Can You Cure Borderline Personality With Unconditional Love?

Guest post by Randi Kreger

Question: Can you cure borderline personality disorder with unconditional love?

Answer: No. I’m afraid not. I’m very sorry to say this, but it can’t. But unconditional love is extremely important to their recovery as long as you are not reinforcing unwanted behavior, such as abuse.

I Am Serious

Knowing this and truly accepting it in your body are two different things. So I will say it again.

Your love, no matter how deep, unconditional, and unselfish, can’t cure this disorder any more than it can cure cancer, heart disease, schizophrenia, and eating disorders.

I Am Sorry

I know you’re convinced you will be the exception. Unfortunately, everyone thinks they are an exception. It’s a mathematical impossibility.

The people who recovered or are recovering do so because they work hard and usually have great support systems with effective treatment and aftercare support.

Later in this post, I’ll explain the role that unconditional love does play. It is a big one.

Let me further explain why unconditional love is not a cure.

The Brain's Role in BPD

First of all, BPD is a brain disorder like bipolar or schizophrenia. You can’t fix the brain. The first neuroscientist to do so will make a jillion dollars.

Very, very briefly, the parts of the brain that control emotions, make them stable, and prevent the person from taking impulsive actions are out of whack in folks with this disorder. Scientists have better language than “out of whack,” but it will do for these purposes.

The parts of the brain that control emotions are overactive and flood the brain like a tsunami. If you look at a borderline brain under stress with an MRI, you can see this happen in blooming color.

The brain is broken partly because of problems with the neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers. It also has to do with the physical structures that you would see if you were doing an autopsy. (The amygdala, if you want to be specific.)

Psychiatrists try to fix brain chemicals with different kinds of medications. But we’re at the beginning stages, and we can only treat BPD traits, not BPD as a whole.

It is guesswork that involves trying different medications in different strengths. Every person with BPD reacts differently, and there are lots of side effects.

There is no surgery to fix the physical brain, except maybe in a science-fiction movie.

The Environment

Love by itself, without work from the person, cannot overcome the early environment that the person was raised in. If their caregivers were not good ones, that means by the time that the all-important attachment bonds were formed (around 2 years old), your loved one was in the wrong line for parents.

Developing good attachment bonds is critical to forming healthy relationships. It’s still possible with some work and therapy: None of us had perfect parents. But if they were abusive, your family member has extra work to do. If they won’t do that, it’s a problem.

The love you give now can’t substitute for the love they should have gotten back then. The life of Marilyn Monroe is a great example.

Born to a mentally unstable mother and absent father, she spent her childhood in a series of foster homes and an orphanage. For a while, she lived with her ill mother, who had a series of mental crises. She had better homes, but twice men tried to sexually assault her.

Passed around from one place to another, she really never had a chance. As an adult, she was known for her emotional vulnerability. No matter how many men loved her for real, no matter how beloved she was to the public, nothing could fill the empty hole inside her. She may be the most famous star with likely borderline personality disorder, aside from Princess Diana (although neither were officially diagnosed).

The Invisible, See-Through Plastic Spacesuit

The “see-through plastic spacesuit” is the third reason love can't cure BPD or, more accurately, overcome certain BPD traits.

Think of the spacesuit as a semi-permeable and flexible person-shaped, clear, three-inch piece of plastic that surrounds your loved one at all times, but can’t be seen. It also can’t be felt.

You can try to break it, burn through it, or use a buzz saw, a brick, a spear, a drill, or dynamite. But the suit is tough, built up over a lifetime of things such as low self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, shame, fear of abandonment, fear of intimacy, fear of being known, fear of engulfment, and an inability to believe they are worthy of love.

The big thing to remember about the spacesuit is that it was there before you ever walked into the scene. You did not cause it. You can’t control it. You cannot cure it.

The suit is part of the illness, the way that red dots are part of the measles, or malignant cells are a part of cancer. You can’t treat the cells, spots, or spacesuit without treating the underlying disorder. And you are not the therapist.

A Short Exercise

There is only one way it can be opened: from the inside. Therefore, it is up to the borderline individual.

Try this exercise to see how scary it is:

Make a list of all of your inchoate fears, defenses, and secret things you don’t want people to know about you. Think about tearing them all down and being exposed. How does it feel? How would you want someone to handle approaching you about them?

The problem isn't that you don't give enough love. The problem is that it cannot penetrate the spacesuit.

Your messages of love can have a hard time getting through to them. Think Wi-Fi in the middle of the Sahara desert.

It's Not Your Fault

Your loved one may accuse you of not saying “I love you” enough, or saying it with the wrong inflection or at the wrong time.

They may argue that you say it, but don’t show it, because you didn’t give up your family for them, or you work too many hours, put your friends in front of them, have hobbies that take time away from them, don’t want to have sex when they do, want to do things without them, want privacy, don’t want to account for every minute or have a life of your own.

(And by the way, you deserve all those things. And you don’t need their permission to have them.)

Borderline Logic

These are all excuses. The real problem is that your family member doesn’t feel the love, and they don’t know why. And that’s not their fault. The suit is invisible to them, too.

So if it’s not them, they figure, it makes sense that the problem must be you. It’s an error that hurts.

You can ask your family member with BPD what you could do to help them feel loved, and do it if it is a reasonable request. But if other people in your life aren’t complaining, you’re acting loving. So stop feeling guilty.

Two Tin Cats With String

You assume, however, that your message is connecting. You do so much for them. (In fact, you may do too much for them.) But remember: Wi-Fi, desert. You get frustrated because they keep testing you to prove it to them, and not always in a nice way.

If you have a partner with BPD, they test because the beginning of the relationship is over, and now that you’re not fawning over them every second, they’re very afraid of losing you. They may be biting just to see how long you stay.

Meanwhile, you’re not passing the test. You don’t even seem to care. You’re not giving up your life to write love poems, gaze in their eyes, and play love songs the way you did during those heady, intense first few weeks.

People with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble reaching a deeper level of intimacy after the initial high of a new relationship. People with BPD may need so much assurance and demonstrations of love that this deeper level provokes anxiety. It’s natural that candlelit dinners give way to fights about who’s doing the dishes. It must be a terrifying time for people with BPD.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

When a person has low self-worth, everything comes across as criticism. You don’t say it, but they hear it. You say you were not thinking that; they don’t believe you.

Always remember that with BPD, feelings triumph over facts every time. They don’t always let themselves feel the love. And it doesn’t matter how you try to prove it.

Some people are pessimists. You might’ve heard about a person in a job evaluation who heard nothing but rave reviews and one tiny criticism, and all they remember is that one small critique.

Well, the person with BPD in the evaluation heard “You’re about to get fired,” and they’re in crisis mode.

You could suggest a different restaurant than they want to go to, and they will hear, “I don’t value your opinion at all about anything.”

You will quickly learn you cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that right now there is not a 6-foot-tall, purple bunny with a machete following you just beyond your sight, because even with a dozen police officers following you, the bunny can hide itself.

So you cannot prove that you love somebody if they do not think they are worthy of love.

What Love Can Do

Unconditional love can’t cure your family member, but if a borderline individual is working towards recovery, it is a 10 out of 10 in importance. Since they believe they are worthless and bad, total acceptance helps them learn they are lovable.

When I meet a recovered borderline individual, I always ask them what was the key to their recovery. One thing they all mention is unconditional support.

Most found it from a special belief in God. Religious beliefs aside, secularly speaking this makes a lot of sense. All loving, all giving, all forgiving, there at all hours of the day or night and with very few needs of His own, God makes for an excellent support.

In terms of unconditional support, therapists come next. Therapists don’t have needs of their own. Their purpose is to simply be there for their clients and assist in their recovery. Therapists who specialize in “reparenting” are especially suited for this.

Numerically, next comes family members, especially partners. Partners have their own needs, and that’s OK! You are not going to be perfect. You are not God. You are not a therapist, and you shouldn’t be. Your role is a family member, not a psychiatrist.

It’s OK—it’s essential—that you express your needs, take time for yourself, say no, set limits, have your own support system, stay safe, put the kids first, be happy, and live a normal life as much as you can. If you give up yourself, you will come to resent your partner. You won’t have anything left to give.

But this only works as long as you are not tolerating/accepting abuse. That’s not recovery. That is enabling and going backward. (It’s a subject for another post.)

This is a guest post by Randi Kreger. She is the co-author with me of Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone with Narcissistic or Borderline Personality Disorder, and has written other popular books on borderline personality disorder for family members.