How Borderline Personality Disorder Affects the Rest of the Family

As a man who comes from a world of borderline personality disorder, having family members and several girlfriends with BPD, I think I’m a bit qualified to talk about my experiences.

And if you disagree? You can click that little back button and go read from someone else. This is my website where I share my experiences and what I learned to improve my BPD relationships over the years.

Still here? Good. I’m all about giving that real world experience, sharing stories from my real life. So be sure to check out my other articles if you like what you read.

Like I said above: several of my family members have BPD. Most of the women I’ve dated in my life have some level of it.

1. “Mental Illness” Is Widespread

Here’s where I get controversial: because of my experiences with BPD, I just assume that everyone has it. That is how I approach life. I expect people to be hot and cold, unpredictable, crazy at times, unfaithful and so on. It’s just what I expect from my experiences. Don’t hate.

I’ve been dating women with BPD for over ten years now. Borderline Personality Disorder comes in all shapes and sizes, all colors. It doesn’t discriminate. It is blind and it is everywhere.

Chances are, you know several people who have BPD. Like I said above, everyone has it these days to some degree. It’s just that we now use the term “mental illness” to describe the various issues that people have.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a borderline, a sociopath, a narcissist, or all three combined. You’re just another person with a mental illness like everyone else in the world. That’s how we label things nowadays. No reason to be specific anymore, right? Right.

We all have a mental illness I guess. And if you have BPD? Don’t worry, we’ll just let it slide and say you have a mental illness. If everyone in the world is crazy to some level, then being crazy is now normal. And that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Yes, your BPD er I mean mental illness might cause you to rage at your family members, hate your dad for being a boomer, blame your parents for all the problems in your life, but it’s not you being an asshole, it’s that damn mental illness you have to live with. Damn.

2. Every Single Woman Has BPD

Alright now I’m really going to piss off some of my readers. And I don’t care. Like I said, I’m just speaking from my own personal experience. You might have different experiences where every woman you meet is perfectly normal and healthy, never hot or cold.

It’s the complete opposite for me. Even the women in my life that are family members and friends, they all have borderline to some degree. That’s why I keep bringing this up. This is the new norm.

Woman = BPD. That’s just how I see things now. I see a woman, I see borderline personality disorder.

What’s really interesting is that I’ve been writing about BPD for about 10 years now on this site. And everything I predicted years ago about women and society and BPD has become true.

I always warned people that social media would make women become more borderline. I warned that families would be torn apart as the internet evolves. I predicted that relationships would become more toxic and dramatic than ever before despite living in a society that’s safer, healthier, and easier than ever to succeed.

Despite all of these technological advances, society has collapsed into full-blown mental illness where it’s now the norm. Borderline personality disorder is normal. You’re basically a freak if you don’t have it.

You met this really awesome guy last week, slept with him a few times, and now you suddenly don’t have interest in him? Guess what babe? You have some serious issues going on. That isn’t normal. Society may tell you that it’s normal, because that’s what they encourage, but it actually isn’t normal. Nor healthy.

If you suddenly go cold on someone that you had that hots for just 2 days ago, you have a serious mental problem. To believe that it’s normal is borderline personality disorder rubbing itself in your face.

It’s everything but normal. You are not normal in anyway. And you will continue to rip apart your family and lose great people in your life all because you fell for the biggest con in human history.

3. How To Deal With Widespread BPD

This is where the fun begins. At least for me since I’ve been aware of borderline personality disorder for over a decade now. And, if you couldn’t tell by now, I really can’t stand the dating & relationships world that we live in.

That’s partly why I created a bunch of courses over the years. My flagship Better BPD Relationships course still stands as my best piece of work (in my opinion). I created this course several years ago when I was deeply involved with a borderline woman.

Yes, it was a successful relationship and I really felt at the time that I had “cracked” the BPD code. However, as the years have gone by, I now believe that there’s really nothing to “crack.”

Don’t get me wrong, I still stand by that course and I encourage you to grab it if you’re struggling with BPD people in your life. It will teach you how to navigate these relationships and avoid the common mistakes that everybody does.

But nowadays, I live my life as if every single person I come in contact with has borderline personality disorder. Growing up with family members that have BPD has made me quite aware of this illness.

Oh yeah, we only call it “mental illness” these days, I forgot. We don’t call people BPD anymore. So don’t forget that as you might offend someone. But at least everyone can say they have a mental illness which causes them to behave in such strange, unpredictable ways :)

That’s probably the biggest attribute of people who have BPD: that are simply unpredictable. And if you’re the type of person who lives a life of stability and logic like I do, the unpredictability will naturally drive you nuts. You won’t know how to deal with it and you will eventually react in a way that causes even more turmoil.

I learned a long time ago to control these urges and I talk about them a lot in my course. But the more logical and stable you are, the more you’ll struggle with people who have mental illness – which is everyone.

Are you starting to understand what I’m getting at yet?

4. Family Isn’t An Excuse

This last point I want to talk about is an important one: just because someone in your family has BPD, uh I mean a mental illness, doesn’t give them an excuse to treat you like crap.

I learned a long time ago to cut people out no matter what. I don’t care if you’re a parent, a brother, a cousin, whatever. If you disrespect me, I will walk away and give you the least amount of attention possible until you come forward and apologize. Admit you wronged me and we can be friends again. It’s that simple.

But because having an ego and never taking responsibility for anything is one of the most prevalent mental illnesses these days, don’t expect even the closest family member to admit that they wronged you.

I have several friends who haven’t spoken to their parents in years. They haven’t reached out to their parent, and the parent hasn’t reached out to her at all. That’s the society we live in these days.

I couldn’t even imagine being a parent that would never reach out to my kid. Because I’m a healthy, rational adult, none of this makes sense to me. As a dad, I would always attempt to reach out to my kids at least once per week. That’s what my parents do no matter how much we fight.

No matter what happens, my parents reach out at least once a week just to say hi and see how we’re doing.

So I really can’t imagine a situation where a parent is so stubborn and full of himself that he would go years without ever reaching out to his daughter. Yet this is so incredibly common. I have met dozens and dozens of women over the years who haven’t heard from their parents in literal years.

Borderline personality disorder is one of several mental illnesses that can destroy a family and cause even more mental illness in those that it affects.

Most of us aren’t born with a mental illness. We instead develop them through the experiences we have in life. Our brains are always evolving year after year based on the experiences that we have. That’s just the way it is.

5. Don’t Try To Control BPD

Here’s the thing about Borderline Personality Disorder: it has a mind of it’s own, and you cannot control it no matter how hard you try.

In fact, if you’re dating someone with BPD and you try to control situations when the BPD is running it’s course, you’re going to get eaten up and chewed out. I’ve learned this the hard way, and so have countless others.

This is something that I’ve been teaching for several years, and it will always be this way. Don’t try to control a Borderline’s behavior. It simply will not end well for you.

These days, since I assume that everyone has BPD, I just keep things simple: I understand that at some point, this woman I’m dating will wake up and suddenly not want to talk to me. She might not even know why, but her desire for me will simply not be there.

Of course I know why, and so do you at this point: borderline personality disorder aka mental illness. For whatever reason, people these days just lose interest in you overnight. It happens.

So what I do these days is I just disappear. I’m gone. When her BPD has run it’s course, maybe she’ll desire me again. Maybe she won’t. But in my experience, she tends to always reach out within a week as long as I keep my cool and don’t do anything stupid during her BPD flare up.

I learned over time that when the BPD is running it’s course, you just need to stay back and let the storm pass. Again, something I’ve been teaching in my BPD course from the beginning.

Let the storm do it’s thing. Don’t try to stop it. You can’t stop a hurricane, you’ll just get blown over.

The same applies for family. Let their mental illness run its course. Don’t get in it’s way, you’ll just make matters worse.

That’s gonna do it for this one. I hope you learned something about borderline personality disorder. Remember, let it run it’s course. You are powerless against her hot and cold behavior. If she can’t prevent it, you definitely cannot!

– Rick