Why Borderlines Have Terrible Memory

Borderlines and narcissists are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is made up of complex trauma.

‘Complex post-traumatic stress disorder’, or C-PTSD for short, results in a variety of negative symptoms which affect a person’s capacity to remain present and calm in the world. In the case of the narcissist, their grandiose false self shields them greatly from this inner storm.

Borderlines are not so lucky. They suffer the full brunt of complex trauma, which manifests in the following ways:

• Emotional flashbacks: The traumatised child is submerged by a constant torrent of negative emotions. A flood of shame, guilt, fear, anger, sadness, despair, self-hatred and more always lurks beneath the surface, controlled by a hairline trigger. These emotional flashbacks are a core feature of C-PTSD. When activated, they take the traumatised person back in time. The person shrinks in stature, regressing to their childhood self. They become uncertain, highly sensitive to stress, easily angered, or mute and unable to assert themselves. They might grow shameful and hide away from the world. They could become numb and have a hard time focusing or engaging others. Emotional flashbacks are so insidious that it can be incredibly difficult to know you are in one. You simply start to feel, think, look and react differently, and usually only become aware long after the fact.

• Dissociation: For the traumatised child, reality is often an incomprehensible nightmare. As the pressure builds, the child splits away from reality and drifts into their imagination. In this other-worldly realm, the child can escape their pain while fantasising about a ‘better’ life. Dissociation provides relief, and is a way to numb the chaos emanating from the child’s core. The price the child pays for this coping strategy, however, is high. The child develops poor memory and even amnesia, being unable to recall aspects of their day or even their entire childhood. The dissociated child often cannot identify the nuances in their surroundings. They remain naive to the happenings in the world, and as a result experience immense disruption in their development.

• Difficulty focussing: Trauma and emotional dysregulation are incredibly distracting. This naturally results in an inability to focus, since the traumatised child is constantly plagued by the chaos and discomfort within. Trauma also impacts brain development, and is a major contributor to ADHD.

• Impulsiveness: Never truly in control of their emotions, the traumatised person may engage in risk-taking behaviour such as unsafe sex, illegal drug use, gambling, over-eating, reckless driving or overspending and materialism in order to regulate how they feel. The traumatised person is also prone to addiction.

• Constant anxiety: C-PTSD permanently activates the fight/flight response, and the resulting anxiety is crippling. The traumatised person has a need to always be doing something or working toward something in the future. They can engage in incessant thinking and compulsive talking to distract themselves from their feelings. They might have a hard time falling asleep, with anxiety corroding their capacity to relax. Those carrying trauma also carry a constant sense of impending doom. They catastrophize often in their minds, being bombarded by ‘what if’ thinking.

• Extreme splitting: The traumatised child sees the world in black and white. People are either a threat, or a source of fantastic pleasure. The world is wonderful and abundant, or horrible and terrifying. There is no in-between, no nuance in the child’s reality.

With such chaos swirling within the borderline, you can see how they might struggle to function day to day, let alone remember what happened.

A Dysregulated World

A person not dealing with complex trauma generally has a continuous experience of their inner Self, remembers most things they experienced, and has a fixed identity which evolves gradually over time.

The borderline, on the other hand, is utterly fractured and dysregulated. They constantly move from elation, to fear, to depression and back to joy. Sometimes they feel powerful and happy with themselves, other times they imagine they are the most despicable creature on Earth. Their impulsiveness leads them from one ‘adventure’ to the next, often destabilising their lives or negatively impacting their ability to create continuity and stability. Countless triggers thrust them into a flood of negative emotions. And above all, they drift in and out of dissociation all the time without realising it.

Dissociation To The Rescue

Complex trauma is extremely distressing and debilitating. Crippling anxiety, floods of shame, a critical voice judging and berating you 24/7, an inability to know who you are minute by minute; all of this is horrifying to face.

With a constant flood of panic, grief, anger and guilt, the pressure of complex trauma is immense. Luckily, the mind has a blow-off valve known as dissociation.

When dissociated, the borderline is no longer there. They are utterly consumed by fantasy and imagination. What happens in the world around them barely registers. The borderline seamlessly drifts in and out of this realm with little awareness. They can barely tell the difference between the imaginary world and the real world.

Yet when the borderline is dissociated, the real world remains, along with the people in it. So how does the mind deal with the resulting gaps in memory?

A Need To Be ‘Normal’

Everyone has a desire to belong, to be perceived as an acceptable member of the group. To be ‘normal’. While dissociation is seamless, the mind knows that the gaps exist. The borderline cannot control when they are present and when they are gone. As they interact with people in their lives, the mind fills the gaps in memory via confabulation. That is, it creates an alternative truth which the borderline completely believes.

Borderlines may lie in some cases, as all people do. Yet when there are gaps in their memory which they need to fill, they do not lie — they tell a fiction which they believe. It is a crucial regulation process for them to feel and be perceived as normal and regulated.

In extreme cases of childhood trauma, a borderline’s entire childhood can be a blank memory, with only random images appearing when they try to remember. However, when asked about their childhood, they might ‘fill the gap’ by stating that it was a great childhood, and that they had good parents. This is especially prevalent in borderlines who are at the beginning of their awareness journey.

A Need To Be ‘Good’

Another mechanism for coping with complex trauma is splitting, where a horrible experience is flipped into its opposite.

A borderline might cover feelings of shame and guilt by becoming grandiose and asserting that they are amazing. Due to their emotional dysregulation, the borderline might idolise a person who they rely on for stability, needing desperately to believe that this person is ‘perfect’ and will never leave them. The first casualty during such a splitting process is the truth.

This desperate desire for ‘perfection’ is achieved via fantasy. As a result, reality is denied, and a projection is used to cover the harsh truth. The borderline who idealises a loved one will ignore all of their faults and wrongdoings while clinging to their perfect projection. When this begins to fail and reality shines through, the borderline flips to the other side of the split and villainises their loved one by projecting hatred and anger onto them. In both cases, the borderline is denying reality. Even when the borderline ‘remembers’ the good times, it is often coming from their imagination, where that memory is tainted by a projection.

The borderline can also apply splitting to themselves. When their emotional dysregulation leads to extreme acting out, the borderline will cope with the horrors of what they did by painting over them with confabulation and grandiosity, believing what they did had a good reason.

Borderlines also disassociate while they act out, by leaving their body and looking down on their acts from above. Pair this with their dysregulation, trauma and fractured sense of Self, and you can see how fickle the borderline’s memory can be.

It can be horrifying to not know what is real and what is not, what memories are accurate and which are confabulation and fantasy. This is what borderlines deal with, along with their loved ones, who grow dismayed by the chaos which manifests due to their relationship with the borderline. The loved ones of borderlines are often left deeply mistrustful, not knowing what is true and what is not.

Yet there is hope for the borderline. They can seek out therapy. They can meditate. They can anchor themselves in the moment by regulating their breathing on a regular basis.

Reality is subjective to all of us. With diligence and practice, borderlines can gently bring themselves back from the extreme end of the spectrum, where nobody really knows what is real or not either, yet everyone manages to function and thrive nonetheless.