Ask the Therapist
Can a BPD Really Love Another Person?
I am deeply in love with my BPD, and she swears she feels the same. But I've been split black and left in the past...I was treated in a way that I'd never treat somebody I love. I worry all the time that I'm just somebody to cling to even though we are engaged and she wants kids with me. Can a BPD really love another person?
Wow...I think this one is more metaphysics than psychology.
In that a BP is human, yes, s/he can feel love. The complication comes in whom or what s/he loves. The love object for a BP is a "projective object", rather than an "integrative object" like it is for the rest of us. What do I mean?...
In terms of our interior life, we experience other people as "objects"...in other words symbols that represent something to us and activate us at the level of the subconscious, personal unconscious or collective unconscious (racial memory) and that's how we get "connected".
Doing away with our more romantic notions, love is a mutual "integration" of various dimensions of mutually "exclusive" personalities (i.e., "one and one don't make two, they make one" -- Pete Townsend & The Who). So, two people meet, all of this crazy invisible psycho-energetic stuff happens, they "click" and they fall in love...the thing is that you don't love the invisible stuff, you love the person, the ego, the persona, that is in front of you.
The BP gets stuck at the object level and never really sees the person whom they "love". They see the object, they project the object and that's how you got "black split" and I will bet you a bright shiny new dollar that you didn't even see it coming. That's because it has very little to do with you. The object of your girlfriend's abandonment-pain-loss-shame-rejection-unworthiness-etc. got projected on to you and you got pulled off the pedestal.
So, the real question is not can the BP feel love, but, rather, can they feel love consistently. I would have to say, not likely.
