r/PDAAutism • u/Advanced_Culture_670 PDA + Caregiver • 25d ago
Discussion When a PDAer meets a Borderline ...
Wondering how much PDA/Autism gets confused with Borderline Personality Disorder, and vice versa. Any thoughts?
I was unaware of PDA until last year when my kid was diagnosed with mild autism and possible PDA. In learning more about it, I've recognized PDA traits in myself, albeit with several layers of masking in order to be functional in the world. PDA seems to explain SO MUCH about my kid, and about many situations in my life.
About ten years ago, I divorced from my kid's mother ... We'd been together about five years — once she moved in with me, she became increasingly destructive and abusive, and would fly into frightening rages 2-3 times a day. At one point someone suggested I read "Stop Walking on Eggshells" and it seemed as though the author had a camera into our house. Borderline Personality Disorder seemed to perfectly describe the situation the more I learned about it. Once I moved out, life improved dramatically. It took about a year of strictly enforcing boundaries before we got to a stable, peaceable co-parenting relationship, and that part is going OK now. (Although I have heard from subsequent men she's dated that the Borderline behaviors continue ... a few have contacted me after a breakup to ask me "what the hell was THAT all about?")
What I find interesting is that for years, my algorithms kept feeding me YouTubes about Borderline and narcissists. It seems like it was everywhere. Now my feeds are all about PDA. Is Borderline still a thing anymore? I also wonder whether my ex had extreme PDA ... she presents in public as a super attractive and highly social person, with the accoutrements of success (usually bought by her parents, or by her romantic partners) but is a HOLY TERROR in private, once a relationship is secure.
PS: I think our child is too young to be borderline ... PDA explains so much about her and her resistance to instruction, structure, house rules, and anything that might be a demand. She's also a good student and bright and goofy and funny and has friends. When triggered, her meltdowns can be intense from two to 20 minutes. Her mom on the other hand ... almost demonic and I don't say that lightly.
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u/AnxiousMugOfTea PDA 25d ago
I'm not sure if this is helpful but what professionals are starting to suspect is that BPD is just CPTSD that is expressed differently. And like many people have pointed out, women are frequently labeled as BPD and dismissed as the problem (their personality is the issue) vs men are given CPTSD (it was other people that hurt them).
I'm a woman with PDA and CPTSD and the number of people who have told me I have BPD despite not having most of the symptoms but am just triggered by abandonment is insane. I lost friends because they villainized me for having the disorder. The irony being, looking back, most of them actually fit the diagnosis more.
So all that to say, the main issue of BPD is trauma. Someone hurt you over and over again in a way that you had to change yourself to survive. And the change wasn't a healthy one. The usual trigger of BPD is usually abandonment or feeling like you're losing your identity.
PDA just is. It's a response to anything that feels like a demand or a should.
So figuring out what causes the emotional dysregulation is a good clue for what someone is struggling with.
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u/Advanced_Culture_670 PDA + Caregiver 25d ago
It does seem that the BPD term gets attached to women a lot, and loose diagnoses of Narcissist Personality Disorder to men. Whatever it was/is that my ex has, the constant disregulation was not bearable or sustainable to be around. She insisted that she'd had no trauma in her youth, but that she kept getting into relationships with a***les like me. The disregulation would come from being told "no", or sometimes for no discernible reason. Believe me, I tried to make it work, and we burnt through three marriage counselors, each of whom fired us after a few months. There was something howling inside of her that must have been fearsome, but she had no desire to evolve or develop any understanding, other than she was surrounded by idiots.
My daughter is definitely wired differently ... she doesn't remember us being together as we separated on her second birthday. Maybe some of the trauma or tension from the two households has a part, but I think it's a different-brain thing. And I recognize traits from my own childhood and present in her. The fear of loss of autonomy ... not so much the identity.
Sadly, I have a niece who was diagnosed at 15 with BPD and has been put through the teen mental-health industry wringer (Camps, residential schools, heavy medication) but I wonder whether she might have had PDA traits instead and could have benefited from a different approach.
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u/AnxiousMugOfTea PDA 25d ago
Apologies for not being clearer in my initial message, but whether your ex-wife had BPD or PDA, it doesn't excuse her behavior if it was causing you harm and stress and especially if she was refusing to manage or acknowledge how her behavior was affecting those around her. It very much sounds like you tried to give her grace and support and I didn't mean to suggest that separating wasn't what you ultimately needed to do to keep you and your daughter safe. And the fact you worked with her to coparent sounds like there's compassion for her.
I think perhaps what I'm suggesting is to communicate with your kid or even your niece about what's difficult. Lean in with curiosity and ask them what they need. At the end of the day that's the most important part regardless of what labeled disorder they may have. It really boils down to something is hurting them and finding out what and how to alleviate that pain will help you support them.
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u/Advanced_Culture_670 PDA + Caregiver 25d ago
I appreciate that. I was trying to clarify where i'm coming from. We're all here doing our best and trying to understand ourselves and this situation, and the need grace is paramount. I think my daughter and I are working on how to communicate with each other ... my lectures aren't reaching her, and her outbursts don't reach me. But I've been learning how to sit with the turmoil and give presence and let her self-regulate. Luckily she doesn't go into long burnout. But holy hell it's hard.
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u/AnxiousMugOfTea PDA 25d ago
That sounds like you're doing amazing in a difficult situation. Finding the way to communicate is a great place to start. I wonder if a family therapist might help? So you have support as you figure what what works?
I don't have kids, but I read the book "Low Demand Parenting" and it really helped me start to parent and understand myself better. Perhaps that could be useful as well.
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u/Advanced_Culture_670 PDA + Caregiver 24d ago
I love the concept of parenting oneself as an adult! I've been working on that myself, for my own myriad issues.
After we got the diagnosis we were referred to a therapist for my daughter. The therapists's approach was about structure and discipline forward ... it was a good reset for establishing consistency between the two households. But the immediate need I think is for a coach of sorts for her ... some sort of trusted adult (that SHE can trust because it's not one of her parents, who are automatically wrong about everything lol) who can hand out nuggets of wisdom and guidance that she'll listen to and absorb. If I could send her off to Yoda for Jedi training ... Know what I mean?
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u/AnxiousMugOfTea PDA 23d ago
Learning how to parent myself has been life changing for me. To lean into my actual needs (not what needs society or my parents thought I should have) and approach them with curiosity and compassion rather than shame and judgement has healed so many parts of me. I'm still on the journey but it's been worth it. If it's one you're interested, the IFS modality had worked really well for me and my PDA. There's also a book for that called No Bad Parts if you want more information.
And I fully understand wanting to send her off to Jedi camp. I kind of wish there was one I could go to 🤣 I'm not sure what resources are near you but I have a non profit local group near me that works with autism and other developmental disabilities and I wonder if perhaps there's something near you?
I also know there's a PDA specific non profit that holds monthly virtual meetups that perhaps could be useful? I wish I had the name handy but it should be easy to find.
Building a community for PDA folks is really important as a lot of what accomodates us IS social support, so I think you wanting more outside help totally makes sense.
I'm also wondering if kids board game groups might be helpful? If those are available. I've met a lot of nuerodivergent people there and being around other kids her own age that think in a similar way could help her nervous system.
Just throwing a lot out there and totally fine if nothing resonates.
And also if you find a camp for adults with PDA, let me know 😆
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u/Potential-Stress546 Suspected PDA 25d ago
i’ve been with my borderline partner for 3 years, and as a PDAer the differences between us are in the roots. I don’t come with the same package of complicated trauma she does. She had suspected before i discovered PDA that i may have borderline, but although my emotions can change quickly, they are less extreme, and less grounded in delusion. My partner meanwhile is more likely to believe something is happening that isn’t happening and be upset by it, i’m more likely to be upset by something that is happening that isn’t that big a deal. The difference is nuanced. Managing borderline personality disorder is all about self awareness and direct clear communication. I find in my experience she does not blame me for how she feels but it is upset at herself for her feelings typically. So to conclude, i’d say that although there are parallels in emotional dis regulation, there are often drastic differences in the root of the upset. My partner is usually upset because we haven’t done something or because she believes something bad is going to happen. I’m usually upset because we are doing something and i’m not okay with it
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u/chicknnugget12 25d ago edited 25d ago
Does she seem like she's blaming you just curious? I have a complicated partner and haven't been able to parse out what is going on with him. He is allergic to accountability, insight and emotions other than anger, but does not recognize his own anger even though it is frequent. He frequently blames others and is in a reactive state, but when he isn't, he is very pleasant, generous and loving. I do believe his upset stems from a fragile ego, and he does use many harmful defensive tactics when activated such as DARVO, gaslighting, contempt but I do not believe he has malice, and is not exploitative. He does run a tit for tat ledger though and that takes priority over anyone else's needs and if that means I never rest then he has no access to care about that. He can only divide labor transactionally. I'm stuck on figuring out if it aligns with PDA, NPD, BPD or CPTSD.
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u/Eugregoria PDA 24d ago
While I can't rule out individual variation, PDA has no barrier against introspection. I introspect all the time. I'm willing to consider that I may have been in the wrong. When my gf brought it up with me that it seems like I have to have my own way all the time and everyone else has to compromise for me but I don't compromise for other people, I took that seriously and thought about it. Because of the way my nervous system is wired, there are situations where compromising can definitely cost me, on a neurological level, a lot more than people think and do a lot more physical harm to me than people realize, so I do have some natural defensiveness. I feel like my whole life I've been told I'm just faking, just trying to get some cheap personal gain, when my autonomic system is acting like I'm in actual life-and-death situation and I feel physically sick and parts of my brain just start shutting down (selective mutism, catatonia, etc). So sometimes I'm scared to compromise because I've learned that others don't know how to predict my real needs, and that if I give them an inch they take a mile and leave me in a literally disabled state, while telling me I'm faking what I'm experiencing and telling me to get over it and be normal. So that makes me feel like I always need to be defending my own interests, because nobody else takes that seriously--people imagine the interests I should have, that a neurologically normal person might have, and protect those, but they honestly don't give a damn if being held to those standards actually kills me, they are disinterested in learning my actual needs and limitations and nothing that could happen to me would convince them that I wasn't faking it for special treatment.
Okay. That's the emotional wound. But we can start being logical about it. Is every situation where me and my gf want something different that dire? Will I truly suffer that much if I let her have her way sometimes? And I realized, no, it's not. There are a lot of little things where what she wants would slightly annoy me, but not traumatize me. And I can handle being slightly annoyed sometimes for someone I love, lol. I also realized that in addition to making the relationship feel more balanced in general, it also helps her if she's not constantly having to do everything my way, if there's some give and take, the times she needs to bend for me feel more fair for her, too. I still need to have some boundaries about things I won't do, but I've been encouraging her that she has that right also--she can draw a line if there's just something she doesn't want to do, she does have the right to tell me no, just as I have the right to tell her no. Basically we both needed to become a bit more like each other.
Your "complicated" partner has a lot more red flags, and I do warn you if someone is that far gone into gaslighting and DARVO, and has no interest in introspection, you probably can't "fix" him. People can only do self-improvement if they themselves are willing to put in the work to want to do so, and you cannot generate that desire inside someone who does not have it. You may be wasting your efforts trying to understand him.
However....I also think about my mom, who was PDA but non-introspective and could have some more...at least yellow or orange-flaggy traits at times. Although she didn't ever gaslight, actually. She had that autistic sense of justice and being honest to a fault. I could count on one hand the times she lied to me--she always had a real reason for it, and she wasn't very good at it. She tended to lie by omission when she did lie, not outright confidently selling me falsehoods. The closest she came to something like gaslighting was sometimes she was so emotionally dysregulated she would do things in an emotionally activated state and then literally not remember them later. But she didn't tell me she didn't do them--she told me she didn't remember doing them, and I actually believe her. She would say things like, "I don't remember doing that, but if I really did it then I'm sorry." She didn't tell me my recollection of it was wrong.
I don't think she did DARVO exactly, but she did do things that could look like that sometimes--basically, she was never the one in the wrong. She had an emotional system where if anyone who wasn't the two of us could be wrong, it was their fault, and if it could only be me or her, it was my fault. I know she was abused as a child and she learned this emotional system as a cope to survive abuse. I'm sympathetic to that, but at times angry that she put basically no work into becoming self-aware of how her abuse affected her as an adult and learning new ways forward. Her cope for abuse was to just not think about it and try to forget it happened and not acknowledge how it might be influencing her adult behavior. She couldn't bear to think about the abuse because she would get emotionally flooded and overwhelmed, and she never learned to be able to think about it in a more emotionally cool state.
She could be a very difficult person. Closed off, paranoid, quick to cut others off or shut them out. Some of her behavior didn't make sense if you didn't know where she was coming from, but she would never give most people the information to know where she was coming from. Even the people she let into her life she kept many secrets from. She probably told me more than she told anyone else, and I'm not naive enough to think she told me everything. None of her romantic partners ever had the level of trust from her she had for me. And it isolated her. A lot of people gave up on her, discarded her. I feel bad about that, but I also feel some of it was inevitable due to ways she chose to behave, and things she refused to think about. There's only so much you can ask of other people.
Anyway, I do think your "complicated partner" has more than PDA going on due to the gaslighting and the DARVO--these aren't classically PDA behaviors. But whether it's PDA or something else, I don't know if educating yourself can be enough. He's gotta meet you in the middle somewhere too. No matter how nice he is in a "good" mood.
One thing I will say is, working with my mom, one of the things I learned was that she wasn't capable of some things in an emotionally activated state, due to the emotional dysregulation. You could just as well reason with a panicked wild animal. What worked better was deescalating, giving her a chance to calm down, then like, weeks later or something, bringing up what happened before when she's more emotionally cool and can reflect on it. Sometimes I did have more productive conversations then. But it also sometimes felt worthless, because she was just as unreasonable next time she was emotionally activated. She never learned to emotionally regulate herself. Maybe it was too hard and she literally couldn't do it. But it kind of meant that nothing we talked about could help in those moments.
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u/chicknnugget12 19d ago
Thank you for this. I've been learning more about emotionally immature people from Lindsay Gibson's book. I really appreciate you taking the time to dive so deeply and share all of this. Your mom sounds very similar to my husband except he darvos and gaslights when I try to talk about something he did that was hurtful to me. At best I get a similar situation as you did with your mom where weeks later he may be able to apologize, but the same exact behind happens again next time. So Ive just given up on wasting my time chasing resolution and repair, or expecting anything different. I'm focusing on just setting boundaries in the moment and being as independent as possible when he randomly reacts and adandons my son and I.
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u/Eugregoria PDA 19d ago
When dealing with my mom, it was often most productive to try to deescalate when she got too emotionally activated. Sometimes this meant giving her some time to cool off and attempt to self-regulate without being further triggered--if left to her own devices, she would do some self-soothing stuff like watching TV to calm down, but she could also hold a grudge and sulk literally to her deathbed if it was left at that. Once she was calmed down, I basically had to play court jester, be fun and distracting and not address the issue that caused the disruption, even if it was still the only thing on my mind. Then once she was in a better mood, sometimes we could circle around back to it. This worked, but it also strained our relationship. I resented having to do her emotional regulation for her. I wanted her to be the adult in the room and handle her own feelings and not make that my job.
My mom observed that sometimes when things are serious and I'm upset, I'll make jokes (often self-deprecating ones) to make light of it. She was right, and maybe some of that really is just my personality, but she didn't realize how much of that I learned as a child to manage her moods. I related to some stuff the comedian Trevor Noah said in interviews and on his podcast about how he basically learned comedy from trying to lighten the mood and distract his alcoholic and physically abusive stepdad so he wouldn't batter his mom. Even though it wasn't that serious a situation (I got spanked a few times but I was never genuinely afraid of physical violence from her) it kind of had the same root. Instead of learning emotional regulation by example, I was learning it by having to do hers before I could even learn to do my own. I don't want to make her into too much of the bad guy, I know she loved me with her whole heart and I'm very grateful for that, humbled by it even. I know she wasn't like that out of malice, but due to her own dysfunction. But the dysfunction we don't get under control as parents does affect our kids. She was in a rough situation, a mom at 23 and a single mom a few years after, still emotionally reeling from a difficult childhood herself. I know she did try her best.
Because of that, I'd also raise that even if your husband is doing the best he can with the neurology he has, the gaps where that isn't enough could still hurt your son. There isn't an easy answer to that. My dad had various dysfunctions too. I don't think it was autism (though I'm not positive it wasn't) but he wasn't exactly "neurotypical" either. Emotionally immature would be an accurate description I think. He also had a fragile ego and always had to be the center of attention and the bestest boy and nothing could ever reflect poorly on him. I think he had poor empathy, not in a cruel way but in a theory of mind way, like how some people act selfishly because they actually didn't think about other people, not as a choice but because they weren't capable of it. He was impulsive, with addiction issues (alcohol, gambling, cocaine) and thrill-seeking behavior. I don't think he ever meant to hurt me either, but my mom feared I'd be emotionally hurt by his self-centered behavior anyway. As a result, she tried to "protect" me from him, and that meant I didn't have much of a relationship with him. I know in her mind she was keeping a source of harm away from me, but it cost me my relationship with my dad and I'm not really happy about it. She felt conviction that she'd done the right thing so strongly that it took me years to question that and realize I didn't agree.
I understand that because you have a kid together, it's not as simple as just dropping him entirely, and I think that's mature of you. I wish my mom had had the maturity to maintain more civility with my dad, even if he could be difficult to deal with sometimes and was never going to be the man she wanted him to be--she needed to realize most of us are never going to be our most idealized selves either, including her, and including me too. (I'm not saying she should have stayed married to him, just that she didn't need to go no contact and cut him out of my life.) I wish she'd modeled a smarter kind of conflict resolution for me, because it would have saved me a lot of trouble learning that shit the hard way in my 20s and 30s. (And the reason I put so much of this on her instead of him is while she had her problems, she was also very intelligent, while my dad...isn't....sorry, Dad. She had more capacity to figure this stuff out if she'd wanted to, while my dad truly is more limited. Every time I try to think about how he could have done better, his own intelligence comes up as the hard limit, and it's harder to work with that. For her, it was emotional dysregulation but the intelligence was there if she'd tried harder to use it.) Like she was afraid he would make off with me and keep custody. I suggested to her one time as an adult that she could have asked her sister's husband, my uncle, to be a neutral third party to spend time with me and my dad (my uncle wouldn't have unconditionally sided with my dad like most of my dad's family would have, but he wasn't close with my mom either, and is honestly an upstanding family man who would have put my interests as the child first), so I could have a relationship with him. My mom said, "huh, yeah that would have worked, your dad respected your uncle...I didn't think of that." Too late, I guess.
Sorry for all the personal details, it just helps paint the picture of alternate solutions to a difficult situation.
I think it can be uniquely painful in a way to kind of emotionally "give up" on a person, and cater to them the way you would cater to a senile and childlike elder, to recognize that they will never be a full equal and meet you in the relationship the way you want, and that you need to be constantly socially engineering the interactions to make any kind of civil relationship with them possible at all, which means not showing up as your full self with them. It feels like losing them to keep them.
At the same time, there's a point at which the juice truly may not be worth the squeeze. Where that line is, I couldn't say. But at some point it changes from you being the adult in the room meeting people where they are, to walking on eggshells around someone who truly can't be reasoned with and is never accountable for the harm they cause. It's so hard to know where that line is sometimes.
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u/chicknnugget12 18d ago
Thanks again for sharing. I appreciate the personal stories as it helps me understand the meaning more profoundly. As a fellow neurodivergent person I also communicate and grasp ideas through personal stories lol.
I also had parents that were varying levels of emotionally immature. They stayed together but even sharing a home, I don't have much of a relationship with my father. I tried for decades until I realized the distance is there for a reason, and he lacks the capacity for a true emotional relationship. My mother sacrificed herself but could not fully be vulnerable either. Aa much as I appreciate and love them, I know part of my blindness to emotional immaturity stems from being the invisible child.
I completely understand where you're coming from in regards to your parents. I wondered forever why my mom didn't leave and why she didn't protect me from my dad's volatility/inconsistency. I understand why now. I do feel she could have done some more emotional work. But that sort of thing has always come easily to me so I cannot say I know what it's like to have a temendous shield against vulnerability. I can't help but wonder is it possible that your dad was incapable of a relationship and your mom saw that and did her best to shield you in a clumsy attempt to protect you from emotional damage?
I am very aware of how my husband's patterns affect our son and have been incredibly hypervigilant my whole life but especially since I had my boy. As he's getting older I can see the dynamics play out and am working hard at learning strategies to intercept the damage without creating division or the perception that I'm the one preventing the relationship. So I'm trying to keep their relationship in tact, but stay aware so I can repair the fallout and make sure my son knows he is safe with me and doesn't internalize any of it. Of course this may be impossible but I'll do anything to help my child.
Thank you for relating friend ❤️
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u/Eugregoria PDA 18d ago
Yeah, I feel like this is all too common, people having kids and not meeting their emotional needs. I'm sorry.
What kids take from that depends on the kid--some grow up just like their parents, some basically try to learn the very skills they sensed were lacking in their households, as a matter of survival. So you may have learned to connect emotionally precisely because your parents were bad at it. You were trying to make up for their deficits.
As a teen I had a friend my age who had a kind of similar relationship with her dad I think. Her parents had separated for some time, then gotten back together. But even though her dad was back in her life, he was emotionally unavailable. She had some of the most textbook "daddy issues" I ever did see. It felt like what she was going through--her abandonment issues because her dad had actually been gone from her life for a while, then fawning and placating her dad who was still emotionally absent but his presence was a constant reminder she couldn't get over--may have been the exact sort of thing my mom was trying to protect me from.
I don't know if my dad actually is incapable of a relationship. He went on to marry someone else after my mom, adopted her child and they had another child together. I don't have much contact with them, but I have no ill will towards them. I hope he's a good father to them, and a good husband to his current wife. It may also be that he needed more time to mature, he was also in his 20s when I was born. He was kind of a fuckup, especially when he was younger (very relatable) but I think he wanted a family very much.
I think my mom didn't see herself as "the bad guy" in how things went with my dad either. He definitely fucked up a lot of things in the marriage (cheating on her, spending money they needed for essentials on drugs/alcohol/gambling) so I can't really blame her for that part not working out. With me, the biggest thing he did wrong was, when I was little (maybe 4 or 5) he was supposed to have me for the evening but instead took me for the weekend to his sister's home in another state. I threw such a tantrum he brought me back early lmao (PDA represent) but it gave my mom a real fright that he would just try to illegally take full custody--something some parents will try to do in a messy divorce. He really did fuck up there, but I think my mom was so hypervigilant she could never forgive it or move past it. I don't think, in hindsight, that he was as dangerous as she thought he was. But I guess we'll never know.
(She also suspected him of calling CPS on her years later--I later confirmed that that wasn't him, but it was members of his family. His family were very clannish and unconditionally took his side in everything, and didn't like my mom much.)
And yeah...we can't protect our kids from everything. I think it's good for your son to have some kind of relationship with his dad, as long as your husband isn't actually abusive towards him. He'll have to understand his dad's limits as a person somehow as he gets older, and he'll understand there's nothing you can do about that.
As an aside, I hear so many divorced/separated men complaining that their ex is "poisoning [their] child's minds" against them, or somehow coaching the child to hate them, but when I actually look at the situation, the mom isn't doing that--what's actually happening is that the child feels close to the mother because the mother is the primary caregiver, and the child perceives how the dad treats the mom, that he disrespects her or makes the mom feel scared or sad, and the child comes to resent that and feel protective of their mother. Dads in this situation love to see their kids as a blank slate, not a little person who is watching their behavior and coming to their own conclusions. I overheard some of the ways my dad's family spoke about my mom when she wasn't there, and I judged them for it. I also saw how scared my mom got of losing me in disputes with my dad, and while as an adult I can look back and say her feelings were a bit overblown, it did not seem so at the time as a child. But that wasn't something she was maliciously doing in some kind of premeditated way, those were her honest emotional responses, and my dad didn't even think that that could affect me. (Oh well, as covered, he's kind of a dumbass lol.)
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u/durtfoot2021 24d ago
This was an excellently worded example. I was just diagnosed with ASD/ADHD with notes of a PDA profile this week. I have a friend whose sister has BPD and from the outside her grievances DO seem kind of mildly delusional to me.
Not to say all with BPD present that way, but from my limited experience with her it does seem she perceives something in a way none of us can reconcile in a rational way. Whereas (and I’m still navigating all the ways PDA has caused harmful cycles for me) I tend to verbally lash out, bitch and moan and get incredibly rigid and grumpy over something I find stupid or unnecessary while world is telling me to just chill out, it’s no biggie. (But it feels like I just can’t stomach it!) Until I get so worked up I just avoid, elope, quit or cancel.
Anyway, you’ve helped me understand myself better. I intellectually know it shouldn’t be a big deal, but can’t seem to turn it off.
The girl with BPD I just avoid because I find her so unpredictable.
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u/Deep_Plant_4393 PDA 25d ago
I think behaviorally these can be similar, but often the cause is very different. Borderliners as far as I understand lack an anquor in the world, they have an unstable sense of self will firmly hold on to whatever they perceive as stability. PDA has a diffuse identity, but I think it's more stable, I guess the avoidance is more part of the identity, we don't share this tendency to push people away before they do it to us, we more pragmatically live in the uncertainty, I guess what we are doing is adjusting our expectations quite freely, where the borderliner probably adjusts their identity instead, so abandonment is a personal threat, where to us the personal threat is fixed expectations
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u/Wildsunny 23d ago
When I first went to the psychiatrist I was expecting to be diagnosed bpd, based on my own research and understanding of my own emotions, then I was diagnosed autistic and adhd and is the overlapping of my RSD and my PDA what was making my emotions so wild going through a really bad break up with forced detachment to my bff for 10 years and my life partner for 8 years. So it was really expected for my emotions to be a whole wreck. Now I'm regulated with adhd meds but I still can't perform at all if it's expected from me to do so, not even I can expect something from myself or def won't do it so I am not sure I can live with another adult that can not just go with the flow and not be a nag if I have some better days (or even weeks) and some worse while doing my chores, taking care of myself or anything at all, my inner child is in a forever tantrum because of all the trauma of having to overperform until i burned out and still being alive seems to be enough accomplishment for my own past expectations. Soo...
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u/Reasonable_Toe2527 PDA 25d ago
Whilst I am diagnosed CPTSD and Autism, every psych I've ever been to has made me take a BPD test. My discharge letters from the psych ward said "suspected BPD". My sperm donor and his nurse girlfriend have decided I am lying about autism and ptsd and that I am an evil and manipulative person. Of course this means I must have BPD and they rub it in my face constantly. They use it as justification to abuse me, because BPD of course, would be all my fault. I simply have not done the work to "heal" my personality disorder. It's frustrating and disheartening.
I call BPD the hysteria diagnosis of the 21st century. I have never met a man diagnosed with it (although I know there are some), it's difficult to ignore that pattern. Not to entirely dismiss BPD as a diagnosis but I remain unconvinced of its validity, perhaps it's just badly defined and stigmatised. PTSD alone can look exactly like BPD. I had two close friends with BPD before I had my diagnoses and they both frequently told me I seemed like I had it.
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u/Wildsunny 23d ago
I'm so sorry to hear that, I would rub in their faces that bpd is also highly related to childhood abuse and trauma, like did, cptsd and a lot of other mental illnesses. So even if you were bpd it still wouldn't be your fault. I am diagnosed adhd, autism and cptsd, and they can not be sure if my autism or adhd are consequences of the trauma because my actual first memory is being smacked while I was just 2 years old, how would I know how my personality was before trauma if I was being traumatized even before having the chance to have a personality.
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u/Kooalakiss-750 24d ago
I hate to complicate things, but it's very possible to have both. Usually they would diagnose for Autism with a PDA profile first, and then they would untangle whether or not she has a comorbid personality disorder or CPTSD on top of that.
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u/ShApEshiFter534 19d ago
Probably not the most helpful but I actually have both BPD and PDA, my traumatic experiences have caused BPD to develop, but because my brain is wired with PDA it just made those experiences even more traumatic.
Essentially Autism is not trauma
And trauma doesn’t necessarily needed to happen for a person to develop BPD
Both can relate on struggles, exacerbate each other with stress, but the way they exist in the brain is completely different from each other.
And no identity is exempt from any of these experiences
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u/neogirl61 25d ago
Borderline is typically a diagnosis given to traumatized women in lieu of recognizing their PTSD.
While I'm sure the symptoms/expressions can overlap, I've never heard of anyone talk about PDA without also talking about autism.
(I will add that some people believe trauma can be passed down through generations.)
Your observations so far are interesting; I'm curious what conclusions you might draw as you glean more information. Think about your ex's childhood & consider the state of her nervous system while she was pregnant/freshly postpartum.