Ask The BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, your questions about Borderline Personality Disorder. I have received countless questions on the subject of punishment and revenge in Borderline Personality Disorder, most often from loved ones with someone with BPD in their lives. I coach a lot of borderline and non borderline clients who find this aspect of BPD the most painful and the most frustrating.

My latest ebook, Punishement and Revenge In Borderline Personality Disorder examines the inner-workings of borderline punishment and revenge.  I do get a lot of email from people diagnosed with BPD, along with coaching many with BPD who are in the process of trying to understand why they punish others and often themselves as well. Most with BPD, whether they admit it or speak of it or not, in some way, to one extent or another do know something about the reality of enacting punishment and revenge against others and against themselves.

Please Note: My lastest ebook, Punishement and Revenge In Borderline Personality Disorder, is written both from my perspective as someone who recovered from BPD and as someone trying to help loved ones understand what they cannot, unlike myself, and people with BPD, understand first-hand. For those with BPD, you can also learn a lot from this ebook. However, you need to be sure that you are in a grounded place with an effective coping plan so that you can manage and cope with any triggers that you may experience in reading this ebook.

Cheryl, of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, a woman diagnosed with BPD, writes:

“I am now 48 years old. I was diagnosed with BPD in my mid-20′s. I have made a lot of progress over the years. I am still not so great with relationships though. I tend to have pattern with relationships. Most last only months. I usually have 3 or 4 a year.  When I am in a relationship with someone I often get angry about things. Sometimes after I blow up and rage I really don’t even understand why or what is going on with me. For some years I truly believed that it was my partners that would “make me angry”. I now know that my anger is mine. I just don’t know what to do with it. I am not in a relationship right now. Whenever I am alone, not in a relationship, feeling disconnected from everyone really, I tend to still punish and seek revenge like I have done when in a relationship. The difference is, when I am alone, there isn’t anyone else to punish but myself. Whoever the hell that is, you know? My question is, is this common? Why do I punish others in relationships and then punish myself when I am alone?”

 The BPD Coach A.J. Mahari responds:

Cheryl, what you describe is quite common for people with Borderline Personality Disorder. You sound like you have a lot of awareness which will serve you well as you continue the journey of the search for self and for further understanding about yourself. Many with BPD punish and seek revenge against others when they feel invalidated, abandoned, or are fearing being abandoned. Punishment when one has BPD, is a wayward (pathological really) attempt to protect oneself. Anger is also an emotion that is felt most when one feels the need to protect against loss and/or triggers and emotional dysregulation.

Coming to realize that your anger is yours and that other don’t and really can’t “make you angry” is wonderful insight. That’s half the battle really. Punishing others is often an attempt to control them. It is a child-like way of saying, with and through behavior, “stop hurting me”, “I can’t let you hurt  me again.” It comes out of feeling like a victim (emotionally). Feeling that you will be victimized again as you may well have been as a child or perceived that you were as a child.

Punishing others comes from a foundation of abandonment, loss, and the fact that arrested emotional development in those who develop and are diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder means that you, like others with BPD, have not been able to learn to master the regulating of the talionic impulse. People with BPD meet disappointment and hurt with the mounting of a defense so as not to have to feel what feels intolerable to feel.

Punishing yourself when you are not in a relationship and there is no other person to focus your anger and inner emotional turmoil upon is quite common for those with BPD. All forms of self-harm, for example, are forms of seeking punishment and revenge on one’s self. Self harm in Borderline Personality Disorder is a prime example of an inability to master one’s talionic impulse.  It can be a way of trying to regulate dysregulated emotions. In the absence of healthier coping mechanisms borderlines often employ dysfunctional (pathological) and self-destructive maladaptative coping mechanisms.

Punishment and/or revenge seeking is an attempt to reduce your pain. It is an attempt to feel in control of someone else because you are not sure how to be in control of yourself and your own emotions. In the ways that borderlines, due to the lost self and lack of identity, effectively try to live through others, others come to respresent survival and safety in the way that one’s mother or care-giver would have initially in life. What unfolds in relationships with others for those with BPD is a re-living and re-experiencing of past abandonment trauma and either insecure bonding and attaching or relational rupture where loss occurred.

Whether someone with BPD is punishing him or herself or someone else the psychology of the how’s and why’s is the same. As I write about in my latest ebook, Punishment and Revenge in Borderline Personality Disorder, the reasons for this unregulated and unmastered talionic impulse are many and profoundly tied to the arrested emotional development of the lost authentic self in those with BPD.

Punishment and revenge seeking in BPD, whether against others or against self, or simultaneously both,  is an indicator that you still need to find your lost authentic self. In order to successfully address and overcome this unregulated and umastered talionic impulse – the impulse to right what feels wrong – the impulse to seek justice where one feels treated unjustly, the impulse to punish self instead of learn to tolerate feelings and soothe self has its roots in the reality that people with BPD are in an emotional sense still young children inside and that they need to re-connect to the inner-child inside and find, reclaim the lost authentic self, and then re-parent that young self and learn to nuture that young self.

I can’t answer why you punish others in relationships and punish yourself when you are alone, between relationships, specifically. However, I can say that the foundation of punishment and revenge in Borderline Personality Disorder is complex and multifacted. From your question, it sounds as if you do not know how to  feel connected to others without a considerable amount of re-occurring anger. It is also likely that you, like many with BPD, when alone, do not know how to feel connected to your Self – a self that you may not yet have reclaimed from your past.

It is not possible to nurture and be kind to a self that you do not know. People with BPD introject the person/people from the past with and from whom they experienced/perceived invalidation, abandonment, abuse and any and all other negative types of experience that occur when insecure attachment of bonding occurs as well as when relational rupture occurs and bonding and attaching aren’t even strong enough to be identified as insecure but rather must be described as nonexistent.

People, like yourself, with BPD, punish others and punish “self” (lack of known self really) because they are in pain, whether aware of that or not, whether feeling that or not, and that pain, abandonment pain – pain that resulted in young childhood when your survival needs felt threatened and that pain persists in many different manifestations throughout the lives of those with BPD (unless and until significant and successful therapy) in ways that perpetuate the shame of abandonment and the ego fragmentation that is the disconnection from known self, from authentic self.

I’d like to add here that not all people with BPD rage outwardly. Many with BPD, described as “quiet borderlines” turn their rage inward for the most part with the bulk of the way that they punish others being via withdrawing, disconnecting and giving others the silent treatment. It’s important for those with BPD and their loved ones alike to understand that rage is a central foundational element of Borderline Personality Disorder and that there are different ways that it can be manifested but that at core, in BPD, rage is one way or the other, there.

Borderlines experience and/or perceive something (or many things) in their lives, from a young age as being unfair and as having psychologically (intrapsychically) injured them. This is one of the main central foundational aspects of punishment and revenge in BPD. When one experiences overwhelming negative experience that injures them psychologically and arrested emotional development at the age of 2 or 3 years the result is rage. Rage that many with BPD are not connected to the source of. Rage that many with BPD are afraid to examine in therapy. Rage that feels both protective and like somehow it could kill you. Rage that was once such a healthy response. Rage that has long since, for those with BPD, become dissociated from in ways that perpetuate it and frankly make it the norm for those with BPD. When primal rage is at your core – the core that is the abyss of the lost authentic self, and you do not know that self or have any stable sense of self, all you really have left that feels familiar and somewhat safe is rage. Borderline rage gets turned outwardly onto others and inwardly onto what is that lack of self.

You, and everyone else with BPD, struggle with primal rage and responses to that primal rage that were once healthy but that have now in adulthood ceased to be helpful and that are hurtful habits of behavior chosen because it is all you know how to do. So much of therapy and the life coaching I do with those with BPD is about not only getting in touch with this lost self but also about learning newer and healthier ways of coping that really can and do address the primal rage, healing it over time, as one practices coping in new ways and as one continues to actively engage the process that is the journey from false self to authentic self – essentially the journey from BPD to mental health.

© A.J. Mahari, and © Ask The BPD Coach, November 29, 2009 – All rights reserved.

All responses given by The BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, are meant to convey general information and are not intended to be in anyway a specific recommendation or commentary on any personal life situation. Coaching is not therapy. It is also not a replacement for professional therapy. Coaching can be an effective adjunct to professional therapy for those with Borderline Personality Disorder and/or their loved ones.

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