BPD Symptoms
While
Kristin's nice alter and a couple of her child alters still
surfaced from time to time, albeit briefly, the protector alter who suffers from
borderline
personality disorder (BPD) increasingly became the predominant presence.
One of the symptoms of BPD is the lack of one's own boundaries and the lack of respect for others' boundaries. This symptom leads BPD sufferers to treat those close to them as if they exist to meet their needs. While many attribute this BPD symptom to selfishness, its real cause is biological. Extreme abuse during infancy leads the brains of BPD sufferers to have under-developed amygdala, which keeps them psychologically and emotionally at about six months of age. To six-month-old babies, their mothers do exist to meet their needs. Because six-month-old babies have no boundaries, neither do BPD sufferers, who spend the rest of their lives desperately seeking to receive from others the boundary-less care that they should have received from their mothers during the critical first six months of their lives outside the womb.
Another symptom of BPD is 'black and white' thinking. When a BPD sufferer meets someone who cares for her, he is initially seen as a knight in shining armor who can do no wrong. But when he eventually falls short of or declines to meet her ever-expanding list of needs, she becomes disillusioned, angry, and flips to seeing him as her betrayer who can only do wrong. For example, this alter of Kristin repeatedly told me that her years with me have been a "waste" and that she wishes she had never met me.
Still another symptom of BPD is twisting the reality to fit emotions. Because BPD sufferers are unable to regulate their emotions, when there is a mismatch between their emotions and the reality, they twist the reality to fit their emotions. For example, Kristin claimed in Poland that she is poor because I have taken all of her money. When asked what she meant, she said she is talking about the $3,000 that she withdrew from an ATM in southeast Asia and gave me.
I corrected her that she had withdrawn and handed me $300, not $3,000, and that it was reimbursement for the flight that I had paid to evacuate her from China for the second time in two months after her crazy decision to return to China after I paid to evacuate her from China the first time. And she had agreed to reimburse me before I purchased the second flight for her.
She insisted that she had withdrawn and handed me $3,000, not $300, so I advised her that flights from China to southeast Asia cost $300, not $3,000, and ATMs in that southeast Asian country have a daily withdrawal limit far below $3,000, so it was impossible for her to have withdrawn $3,000 in one day, let alone in one ATM withdrawal.
She still insisted that the amount was $3,000, so I told her that '$3,000' may be in her memory because it was the amount that I had sent her periodically for her college expenses in USA until she lied to me, told me to never contact her again, and flew off to China. $3,000 was also the approximate amount that she would have received from her Chinese employer if she had stayed in her apartment or in a hospital for three more days until her payday instead of getting more sick by going outside and breathing China's toxic air pollution for three hours and then calling me crying for immediate evacuation.
Kristin still insisted that she is poor because I have taken all of her money. So I told her that the reimbursement for her second evacuation from China in two months - the only reimbursement I ever received from her - had been to teach her that making bad, emotion-driven decisions, which is another symptom of BPD, leads to negative consequences. After she first called me from China five years prior, I had first depleted my small savings and then worked for four years to meet all of her expenses and had even taken her on a trip to Israel and now to eastern Europe despite no longer having a source of income. Instead of being grateful, how could she claim that she is poor because of me?