Does this sound like Borderline Personality Disorder?

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I posted this in a thread regarding ASD and Attachment and I would like to know if this sounds as if I've had some borderline tendencies from an early age:

I would sometimes become very attached to people, when I was a kid. Some of the attachments were normal, like my attachment to my aunt, and others were a bit random, such as my attachment to one of my mom's co-workers. Her co-worker seemed to like me, but my mom was always yelling at me not to bother her.

Another time I allowed myself to become attached to somebody was when my parents were hosting an exchange college student at their house when I was about 5. The student really seemed to like me and she and she gathered a bunch of sticks in our backyard, broke them into smaller sections, and made a little house out of them.

A couple of days later, I found out she was leaving, and I destroyed a part of the stick house....not the whole thing, just enough so that she was aware that I was upset at her leaving after she had bonded with me.

....Come to think of it, it's really no wonder everyone pushed me away after awhile; I was kind of a weird little prick when I was a kid.

Also, every time my aunt had to leave after visiting, I would go into this really deep depression for at least a couple of days afterward. To me, it was like being abandoned by the one person in the world who truly understood me. I would lie under my bedcovers with the Pikachu plush she gave me years ago and try to get her "love" from that. She also gave me a plushie of Sneezy from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when I was a baby, but he was usually at my dad's house and Pikachu was bigger and more cuddly.

I think part of the reason why I sought my attachments to real people in the oddest places was bcuz I really didn't have friends when I was a kid. The only kids my age in our street were two boys who mostly just beat me up when they came over, and anyway, even I did make real friends, I wouldn't have known how to act around them or would just have gone along with whatever they wanted me to do....and one thing I've learned is, no matter how nice and sincere a potential "friend" may seem, once they realize that they can walk all over you, they WILL. They always do, pretty much. Generally speaking, my stuffed animals and the cartoon characters I saw on TV as a kid were my friends, growing up.

I'm grown up now, and my stuffed animals/movie and TV characters are still some of my closest friends. I know they won't leave me, anyway. When it comes to relationships I have with other people, I'm very friendly with them and express my love to them and all, but try to stay somewhat detached - I remind myself that they're just going to leave eventually; either it'll be bcuz I do something that pisses them off, they just get tired of me, or they die. I even feel this sort of detachment towards my own father and mother (and even my aunt), and it makes me sad....but I just keep telling myself that it HAS to be this way.

So....what do you think? Is this borderline? I recognize some borderline tendencies in myself now, as an adult....some, but not all of them.

You could be drifting toward avoidant personality disorder.

Yes, I've also been considering the possibility of my having/developing Avoidant Personality Disorder, too...thank you for mentioning that.

A fear of abandonment is certainly a BPD trait but on it's own does not necessarily suggest BPD. Do you have any other BPD traits, such as self harm or suicidal thoughts or actions, instability of mood, inappropriate or intense anger, confusion with identity etc? If not then I think it;s unlikely to be BPD. Please bear in mind that I am in no way qualified to diagnose you (or not diagnose you).

I do think Avoidant Personality Disorder sounds a little more likely (APD can be co-morbid with BPD, so one does not rule out the other). Aspergers could also explain some of the difficulties you have had making friends in the first place. It makes sense that you are worried about losing people you are close to if you feel you struggle to find people to connect with.

That can be just an AS thing...particularly with AS females. We can develop inappropriately strong attachments to people, and that person becomes an obsession, almost like a special interest. You should read Aspergirls by Rudy Simone, or go to her website for more info on this.

I'm not a doctor, but I do teach psychology...If you had borderline personality disorder, you would see wild fluctuations in your identity to try to please other people because you fear rejection, and always be trying on new personas, along with self-destructive impulsive behaviors like cutting, promiscuity, drug abuse, shopping sprees with money you don't have, et.c. Your relationships would tend to get serious rather quickly, yes, but they would also burn out very quickly, with you deciding you hate the person when they finally reject you.

Avoidant Personality is when you can't have relationships at all, with anyone, because you fear rejection so much.

In my experience, it is best not to pathologize every little personality quirk, and if some behavior is causing substantial disruption to your life, then you should go to a mental health care professional to work on it, and not really concern yourself with what the diagnosis might be, but how to curb the behaviors and thought patterns that are making you unhappy.

I know you said you destroyed part of something out of frustration at someone leaving, but does your view of the person you were attached to change? Like you adore them.and when you perceive them as abandoning you, you suddenly hate them? A Borderline friend is like that (although she has become very avoidant after years of destroying friendships with this behaviour) and from what I understand it is fairly typical, this "I hate you, don't leave me" fluctuation.

Thank you, SilkySifaka...I did self-harm for a few years when I was a teenager (mostly by scratching, biting, beating my head and throwing my body against hard surfaces), and have considered suicide before (though not recently) but these are not consistent things for me. I haven't self-harmed in several years. Thank you for your feedback.

Thank you, Paris - I've never noticed any fluctuations in my identity or my relationships getting serious quickly (I've never really been in any serious or "romantic" relationships), but I do identify with your description of APD - not being able to have relationships at all bcuz I fear rejection; and I definitely do.

Hi, Noetic - no, I didn't really "hate" her for leaving....I just didn't want her to leave because she and I had been having such a good time. I was very young at the time (maybe 5 and a half) and didn't really have the facilities to ask her not to leave or express how I'd miss her; so I expressed my sadness through destroying part of the stick house. I know that that probably doesn't make much sense; I don't really understand it, myself, in retrospect.

I don't really think that you have BPD, but that's just my personal guess, not knowing you in person.

But I want to give you one advice, I also forget once in a while, don't worry too much and don't search for diagnoses on the web you could or couldn't have.

I don't think what you did is anything outside of what could be considered normal behavior for a 5 year old child. You did what you did because you were hurt. Now if you'd felt a deep, intense and irrational hatred and mentally fantasized a billion different ways to hurt them back then you might be concerned about Borderline. But only a qualified mental health professional could tell you that.

My nephew was dx'd with Aspergers awhile back and also my mom, who'd been dx'd bipolar for years. She suggested I might have aspergers too. I certainly had the signs of it as a child: awkward and immature behavior, getting picked on for that behavior, trouble making and keeping friends, etc. Hell, I never went through a school year with more than one friend at a time and by the end of the school year, they grew up some and almost always made friends with people who didn't like me and they'd resort to picking on/bullying me too.

Every.single.year.

One thing I was often picked on for the most was being the smartest kid in class. If I gave a clever answer to the teacher, I'd pay for it at recess let me tell you.

I would say my biggest problem was-and still is-a very difficult time accepting change. Particularly in relation to routines. This itself is strange because I don't have routines. I start out with ideas about a routine I'd like to establish, like a better sleep routine for example. Then if something disrupts it, I get irrationally distressed over it and will remain 'paralyzed' [unable to act]when it doesn't work out.

I might start out with the idea that I'd like to wake up at 9am, for example, and go to sleep by 11pm or midnight. Then when that time comes around, I'll feel wide awake and creative and not be able to sleep. I'll end up going to sleep when the sun comes up and not waking till mid or late afternoon feeling depressed and defeated. I'll also feel emotionally paralyzed and unable to do anything the rest of the day. I'll more often than not go back to sleep determined to sleep through until 9 am or whatever time I want to be up. I sleep like a madman.

It's very disruptive to me because so many things you do throughout the day are linked to others. Like, if I don't wake at 9am like I want, I wont even let myself take a shower until I wake when I want. And by let myself, I mean I feel compelled to not shower until I succeed at waking at the desired time.

Going out and doing things is nearly impossible for me because there's so much outside the house that's out of my control and being around people makes me feel literally 'bombarded' by all their emotional energy. It's one of the reasons I'm on a disability. I can only hold down a job for 6 months at a time before I collapse and end up in the hospital because I can't 'fake' being 'normal' anymore. That and the sleep disturbances lead me to exhaustion after time. I have a difficult time being around spontaneous people too. They just seem to be all 'this way and that way' all over the place and it overwhelms me.

That's a keyword for me: overwhelmed. I get overwhelmed very easily and when that happens, I get 'paralyzed' and shut down and become unable to do anything at all-bathe, do dishes, laundry. And that's aside from feeling like I have to have a set schedule for doing these things or else I don't do them at all. It's been three months since I've done any laundry and my ex will cave in once in awhile and do one set of clothes for me and tells me it's so I can take the rest of the clothes to the laundry and do them. It's all part of that paralysis: I need to do wash. I can't do the wash because it's evening time and I planned to do it in the morning after I have coffee. Then morning rolls around and if I happen to be awake, then I can't do the wash because I have nothing clean to wear to go do the wash. Then I get paralyzed because none of the qualifiers for me to get anything done have been met.

What a nightmare! What hell!

And all of this is beside my avoidant behaviors regarding socializing. I don't really have borderline symptoms much anymore because I don't let myself get close enough to others to lose my own sense of self, which has taken me to the other extreme of emotional detachment from others, period.

Sorry. I didn't intend for this to turn into a novel or to hijack the thread, it just all came out of me. Don't mean to step on any toes.

One thing it could be is Newson Syndrome - a lot of people with that condition have obsessions with other people. How do you deal with people telling you what to do, such as teachers in school?

Do you mean PDA (pathological demand avoidance)? That's a good point.

Not borderline. Does not seem to meet the diagnostic criteria (link)

No mention of intense anger, paranoia, impulsivity, or identity disturbance.

None of that kid stuff seems like anything but being a kid to me.

Don't forget that a lot of things that would be seriously insane in adulthood are perfectly normal in a kid.

It's practically impossible to judge whether you may have BPD from your OP. You don't state anything that yells Borderline to me.

However, I have noticed from other forums (psychological forums) that people with certain personality disorders do tend to downplay what they have even when they're asking for others' thoughts on whether they actually have the disorder or not and they tend to not mention facts that need to be mentioned.

Regardless, the only proper way to be diagnosed is with a professional who's qualified to make these diagnoses officially.