BPD and Abuse

0:01Speaker 1:Look out, we come all the things, beat it on the bottom. All I want is you. You're my favorite view. But there's nothing move.

0:22Speaker 2:And we are back.

0:24Speaker 3:Welcome back, bumble bitches.

0:26Speaker 4:Today we're gonna be going over borderline personality disorder and abuse. What it looks like to be with somebody who has borderline that is unchecked. We could say, somebody that has done nothing to start doing the things necessary to heal themselves. And this is a document that I put together and we are going to read it. And my lovely wife is going to interrupt me when she feels the need to do so.

0:46Speaker 2:All right, all right.

0:48Speaker 4:One of the biggest mistakes that people make when talking about borderline personality disorder is swinging to one of two extremes. Either they believe someone is simply mentally ill and can't help what they do, or they believe everyone BPD is abusive. Neither position is accurate. A diagnosis describes a collection of symptoms and patterns. It does not determine a person's character. It doesn't tell you whether someone is honest, compassionate, manipulative, accountability, accountable, excuse me, or committed to growth. Those qualities come from the individual and not the diagnosis. I've met people with BPD who are incredibly self aware. They know their triggers, They recognize when they're beginning to spiral, they apologize when they've hurt someone. They go to therapy consistently, They practice DBT, which is dialectic behavioral therapy. They journal, they ask for feedback, They work every day to become safer people to love.

1:38Speaker 4:I've also seen people who use the diagnosis as a permission slip, where every outburst, every accusation, and every broken boundary gets explained with you know how my BPD is. Those two are completely different people, and a diagnosis can be a diagnosis can explain the behavior, but it never excuses.

1:56Speaker 3:It anything that know how my BPD is.

2:02Speaker 5:If I'm trying to have a conversation with somebody, right, this is a This is a relationship with somebody that I care about, Like my husband, the perfect example, who has borderline and we're having a conversation. He has a super and I'm making this up. He has a super explosive reaction and he calls me a name and tells me that I'm crazy, slams the door, calls his best friend and inserts telling his best friend that I'm a bitch, and I'm trying to have a conversation with my husband after the fact, right, I'm in myself mad.

2:35Speaker 3:Trying to have a conversation with about that. After the fact.

2:39Speaker 5:I'm saying things like, I understand how you got upset, I'm making room for you to give me your experience and all those kinds of things. And then I tell you that your reaction right, because that was not a response. Your reaction was vastly inappropriate, and that is not how I want to be treated by my husband. And my husband hits me with, well, that's you know how my borderline works. I can't think of a nice way to say it. That just sounds stupid to me. Yeah, that's right.

3:12Speaker 5:Like I want to tell my eight year old son try again, right, that that's not the answer. That's not I mean, it is a answer, but in a mature adult relationship circumstance, right, it doesn't have to be a marriage. We're trying to have in depth problem solving conversations here, not pointing fingers while we're playing four square?

3:36Speaker 3:Did that paint the picture?

3:37Speaker 5:Well?

3:37Speaker 4:Enough?

3:38Speaker 2:Did? So?

3:40Speaker 4:It's an important distinction to make because BPD itself does not cause abuse. Abuse is a pattern of behavior involving control, intimidation, manipulation, or repeated disregard for another person's well being. Someone with untreated BPD may become emotionally dysregulated, impulsive, terrified of abandonment, or experience intense distortions during conflict. Those symptoms can absolutely contribute to abusive behavior if they aren't addressed, but they can also be managed. Thousands of people with BPD live very healthy lives because they've accepted responsibility for learning how their mind works instead of expecting everyone else to adapt to it. You cannot expect people in your life to fucking cater to your every whim. You are the center of your universe, but not the center of the universe, and we are all supposed to be working together in this anything.

4:35Speaker 3:Nope, just my predator clicks in agreement.

4:37Speaker 2:Okay, I can't do it. I tried.

4:41Speaker 4:One of the defining features of BPD is emotional intensity. People often assume that emotions are fake or exaggerated. They're not. The emotions are very real. The nervous system is experiencing genuine fear, shame, rejection, or abandonment. The problem isn't usually the feeling. The problem is the interpretation attached to the feeling. This is where emotional reasoning becomes dangerous. Emotional reasoning says I feel rejected, therefore you rejected me. Healthy thinking says I feel rejected. Let me slow down and figure out whether this is actually what happened. Feelings are always real.

5:14Speaker 4:They tell us something is happening inside of us. They don't automatically tell us what is happening outside of us. We tell ourselves stories within seconds, and those stories become our reality very quick. So imagine someone doesn't answer a text message for a few hours. A person without abandonment sensitivity might assume that they're busy. Someone who's untreated BPD may genuinely experience that silence as evidence that the relationship is ending. Their heart races, their mind begins searching for proof that they've done something wrong. Before long, they're sending angry messages, accusing their partner of not caring, or threatening to leave first before they can be abandoned. The emotional experience is authentic, the conclusion often is not. One reason this happens is because many people would BPD struggle to stable the sense of self, their identity can feel fragile or inconsistent, so relationships become the place where emotional stability is sought. When the relationship feels threatened, the nervous system often reacts as though survival itself is threatened. To someone outside the experience, the reaction can seem wildly disproportionate. To

6:21Speaker 4:the person experiencing it, it feels completely justified because their body has already decided they're in danger.

6:28Speaker 3:The world's not ending, their world is ending.

6:29Speaker 4:Fucking right, It is fucking right, it is, And like, as somebody again, you know, we both have borderline. I used to have people that I had to call when I was feeling something to be like, hey, this is what's going on in my life. I need to know if I'm overreacting or not, because my response to the situation felt very, very justified because what I was feeling. The reality is is most people would hear what I was going through and be like, it's not really that big of a deal, bro, And like I would have to talk myself of a ledge and then have to work through what I was going through to make it so that I wasn't fucking flying off the handle that survival response often activates familiar trauma patterns. Some people fight, some people flee, some shut down, some desperately seek reassurance.

7:09Speaker 4:These reactions aren't necessarily conscious choices in the moment. They are automatic responses learned through years of emotional pain. But automatic doesn't mean permanent. One of the goals of therapy is creating enough awareness that a person begins interrupting those automatic reactions before they become destructive. That's what progress actually looks like. It isn't never getting triggered. It isn't becoming emotionally perfect. It's reducing the time between the trigger and the accountability. Someone may still feel overwhelming fear, but instead of sending twenty angry text messages, they pause, They use grounding techniques, They check the facts, They wait until their nervous system settles before responding, and then the emotions. The emotions haven't disappeared, but the behavior will change. Another concept is often associated with BPD is something called splitting. Splitting is the tendency to see people in extreme someone is either completely wonderful or completely terrible, depending on the emotional experience of the moment. Yesterday, your partner was your soulmate.

8:07Speaker 4:Today they're selfish, uncaring, and you've never been happy. Tomorrow they're the love of your life again. The partner experiences emotional whiplash because they never know which version of themselves they're about to encounter. Over time, that unpredictability changes the person the other person. They begin monitoring every word they say, every facial expression, every change in tone, every delayed response. They aren't communicating naturally anymore. They're trying to prevent another emotional explosion. Without realizing it, they've stopped participating in the relationship and started managing someone else's nervous system. This is where conversations about gaslighting become more nuanced. True gaslighting involves intentionally manipulating a person's perception of reality. Not everyone with BPDS gaslighting, However, someone experiencing intense emotional dysregulation may genuinely remember events differently because they're emotional state changed how they interpret what happened. They may sincerely believe something occurred that didn't to the partner, the experience can feel nearly identical

9:09Speaker 4:to gaslighting because they're constantly questioning their own memory, rereading messages, replaying conversations, and wondering if they're losing touch with reality. We've talked about this on the podcast already. I'm just bringing up again real quick this. This happened to us in Real Time Season one. We were sitting back here recording when we had the table, and I thought we were in major conflict, and she went away. We were done recording and I was editing, and I asked her to come back here, and she came back and she's standing next to me, and I played it and she's like, okay, and I'm like, I thought we were fighting, Like I'm mad, Like I'm fucking going through a whole gambit of emotions right now. I really thought that you and I were in the middle of conflict, and watching it back like what I believed was happening in my head clearly didn't fucking happen. This is very real for people who have borderline our emotional response to things, it's it can create illusions like we get so overwhelmed and over emotional that like the stories that we tell ourselves in the moment becomes so very fucking solidified that that's our truth and

10:07Speaker 4:it's not it's not always true, And that shit broke me, Like I fucking cried over that. I always knew that I couldn't trust my emotions, but I didn't know that it went to that extreme. Having that wake up call to me was unlike anything. It was like I was living somebody else's life in the moment. It was fucked up. So whether the distortion is intentional or not doesn't erase the impact. Intent helps explain why something happened. Impact tells us what damaged it caused, and that's why accountability matters so much. The healthiest response after conflict isn't proving who was right, it's asking what happened here and what responsibility belongs to me. Healthy accountability sounds like I understand why I reacted that way, but I still hurt you and I need to do better. Unhealthy accountability sounds like you know my BPD is or how my BPD is. The first statement uses the diagnosis to create understanding, the second uses it to avoid accountability. It's the problem anything, Nope, all right. One of the hardest parts, especially if you've loved someone with untreated BPD, is separating their pain from

11:10Speaker 4:the damage that they cause. You know that they're suffering, You know their childhood may have been filled with trauma, abandonment, or neglect. Your empathy grows. At first that feels compassionate. Eventually it becomes self abandonment because you begin accepting behavior that you would not never tolerate from anyone else. You stop asking whether the relationship is healthy and start asking how you can avoid upsetting them. You become hypervigilant. Your emotional world revolves around preventing their next spiral. That's not intimy, it's not intimacy, it's survival. Many people mistake emotional intensity for emotional closeness, but they are very different things. Intensity is unpredictable and consuming, and intimacy feels emotionally safe. This is why boundaries are an act of love, not punishment.

11:54Speaker 4:You can fully understand why someone reacts the way that they do while still refusing to accept the behavior. You could acknowledge their abandonment wound and still say you don't get to scream at me because you're scared. Compassion and accountability are not opposites, and healthy relationships they exist together. Moving on to the next principle.

12:13Speaker 5:I just want to say that that last one is not hard. It's not hard to not yell at you or to raise my voice here, or to call you names and all those kinds of things. Can't remember we were listening to a book or reading a book and they said that the person you're not the You're not the reason that the person yelled. The person wanted to yell, and they used you as the excuse to do it.

12:33Speaker 2:Yeah, it's courage to be disliked.

12:34Speaker 3:Yes, that was a lot of my borderline.

12:37Speaker 5:I'm not going to speak for the world's borderline, but there is a repetitive pattern that borderline is used in an excuse to to get away with things because borderlines developed through trauma. Yeah right, borderline almost said at attendees, like we're going to events people who have borderline, it is we are victims who slowly transform into abusers, and it's done as a survival Mechanism's fucked up. It's a fucked up cycle, but it's definitely something that you can break.

13:11Speaker 5:My husband and I both with borderline. We do not scream at each other. We do not yell at each other. We do not call each other names. We do not cuss at each other when we're upset. Took a whole lot of work though self mastery. Yeah, guys, I'm gonna apologize. Sorry, I'm gonna apologize about the noise is gonna come through the mic carry is using a screw gun back there. Okay, so this principle extends far beyond BPD. Depression doesn't excuse cruelty, ADHD doesn't excuse chronic disrespect, PTSD doesn't excuse violence. Anxiety does not excuse controlling behavior. Every diagnosis deserves compassion, but every person remains responsible for what they do with their pain.

13:49Speaker 4:I'm gonna read that again. Every person remains responsible for what they do with their pain. The people I've seen make the greatest progress aren't the ones whose symptoms disappear. They're the ones who stopped defending their symptoms. They became curious instead of protective. Instead of asking why can't people understand me? They began to ask why or what excuse me? What effect does this have on the people I love? And that's where healing begins. It's not shame, its ownership.

14:16Speaker 4:The same is true for the partner. Healing doesn't begin when the other person finally changes. It begins when you stop abandoning yourself in the name of understanding someone else's diagnosis. You can have endless compassion for another person's wounds without sacrificing your own well being. Understanding why someone behaves the way they do should never require you to disconnect from your own reality. The healthiest relationships aren't built because two people have no wounds. They're built because people are willing to take responsibility for what those wounds produce. That's true whether someone has BPD or no diagnosis at all. Accountability is what turns pain into growth. Without it, pain simply gets passed from one person to the next. Another pattern that people often struggle to understand is how quickly love can seem to transform into punishment and healthy relationships. Conflict might change how someone feels in the moment, but it doesn't completely rewrite who their partner is. With untreated BPD, emotional perception can shift so dramatically that the entire relationship seems to change in an instant. One day, you're described

15:20Speaker 4:as the most understanding, loving, and safe person they've ever known. A few hours later, your selfish, manipulative, uncaring, or exactly like everyone else who's ever hurt them. From your perspective, nothing significant happened from theirs. Everything changed because their emotional experience has changed. This is often connected to what's known as splitting. Splitting is someone consciously deciding to paint you as the villain. It's difficulty holding on to two seemingly opposite truths at the same time. It's hard to believe that someone can deeply love you while also disappointing you.

15:53Speaker 4:It's difficult to accept that someone can make a mistake without becoming a bad person. When emotions become overwhelming, the minds simplified reality into two extremes. You're either completely safe or completely dangerous, completely loving or rejecting. That black and white thinking can make relationships feel incredibly unstable because your place within them is constantly shifting. The painful part for the partner is that they're trying to solve a problem that doesn't actually belong to them. They assume, if I can just explain myself better, or if I can choose my words more carefully, then maybe the misunderstanding won't happen again, So they begin editing themselves. They think three steps ahead before speaking. They rehearse difficult conversations in the shower. They delete text messages before sending them because they worry about how they will be interpreted. They become less authentic, not because they're dishonest, but because they're trying to avoid another emotional explosion. Over time, this creates what people commonly describe as walking on eggshells. That phrase gets so often, it

16:50Speaker 4:gets that phrase gets used so often it loses its meaning. But if you lived it, you know exactly what it feels like. You're constantly scanning for danger. You pay attention to the subtle chain and tone, facial expressions, pauses, and in conversation, you stop bringing up your own concerns because you already know that the conversation is where it's likely going to end. Instead of discussing the original issue, you'll spend the next two hours defending your character, your intentions, or your love for them. Eventually, silence starts feeling like the safer honesty. I've mentioned splitting and stopped in the eggshell thing a lot in this document for two reasons.

17:23Speaker 4:Splitting gets asked about every time we talk about it. When VPD gets brought up, everybody wants to know it's splitting, and so it's been mentioned a lot in this document. And then the eggshell thing is because of the book. Stop walking on eggshells. If you are in a relationship with somebody who has borderline, you should be reading that book. It's going to give you a whole lot of information about the mood swings and how you should handle it as a partner so that you don't become an authentic version of you. So the tragedy is that this doesn't create peace, It creates an emotional isolation. The relationship begins revolving around one person's nervous system while the other person's needs slowly disappear. The partner becomes so focused on preventing in the next crisis that they stop asking for what they need, their boundaries soft in, their opinions become quieter, their emotional world shrinks because maintaining stability feels more important than being understood. The fear of abandonment is another area that is frequently misunderstood. Most people hear those words and picture someone simply wanting extra reassurance or needs to hear

18:20Speaker 4:I love you more. Often sometimes that's exactly what it looks like, but untreated abandonment wounds can become much more controlling because the goal shifts from receiving reassurance to trying to eliminate uncertainty altogether. That's why seemingly ordinary situations can become major conflicts. Why are you going out with your friends? Why didn't you answer your phone? Who were you texting? Why do you need to be by yourself? Why didn't you tell me sooner? Why do you need space? Individually, none of those questions are inherently unhealthy. Healthy couples ask questions.

18:51Speaker 4:Healthy couples seek reassurance. The difference is the frequency and tensity, and whether the questions are actually seeking understanding or trying to eliminate anxiety. The difficult truth is that uncertainty can never be completely eliminated. No amount of reassurance permanently heals an abandonment wound. The relief is temporary because the fear doesn't originate from the present relationship. Read that again, guys. The relief is temporary because the fear doesn't or originate in the present relationship. It originates in older experiences that taught the nervous system that people leave, love disappears, and safety cannot be trusted. If those deeper wounds aren't addressed, reassurance becomes like pouring water into a bucket with a fucking hole in the bottom. It helps for a moment, but soon the anxiety returns and demands even more.

19:39Speaker 2:Why am I having such a hard time saying that I don't know? Moving on?

19:43Speaker 4:This is why many partners eventually find themselves trapped in an impossible cycle. They reassure more, they check in more, they give up time with friends, they share passwords, they answer every single phone call immediately, they stop asking for space. For brief period, things improve, then the anxiety, a new uncertainty to focus on. The standard keeps moving because the real problem was never your behavior, It was the nervous system's inability to tolerate not knowing what I'm just pausing for effect, okay. One of the most heartbreaking dynamics involves threats of self harm or suicide during relationship conflict. Statements like statements like if you leave, I don't know what I'll do where if you loved me, you wouldn't walk away place an enormous emotional burden on the other person.

20:29Speaker 4:In those moments, people often become trapped by a question they can't answer. Is this genuine desperation or is this manipulation? Are they serious? What if I leave and something actually happens?

20:42Speaker 5:I would That's exactly what I've had. I remember one guy specifically send me pictures of him harming himself because I didn't want to be with him anymore, and at that time I didn't. I fucking fed into it, and I allowed myself to be manipulated and all those kinds of things.

20:59Speaker 3:I should have called the cops.

21:00Speaker 5:I should have looked at those photos, been like, Okay, this is what's happening, and be like, I need a wellness check. Here's the address. I got photos of them harming themselves. They say that they're gonna control all delete check on them please, yep. And if they get Baker acted, that's not my fault. That is not my fault either. People who want to use those extremes to try and continue.

21:22Speaker 3:To control people fucking need help.

21:24Speaker 2:Yep.

21:25Speaker 3:That's not how okay human beings behave.

21:29Speaker 4:I actually think that's the best thing that you can do for somebody in one of those situations, because they do clearly need the help.

21:34Speaker 2:Yeah.

21:35Speaker 4:The reality is that from the partner's perspective, the distinction often doesn't change what they experience, whether those statements come from overwhelming panic or a conscious attempt to stop someone from leaving, the effect is the same. Someone else's safety becomes your responsibility. Your choices stop being based on what's healthy and start being based on fear. You remain in situations you know are harming you because you are terrified of what might happen if you leave. It becomes a psychological prison that creates an abusive dynamic regardless of intention.

22:06Speaker 4:This is one of those places where intent and impact need to be separated. Intent matters when deciding what kind of treatment someone needs. A therapist needs to understand whether the behavior comes from trauma, emotional dysregulation, personality structure, or something else entirely, but inside of a relationship, impact matters just as much. If someone repeatedly uses the possibility of harming themselves to influence your decisions, your freedom to choose has been compromised. It's also important to understand that manipulation isn't always calculated. People often imagine manipulation as someone sitting in a room carefully plotting how to control another person, and reality, manipulation is frequently much less conscious than that.

22:45Speaker 4:Sometimes it's panic, sometimes it's survival. Sometimes it's a childlike part of the nervous system. Repeating strategies that once worked because chaos was the only language that got attention, comfort, or protection. That explanation can generate tremendous amounts of compassion.

23:00Speaker 2:It should.

23:01Speaker 4:Many of these behaviors develop because they were adaptive at one point in life, but understanding where they came from doesn't mean that they should continue unchecked. We can have compassion for somebody's history while still requiring healthy behavior in the present. Those two things are not in conflict with one another. This is why the biggest red flag is an emotional intensity itself. Everyone becomes emotionally overwhelmed. Sometimes, everyone loses control. Everyone says things they regret. The defining question isn't whether someone has emotional outbursts, it's what happens afterwards.

23:31Speaker 4:Do they become curious about their own behavior or do they become defensive? Do they know how they affected you? Or do they immediately explain why you deserved it? I fucking hate that that you deserved it, liney like that is and immediately I'm.

23:46Speaker 3:Out, Well if you didn't do this?

23:49Speaker 2:Yeah?

23:50Speaker 4:Do they acknowledge your pain or do they redirect the conversation back to their own Every emotional explosion somehow becomes your fault and growth becomes impossible. If every boundary is interpreted as abandonment, then boundaries disappear. If every consequence is framed as proof that you don't love them, then accountability never has room to exist. If every apology arrives wrapped inside of an excuse, nothing will ever actually change because responsibility has been given away. Healthy accountability sounds completely different.

24:21Speaker 4:It sounds like I know I split on you, I wasn't seeing you clearly. I understand how this damaged our trust. I handled my fear by trying to control you, and that wasn't okay. I'm working on slowing myself down before I react. If you notice what's absent from those statements, there's no attempt to shift responsibility back onto the other person. There's no expectation that forgiveness should erase the need for change, and there's no demand that empathy should replace accountability. And that's what genuine recovery looks like. It's not perfection, it's the app it's not perfection, it's not the absence of triggers, it's not ever having another difficult day. Recovery becomes obvious because the person and stops defending their behaviors that are damaging the people they love. They become less interested in proving their reactions made sense and more interested in understanding their impact. That's where trust begins to rebuild. Ultimately, relationships don't heal because somebody finally explains why they behave they do.

25:17Speaker 4:They heal when the explanations become the starting point for responsibility instead of the substitute for it. Understanding creates compassion, Accountability create safety, and healthy requires a relationship to have both. Anything all right one of the statements we hear all the times, I can't help it. I think there's some truth. Yeah, I think there's some truth to that, But only up to a point. Can someone always control the emotion that rises up inside of them? No, No one can fear anger, shame, jealousy, grief.

25:47Speaker 4:Those emotions often arrive before we've had a chance to really choose them. I think that on a nervous system level, they're automatic. They are the product of our nervous system and our past experiences, in the way that our brain has learned to interpret the world. Where the choice enters, the pictures what happens next. There's a distinction between an emotional impulse and a behavioral response. Feeling rage is not the same as screaming. Screaming is the choice rages the emotion right. Feeling abandoned isn't the same as threatening someone.

26:20Speaker 4:Feeling terrified isn't the same as manipulating another person into stain. The emotion may not be voluntary, but the behavior can be voluntary through awareness, practice, and repetition. It's one of the central goals of therapy. If people had no control over what they did, treatment wouldn't work. Dialectic behavioral therapy, one of the most effective treatments for BPD, is built on the assumption that people can learn new ways of responding to old emotions. It teaches mindfulness so that people notice what's happening before they're consumed by it. It teaches distress tolerance so that they can survive overwhelming emotions while acting impulsively without excuse me, without acting impulsively. It teaches emotional regulation so feelings become less explosive over time. It teaches interpersonal effectiveness so that people can ask for what they need without resorting to threats, accusations, or emotional chaos.

27:13Speaker 4:The existence of successful treatment tells us that people are capable of change, but not everyone chooses it. The existence of successful treatment tells us something important. People are capable of change, not everyone chooses it, not everyone has access to it, and not everyone sticks with it, but many do. That's why I never accept the idea that someone is simply destined to hurt everyone around them because of a diagnosis. The research, and more importantly, the lived experience of thousands of people in recovery tell a very different story. We tried to record this in the beginning, and I was on the wrong document, and at the beginning of the last one that we were recording, I don't believe that I fit the criteria for borderline anymore. I've had it my entire life. I've done enough therapy and enough healing, enough self help, growth, whatever you want to call it, shadow work that though I still have moments where I get triggered, I think that I'm way off that scale now, And like, I do believe that anyone can be healed from BPD. You know, you compared to when I met you, is a very different person. Yeah, So, like there's a

28:14Speaker 4:whole lot of growth that can happen, but the work fucking has to get done, and it's not an overnight thing. And the hardest part about this is until you have an episode, it's all theory. When you have an episode and get triggered and you allow that emotion to take over, all of that theory goes out the fucking window. A lot of the times you forget everything you learned and you have to like try to regain that in the moment of conflict when your emotional system is freaking the fuck out.

28:38Speaker 3:It's hard to do in the beginning.

28:39Speaker 2:It is.

28:39Speaker 4:It is a fucking nightmare, but it's possible, and you just have to continue to stick with it. That's why when someone tells me they have borderline personality disorder, my first thought isn't they're dangerous? My first thought is what are you doing with that information? A diagnosis is valuable because it gives you a map. It helps you explain why certain patterns keep repeating. But a map only matters if you're willing to follow it. Are you learning about your triggers? Are you practicing the skills that you've been taught?

29:05Speaker 4:Are you becoming curious about your own reactions instead of automatically defending them? Are you apologizing when you've caused harm? Are you willing to hear how your behavior affects other people without immediately explaining why it happened? Those are questions that tell me, did you hear that h Those are questions that tell me far more than the diagnosis itself ever could. Unfortunately, some people use a diagnosis as an explanation, while others use it as an identity.

29:33Speaker 2:Those are different things.

29:34Speaker 4:An explanation helps you understand where to begin healing, and an identity can become a prison because every unhealthy behavior gets folded into that's just who I am. Once that happens, growth stops because change starts feeling like a threat to the very identity that you have now built around your suffering.

29:53Speaker 2:This isn't unique to BPD.

29:55Speaker 4:You can see it with anxiety depression, ADHDPTSD, addiction, and other countless struggles. Every diagnosis offers an explanation, and none of them remove responsibility. They simply tell us which mountain we're climbing. The same principle applies to trauma. Trauma explains why your nervous system reacts the way that it does. It explains why some people become hypervigilant, why others avoid conflict entirely, and why certain situations trigger responses that seem completely disproportionate from the outside. Trauma deserves compassion because it represents something that happened to us, often before we have the ability to protect ourselves. But compassion and responsibility are not opposites. One of the greatest mistakes we make is believing that because our reactions make sense, they therefore become someone else's responsibility to manage they don't. Healing begins the moment we stop expecting other people to carry emotions that only we can learn to regulate ourselves. It's one of the hardest transitions in recovery. It means that accepting that your pain may not be your fault, but your healing

30:57Speaker 4:eventually becomes your responsibility. It's an unfair truth, but it's still true. Another area that creates tremendous confusion is the difference between splitting and lying. Many partners assume that they're being deliberately manipulated because their loved one is describing reality in a way that feels completely disconnected from what actually happened. Sometimes intentional manipulation does occur, but often something much more complicated is happening. I do believe that people can use their their borderline as a reason to abuse other people.

31:28Speaker 3:I agree.

31:28Speaker 4:You know, if you are really that unhealed and you are so worried about self and your own nervous system, the way that you manipulate and treat other people does become abusive, and I think that it becomes normal for them.

31:40Speaker 5:Looking back on who I was with my borderline, the way that I acted towards certain people, that there were certain behavioral traits that I look back on that I did, and I view it as abusive. I would scream, I would yell, I would degrade, I would gaslight, very self centered, I had very high narcissistic traits.

32:00Speaker 4:So there's an important distinction to make because it changes how we understand the behavior. It doesn't make the accusations accurate, and it certainly doesn't make the impact less painful for the receiving partner, But it reminds us that we're not always dealing with a calculated deception. Sometimes we're dealing with someone who has temporarily lost access to a balanced, integrated picture of the person standing in front of them. This also explains why logic often fails during intense emotional episodes.

32:26Speaker 4:Partners frequently believe that they can just explain themselves clearly enough, they'll resolve the misunderstanding that if they offer evidence, they clarify timelines, they point to text message, they commonly explain what it meant, and none of it works, not because the explanation is wrong, but because the nervous system has already decided there's danger. Once the brain enters survival mode, higher reasoning begins shutting down. The emotional centers become louder, while the parts responsible for nuanced perspective and complex thinking becomes quieter. Guys, I want you to think about your own life. Someone startled you with a loud explode in your heart would race before you had time to analyze whether you were actually safe. Your body reacts first, and then your thinking catches up afterwards. Just walked in there and said something to carry and scared the fuck.

33:10Speaker 2:Out of her.

33:10Speaker 4:Thought she was gonna cry shot me. She did that to me like, I don't know what that's gonna do. Yeah, but she did it, and that was her body before her mind could process what happened, she was gonna judy chot me. That's essentially what's happened emotionally. The nervous system has already declared an emergency, So trying to reason someone back to calm is like trying to convince a smoke detector that there's no fire while it's sensing smoke. It doesn't excuse behavior. It explains why timing matters. Most productive conversations happen after the nervous system has returned to baseline, not what it's flooded with survival chemistry. We have told you, guys, over and over again on this podcast that you will never come to resolution and conflict. It does not work that way. You guys might end the conversation in conflict because you don't want to fucking fight anymore. But conflict resolution comes after the conflict is ended. You've both had time to think. When the nervous system calms down, it does the thing something else that's really discusses the role of the partner. Conversations about VPD often focus exclusively on

34:10Speaker 4:the person carrying the diagnosis, but relationships always involve two nervous systems interacting with one another. Many partners unknowingly bring their own attachment wounds into these relationships. They mistake hypervigilance for love. They believe that if they're patient enough, understanding enough, or sacrificing enough, that they can finally create the safety that the other person never had. They become experts at anticipating moods, avoiding conflict, and minimizing their own needs. From the outside, that looks incredibly loving, and in reality it may be codependency. Codependency isn't simply caring deeply about another person.

34:44Speaker 4:It's organizing your life around managing someone else's emotional world while you are neglecting your own. Your mood becomes dependent on whether they're okay. Your sense of peace depends on keeping them regulated. You stop asking what do I need and start asking how do I prevent the next explosion. One person's fear of abandonment fits perfectly with another person's fear of disappointing people. One desperately pursues closeness, the other desperately avoids conflict. It feels like compatibility because each person's wounds temporarily sue the others. Over time, the same wounds begin feeding each other. The anxious partner asks for more reassurance.

35:19Speaker 4:The code dependent partner gives more reassurance. Then the anxiety returns, the reassurance increases. Neither person is actually healing, They're simply becoming more dependent on the pattern. That's why what initially feels like fate often becomes a trap. This is why boundaries become so important and why they're so frequently misunderstood. Many people think that a boundary is something that you can impose on another person.

35:43Speaker 2:It's not.

35:44Speaker 4:A boundary is something that you place around your own behavior. A threat says you better change. A boundary says he I will. Here's what I will do if discontinues. There's a profound difference between saying, if you ever yell at me again, I'm leaving you and saying, if this conversation becomes abuse, hi, I'm going to leave the room until we can both speak respectfully. The first tries to control another person's behavior, the second defines your own. For someone with untreated BPD, however, even healthy boundaries feel like abandonment.

36:13Speaker 4:That's because limits are often interpreted through the lens of old attachment wounds rather than present reality. A request for space feels like rejection. A consequent feels like the withdrawal of love. That doesn't mean that boundaries are wrong. It means they may feel painful while still being necessary. Healthy relationships aren't built by avoiding discomfort. They're built by learning that discomfort isn't the same thing as abandonment. Attachment theory also helps explain why people respond so differently to these relationships.

36:42Speaker 4:Someone with anxious attachment style often stays far longer than they should because emotional intensity feels familiar. Chaos becomes confused with passion. The constant cycle of rupture and repair creates a powerful emotional high that can be mistaken for deep love. The relationship feels significant precisely because it feels so consuming. This is that fucking, deeply toxic, flawed shit. Someone with more avoidant attachment styles may have the opposite challenge. They may leave at first sign of instability, sometimes before the other person has had genuine opportunity to demonstrate accountability and growth.

37:19Speaker 4:Their instinct is to create distance rather than tolerate uncertainty. Neither attachment style is inherently healthier both their adaptations. One clings, one withdraws secure attachment learns to stay connected without abandoning itself. One perspective I find especially helpful comes from Alfred Adler. We talked about him on the live that we did earlier today. Adler believed that symptoms often serve a purpose, even if we're completely unaware of it. He called this our private logic, the internal story that explains why our behavior makes sense to us. From an Adlerian perspective, an outburst isn't anger, it's a strategy. An accusation isn't just criticism, it's a strategy. A threat isn't simply manipulation, It's a strategy.

38:05Speaker 4:This becomes so the question becomes, what is this strategy trying to accomplish. Usually the answer isn't cruelty. It's safety, closeness, certainty, or it's the control in the face of overwhelming fear. Understanding that changes how we see the behavior without requiring us to accept it. We can have compassion for the goal while refusing the strategy. We can understand that someone is desperately trying to avoid abandonment while still refusing to accept screaming, threats, manipulation, or emotional abuse. And that's the balance we should be aiming for. Understanding without enabling compassion without self abandonment, and accountability without shame because healing doesn't happen when we deny our wounds, nor does it happen when we make other people responsible for them. Healing happens when we understand why, we develop the strategies we did, thank them for helping us survive, and then have the courage to replace them with healthier ones. That's true borderline person disorder, and it's true for every human being carrying wounds that they didn't ask for, but they're now responsible

39:05Speaker 4:for healing.

39:07Speaker 2:And that's my.

39:07Speaker 3:Document, very good document. Husband.

39:11Speaker 4:I think that it's important to recognize that people that have borderline personality disorder, though I don't think that most of them intend on being abusive, I think that they need to understand that the way that they conduct themselves most of the time actually.

39:28Speaker 2:Is abusive to other people.

39:30Speaker 4:And when you have untreated borderline personality disorder and you're not doing any of the therapy CBT, DBT, cognitive processing therapy schema, any of the things that you could be doing to start to learn new training, learn new behavioral patterns, to break cycles of triggers and trauma responses. The rain thing happened and I lost my train of thought. Damn, where was I chat somebody remind me of what the fuck I was talking about. It's completely gone. We'll be able to watch this back. Yeah, yeah, you'll just have to click on the link again. You were talking about unintentional being abusing, unintentional being abusing. I don't know where I was going with that thought, but I do believe that if you are unhealed and you are not doing anything to heal yourself, that you are actually abusive to other people. I do remember where I was going, but I don't remember the line of thought. The where I was going was that it is your responsibility to start doing the healing work for yourself because the people that are going to come into your life are going to leave scarred and fucked up because of your trauma. And

40:32Speaker 4:it's not fair to the people that come into your life and attempt to love you for you to just be like, well, you know how my borderline is, or I have BPD, so this is just who I am and you have to accept me.

40:41Speaker 3:This is what you signed up for, right, miss Bush?

40:44Speaker 4:Yeah, this is not what I signed up for. I signed up for a healthy, loving relationship, and you're not doing anything to become loving or healthy.

40:52Speaker 5:I was a psychotic bitch when I was unhinged with my borderline. I've heard people say that about me, and I am willing to acknowledge that of my past until you're willing to recognize that you, yourself, are a Tasmanian devil, leaving a trail of destruction behind you while thinking that you're protecting yourself while simultaneously abusing people. It's a mess, and there's a whole lot of lessons to be learned. There's a whole lot of self mastery. My borderline has become a superpower.

41:23Speaker 2:Can you elaborate on that? How your borderline has become a superpower?

41:29Speaker 5:My hypervigilance, We can start with that. My hypervigilance and always scanning rooms and looking for threats. I can now read people almost instantaneously, whether you're being emotional, you're having a good day, having a bad day. My abandonment is almost completely healed because I've recognized people are not meant to stay in my life forever. There is a higher level of emotional intelligence that I gained having to work through my abandonment and recognizing at the end of the day, yes, I have people who love me and people who will be here for me, but I'm going to experience death by myself.

42:08Speaker 3:I could have people in the.

42:09Speaker 5:Room with me, but at the end of the day, all of it's going to be with me.

42:16Speaker 3:So people don't abandon me.

42:19Speaker 5:They choose to do what's best in their life, and I just happen to be a casualty.

42:22Speaker 3:Their life isn't about me.

42:23Speaker 2:It's such as that in itself is a superpower.

42:27Speaker 4:People get so hung up and they did this to me because, like we talked about earlier today and the other live, it's about being a villain or a victim, and you have to be one of them, and it's so much easier to make someone else the villain so that you can be the victim, so that you're not perceived in a bad light. When you realize that people are going to do what's best for them and you just accept that that is human nature, it changes almost every conversation. It's no longer about I can't believe they did this to me. This sucks and I'm hurting right now.

42:53Speaker 4:That's a very fair statement. But they didn't do this to you. They did this for them, and you got splashed by it.

43:00Speaker 5:Your egos thinking it's about you Yeah, yep. You will never be the center of someone else's universe.

43:06Speaker 4:No. I think the most that we can hope for in life is that somebody will love us enough to make us like want to share the universe with them, right, you know, And that's one of those things that has to be constantly pushed, right, Like you can't just go one day, hey, we're going to be together for the rest of our lives, and that we're just going to be together and that's all there is to it, because it doesn't work right. There's a whole lot of work and a whole lot of obstacles that's going to have to come in. It's like a what do they call it?

43:34Speaker 4:A spartan race? You know, some of this is going to be pretty easy for one of us and for the other one it's gonna be a fucking nightmare.

43:39Speaker 2:But we have to choose to do the shit together. Like, it's a whole lot of work. Yeah, I don't really have anything else to get into.

43:46Speaker 4:Somebody on Patreon asked if we would do a conversation about the control dramas and parenting.

43:52Speaker 5:That sounds interesting, Yeah, should you should tag me in the discord and post that again?

43:56Speaker 3:I won't remember it was.

43:57Speaker 4:Okay, yeah, it was posted on the actual Patreon page, not on a discord, but either way, I definitely think that that would be a good idea to sit down. We've done the control drama thing a lot. I don't remember where I did it, but I did something and tied it into young and psychology so that people could see the crossover and how it works from the Celestine prophecies control dramas and to actual young and psychology. And I think that that was, you know, a benefit for people to hear. But I do think that parents use the control dramas quite a bit with their kids, especially in forms of manipulation, because their young minds don't understand it yet. I also think that when you realize that that's happening, you realize where the childhood wounds come from. Yeah, because you're you're creating an unsafe nervous system in your children.

44:38Speaker 4:We definitely should do that episode.

44:39Speaker 2:Okay, Yeah, so.

44:41Speaker 4:Many in chat said, what's the control drama? So there's a book called The Celestine Prophecy that came out a while ago, and it talks about energy transference between people. It's fiction, it's not a you know a real book, but they talk about the control dramas in that book, and the control dramas are the way that humans vie for energy, and the control dramas tie into YOUNGI and psychology. They just have different words for it, and it ties into kind of the shadow and there's a whole lot that gets into that, but it is the way that human beings vie for energy. Some people are interrogators, some are bullies, some are pity me, some are aloof There's different control dramas that do different things for people, and that's how they basically steal your energy. And you can see it when people come into the room and like, imagine you've got four people that you're friends with and you guys are all laughing, and then Debbie Downer walks into the room and the moment she walks in, the energy shifts and as soon as she starts talking, you can see it depleting energy from the people in the room and what was once a laughing, happy thing is

45:37Speaker 4:now giving all of their energy to Debbie Downer. And she walked in feeling depleted, and she's leaving high and everybody else is like, what the fuck just happened? Like we were feeling so good a minute ago. Yeah, somebody said you have her must read list of books.

45:49Speaker 2:We do.

45:50Speaker 4:There's a downloadable list on the website. Guys, if you enjoy this content, please give it a light, give a share, send it to people that you think need to hear it. We are trying to continue to build and grow this channel. If you want access to an exclusive community of people who are trying to heal and go through their own healing journey, I highly recommend that you go to patreon dot com, forward slash to be Better and check it out. We have mentor groups in there, men and women's public scroups.

46:14Speaker 4:We have private coaching. There's a whole lot of things that we do in the Patreon that you're missing if you're not a part of and it really helps support the channel.

46:22Speaker 2:So do you have anything you want to add?

46:24Speaker 4:Buttemus Beautymus Maximus, Nope, I think you covered it all all right. She's gonna be doing some of these documents on her own, and I'm gonna sit and be her beautiful sidekick. I'll make sure I do my hair that day just so that you guys, can you know, get the beautemous version of me and we will see you guys on the next one.

46:41Speaker 2:Hi, guys,