As an abuse survivor, I don’t want to become the next person to take my pain and thrust it upon someone else in the form of shame.

256.

That’s how many different ways borderline personality disorder can present itself, just looking at the diagnostic criteria alone.

Factor in other types of neurodivergence, trauma history, and all of the biological, sociological, and psychological influences that make us individuals? You’ll find that “borderline personality disorder” very loosely describes a very diverse group of people.

It’s also been used in the past to describe me.

More specifically, as a survivor of complex trauma, it’s been used to describe the dysregulation I experienced — and the skills I developed to survive it — after prolonged childhood abuse and neglect.

While it’s a label I vehemently reject as an adult — both because C-PTSD and autism more accurately reflect my internal reality, and because it pathologizes my so-called “personality” rather than reckoning with my abuse history — I recognize for some, it is still an important label.

For folks with BPD, this label may still support their access to care, and is part of their journey into knowing themselves more deeply.

But it’s also become a fraught label for some abuse survivors who, without fully realizing it, may scapegoat a diagnosis and dehumanize people with BPD collectively, in an attempt to soothe the part of them that was harmed.

While I understand the urge to categorize and psychoanalyze the people who abused us, the truth is, further stigmatizing any personality disorder will not prevent abuse from happening and, in fact, hurts survivors collectively more than it will ever help them.

Even a quick glance at the diagnostic criteria for BPD can tell you that by stigmatizing traits like dysregulation, self-harm, and fear of abandonment, we’re stigmatizing very typical expressions of relational trauma, especially trauma that happens in childhood.

Years ago, during my own process of deciding whether or not BPD was a label that fits, I noticed that few people wanted to talk about borderline as a product of abuse, so much as they wanted to make it synonymous with abuse.

To this day, I regularly encounter people online who only view borderline as a propensity for abuse — even as a “disorder” of inevitable abuse, painting people with BPD as dangerous, immoral, and irredeemable.

Not only does this ignore the fact that many people with the traits of so-called BPD are themselves survivors of abuse — and more likely to be victims than perpetrators — it also further stigmatizes the label, inevitably impacting the kinds of care folks will receive.

The uncomfortable truth is, abuse is not specific to any diagnosis — and that includes personality disorders. A diagnosis does not guarantee that someone will be abusive, but stigmatizing a diagnosis does guarantee that many people who aren’t abusive but do have that diagnosis will be harmed by your assumption.

And that’s what we call bias, prejudice. And yes, that’s what we call ableism and saneism specifically.

I know as survivors, we might wish that spotting an abusive person were as straightforward as a checklist of criteria or a listicle of red flags. I wish this personally in much the same way that I wish “stranger danger” held water, rather than reckoning with how it’s the people you know personally that are more likely to hurt you.

I deeply empathize with the desire to, in some coherent way, concoct a theory that explains why someone harmed you, and maybe even how you could avoid it in the future. And it can be satisfying for our younger selves especially to emotionally “retaliate,” and pin a mark of shame onto someone who radically altered the course of our lives.

To call an abuser borderline, or even a narcissist or sociopath, can feel like displacing the Big Bad they placed on us, casting it back on them — I know this feeling all too well.

And while the people who harmed us should feel ashamed for what they did, we cannot force that shame upon them by weaponizing these diagnoses without also placing that shame on people we don’t even know, who will only be harmed by it.

In my own journey as a survivor, I had to learn that weaponizing “diagnoses” only ever results in reducing complex human beings into one-dimensional caricatures of the people we think we’re afraid of, instead of tending to the fear and even shame within ourselves.

This became clearer when I saw clinicians weaponizing “borderline” against me when they missed my autism, and when I wasn’t responding to the medications they gave me. It was clearer when I met people who were diagnosed sociopaths and narcissists — all the labels I was told to be afraid of — and they were nothing like I expected.

And it clicked, how much the use of these diagnoses is, at its core, just a placeholder for shame, to obscure the complexity of someone by rendering them Bad and Irredeemable.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves who is being helped and who is being protected when we treat abusers as pariahs that we have nothing in common with and who we have no choice but to discard.

It doesn’t mean that we, as survivors, need to hold someone’s hand and be part of their process of healing after enduring harm and abuse by them.

But I wonder how the world is being made better when diagnoses are the scapegoat, and we’re not invited to think more deeply about the systems and environments that make abuse more likely to occur.

I have to wonder how the world is being made better when we reinforce a culture of shame and othering that depicts harmful behavior as an inevitability from certain kinds of Bad People, instead of something we can collectively transform within ourselves and our communities.

I’m not denying that there are some people who have been diagnosed with a “personality disorder” that are abusive, and that the intersection of those traits with how they enacted abuse can make the exercise of learning more about it feel empowering for some survivors.

But I would ask that we be mindful of what we do with that information, and be honest with ourselves about the function and the limits of this mental exercise, especially when zooming out and considering how many people are abusive who don’t have these so-called “traits.”

We can end up staying stuck in analyzing The Other, thinking that we’re validating the parts of ourselves that were harmed, only to realize much later we were abandoning ourselves by centering the abuser’s experience — which we can never actually know — instead of affirming our truth without needing an external authority to do so.

It can feel really good to look at the folks who harmed us — who convinced us for so long that there was something inherently bad and horrible about us — and label them as The Bad One, with the backing of a medical system that would surely label them the same.

But considering the long history of borderline in particular being leveraged to dismiss “difficult” patients (especially women) and linked to oppressive ideas about marginalized people, we should all be wary of weaponizing labels that only derive their inherent power to shame others from replicating hierarchies.

We already have words for things like emotional abuse and coercive control. At some point, we need to get honest about the real function of words like “narcissistic abuse” and even the very concept of a “personality disorder.”

I say this as someone who used these words in exactly that way.

But years later, I can promise you, it feels infinitely better to let go of what I can’t know about the people who harmed me — and with that, to let go of the need to scapegoat an entire group of people already facing stigma, just to shame two people who may not be capable of accessing that shame, now or ever.

Maybe because I thought that their feeling bad would finally validate my pain — but even if I could “make” them feel bad, the dilemma is right there in the statement: I’m seeking their validation.

And that’s part of what I need to heal from.

So instead, I now tell my inner child every chance I get that what they experienced, what they felt, and how they suffered was all very real and very undeserved. And that, no matter what the adults around him may say, he has nothing to prove and nothing he must do to validate that pain.

The best “retaliation” for me as a survivor has been building a joyful and liberated life, and importantly, one of integrity, too, to ensure that I don’t become the next person to take my pain and thrust it upon someone else in the form of shame.

If we want to help survivors collectively — instead of just soothing the survivor within ourselves — at some point we have to reckon with whether or not our belief systems that we forge through and after abuse are actually setting us free, or merely placing us above someone else.

At some point, we have to realize that the same hierarchy that we leverage to shame our abusers is the one that sealed our fate all those years ago — ensuring no one intervened, no one believed us, and no one could offer us refuge, because the system cares more about punishing those who step out of line than protecting those who need it.

I believe that survivors will change the world, including survivors who have been diagnosed with personality disorders. But only if we have the courage to grieve, and the courage to refuse to replicate the shame we so unfairly inherited.

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