"Why Do I Feel So Lost in This Relationship?"

Someone I know recently fulfilled a life goal: he married a wonderful woman. About 2 months later, though, things began to change. The woman he had married asked him for a significant sum of money to start a business. He told her he didn't have that kind of money and was completely unprepared for the emotional reaction he got. She first became really angry and berated him for not loving her enough. She picked up a paperweight and threatened to throw it at him. Then she became despondent and said she didn't deserve to live. Finally, she drank a bottle of wine and burned herself several times on the arm with a cigarette.

That one evening became a turning point in their relationship. The wife quit her job. She vacillated between not speaking with my friend for hours and spending hours telling him what a bad person he was. She often drank two bottles of wine in an evening. She went into great detail about how worthless she was. My friend tried to get his wife help, but she mostly refused. After he had to leave the house several times because his wife was out of control, friends and family began to tell him to leave her. The problem with leaving his wife, however, was that she was not always despondent, drunk, and enraged. There were moments when my friend saw the woman he had fallen in love with, a woman who was smart, witty, caring, and exciting. He wanted to be with that woman.

Meanwhile, the psychiatrist who had seen his wife a couple of times told my friend that his wife met the criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD). He was very discouraging. In fact he told him that there was no help for his wife and that he should just get out of the relationship before things got worse. My friend is still with his wife, but he's often exhausted and stressed out and seems less and less like the outgoing, optimistic person I've known.

HOW BORDERLINE BEHAVIOR CAN MAKE YOU LOSE YOUR BALANCE

My friend, whose name is Brad, describes himself these days as feeling generally lost. A man with the enviable knack for knowing just the right thing to say or do in virtually any situation, he now says that everything he does with regard to his wife, whose name is Sadie, seems to be wrong. Brad no longer trusts his social instincts, and friends have started to notice that he often retreats into a corner at gatherings where he'd usually be at the epicenter. After the fateful conversation where he told his new wife that he couldn't give her thousands of dollars, he agonized all night over whether he was in fact being stingy and had underestimated what he could afford to do without. It was only the first of many sleepless nights spent second-guessing simple decisions that seemed so benign at the time but got such an accusatory reaction from Sadie. Surely he must have done something offensive if his wife was that upset, he told himself. So he would rehash the incident again and again, looking for an explanation but never able to find a credible middle ground between the idea that he was the terrible person Sadie had called him and the idea that she was. He wasn't quite sure who he was anymore, and he certainly didn't know who Sadie was.

Brad's confusion was compounded by the fact that sometimes Sadie was everything he'd ever wanted in a wife. Once, after hearing the discouragement in his voice when she called him at work and asked how his day was going, she surprised him by having a candlelit dinner all ready when he got home and a DVD of an obscure old movie he'd mentioned months ago that he'd always wanted to see. When his mother was recovering from surgery and he was caught up in the busiest time of year at his job, Sadie had doted on his mother so Brad didn't have to worry about how she was managing on her own. Two of his friends kept asking him when they could all get together for dinner again because the last time they'd gone out Sadie had had everyone in convulsions as she told one hilarious story after the next. Sometimes Brad felt like he was living with two different women, and he wondered whether he was simply losing his mind.

Of course he wasn't. The fact is that there are so many reasons we love people with BPD. Most are kind and generous of spirit. One time I had surgery, and after returning to run a group with eight women who had BPD diagnoses, I casually remarked that my husband was not doing such a good job of cooking for me while I was recovering. The next week, every woman in the group brought me some kind of casserole.

When someone acts so caring, you can easily question whether your anger at the aggressive, frightening behavior that you see at other times is justifiable, as Brad did. Maybe, you might think, you're not a very good or worthy judge of human character at all. Or you get over involved. In training therapists, I have often found that therapists who treat BPD can lose their way simply because their clients are so kind and such brilliant listeners that the therapists feel like the clients are taking care of them instead of the other way around. Then they feel an irresistible urge to repay the clients in kind and end up extending themselves in inappropriate ways. For example, I knew of a therapist at one point who loaned a great deal of money to a client. I once met another one who called her client when she, the therapist, was in emotional distress. A third I know of ended up adopting the daughter of a client. All of these behaviors are considered questionable or unethical in our profession, and I know the therapists did not set out to be unethical. Somehow the behaviors typical of someone with BPD made them lose their way.

You've probably had the same types of experiences. Family members and loved ones often find themselves trying to rescue people with BPD. After a particularly wonderful period with Sadie, Brad suddenly found himself writing a check for her poorly defined new business even though he was going to have to withdraw funds from his retirement account to cover it. Months into their marriage, Brad found out that Sadie's older sister had bailed her out of financial disasters for years, despite repeated vows never to help her again. Sadie's mother was under...