Borderline Personality Disorder
While
searching online to try to make sense of Kristin's personality and behavioral changes, including what happened just
before I returned to China, I came across something called
borderline personality disorder, which was also said to be
caused by extreme childhood
sexual abuse and whose symptoms matched Kristin's. So I asked her if she'd
ever heard of something called borderline personality disorder.
Years earlier, when I had asked her if she had ever heard of dissociative identity disorder, she had said no and asked me what it was. When I asked Kristin this time if she'd ever heard of borderline personality disorder, her response was very different. Instead of saying no and asking me what borderline personality disorder is, she immediately flew off the handle and reacted as if I had insulted her, which implied that she knew something about borderline personality disorder.
I found a self-diagnostic website that asks a long series of questions and then calculates the probability of borderline personality disorder based on the answers. I answered the questions as if I were the current alter of Kristin and the resulting score indicated almost a perfect match for borderline personality disorder. To ensure that my answers hadn't been too liberal, I answered the questions again, this time choosing the most conservative answers possible, given Kristin's symptoms, and the result was still in the highest bracket, indicating a very strong probability of having borderline personality disorder. Based on the answers I had input, the current alter of Kristin exhibited all of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder.
So I emailed Kristin a link to the website and asked her to answer the questions and share the result with me. Again, she flew off the handle and refused to do it. I continued to press her to do it until she finally said that she had done it. What was her score? "Zero," she replied. Since the minimum score for each question is a "1" and not a "0," the lowest possible score was 1 x the total number of questions, not zero, so she had lied.