don’t want her to do it, be careful. If she attempts to assuage you, should you push her away in annoyance, by an excessive effusion of affection, be even more so. The Borderline is seeing how much abuse you will take, because this is a measure of her possession and control over you; but she doesn’t want to lose you, because you have become the centre of her own identity.
She knows she is causing you pain; it’s just that she has felt pain and wants everyone else to. She can’t help it.
Relationships with Borderline subjects
These are characterised by intense stress on the people around them and especially their partners. One never knows when a casual word or act will provoke a rage response and, indeed, one may never know the actual cause of it. Because the Borderline is so paranoid, she suffers from delusions: what has set her off might have happened only in her mind. You get an unexpected message from an old flame. She takes a knife to you — because, obviously, you must be cheating on her.
The Borderline will go through your contacts book like a dose of salts, insisting that first your pretty female friends are removed, then your not pretty female friends, then your male friends. I would say that any demand for access to personal details is a cause for worry and that insisting on removal of particular individuals should be a deal-breaker. Relationships are based on trust, but a Borderline is completely incapable of trusting anyone.
Borderline is associated with childhood sexual abuse.
Completed Sexual Inverts or HSTS report high levels of childhood sexual abuse, often by other family members. They also report non-sexual physical and mental abuse, usually applied to ‘cure’ them of their non-conforming behaviour, either at the hands of parents or school peers. This might lead to the development of Borderline in adulthood.
Autogynephilic transvestites are less likely to have suffered such abuse, because their condition does not appear till after puberty; but they are themselves exhibiting a disorder, a paraphilia, and we know that these tend to ‘cluster’. Since the issues surrounding autogynephilia are to do with self-image and the characterisation of the self, this tends to make them prone to Borderline. (Asian AGPs might be less so than Western ones, because of greater peer-group support in adolescence.)
No Fault
It is not the Borderline’s fault that she has the condition. All too often it is the direct result of appalling parenting and childhood abuse. But at the same time it is not your responsibility to throw away your own life and happiness to cure her. There are plenty of transwomen (and for that matter natal women) without it. It is up to the Borderline herself to recognise her problem and to deal with it, before asking anyone else to sacrifice themselves at her altar.
At the same time, like all things human, Borderline appears on a scale of severity from mild to severe. Here we should apply the standard: does this condition allow the subject to live a normal meaningful life and sustain viable relationships? All too often the answer is ‘no’.
By no means would it be true to say that a majority of transfems are Borderline. In fact, very few are. A survey in 2008 suggested that around 6% of people have this condition, or around 1:20. Even though other studies suggest the incidence in women is much higher than in men, there is no reason to assume transfems are vastly more prone to it. But that still leaves a 1:20 chance, even if just being trans is not an aggravation, that the transwoman you have agreed to date has it.
These are just a few of the things you should be aware of. I strongly advise you to read the links I provide below and to consider this: is this relationship worth your own sanity, physical health and even your life?
https://acerahealth.com/borderline-personality-disorder-self-test/
https://psychcentral.com/quizzes/borderline.htm
https://www.borderlinepersonalitytreatment.com/borderline-personality-disorder-women.html
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026087410516
This is interesting:
Borderline Personality Disorder as a Female Phenotypic Expression of Psychopathy?
“”Across two independent samples, results indicated that the interaction of high F1 and F2 psychopathy scores was associated with BPD in women. This association was found to be specific to women in Study 1. These results suggest that BPD and psychopathy, at least as they are measured by current instruments, overlap in women and, accordingly, may reflect gender-differentiated phenotypic expressions of similar dispositional vulnerabilities.””
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323706/
Regarding AGP, I came across this the other day, as I have been studying abnormal psychology in general:
“”Psychiatric diagnoses revealed a higher total number of paraphilias: Transvestic fetishism and paraphilias not otherwise specified were more frequent in offenders with brain abnormalities. A binary logistic regression identified five predictors that accounted for 46.8% of the variance explaining the presence of brain abnormalities. Our results suggest the importance of a comprehensive neurological and psychological examination of this special offender group.””
https://www.astm.org/DIGITAL_LIBRARY/JOURNALS/FORENSIC/PAGES/JFS2004472.htm
Hi CJ yes I think the issue of co-morbidity in AGP is being ignored, because if they addressed it, they would have to accept that AGP is a real thing!
Rod, it seems that I have been commenting on: RodFlemingsWorld, instead of RodFleming.com.
And now my most recent comment on RodFlemingsWorld isn’t even showing up as being ‘under moderation’
I am confused. I am guessing this is the main site and that I should just comment here for now on?
Hi CJ I’m so sorry! This is the main site, the other is a mirror. I tend to housekeep there a lot less than here, I’ll go approve your comments right away
If it’s ok with you i will move my comments over here…
I was a bit concerned, thought maybe I was blacklisted or done something to annoy you! 😛
Hi again CJ
I see a couple of your comments Rod Fleming’s WordPress World, which is a mirror. I’m figuring out how to import them to this one right now. They are approved over there. I’ll see if they might have appeared anywhere else too
This happened because FireFox has taken away my ‘post comment’ button, so I went to comment in Chrome, and I accidentally posted on the mirror site…
oops!
I made a couple of comments on another article on RFW and those made it through a couple of days ago. If it’s ok with you, I will consolidate them, fix the formatting (which I bungled) and add some new info, and post them on this site.
What happens is, I will post a comment, and then a few hours later, come upon new research 😛
if you are not following @YeyoZa on the Twitter, you should be! I follow him and some other evolutionary psychologists and biologists. That’s where I got the BPD study from. I am learning a *lot* about sexual dimorphism as they smack down the claims made by ‘gender scholars’ who claim that biological sex doesn’t exist.
I also posted some information on DocAmitay’s YT channel, I think that I will add that one as well…
There is just so much info out there!
Hi CJ
Thank you for these links and I am now following the Twitter. Yes please consolidate the comments. really the mirror site is an experiment (I stumbled on software that does crossposts automatically) so we shall see how it goes/
Got damn though it takes an age to upload videos!
BTW you should also check Kuhn and Stiner. They have very nice work on the division of tasks by sex in the Palaeolithic. It is my opinion, given what we know of the Neanderthals, that they did not separate tasks by sex in this way — we have female skeletons that show typical hunting injuries. This separation is basic to gender. I argue that this is one of the reasons they died out and we survived. In which case, gender is not only innate, it is essential to our species.
hi whats the treatment for autogynephylia ?
Hi
There is no cure for Autogynephilia that I am aware of. Transition is much vaunted as a ‘cure’ but we do not know the actual success of this approach in therapeutic terms, since the AGP lobby actively tries to block any such research. For person over 25 I would suggest that transition be an absolute last resort; even MtF HSTS, who are vastly more feminine, generally transition before that. This counter-indication just gets more severe, the older the subject.
In terms of treatment, some clinicians report success using testosterone-suppressing drugs but there are no widespread trials of this therapy. You have to understand that the AGP lobby has completely hijacked the debate and does its best to prevent any research into autogynephilia. In an act of utter cowardice, universities have acquiesced and the research has practically stopped now. Earlier this year, Bath University axed a research project, which had previously been approved, that aimed to establish a reliable baseline for AGP desistance (detransition). The University withdrew the permission in case it might ’cause upset’ in the ‘trans community’. Imagine if psychopaths demanded we stop researching psychopathy for fear of hurting their feelings!
It is possible that orchiectomy (removal of the testes) might provide relief. It is likely this element of Genital Reconstruction Surgery (GRS), sometimes called ‘SRS’ or ‘sex change’ that provides relief from AGP feelings, rather than the removal of the penis — although I would not expect an AGP to admit to that. If this were to be carried out, however, it would be imperative to harvest and safely store sufficient samples of sperm to allow the subject to father children, if he later desisted.
With no cure in sight and any attempt to find one being blocked by those it would help most, if you have AGP then your best recourse is to find a way to manage it. I suggest psycho-analysis to explore what triggered the disorder, to begin with. There is some evidence that there might be an innate propensity towards it, but again, that is not confirmed. Other evidence points to events at or around the time of puberty triggered the conditioned. These would not be mutually exclusive, of course.
If you are religious then you might talk to a priest. It’s unlikely that any of the Protestant denominations could help, but priests in the Catholic Church are generally better trained. Alternatively, consider investigating a religion that develops self-control, like Buddhism.
In terms of day-to-day management there are two basic approaches: using drug therapy as discussed above to reduce the intensity of the symptoms and partial satisfaction of the condition to do the same thing. For example, some men wear women’s underwear or a pair of stockings under male work clothes. Others may isolate it behaviourally, confining the indulgence to particular times and places. This latter may be in company with other AGPs (Be warned: these can turn into orgies, so make sure you know what you’re getting into, especially if you’re younger and cuter, as a woman.)
Remember that excessive reward of AGP will make it worse, so that it might take over. The idea here is to control and regulate it, not to encourage it. But the good news is that there are countless men succeeding in doing this; it’s only in the last few years that they have been encouraged to succumb to a pernicious, invasive condition, by so-called professionals. Until then, most AGPs were covert and died keeping their secret, although there were always a few who ‘came out’. We still do not know what the relative proportions of overt/covert AGP there are.
In addition, some trans-attracted men are actually non-trans AGP themselves. I’m not sure how that might be used to help, but it’s perhaps worth knowing about. In the modern context there does seem to be a correlation between exposure to ‘shemale’ porn and AGP; here the porn seems to act like a trigger. Given that this form of porn is still increasing in popularity and if there is a such a correlation, it seems likely that AGP, either overt or covert, should continue to increase too. Again, however, research is next to impossible due to resistance from AGPs.
You have to remember that AGP is NOT like Homosexual transsexualism or HSTS. HSTS is a function of Sexual Inversion, or, feminine homosexual males and masculine homosexual females. In the more complete forms of Sexual Inversion, full transition is usually required. If carried out at a young age, the subject will usually pass easily in the target gender and have a full life. All they really need is a nice man to love them and a social place that accepts them. (If MtF, opposite for FtM.)
AGP is a narcissistic mental disorder and even in places where AGPs transition young and can feminise themselves more effectively, they still rarely ‘pass’. The classic middle-aged profile, most common in the West, has absolutely NO CHANCE of passing, in 95% of cases and their recourse is to bully others into ‘accept’ them as what they are not — women. Some people, and I am one, find this level of coercion unacceptable and I would urge you not to indulge in it.
Management of AGP in cases like these, therefore, must be a method of satisfying the paraphilia sufficiently that it does not have severe consequences like suicidality, depression, alcoholism and so on, while maintaining an understanding, on the part of the subject, that he is a man and can never be a woman. He must learn to control his impulses and channel his sexual energy, which is at the root of this, in more positive directions. That will be difficult, especially in the ongoing atmosphere of prudishness typical of the US, alongside the transition express train.
The one possible exception to this would be the adolescent-appearing AGP. This was not discussed by Blanchard in his original research, because when he researched it was very rare, but it is accommodated within the DSM’s description of the condition. Teenage-transition AGP is by far the more common form in areas like southeast Asia, for example and here, AGPs can become strikingly beautiful transwomen, because they begin hormones at 14-16 years old and come from ethnicities where features tend to be naturally softer. But they are dependent on cultural conditions in the area they live, which are too complex to discuss here and, in any case, simply are not present in the West. Further, in my experience, many such AGPs will desist (detransition) when their looks fade, typically in their mid-to-late 30s. (HSTS don’t; if they ‘desist’, it’s a matter of presenting as highly effeminate gay males rather than transwomen. But I know HSTS here who are well into their 50s and going strong.) Any AGP in this position should not undergo GRS.
Finally, you will be told by many, including clinicians, that the best path to take is just to transition. This is a catastrophic mistake for a Western AGP anything much over about 20 years old. AGPs are not differentiated morphologically from the broader male population, as HSTS are. They will not slip easily into the social role of a woman. If you are married, have a career, have children, a house, a car, look forward to losing ALL OF THAT. The LOT. Although the Western AGP lobby is keen to showcase those instances where women have been loyal enough — or weak enough — to stay with their transitioned husband, this is rare. The price of transition, for most AGPs, is the complete loss of everything they have worked to establish.