10 Signs of a Wife with Borderline Personality Traits

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel closest doctor grande today's question asks I can talk about the signs of a wife with borderline personality traits so in Prior videos I've talked about both husbands and wives with narcissistic traits psychopathic traits sadistic traits this is the video about borderline personality traits and again specifically wives so answer this question by looking at the ten signs of a wife with borderline personality traits now this video is focused on the husband and wife relationship in theory a relationship that is relatively stable not a new or dissolving relationship one where there's an expectation that the couple is in a long-term relationship these signs of course could apply to a long-term relationship in general whether or not the couple was married here I'll be talking about borderline personality traits and borderline personality disorder now someone can have borderline personality traits without necessarily having the disorder so BPD is an official personality disorder an official mental disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual borderline traits are really just personality traits that researchers study now of course both have an application if somebody has BPD of course that would indicate that they might need treatment right it might be a good idea to get treatment and it might guide what type of treatment was used borderline traits are used in other areas for example somebody could have another mental disorder and borderline traits and because they have those borderline traits that changes the treatment protocol a little bit so again both have an application in mental health treatment in the research BPD has studied more than just borderline traits in general so that's going to be evident in the signs right they're going to have more information from research involving borderline personality disorder as opposed to borderline personality traits in general as I review the ten signs when I say the word wife I'm really talking about a wife with water line personality traits it's a lot easier just to say wife then that whole phrase right so that's what I'm kind of too here for this video these signs are observable from the husband's point of view or people who know the couple at least in theory having one or more of these signs doesn't necessarily mean the wife has BPD or the traits rather these signs are just simply associated with borderline personality traits so now taking a look at sign number one in this marriage where the wife has BPD we see the distress starts early right so a lot of people when they get married they have six months a year sometimes a little bit more where things are pretty good before the relationship kind of settles down a bit that doesn't mean that all relationships turn bad it's just for almost everybody the first few months or the first year is pretty good with this type of marriage that's not really the case very often the distress again begins right away in the first few years the stress is particularly high in these types of marriage because they think the stress is somewhat new for the couple the stress doesn't necessarily decrease over time either in some ways actually increases but people become better at coping with it so there's this idea that things improve a little bit at least for most of the cases sign number two involves the personality traits in this type of marriage again one where the wife has BPD we see that in these situations both people tend to have water line personality traits so this is really just more evidence that points toward a sort of mating so individuals with borderline traits tend to be attracted to one another but we also see a lot of other information here around personality traits now looking at one particular study and I'll put the references for all the studies I used in the description for this video but looking at one particular study we see that 45% of the husbands in these situations have at least one personality disorder now the expected would be 10 to 15% so if you just found any couple at random that involved a husband and wife and you assess the husband again 10 to 15 percent of time you would see there was a personality disorder so 45% is a lot different right that's a lot more and that probably didn't happen by accent that observation wasn't due to random error alone so what personality disorders do we see in the husband more often paranoid antisocial and obsessive-compulsive personality percent prevalence and avoidant personality so our coming in at 11% so again all these percentages much higher than we would expect to observe in the general population for a person is order in general as I mentioned but also for these specific personality sorters now one of the criteria for antisocial personality indicates that an individual has to have symptoms of conduct disorder that were evident before the age of 15 so again this is just one element for somebody to be diagnosed with antisocial personality interestingly over 50% of the husbands in this type of marriage meet this particular criterion moving to signed number three this has to do with the types of attachment styles we'd expect to see these are really attachment style irregularities now the attachment styles we see in this article and again for this I am using the same article I used before we see four different attachment styles secure dismissive preoccupied and fearful generally speaking secure is considered normal or normative right that's what we would expect to see in most marriages so when we look at the wife in the situation we see in terms of secure attachment style and this one study zero percent none none of the wives had a secure attachment style so if we look to the wider population of wives with borderline personality disorder we would expect of course some to have a secure attachment style but not many just looking at the definition of water line person is order it shouldn't be surprising that it would be a very small number he'd be unlikely to find somebody who had a secure attachment style and BPD now in terms of the dismissive attachment style few in the study 3% but we saw a lot in terms of occupied and fearful 60% and 37% respectively which again shouldn't be surprising based on how we define BPD in terms of the husband's in these marriages they were roughly balanced between secure preoccupied and fearful in terms of prevalence and only 5% had the dismissive attachment style now if you compare this type of marriage to a marriage where neither spouse has BPD we can really get a juxtaposition that tells us something about how different these BPD related marriages are we see in the control groups the normal marriages for a lack of a better term in terms of the wives 70% were secured 23% preoccupied and few were fearful or dismissive in terms of their attachment style the husband's were somewhat similar in terms of these percentages so again we see a significant difference between a marriage that involves a wife with BPD and a marriage that does not moving out a sign number four sign number four is we see terrible problem solving and communication skills as well as frequent arguing the wife often demonstrates a criticism attack conflict type behavior and avoidance behaviors so we often see the same arguments in complaints year after year now when talking about marriages without BPD we still see arguing in those marriages usually the format of the arguing is the wife making demands and the man withdrawing right that's the typical format we see in the research literature explained for they call community samples however with a marriage that involves the wife having BPD that's reversed we see the men making demands and the women withdrawing so real difference there in terms of the approach of wind style now in terms of the arguments specifically again now talking about the borderline personality we see that there is physical violence in both directions but the wife exhibits more she tends to be the aggressor the wife also exhibits more verbal aggression and during arguments if the wife cannot hurt the husband in some way or sometimes even if she can she'll often hurt herself that's fairly common so both people are physically hurt even though most of the time again the wife would be the aggressor we also see a lot of usage of weapons of opportunity so this is really based on reactive anger not instrumental anger this is emotional and unplanned not like a scheme to harm somebody so again weapons of opportunity and I've seen many examples of this throughout my career chairs eating utensils I mentioned prior video the use of a spork which I thought was a little unusual shoes dishes glasses like glasses that would hold water gallon containers like a gallon of milk which weighs over eight pounds and can do a lot of damage keys a lot of times these are thrown like the keys are thrown phones like smartphones books clocks framed photos I've seen examples of a lot of objects being swung or thrown or just in general being used as a weapon as part of these arguments and sometimes as part of the devaluation cycle we also see that the life will destroy something that the husband values like something that has sentimental value for him perhaps I've seen a lot of horrible examples of this as well I've seen situations where the wife took tools or like computers and put them in hydrochloric acid I've seen situations where the wife sold or threw away collections like stamp collections coin collections I've seen the wife throw away medicine right so medicine the husband would need it would be important to have and I've also seen the situation where the wife will fill the husband's vehicle like his car with gasoline now sometimes when I talk about this like in trainings whatever people will say oh that's really nice you know the wife filled the husband's car with gasoline I'm not talking about the tank I'm not talking about the fuel tank I'm talking about the passenger compartment so filling the passenger compartment gasoline and sometimes lighting on fire but interestingly most of the time it doesn't reach that point all right this isn't a high-frequency behavior in the first place but in the times where I've seen it like in my clinical experience it usually doesn't involve igniting the gasoline although I do think that's the point right to at least pretend that the car is gonna get set ablaze now moving a sign number five this one is dissatisfaction so on the part of the wife this is common about 50% of wives with BPD are dissatisfied in their marriages with the husband it's not as common it's a 40% so still quite high but not quite as common as we see with the wives interestingly this isn't shockingly different than marriage that doesn't involve BPD right so it's worse but not shockingly different under the sign dissatisfaction we also see frequent breakups again not surprising given the nature of BPD and what we see from the research literature is that we could expect a breakup and possibly a reunion about once every six months right on average that doesn't mean it's gonna happen like clockwork that's just the average sign number six is that others see the couple as having the most intense love hard fight hard type relationship and a lot of the time I see this mention as a compliment so somebody be talking about the husband wife where the wife has BPD and they'll say they must really love each other they're so intense and their arguments are so heated but I don't think this would usually be thought of as a compliment right there's a lot of destruction that happens with this fighting and arguing behavior friends will watch in horror as the couple argues eventually they'll find reasons not to visit right no one wants to be the referee nobody wants to get in the middle of the people who are arguing so the couple becomes more isolated if an individual does want to take on the role of being referee like taking sides with the wife or with the husband this often backfires because with these types of relationships again we see breakups but then a reconciliation and when the couple reconciles they often drop the friends who sided with one or the other this is fairly common with infidelity as well moving the sign number seven this sign is the wife believes that sex resets everything in the relationship right it resets everything emotionally it means that the couple is on the right track and essentially the wife believes that sex equals forgiveness right of sex occurs then there's forgiveness in the relationship now the wife may be confused if the husband expects more than that right so it's almost like kind of a superficial level of operating so if the husband wants a real connection like constructive mutual communication as we call it mental health counseling this might be seen as kind of foreign to the wife now of course this type of communication is one of the keys to a successful marriage so again we can see how these marriages can be a trouble from a few different angles sign number eight is that the wife is extremely jealous and this is isolating for the husband as well the husband can have no female friends really of any type regardless of any age difference or any position difference like at work or anything he's really just not allowed to have friends we see continual accusations we also see monitoring electronic devices like smart phone for example sign number nine is that the couple is searching for different things in life so a different sense of purpose or a different meaning in the relationship the wife is always searching for something more something more intense more satisfying something ideal which kind of crosses over into narcissism a little bit she's searching for her true love something permanent looking for satisfaction and security that she's never felt so really looking for something that she's never had now part of this of course can lead to infidelity the wife over identifies as a couple so she kind of loses her own identity in this marriage there's no individual identity so essentially the wife looks at her own search for meaning in purpose as the couple's search for meaning and purpose there's overlap there the boundaries aren't clear there now the husband is searching for stability peace and an end to all the anger and arguing however we see that he blames himself often especially for the wife's more severe behavior like self-harm behavior so he develops a habit of giving in and he feels powerless and exhausted moving a sign number 10 this sign is contemplating a divorce or getting a divorce now interestingly the research literature does not all point in one direction on this topic right one study we see found that borderline personality traits have no association with divorce 10 years into the relationship now what's happening beyond 10 years is a different story and maybe more divorces occur after that but that's a pretty surprising finding although there are many other articles that indicate that if the wife has BPD the chances of divorce are quite a bit higher so again we see mixed results now an anxious attachment style like that preoccupied or fearful styles which are massively of represented in these situations may explain why the divorce rates aren't as high as we would think they would be right because the wife really wants the relationship to continue even though there's a lot of suffering in the relationship another factor here could be the presence of Whitten personality sorter and the husband I mentioned before that in these marriages the prevalence of wooden person is order for the husband is 11% which is higher than what we'd expected the population and we know that avoidant personality disorder is special in a few different ways one of the ways this person alias orders special is that individuals with this disorder have a lower chance of becoming divorced so all of the other personality orders all nine of them are associated in general with an increased risk of divorce avoidant personality of divorce so we see kind of both sides being affected here from the wife's point of view again anxious attachment and from the husband's point of view the presence of Weeden personality traits or the actual personality disorder so kind of an interesting mix of factors that explain why this divorce rate isn't as high as we might think now with all these signs with all ten signs and of course there are other signs out there individuals may get discouraged they may think well a marriage where the wife has BPD is a marriage that's going to involve a lot of suffering its doomed and all this but actually treatment can help quite a bit in my career I've treated a number of people in this situation and the results are usually somewhat positive now certainly there are some instances where nothing good happens or what happens isn't as good as we would hope but in many instances treatment does have a positive impact on the marriage so I understand when I mention recovery and personally sorters that there's another explanation right so someone could have a personality trait perhaps something like high conscientiousness and also happened to have BPD and that conscientiousness could explain why they come to therapy in the first place and explain why they might recover right so really there could be an alternate explanation other than that counseling helps people in this situation and I understand that's the case every time we look at a mental disorder right we could look at a disorder and say well somebody has this disorder but they might have this other characteristic and the other characteristic is explaining why they improve right this is what we deal with with all mental disorders including all the personality sores even with that in mind I still believe counseling can be a very successful path for somebody with a personality sorter even taking all that into account with other traits perhaps explaining why people improve I know when I talk about topics like borderline personality disorder there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of the waif with BPD to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 529,315

Keywords: wife, borderline, borderline personality disorder, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, unstable relationships, identity disturbance, impulsivity, affective instability, feelings of emptiness, anger paranoid, dissociation. Cluster B, antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, psychopathic, psychopathy, interpersonal affective, lifestyle, grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulation, superficial charm, callous, unemotional, lack of remorse

Id: KoEPcOM1g_0

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Zealousideal_Taste17]

I find him too stoic and a bit strange. Don't care for him throwing in politics which he did in one of his videos.

[u/scooptyy]

This video has absolutely nothing to do with Amber Heard nor does it describe her. I do like his videos but this one was a waste of time in terms of the JD/AH trial.

[u/Ok_Tough2944]

I love Dr Grande! Been watching him for years, I do love his little wise cracks in his vids, need to catch up on these!

[u/Hallelujah289]

I appreciate this psychologists content and find him accurate to my intuition much of the time.

I also liked the specific ways this psychologist mentions about Amber overreacting. I think he mentions how she would look disgusted as a way to communicate this is how the jury should react to what she is saying about Johnny.

I honestly didn’t quite understand his metaphors about their relationship but liked his simplification that Amber cycled because of personality disorder and Johnny cycled through emotions because of drugs. And sometimes they would be in same positive phase, or same negative phase, or opposite phases.

[u/Inner-Thing321]

The first 5 minutes he tells it literally the way amber testified, then goes into personal opinion afterwards

[u/siouxsiewildcross]

I've followed him a while. I like his take on things. Not seen his recent one tho