Dr. Robert,
I was victimized by a psychopath and finally had the guts to walk away from him 7 years ago. He tormented me, wiped me out financially, wrecked my car, left me in dangerous situations alone with thugs, stole from my family, choked me, you get the picture.
I have been moving through life the last seven years feeling angry and shocked over how I was sucked in by this person. I am still in disbelief. However, after seeing a warrant for his arrest on a local police website recently, I have started to have nightmares and flashbacks of the abuse and I even feel things like "How could he do this to me" "How could he not return my love" etc. Its like I am experiencing PTSD and even mourning the relationship as if it just happened yesterday.
Why is this happening now? I also feel enraged and full of hatred towards him while at the same time feeling heartbroken. I don't know how to deal with this. I am obsessed right now. Please advise (FYI I have Borderline Personality diagnosis). I feel like he ripped my soul out and wonder if I will ever recover.
Thank You,
Lisa
Lisa--
Your story is a rather common one. There are many women who love psychopaths, and continue to love them even after being victimized, sometimes brutally. Not all of those women suffer from symptoms of borderline personality of course, but I suspect that many of them do. Without knowing you personally, if you have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), I assume that:
1. you lack a firm self-image, so that you depend on others to fill "holes" in your sense of self,
2. your relationships are intense and unstable,
3. you tend to see things as either all good or all bad (black or white, in other words, with few shades of grey),
4. you tend to view yourself as a victim rather than taking responsibility for your own life and your own problems.
Before continuing to read, please make a self-assessment, and ask yourself if any of that fits.
Now, given your diagnosis of BPD, I am assuming that most or all of it does fit. If little or none of it seems pertinent, then your diagnosis of borderline personality disorder probably is incorrect, and if so, the rest of my answer to you will not apply, and you should ignore it. However, if BPD is a correct diagnosis, your continuing one-sided emotional involvement with the psychopath who victimized you is not very difficult to understand. Your mourning of the relationship is not a case of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at all, but rather a case of the kind of extreme, totally unreasonable emotional attachments which borderline personality people tend to form with friends and lovers. Not feeling complete in yourself, you use others to fill in the emptiness, so that when a relationship ends—even an abusive and totally unsatisfactory one such as yours with the psychopath—you feel abandoned, hollow, and lost to such an extent that you wish for the relationship to be reestablished even while knowing and understanding that you were mistreated and that the relationship was harmful to your welfare.
Your cycling between anger and broken-heartedness also is characteristic of BPD, because some common features of your personality type are instability of moods, the tendency to blame the beloved for any pain which results from the relationship, and an inclination to imagine that anything that went wrong was due to the failure of the partner in the relationship to love the borderline person sufficiently and to value her enough. Typically, any problems which might arise would not be seen as the fault of the borderline type person who would imagine herself as having given everything only to be disappointed by someone who mistreated, or misunderstood her. In other words, a person with borderline personality disorder would probably oscillate between grief for the loss of a relationship and anger at the lost partner (who would be blamed for causing that loss) no matter what the real facts of the relationship were. Of course in this case, since you really were mistreated on a factual level, things are a bit more complicated, but if you were not suffering from BPD, I think you would have understood long ago that your ex was simply a person who did not love you and never could love you (or anyone else either), and you would have put this affaiar behind you long ago by seeing it as a mistake--we all make mistakes--due primarily to your own poor judgment, and simply moving on emotionally. After all, seven years is a long, long, long time to hold on to something like this.
In my view, this is not a case of PTSD, nor obsession (both of which require very different kinds of therapy than the treatment for BPD), but rather a classic example of how a borderline style personality often reacts to the loss of a relationship, so I recommend continuing with whatever therapy you have been receiving for BPD. If your current therapy is insufficient—if you feel you are not getting the help you need, that is—discuss that problem with your therapist to see if a change of direction, or even a change of therapist, is in order.
Be well.
