Life With Paranoid Borderline Delusion
Breaking through the “Veil of Maya”
“It is Maya, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller from afar takes to be water; or the stray piece of rope he takes for a snake.”
Paranoid thinking is one of the main symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). According to the DSM-V, it can manifest itself in an irrational fear of abandonment, a tendency to idealize and subsequently devaluate people in extreme ways, and a deeply unstable sense of self.
But Borderline delusion goes way beyond all that. It is an ever-pervasive mental “mist” that often warps and distorts our perception of reality beyond recognition. It fills our heads with intense fear and deeply rooted phobias, making us feel as though we’re constantly on the verge of a cliff, just one step away from falling to a grisly demise. It negatively affects our relationships with others and our relationship with ourselves.
But unlike other forms of pathological delusions, paranoia in Borderline patients cannot be treated with pharmaceutical treatment, and only occasionally (and usually never entirely) responds to therapeutic treatment. As discussed in a paper published in the National Library of Medicine:
“Despite improvement with some classical neuroleptics on individual symptoms, the antipsychotic class as a whole was associated with worsening overall severity of BPD in a recent meta-analysis.”
It is also worth noticing that, while some BPD symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, can be treated pharmaceutically, no medications or class of medications specifically target BPD symptoms:
“There are no medications approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of BPD, and very limited data exist for any single medication improving overall BPD severity.”
The type of paranoid delusion that Borderline patients experience is pervasive and consuming, often seeping through multiple aspects of the patient’s life and affecting their overall perception of the world.
Paranoid Borderline delusions can take the form of convictions that make little to no sense, and yet, the Borderline patient will believe in them with unwavering certainty. Not just that: the Borderline patient is urged to believe in them by an inner force whose source cannot be identified. All we know is that we feel the certainty of our assumptions with every fiber of our being, and that that supposed veracity often fills us with catastrophic dread and overwhelming despair.
Recently, I had this exchange in my mind between my “grounded” and “clear-minded” self and my much more emotionally erratic “Borderline” self:
Person X has implemented a cunning and vicious plan to make me suffer and doubt myself.
Is there any evidence that corroborates that idea?
Well… not really. But I can feel that it’s true.
Are you aware that that is precisely a symptom of your condition?
Yes.
Ok, so, are you aware that your conviction might not be true?
No, it is true. I can feel it.
But, as your therapist said, feelings are not facts...
Even reason and hard evidence cannot fully dispel the compelling and elaborate illusion crafted by my Borderline brain. At that moment, every fiber of my body was telling me that all my worst fears were true, that somebody had willingly used me and abused me, and it simply felt real. I could not convince my brain otherwise. Even while being aware that delusional thinking and mistaking feelings for facts are two common traits of BPD.
“Your brain is lying to you” is what I was once told. It’s that simple. And yet, as any human or sentient being on this planet, how can one even fathom the idea that what our very brain perceives to be real is, in fact, a lie? A phantom? A Fata Morgana skillfully conjured up by some neurodivergent synapses?
My delusions are no more real than visual hallucinations, and yet, just like hallucinations, the brain makes them feel real. They are just as viscerally terrifying. The pain that they cause is just as real. They are invisible monsters that I cannot turn away from.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was well aware of men’s cognitive fallacies when it comes to perceiving the world around us. In fact, he developed a term for it: “Veil of Maya,” an expression that he borrowed from Eastern philosophy. In Schopenhauer’s thought, the Veil of Maya is meant to represent the misty layer of illusion that can stand between man and reality, a veil through which sometimes men can hardly glimpse the contours of reality.
Schopenhauer’s concept of the Veil of Maya feels eerily close to that of Borderline delusion, and, ironically enough, Schopenhauer thought that the only way to “break through” the Veil of Maya was by embracing the “will to live” (“der Wille zum Leben”), a primordial urge towards life and survival. Indeed, choosing life and survival is often the case — and necessity — for Borderline patients.
Healing from BPD means actively reminding oneself of what is real and what is not, even though what is not real might feel more convincing than reality itself. It means reminding ourselves of what our symptoms are, how they manifest themselves, how they affect us and our perception of the world. In some cases, this can feel like walking in the utmost darkness, alone, moving forward toward an invisible path to enlightenment that is nowhere in sight. Even though we don’t see the light, we must believe that it is there, waiting for us, at the end of the road.
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