Every since my teens when my best friend told me I was a psychopath, I have believed it. The more I learn about psychopathy, the more it looked like the truth. I got a personality appraisal and was diagnosed ASPD and NOS. And yet…
A year or so ago, a friend, also a Path, once suggested I might to Borderline instead of Psychopath. I was much too emotional to be a Path. True, I was more emotional than he was. But, of all the Cluster B “disorders,” I scored lowest on the tests for BPD. I don’t fear abandonment. I don’t love-hate anyone. Well, he other day, I replayed the video about BPD that I have on my Borderline page. I’ll display the video here for convenience.
I realized that I have displayed some signs of BPD in my past. I have cut myself a couple of times. It’s wasn’t like the Borderlines in the video who did it because they needed to get relief from their feelings. In both my cases, it involved a fucked up attempt at communication. One time, I cut myself in order to write a note to a guy I had been dating in blood. (How Borderline is that?) I wasn’t even in love with the guy. Just buttsore. I changed my mind and begged him to destroy the note without opening it. He assured me he had done so. The other time was when I was living with my parents and cut to win an argument. It didn’t work. The negative reaction I got probably dissuaded me from ever doing such a thing again. The exhibitionist nature of the acts seem kinda Histrionic in a way.
Another behavior the people in the video described was getting so angry with a frustration as to throw a phone across the room. I have actually done such a stupid thing at work, of all places. I mostly get so mad when the technology isn’t working properly. People occasionally but not often piss me off that much. I guess I deal with people who piss me off by just being directly rude to them. Of course, ‘Paths can get plenty angry too.
For years, Nine Inch Nails was my favorite band. I still love Trent’s music but not the way I used to which was a typical rock fan kind of worship. I don’t know enough to venture a diagnosis but Trent does show a lot of traits in his songs that could be considered borderline.
The video shows a man talking about have a “camillian-type” persona. That sounds similar to Narcissists (false self), Psychopaths (the mask) and even Histrionics (all the world’s a stage). Maybe having a fluid sense of self is a Cluster B trait.
It’s funny how many of the same traits keep showing up in each of the Cluster B “disorders.” Histrionics want all the attention. So do Narcs. Psychopaths, Narcs and Histrionics are detached from emotion, each in a different way. Psychopaths just don’t feel that much. Narcs have a “false self” which fight their battles while the “true self” is tucked away safely. Histrionics feel a lot but the emotions are shallow and change quickly. Borderlines are the only ones who feel deeply. That makes them so different from the other Bees that one wonders if they are even in the same cluster. But my recognition of my own Borderline traits informs me that there is a connection. I would welcome the insights of others on this question.
Definition of BPD in the DSM
A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects, as well as marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5.- A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
- Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
- Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5
Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.- Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
- Chronic feelings of emptiness
- Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
- Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms.
Symptoms & Criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder
According to the DSM-5, there are four diagnostic criterion, of which Criterion A has seven sub-features.
A. Disregard for and violation of others rights since age 15, as indicated by one of the seven sub features:
Failure to obey laws and norms by engaging in behavior which results in criminal arrest, or would warrant criminal arrest- Lying, deception, and manipulation, for profit or self-amusement,
- Impulsive behavior
- Irritability and aggression, manifested as frequently assaults others, or engages in fighting
- Blatantly disregards safety of self and others,
- A pattern of irresponsibility and
- Lack of remorse for actions (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
The other diagnostic Criterion are:
B.
The person is at least age 18,
C. Conduct disorder was present by history before age 15
D. and the antisocial behavior does not occur in the context of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
Well, one out of three. But these “recovery” sites often accuse us of idealization followed by devaluation in our relationships. And the fluid sense of self, discussed above, is certainly a characteristic of Psychopathy, if not ASPD.
So there are three characteristics Psychopaths share with Borderlines. I used to think there weren’t any.
Links
- Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Symptoms, Treatment, and Recovery
- Borderline Personality Disorder. NIMH.
- The Emotional Vulnerability of Borderline Personality Disorder.
- 20 Rules for Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder.
- Treating BPD.
- Brain Biology, BPD & Mindfulness.
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Antisocial Personality Disorder Symptoms and Relation to BPD. The differences and similarities between ASPD ad BPD b
They appear on t-shirts. There is even a line of fashion named 
evil invaded the paradisaical Garden of Eden in the form of the serpent. Eve was a mammal, a member of the human species. So, I guess she was intrinsically good. But the evil serpent made her do something wrong. That’s the equation. Human = good. Reptile = evil.
And so it has been from time immemorial. Look at Harry Potter. The students are divided into four houses. One of them is identified with reptiles. Slytherin.
I like reptiles for their stillness, their concentration, their readiness for action. These are the same traits Bruce Lee advocates for his students. That’s the stance of a warrior. Not that we always have to be at war. Just living life on my own terms is a worthy goal. For this, some people want to read us out of the circle of humanity. Says some interesting things about these people’s values. Happy to be one of me rather than one of them.
In the past, I have written about the concept of “evil.” I just read a new article that tries to tackle the question:
Trying to define “evil,” by calling it “immorality, wickedness and depravity,” is just saying evil is evil. These words are pretty much synonyms for “evil.” Perhaps evil is a matter of degree. Bad things become “evil” things when they reach a certain level of intensity. If so, can it be measured?
Throughout the centuries, religious leaders and morality pundits have defined what is good and moral and differentiated it from what is bad. We call those who do bad things “sinners” as a way to suggest these people can improve, clean up their act. We only call them “evil” when we have written them off, given up hope of redemption.
Donald Trump did a terrible thing tearing babies out of the arms of their mothers on the ground that the mothers “broke the law” by daring to come to this country without all the right paperwork. Empaths are mortified and Mr. Trump is going to have a hard time living this down. It’s just this kind of thing that arouses the emotions of the electorate like nothing else.
When I was a little kid in elementary school, we kids had a rotten principle, Mr. Wiener. Had I been as fluent with words as I presently am, I would have dubbed him Mr. Weenie.
I decided I was not going to donate. In the first place, I didn’t want to give away my money. Frankly, I didn’t care about veterans. In fact, I scarcely even knew what they were other than something patriotic, in other words, something I have to pretend to respect. Anyway, the fact that it was my money seemed to mean something.
us kids. He pictured each of us with money in our pockets contemplating various places we might spend it. He vocalized words like “movies” and “candy” with a voice that dripped contempt. He made it clear that he thought spending our money on such unworthy things, things that might probably give us pleasure, disgusting. The loathing he expressed for children’s diversions was easily transferred to loathing for us kids, ourselves. I knew he hated us. He hated us but he wanted something from us.
I caught a glimpse of Pat Robertson and I was amazed and appalled at who I saw. First I thought of the scabby hobbit-like creatures who worked for Glory in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But then I saw even more clearly, Peter Pettygrew, AKA Scabbers on Harry Potter. His demeanor suggests he could be crawling through a tunnel. That combination of cowardice and unction is priceless!
Doris Tate has devoted her entire life since the death of Sharon to making sure the Manson killers suffer. Her lifetime devoted to hatred shows on her face. It’s sad that a tragedy like the Tate/La Bianca killings should become the focus of this woman’s entire life.
She claims to believe in rehab except for these “monsters” who were once under the influence of Manson. Imagine what it’s like for any convicted felon trying to get parole. They go up before the Parole Board again and again. They offer signs of their rehabilitation only to hear that the heinousness of their crimes means they are to be rejected over and over. WTF! The board knew about their crimes before the hearing. Why have a hearing? Yet, at long last, now that Leslie is an old lady and far from the person who committed her crime, she is finally getting out. She will not “walk free.” She’ll still be on parole, under the supervision of the parole officers, under restrictions of curfew. But that’s just too good for the murderer of Deborah’s sister.
Love takes many forms. There is romantic love, agape love, love of a mother for a child, love for an ideal. One kind of love is the love for a person we only know from afar, the love of a fan for a star. That kind of love can be very intense. Most often, the fan is female and the star a man. He can be a movie star or a rock star. More unusual was my love for a 19th Century composer, Richard Wagner. I discovered him during my college years. I think such infatuations involve marriage of an ideal with the image we have in our minds of the object of our love. It has religious connotations. It is a kind of worship. The fact that we have never met the person makes it easier to create our own personal god/goddess. Personal interaction with this deity can never spoil hir perfection. It is a very special kind of love.
This morning, I woke up with the thought of Elton John’s song, Candle in the Wind. I went to You-Tube and watched the video. I was struck by the expression of love that came through. The video showed some pictures of Norma Jean as a young child, lots of shots of Marilyn Monroe in movies and some of her dead body being wheeled out of her house, covered with a sheet, as is customary with corpses. The song depicts her as a victim, perhaps unfairly. People didn’t “crawl out of the woodwork, put her on a treadmill and make her change her name.” She chose her career, after all. Elton John sang, “I really wanted to know you but I was just a kid.” Do we ever know these objects of our worship? He sang, “Loneliness was the hardest role she played.” It seems to me that it was her very image that made her unknowable and, I guess, lonely. Who was she behind the myriad images controlled by the movie industry. We see her in so many movie roles, playing a fictitious person in a fictitious story.
heard about her in the past. I saw The Seven Year Itch as a child and a few other movies over the years. I remember a friend of mine dissing her during the troubled time in her life when a picture of her coming from a hospital, unmade-up and far from glamorous. My friend gleefully declared that this was what she “really” was. I never figured out why she was so hostile toward this person she didn’t even know. I also remember hearing mutterings about how Arthur Miller was to blame for her problems. She should have stayed away from that left-wing intellectual, according to the mutterers.
Icons lend themselves to the many fantasies myriad people weave about them, from conspiracy theories to something more personal as was the case of Candle in the Wind. But Elton John didn’t write the lyrics. They were written by Bernie Taupin, Elton’s song writing partner. He wrote the lyrics first and Elton John set them to music. About his part in writing the song, Taupin said,
The noise blots out everything in the universe. Hitler knew this tactic and called it “The Big Lie.” His big lie motivated a whole nation to round up Jews and take them to concentration camps. There, they were abused so badly, they became degraded versions of themselves, scarcely recognizable as human beings. World War II is over and the Third Reich is just a period in history. But Jews are still vulnerable to bigots who want to wage war on them psychologically. All they need to do is invoke the name of Hitler in a way that denies all 
the hurt he caused, effectively denying the humanity of his victims and he has mentally trashed anybody who identifies with the victims of the past. As a child, I grew up knowing about the Holocaust, knowing that a group I happen to belong to was dehumanized. Whenever you value something, the troll has a weapon. He attacks the thing that you value. He has nothing of value so the fight will always be uneven. In the case just mentioned, the thing of value is our humanity. The bigot doesn’t have to prove Jews are inferior or defective in any way. The fact of the Holocaust speaks for itself.
These days, it has become fashionable to scorn sensitivity to victims of crimes of bigotry as “political correctness.” The term politically correct was not originally meant to be a term of derision. People who wanted to improve society by fighting oppressive systems struggled together to figure out what was worthy of their beliefs. The ideas they decided were right were politically correct. But even fighting oppression has become something to sneer at with the term social justice warriors or SJW. Sad to say, many of the people I 
identify with, people with Cluster B personality “disorders,” are among those who cynically do the sneering. Is it really so wrong to fight for social justice? It’s easy and gratifying to stand with the “winners,” that is, people who are not being attacked (at the moment) and can luxuriate in the pain of the other.
Yes, even psychopaths are smeared and it isn’t even “politically incorrect” to do so. Many “social justice warriors” casually name the oppressors they are fighting “psychopaths,” apparently oblivious to the fact that they are denigrating a whole group of people. They name their enemies “psychopaths” without even knowing if those people are psychopaths. It’s just a convenient term of abuse. This blog has discussed the subject and exposed “
“Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice—your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own.”
That says it all. Yesterday, I was insulted for being old. Probably the fact that I was an old woman factored into it. Women are only supposed to be young and sexy. Otherwise, we have no value. I could have pointed out that I only got old by staying alive for 75 years and those who denigrate the elderly might, with any luck, live that long themselves. Ageism is quite pervasive. For example, one of my favorite TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is full of it. But pointing out the logical absurdity of it is pointless. Stupidity shields the stupid from having to deal with reality.
It started with pain. I’ve had an ache in my low back for about a week and it has gotten tiresome. But it reminded me of a remedy I once discovered for pain that doesn’t involve drugs. It’s a mind game, if you will. I thought pain is a sensation. Why are some sensations pleasurable and some unpleasurable? A physical sensation can be neutral. What gives it value, positive or negative? I focused on the sensation to try to zero in to what quality makes it “painful.” The more I focused on it, the more it receded until it disappeared. I realized I had just discovered a way to make pain disappear. The trick is, for it to work, 
This discovery of mine had implications. Deliberately focusing on a sensation or on any experience, for that matter, can only be accomplished if one is totally in present time. That means no future or past. Just here and now. That led me to a new definition of pain (or any unpleasant feelings). It is a denial of the present. Full acceptance of the moment is the antidote!
Buddhists value detachment from emotion. They say, for the unenlightened, “life is suffering” due to attachment. “Desires are endless. I resolve to end them.” Being in present time, one is free of attachment. The consciousness of psychopaths is said to be close to Buddhism. That makes sense since psychopaths are detached. Our detachment involves a lack of empathy which seems to drive the rest of the world crazy as Adam’s detached statements drove Riley crazy. We are not free of desire, however. The reward center of our brains is very active. Dopamine feeds the drive for reward.
I know two psychopaths who have said psychoactive substances don’t really do it for them. I suggested my above theory to one of them. Perhaps, I hypothesized, you don’t get high from substances because you are already high in your normal state, by virtue of being in the moment. But he pointed out that such a possibility is inconsistent with boredom which is notoriously our Achilles Heel. He’s right, of course. Being in the moment is an antidote to boredom just as it is to pain and other forms of malaise. I confess, I cannot, at this time, explain the paradox of how we can be so detached and, at the same time, so averse to boredom and so driven to thrill-seeking. If anyone reading this has an idea, please share it in your comments.
I tried consciously embracing the here and now yesterday. I didn’t do very well. Detachment from my back pain was difficult to achieve. Then Life intervened. I had a problem with my Smart Phone and needed to call Technical Support. I hate having to deal with Technical Support. The first “expert” I talked with was pretty clueless and too stubborn to let go of his rigid ideas which were wrong. I called again and got someone much better. Eventually, we solved the problem. But I let annoyance get in. Then anger. Too bad. Better luck the next time. I guess I’m not enlightened yet. I guess I still have things to learn in this life.
Links
CLUSTER B 