Do individuals with borderline personality disorder have awareness of their actions or do they believe their behavior is normal?
09.06.2025 04:02
A part of having BPD in the DSM criteria is having a “Distorted negative or shifting self image.” From as long as I can remember, my mom treated me like I was bad in every way. She was vicious and chronically angry. She flat out told me she hated me, I was a devil child, my father loves her more than me, I will grow up to be a slut, and I’m a n***** lover. This was when I was just a toddler and I didn’t know what they meant, but she hurled the same insults lifelong.
Other than my personal life, I felt and still feel relatively healthy—I guess what people may call “normal?”
I stayed in therapy and invested in healing in all ways: from breaking all enmeshments to toxic people to leaving a toxic job to meditation to spirituality to quitting smoking and other forms of self harm or addiction. I’m eight years celibate.
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It’s only now that I’m proud of my accomplishments and can see my worth and know why my loved ones did what they did.
I was begging for help. Teachers called CPS multiple times. I went to guidance counselors, I asked to be put in therapy, I read every book I could on suicidal girls. I wanted to fix it so I could finally earn love.
I saw I had worth and talent all along, and that was why unhealed narcissists abused me so badly—in an effort to keep me beneath them and miserable.
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But first I had to escape. Escaping and surviving him were the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I also developed Stockholm Syndrome: I still harbor a deep grief over his pain and I wish there was healing for him like there’s been for me.
So, in that way, even though my life feels healthy (I’m still not perfect and I think healing is lifelong), I still don’t feel normal.
I did have some nurturing teachers, which was what made me want to become one.
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Yes and no.
…they’re a human being, having a human experience.
(RIP beautiful boy. I love you forever).
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My sister and I took until our 20s to stop physically fighting. I also physically fought with my mother. I didn’t ever carry that into any other relationship, but I was with a couple men who assaulted me. And I hit a man who broke into my home after I broke up with him. I felt suicidal after that, because it’s very painful to hurt people I loved.
A pattern of unstable relationships is a part of our diagnostic criteria. I recognized I had patterns of very abusive partners and traumatized men. My first love had ASPD like my parents and he committed suicide at 15. I loved him so sincerely that I couldn’t believe my love wasn’t enough to save him. My father also attempted suicide, and it seemed every man I loved didn’t think twice about abandoning me and maiming my heart in the worst way.
But I definitely will die on the hill that says normal is a gaslight only meant to torment us in shame.
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To my favorite people, I was as loyal as a dirty doormat. I trauma bonded to narcissists like my parents and tried to earn their love. But I didn’t know they had NPD until much later when I learned in therapy. I thought they were perfect. They cheated, ghosted, beat, abandoned, or raped me because I was unlovable.
I knew I wasn’t perfect but I didn’t cheat, lie, or abuse my partners. However, when I discovered their affairs, I think I was emotionally abusive, yelling and crying in betrayal.
But therapists only diagnosed me with chronic depression and cPTSD. So it didn’t seem THAT abnormal. Everyone in America seems to have those at some point in their lives.
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I had a serious suicide attempt after losing a favorite person via a sudden narcissist discard and then after that my maintainance man of my apartment stalked me for eight months and then broke into my home and raped me.
I knew my relationships were toxic but I blamed myself for being dumb and unlovable. In therapy, I kept trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. The men I chose were mostly covert malignants like my dad, so they seemed so wonderful…until they seemed like a werewolf shift.
The only other category narcissist parents have for people with their split thinking is that they’re invisible or irrelevant. They are given very common or very unusual names. They develop Histrionic Personality Disorder.
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Suicidal ideation has been pretty much as long as I can remember. My first attempt was at 8 years old, when I tried to hang myself from the ceiling fan.
Personality disorders root in early childhood. They’re called personalities because they’re lifelong. Children don’t have developed brains. We don’t have any power over our abuses either. Our wounded inner children don’t need anymore bullying.
We need compassion and innovative treatments and research and critical thinking so we can help the other little kids developing these life-threatening illnesses and behaviors. We can also save future victims of sociopaths if we invest in mental health care for kids. If we can afford police in schools and their weapons and metal detectors to prevent mass shooters (so far police have prevented exactly zero mass shootings), we can afford therapists and research for suffering children who may commit such a crime…
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The brain has trauma responses in childhood to protect us, so we can survive.
Narcissists victim blame while borderlines blame themselves.
A lot of cluster b kids don’t even survive childhood: they get killed or commit suicide or suffer chronic health conditions like childhood cancer. Not being loved in childhood takes a serious toll on a vulnerable mind and body because love is necessary to survive and we’re a social species. My health history looks like I’m 90. (Though I’m healthier than ever now: even my chronic acne cleared).
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A very painful one.
I became an anxious child. I didn’t know it, of course, but I was diagnosed later in life as autistic as well. I had stimming behaviors, but the worst of my stimming behaviors included self harm. I felt a relief to hurt myself. I would peel at my skin until it bled, hit myself when I looked in the mirror, pinch myself until I bruised, and as I got older, I’d cut myself and burn myself with a candle.
Borderlines see themselves as an all bad object while narcissists see themselves as an all good fantasy.
But I understood that other children seemed loved and I didn’t. I knew I was abused but I thought I must deserve it. It’s not like anyone was saying the abuses were wrong. My mother would do things like throw me in scalding hot water. Some people at school bullied me too.
I’ve never committed a crime. My only addictive vices are caffeine, nicotine (quit), and weed: I don’t even drink. I went to college and grad school with a 4.0 GPA summa cum laude. I lived all over the country, traveled the world. I did activist work in Cuba and Palestine. I’ve been a professor for the last 17 years and I’ve published 7 books. I won awards for my writing. I’ve always been a well liked teacher and made friends easily at work. I’ve been able to hold a job and support myself independently, even through some serious mental and physical health issues. I’ve always paid my bills and have good credit. I have many long term friends and two sweet cats.
In the weeks he drugged and raped me, I could see how he was an avatar of my father and also my first love. I had these horrifying realizations about who my family really were. This broke the last of my denial—the first stage of grief—I’d been trapped in.
From birth, at least one narcissist parent categorizes them with their split thinking as “all bad.” We are generally named after someone who died tragically or former supply of our parent who they hate. Golden children, the next generation narcissists, are considered “all good.” They are generally named after the narcissist parent in some way, as Jr, rhyming names, same middle names, or names with the same meaning.
I think we should stop stigmatizing mental health struggles—including NPD or ASPD—and start recognizing that a person who is having a trauma response isn’t an abnormal person…
I was developing empathy while my parents and sister didn’t have it, so they said I was sensitive and crazy. I felt very out of place and my pain felt like a burden to people so I tried to hide it and hide my autism.
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I know my life is gnarly but I don’t see myself as a victim or as woe as me. I see my life as a miracle.
I didn’t like to become that way, so I’d leave the relationships, but leaving them was followed by narcissistic rage. So those experiences just made all my buried traumas pile up and threaten to drown me.
Phyically, I suffered from bulimia and saw myself as an ugly troll. I have body dysmorphia and gender dysmorphia as a part of my poor self image criteria for BPD. Possibly due to childhood sexual assault, I’m phobic of my own vagina.
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But I don’t know what people mean by “normal.” Research doesn’t support this idea; neuroscientists reject the idea of a “typical” brain; and I teach and work with tons of people, yet I haven’t met this “normal” one yet. Who is this unicorn?!
I never really had explosive anger issues, but I did feel like anger was burning me alive in my gut. I felt angry over racism, war, genocide, and my rapes and child abuse. I let go of most exes but there were a few traumas that I still think no one should have to endure.
My healing is a badge of honor from fighting a war I was sure I’d die in.
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Maybe instead of normal, we should say healthy or non-abusive.
Narcissist kids need it and deserve it too. My first love deserved better. So did my sister. So did my parents.
So, did I know my self harm and suicidal ideation were abnormal? Absolutely.
We just need to be willing to break the cycle of abuse and choose healing.
People with Borderline Personality Disorder are raised scapegoat children in narcissist families.
Did I know my behavior was unhealthy? YES.
I put myself in therapy at 18 and I majored in psychology. Slowly I unraveled that my childhood was very toxic. But self worth and real self love didn’t come until after I hit rock bottom.
I knew I was abnormal, but I didn’t know why. Or what I needed to do to earn love.
But in stitching up my gangrene wounds, I finally could see that I was strong, smart, and I had worth.
I know, however, my self awareness and healing aren’t “normal.” I meet unaware borderlines all the time. And half the people I meet who SAY they are borderlines are confused narcissists. I’d say more people spend their lives unhealed rather than traverse the arduous and lonely healing journey of grieving your childhood and reparenting yourself.
I thought I only attracted damaged abusive men because I wasn’t lovable, so those were the only men who wanted me. I didn’t understand trauma bonding or BPD. I also thought I was dumb. With my autism, it wasn’t unusual for narcissists to call me retarded and it’s what my parents said since I was little.
All brains have trauma responses: and the reasons we have names for disorders is because they operate as faithfully as algorithms.
Was my behavior abusive? No.
Regardless, our life expectancy is 39, so first we need to make it to 50.
This year I no longer qualified for a BPD diagnosis. 50% of us heal our disorder by age 50: we’re the only cluster b disorder with a prognosis for possible healing.
People are diverse and this world is traumatic. The culture is really sick. We hold our phones and watch genocide corpses pile up daily and we are deluded enough to use the world “normal?” How does it compute? Is normal supposed to be this barbaric, hateful, uninformed, unaccountable, and unfeeling?
We need to stop fearing healing just because we fear shame.
I realized the girl I looked at in the mirror was the hero I’d been waiting for to rescue me lifelong.
But my accolades never impressed the ones I loved MOST—my family and narcissist lovers and FPs—so I just felt I was missing something to be lovable.
If so, I’m very glad to NOT be normal.
So, as far as I knew, I was born bad. I didn't understand why I was bad or different from other kids. And I did make black friends at school, but I also didn’t understand why that was bad or how we were different other than skin color.
It made me start going through the rest of the grieving process.
But did I have toxic behaviors? Yes.
I had two sociopath parents. I was scapegoat to my mother, invisible to my father.
Then I finished a memoir that I think is my creative zenith and I became an accomplished blogger on mental health.
I worked so hard to be a perfectionist and to impress people so I’d earn love that I excelled past all my wildest dreams. I think I’ve lived a rich life despite the brutal pain. It’s not ALL bad, not by a long shot.
It takes humility to grow because in order to grow you have to be willing to be wrong and to change as you learn new things.
I’ve processed my grief and grown from it and grown into a deep self awareness, which brings with it a lot of peace. My life after I stopped trauma bonding is a life I always dreamed of and never thought I’d ever deserve. I even think I’ve been able to help some people and have had really beautiful experiences as a teacher. Sacred blessing. I’m so very grateful.