Is Borderline Personality Disorder ‘Genetic’?
This is a convoluted topic, but one that has to be addressed and sorted out if genuine recovery is your goal. You see, when somebody starts spouting off scientific studies, and the reader begins imagining beakers, microscopes and intellectuals in laboratories dressed in white lab coats, it can be hard to reason against the bedazzling effect of such things. I warn you now, this article will be long. But in its length, I will also address this subject comprehensively.
Personally, I love science. I love reading and talking about science. But I often say, and it is true, “If you want to see somebody shut off their brain, just attribute any point you are making to science.”
It’s uncanny. You simply say, “There’s a scientific study that says such and such…” show off a graph or two, and watch people fall into line. Few people will question it, or apply their own powers of reason. You see, if science says it is so, it must be so.
Here’s the problem; When we discuss science, what we are generally talking about is not science at all, but rather scientists. There’s a term for this, do you know what it is?
Metonymy. Metonymy is a sneaky type of figurative language where one elevated object or concept is used in place of another in order to lend greater credence to the argument, and it has the effect of concealing, or blurring, the true nature of the information’s source that is being spoken about. Here are some examples of metonymy:
•“The White House issued a statement.” (The White House is a building. It can’t issue statements. Some specific person, within the White House, had to author that statement.)
•“The book claims…” (It’s actually the author who is making the claim. Books are inanimate objects, and as such, they can’t ‘claim’ anything.)
• “Science made a new discovery this week.” (Scientists discovered something new, not science. Even so, we are not even talking about all scientists here, but rather some very specific scientists; for not all scientists will be in agreement with the interpretation of the results of the discovery, no matter what the discovery is. Don’t believe me? Look up the current disagreements among scientists about whether coconuts are good for you! Or whether milk is good for you. Or whether women should get annual mammograms. Or whether humans should terraform Mars. Take your pick.)
Many people reading this will not see the importance of understanding, or care about, the misuse of metonymy and how it is regularly employed, powerfully and effectively, to your perceptive detriment. If you’re one of these types of people, you can stop reading now. I can’t help you, and you were never my intended audience, anyway.
See, the way scientific studies are created and carried out, matters. The motivation for the scientific study matters. The individuals who carry out the study matter. The results of scientific studies just are what they are, but somebody still had a motive and an expectation for the results, and somebody still has to interpret the results; results that aren’t reliable absent the information I just spelled out: The whys, hows, and whos.
Everybody - even scientists - are prone to their personal filters. People kick, buck, and flop around, at the mere mention of this possibility, but anybody who does not understand that this is true and appreciate the significance of it is, frankly, a fool. Everybody always hee-haws and laughs at the ridiculousness of the blind adoration towards scientists and doctors reflected in classic B movies, and yet, nothing has changed. This same blind attitude still permeates society.
There are people who believe, for example, that judges, once they reach a high-enough level of responsibility, are immune to the personal filters they live with when interpreting the law. Anybody who believes this, also, is a fool. Every human being is affected by their life filters, personal bias, personal experiences, culture, upbringing, and so on. If you are a human being, you live with filters, and those filters affect the way you interpret data. This applies to every single human being, scientists and judges included.
When you read an article in National Geographic, and the article asserts things based on a scientific study, you aren’t reading the results of that study. No, you are reading the journalist’s interpretation of the results of that study (or perhaps a scientist’s interpretation, spoon-fed to the journalist, who turned off his brain and powers of reason the instant he saw a guy in a white lab coat with ‘scientist’ written on his lapel.)
So that we know exactly who it is we are dealing with, let’s examine the people who are behind the claims of ‘genetic’ findings as they relate to Borderline Personality Disorder. Let’s examine their track record. Who are they? What have their capabilities as a group revealed so far? At the end I will then specifically discuss genetics, and why it is a decoy duck in your efforts to recover from Borderline Personality Disorder.
1. The ‘experts’ routinely talk of Borderline Personality Disorder as a ‘mental illness’, and even describe it as such in their official literature and references. But Borderline Personality Disorder is not a ‘mental illness’. It is an emotional disorder, as I have plainly explained in the past in ways that are so clear as to be immune to argument. Not mental, but emotional. Not illness, but disorder. Yes, I am aware of what the psychological associations say. They are wrong. And frankly, their ineffectiveness and incompetence as a group is one of the reasons you have a need to read my articles at all, isn’t it.
2. Borderline Personality Disorder does not have multiple possible causes, contrary to the experts assertions. There is only one authentic cause of Borderline Personality Disorder, for everybody. The entire disorder, every symptom and aspect of it, springs from a single, unhealthy, subconscious, learned, erroneous perspective. I often call it a ‘distorted core belief’. I also often refer to it as an ‘emotional algorithm’, or ‘erroneous, subconscious, foundation certainty’. There is only one reason ‘experts‘ speak of multiple possible causes, rather than defining the one true cause. Think about it; in what circumstances have you ever spoken in generalities about a thing when pressed for an answer on any topic? You did so on occasions when you didn’t understand the subject thoroughly enough, nor genuinely enough, to speak of it in absolute terms. This is also why the professional community keeps open the possibility of multiple causes. They do not want to back themselves into a corner on a topic they are ignorant about. If one of six possibilities you suggest ends up having some validity to it, you weren’t ever technically ‘wrong’, were you? ‘Genetics’ is the granddaddy of all underhanded strategies to conceal incompetence, which we will discuss here soon.
3. The prime distorted core belief from which the entire disorder sprouts is this: “My feelings are inherently irrelevant and shameful. Devoid of worth.”
This quickly gives birth to a second, primary distorted core belief: “If my feelings are irrelevant and shameful, then I myself must also be inherently irrelevant and shameful. Devoid of worth.”
Everything the person with Borderline Personality Disorder observes, experiences, feels, and thinks, must first pass through this filter, and this goes on to explain every single one of the disorder’s symptoms. Just like a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses, these two distorted core beliefs affect every view the person with Borderline Personality Disorder has of the world and of life. Given that the entire disorder is built on this one cause, Borderline Personality Disorder is entirely curable. All of the symptoms are tied into one root cause - a root cause that is correctable. Nothing the professional community popularly offers is able to lead you to this cure. Why not? Because they never address the cause. Instead, they only offer you soothing techniques, behavioral tricks, coping strategies. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an example of this misdirection and lost effort. I’m not saying it has no value at all, only that it will never cure you. The professional community as a group does not help their clients distinguish the symptoms of the disorder from the actual problem - its cause, and this is an outrageous failure on their part. As long as you are focused on coping strategies, you will never be rid of your emotional disorder. I want something better for you. When I say ‘cure’ and ‘recovery’, I mean them by their true definitions.
4. Given that the entirety of Borderline Personality Disorder is the result of a distorted, subconscious, erroneous perspective, the idea that any pill can ever, or will ever, fix Borderline Personality Disorder is ludicrous. Yet, the professional community continues to prescribe medications for those suffering with the disorder instead of educating them. You might as well be taking pills to learn Swahili as to take pills to cure Borderline Personality Disorder.
5. Parental (or immediate caregiver) neglect and abuse was involved in every person’s development of Borderline Personality Disorder when they were in a developmental stage of childhood. No, your parents aren’t the exception. The fact that you are unable to see the neglect and abuse for what it is (which involves denial and ignorance), is not the same as saying your parents weren’t guilty of it. Some will say, “But I went to live with my aunt when I was three, so my birth parents couldn’t have been the cause.” Oh really? If your parents weren’t there, then by definition, they neglected your emotional needs, did they not? They emotionally neglected you with their physical absence. They couldn’t provide for you what they weren’t present to provide. You still needed it from them, nonetheless. How can you fail to see this? This very naturally gave rise to your adoption of the distorted core belief mentioned earlier: My feelings are inherently irrelevant and shameful, devoid of worth. If my feelings mattered, my parents would never have abandoned me.
How about those who say their parents were loving and always read them bedtime stories, yet here they are with Borderline Personality Disorder? What do your parents’ words, hugs, and bedtime stories have to do with whether or not they also invalidated your feelings, consistently, over a period of time? If you have Borderline Personality Disorder, it was the nature of your parents to invalidate your feelings in subtle, or blatant, consistent ways. I don’t ever need to meet your parents to know that this was true. So ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many bedtime stories they read you, or how often they said they loved you. Their attitude toward your feelings is the only thing that matters.
Invalidating children’s feelings is an example of emotional neglect, and emotional neglect of children is child abuse. Rather than having the insight to explore, and help their clients identify, and work through, their denial until they are able to perceive and accept the reality, what do the 'experts’ instead do? They routinely accept their patients’ denials of parental neglect and abuse outright, denial which is rooted in total ignorance and lack of understanding.
6. So you have an emotional disorder and your siblings don’t. They turned out just fine while you ended up with an emotional disorder. This is what you want me to believe, correct? Now listen closely: I made it to age thirty-five before anybody - myself included - caught so much as a whiff that something was out of place with me. How is this possible? Because emotional unhealth is easily hidden from others and hard to identify and recognize when we ourselves have always lived with it.
Furthermore, this argument is built on the false assumption that you are a reliable judge of what constitutes good emotional health and what does not. Yet, the fact that you are here reading this means that can’t entirely be true, can it? Children do not grow up in environments of emotional unhealth, and miraculously emerge emotionally healthy. No. It is impossible. Children get their emotional education directly from their parents.
In other words, whether your siblings specifically have Borderline Personality Disorder or not is irrelevant. You are wasting your time making such comparisons. The relevant point is that they received the same emotional education as you did, from the same two emotional teachers. Therefore their lives are built upon the same distorted emotional foundation that yours is. Their ability to blend into society does not change the reality of this in any way. It seems the professional community has yet to arrive at this understanding. As far as they are concerned, as long as your emotional unhealth isn’t too disruptive, you don’t have any work to do.
7. The term 'trigger' is a bullshit term, fully embraced and regularly used by the professional community. It is a concept they actively encourage, and nurture. It suggests that external things can somehow generate your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, for you. Anybody with any capacity for reason whatsoever knows that, in reality, there is no such thing as triggers. There is only you, triggering yourself. Nobody and nothing is responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, except for you yourself. Emotionally-healthy people recognize the reality; that each person is a self-contained machine, and every feeling, thought, and behavior is what one generates him or herself, within him or herself. Emotionally-healthy people do not ever view external things as being the cause of their behaviors. They instead recognize the concept of ‘triggers’ as an attempt to deny responsibility.
Rather than educating people on principles reflective of emotional health, ‘experts’ continue actively clinging to, and promoting, these profoundly emotionally-unhealthy ideas. If you would like to hear a recent podcast where I spoke in depth about 'triggers', you can listen here:
8. The professional community routinely makes claims that something like 70% of people who are diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are women, thereby actively pushing the false notion that the disorder is a 'women’s' disorder. These ‘experts’ lack the basic intelligence required to understand that this statistic does not in any way suggest that more women than men actually have Borderline Personality Disorder. At best, these statistics reflect only one thing: That more women go to therapists than their male counterparts do. (Men can’t be reflected in a statistic in which they refuse to participate. If you suddenly see more reports in the news of bear attacks, it doesn’t mean bears as a species have lost their minds and are out of control. It only means that the news is reporting on bear attacks more than usual. There could be a hundred reasons for this, but the most likely one is that there isn’t anything else interesting worth reporting on.)
9. Contrary to what the ‘experts’ tell you, there is no such thing as having a ‘little bit’ of Borderline Personality Disorder. People are either emotionally healthy, or they are emotionally unhealthy. In reality, there is no ‘spectrum’ zone. One can’t ‘sort of’ have distorted, unhealthy, subconscious foundation beliefs. You either do or do not. One’s ability to blend into most social situations does not change this reality. Therefore, ‘spectrum’ is bullshit. It measures outward displays of the disorder, not the reality of what is going on inside a person - the force and its origin. Anybody who genuinely wishes to be cured will have to give up the denial that emotional unhealth is emotional unhealth, period. In the real world, there is no scale from 1-10 for severity of BPD. It is an imaginary, bullshit notion invented by bullshit experts. Everybody with Borderline Personality Disorder has Borderline Personality Disorder equally, and I’m going to tell you why:
• Because Borderline Personality Disorder is not defined by its symptoms, but by its cause. The degree to which individuals control its outward displays, and therefore blend into society, vary. But nobody should be interested in merely controlling, or studying, outward manifestations of symptoms, as the professional community revels in doing. The only thing that matters, the only thing anybody should be interested in is identifying, understanding, and eliminating the cause, which is conveniently the same cause for everybody.
So now I have, in great detail, demonstrated a thorough, comprehensive understanding of what Borderline Personality Disorder is, while at the same time detailing some of the most glaring failures and inadequacies of the professional community. I am clearly not a person who simply picked up a psychology book one day and started talking about something I only superficially understand. However, the subject here is genetics. Let’s take a look at the professional community’s embrace of ‘genetics’ as a possible cause of Borderline Personality Disorder, and while we do, I want you to keep in mind the nature of these people (as a group, that is) and their overwhelming incompetence, tirelessly demonstrated.
First of all, it is important to understand that Borderline Personality Disorder is indeed inherited. Yes, you read that correctly. Borderline Personality Disorder is inherited. In fact, it is inherited in every case.
However, Borderline Personality Disorder is not genetic.
Inherited and genetic are not synonymous terms.
You inherit a lot of learned things from your parents; Culture, for example is a learned thing we inherit. You inherit certain food preferences, music preferences, ideals, and so forth.
Emotional disorders are similarly passed along in the way cultural aspects of one’s life are passed along. Are Mexicans genetically predisposed to liking cilantro? What an absurd question. And yet, the idea that Borderline Personality Disorder is subject to the same lazy explanation is no less absurd.
When you read studies about how scientists have discovered BPD ‘genes’, or about how they have discovered that certain glands are larger in folks with BPD, or their brains are altered - do you fully appreciate the blind assumptions a belief in these studies requires?
To begin with, you must suspend disbelief long enough to assume that these ‘experts’ are actually good at identifying people who have Borderline Personality Disorder.
Think about that for a minute: You must believe that the people they studied actually had Borderline Personality Disorder. And not only this, but that they had Borderline Personality Disorder only. That is, in isolation. That these people are so adept at recognizing it, and they understand it so thoroughly, they were able to hand-pick participants for the study who definitely have Borderline Personality Disorder, and only Borderline Personality Disorder - then do their brain scans, or blood work, or whatever, and then know for a certainty that the results were not influenced by any other factors aside from Borderline Personality Disorder. Not depression. Not OCD. Not Narcissism. Not Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Not high blood pressure. Not stress. Not anything in their environment. Nothing except for Borderline Personality Disorder.
If you have any experience with psychologists, therapists, counselors, and psychiatrists at all, as I do, you know that this is a ridiculous assumption. The reality of your experiences with them simply does not support such confidence.
In my personal experience, at least fifteen psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists had two years to get my diagnosis correct. Two uninterrupted years. And in two years, given thousands of ongoing opportunities, they were unable, among all of them, to fulfill even this most basic function. It was finally a lowly Georgian girlfriend who worked as a nanny who finally diagnosed me correctly.
Yet, I am supposed to blindly believe that in these scientific studies, they managed to not only select candidates that have Borderline Personality Disorder, with uncanny, uncharacteristic skill, but that they also only selected candidates with Borderline Personality Disorder absent any other disorder whatsoever, so they could be certain the tests were unaffected by any other factors? That they understand how the disorder manifests and behaves on the surface so well, that they can not only accurately diagnose it in isolation, but then also study the human body with every other possible influencing factor isolated from the picture?
If you are here, it is because the genetic scientists have yet to help a single person with Borderline Personality Disorder, or am I missing something?
Another thing to consider: Our experiences are able to alter our DNA. So when a scientist studies your DNA, what is he looking at? Is he seeing how you were born? Or is he seeing the result of your experiences? Here’s the truth:
The answer doesn’t matter one way or another as long as your experiences can alter your DNA.
Good experiences can have positive effects on your physiology as effectively as bad experiences can affect you negatively.
For example, if you lie a lot, studies show that the guilt response in your brain weakens. But this does not mean that if you start telling the truth a lot, that your guilt response (your conscience) does not strengthen again. In other words, scientists have described things with a brain scan that anybody with a brain has already known since Bible times. Do you know what practical value the scientific study therefore has? No value whatsoever.
All of this talk of science is misdirection. It is all taken out of context by people who do not factor in every relevant detail, and therefore are incapable of interpreting the results in a correct manner that has any relevance whatsoever to your situation or to your recovery.
And yet, none of what I have explained up to this point is the real reason I am certain the scientific studies regarding Borderline Personality Disorder are total bullshit. Would you like to know the real proof?
I’m cured of Borderline Personality Disorder.
This is my proof. I don’t care if you believe it, you are free to believe what you like. But I hope you will believe it, which is why I am trying to present a thorough, comprehensive argument here. Because I sincerely desire for others, who are suffering as I once suffered, to have the same opportunity to get it behind them; to benefit themselves from the unique insights I gained in my recovery.
Would any part of my recovery have ever been possible if the science articles everybody loves quoting and speculating on (wasting their focus and energies on) were indeed based on good science, or the results were being correctly interpreted? No. If Borderline Personality Disorder were truly the result of genetics, my entire approach would have failed. I would still be seeking answers and running around in circles. The entire premise that my understanding is based on - the root cause - would be false, and could not possibly be as cohesive and as comprehensive as it is. This means that every approach I ever took to addressing the root cause would have been meaningless and would have produced no results. But this is not what happened. My understanding of the disorder worked and produced the results it could only have produced by being built on a thorough and accurate understanding of the disorder in its entirety, rather than on hollow theory and pointless speculation.
My recovery is genuine. I really did have Borderline Personality Disorder, as powerfully as anybody ever has, for my entire life. I can’t emphasize this enough. And now I really don’t have it.
Perhaps you think, “He can claim anything at all. But I have no way of knowing if he’s telling the truth.” But this simply is not true. You do have a way of knowing if it is the truth. My very ability to explain the disorder in the detail that I do, without speculation or uncertainty, so that all of my assertions and explanations harmonize and make rational sense; all of this is powerful evidence for any sincere, genuine person, that the things I say are true.
The results speak for themselves and are enough, in themselves, to discredit a thousand phony articles on genetics. The topic of ‘genetics’ is a lazy fool’s game, and anybody eager to attribute Borderline Personality Disorder to genetics is a lazy fool.
You see, by attributing it to genetics, the professional community spares themselves from truly having to explain it in practical, relevant terms that demonstrate genuine understanding and insight. This is the true reason people search out, and cling, to explanations that involve genetics. They want the shortcut, the pill that allows you to skip all the work, learning, and insight, for these things require much effort.
“If you want to see somebody’s brain shut down, just attribute the cause of Borderline Personality Disorder to genetics and base it on a ‘scientific’ study.”