Autism vs. BPD: The Stark Contrasts in Neurodivergence

Meet Taylor and her partner, Don, happily together for five years now. Canada is their home, where they run a farm together. Taylor has autism. She is also a survivor of domestic violence from her ex-husband who had BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder Trauma Glossary 1). Having been well acquainted with her beautiful mind for over a year, I asked if she would be interested in helping me lay to rest the latest internet question. “Is BPD just like autism?” The short answer is no, but Taylor surprised me with her suggestion. That I interview both her and Don together. The reason, according to her, “Don’s previous girlfriend was a diagnosed BPD. So, instead of just getting my perspective on being a partner, you can also hear his perspective as the partner.”

Their backstories will unfold in the upcoming weeks. Just to suffice to say that having such a unique perspective as Don’s offered to me, how could I resist?

Opening the Conversation

Jaena: My brother was diagnosed with autism in his mid-thirties and he said that’s when everything clicked for him. He now understands what he needs to navigate his life. Was this the same for you?

Taylor: For me realizing I was autistic – which was was actually in my late 30s – I suddenly was like, Oh! The best way I can describe it is I’m not a horse, I’m a zebra. So, if you keep asking a zebra to do the things you’d ask horse to do, and you keep trying to ride a zebra, you’re gonna get hurt. It’s not gonna work and the zebra is gonna be frustrated. But if you recognize that zebra and you put it into an environment where zebras thrive, they do great and they they add value. There is no environment where a borderline would thrive.

Jaena: Except chaos.

Autism and BPD: Their Opposite Commonalities

Jaena: I know we’ve talked before about the differences between autism and BPD. So, could you share the glancing similarities between the two that are confusing people?

Taylor: OK so from a standpoint, both are neurodivergent. But neurodivergent is neither good nor bad. We can be not the same as the norm and be terrible or not the same as the norm and be good people.

Jaena: It’s like the linguistics are confusing people and I know how I felt when they were lumping in BPD with complex-PTSD. I was like that is not okay. We are not the same.

Taylor: When they say autism and and borderline it’s shocking because one is the malicious disorder and the other is someone just looking at things differently.

Don: After dating someone with borderline and now someone with autism, the difference is the maliciousness of it and the intent of the actions. Whether they’re aware of their behavior or not – which is arguably arguable on both sides – whether they remember it or whether they created a new reality and they’ve been able to whitewash it, borderlines are malicious. It’s a malicious disorder. Not that all autistic people are good people but they’re good and bad at the same level as the rest of the population. It’s not changing with the wind, so I can see how with autism – yes – there’s good and bad.

Jaena: This is another thing you hear borderlines saying all the time. “There are good and bad in everyone, including borderlines. Not all borderlines are bad.” Well then explain the criteria, geniuses.

Taylor: The criteria for a borderline makes interpersonal relationships awful. So, the criteria for autism is everything that makes their interactions with the world difficult, trying, and awkward.

Autism Masking

Taylor: Maybe it’s the same for borderlines, I can’t actually speak for them. But I know for myself, I didn’t even realize I was masking. I thought everyone had weird awkward quirks, weird body language, and weird noises that they just learned from a young age not to do in public because people don’t like it. I thought everyone was like that and they were just better than me at hiding it. It was not for my own gain because it really makes other people uncomfortable if I’m sitting there flapping my hands or pinching my fingers or walking in circles. And so, that’s the reason I don’t drop my mask, even around people that I love because it makes them uncomfortable.

Jaena: Until Don?

Taylor: I didn’t realize the level to which I masked in life until I was with Don. I was making my weird beeps and boops and doing my circles and my hand flapping and my whatever around him and he wasn’t even acknowledging it. Like not in a bad way, just accepting. Then I realized how much my anxiety was going down, which was allowing me to be more social outside the home. I actually have a safe place to just totally be my weird self.

BPD Masking

Taylor: My experience with the borderline has been that they mask to ensnare and they put the mask up when it’s advantageous to them. Once they feel like the person is trapped. I find that they take their mask off as soon as they realize they’ve got the person in the FOG (Trauma Glossary 2). And now they no longer have to be a decent human being.

Don: And to reset their life because accountability is their kryptonite. So, they’re gonna have to reset their life and create a new mask. If you’re honest with yourself, then you can honestly look at the relationship you’ve had with the borderline. You can read them like a road map, you know where they’re going, you can see the steps. If you’re lucky they’ll unmask quickly around you and you’ll realize what they’re up to. But if you’re not, you’ve got some trauma bonding (both underline terms in Trauma Glossary 1) already forming. You’re desperately chasing that original person you found and so yeah, they’re using that mask again like you said, to ensnare for sure.

Jaena: See, those are my experiences with my borderline mother, her acting so fake and held together in public. Then at home, she wouldn’t slip that mask off, she ripped it off. It was malicious and it was terrifying.

Accountability

Taylor: After my surgery last year – when I almost died – I had to live with my mom during my recovery. That was eye-opening because it was like, Oh no! I completely whitewashed my childhood to try to make it that mom was just misunderstood and it’s not abuse. And then being there again, I realized she’s full on abusive to my father, just terrible. So, it caused this complete feeling of not being in control. I was behaving like a borderline 100%.

The difference is that when I realized the fact that, Holy s*** I’m terrible to Don. God bless him, he’s going through his own trauma that I almost died and I’m losing my s*** on him because he’s not with me every two seconds. He’s running my farm, feeding my animals, and cutting hay for the year which is a 24-hour job with a partner at home helping. He’s doing it all on his own and I’m losing my s*** on him because “Why are you not here beside me?”

Jaena: In other words, you were able to think outside yourself and review the overall picture.

Taylor: Yeah, so I said, I’m gonna go to therapy and pretty quickly things changed. I had been through some trauma and I was aware of it, did the changes, and I owned it.

Emotion Overwhelm and Meltdowns

Jaena: Let’s talk about another one that, if we’re using a far-reaching lens, it looks like another similarity. But up close, it’s yet another stark contrast. The meltdown that occurs from emotion and sensory overload.

Taylor: For myself, I almost never allow that meltdown to happen in front of people, even people I love. But it does sometimes happen.

Jaena: I’m sensing a story here.

Taylor: I’m a volunteer firefighter and I’m absolutely terrified of heights. We were doing a site plan, which is where we go visit a place and we check it out so that if there is ever a fire we would know how to get around it, how to navigate it, and how not to get killed. It was a granary, so I’m like 300 feet in the air on these metal grate stairs. You can see right through them and I’m hoping and then I’m realizing, No I have hit my threshold. I’m not okay. I turned to my chief and I said you go ahead and that I knew I couldn’t mask anymore. He goes “I actually can’t go ahead of you. I have to go last to make sure everyone’s okay.”

And so, I said, “Alright well this is about to get weird.” I had nothing left inside of me. I walked down 300 feet of stairs going, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” The whole way down, watching me unmasked, he was howling. He thought it was hysterical. Then I got to the bottom and I did my little walking around in circles until I recalibrated and got back to my masked self.

“You can imagine if someone didn’t know me…”

Taylor: You can imagine if someone didn’t know me, didn’t know that I was actually a very capable person, and I started doing that, their judgment of me is gonna be that I’m pretty useless. Whereas because he knew how much it took for me to get to the top of those stairs and he knows I’m autistic, he was just laughing the whole way down and he also knows that I could I could take a ripping about it. So, I understand how ridiculous it looks even though I can’t stop it.

Jaena: Is this a form of stemming?

Taylor: It’s not that I don’t have control over it. I have to make myself not do it. It’s sort of like, if you have a rash you know you shouldn’t scratch it, right? As soon as your guard is down, you’ll catch yourself, “Oh my God I’m scratching it.” It’s the same sort of feeling, where you want to do it, you don’t have to do it, but then at a certain point of overwhelm you have no no real control. If I was in a really public place and didn’t want people to see, I could have held it together downstairs. But instead of taking a few minutes at the bottom of the stairs would have probably been like a few days trying to to recalibrate.

“Socially awkward”

Jaena: It makes perfect sense. You were scared, so you needed to kind of regulate your nervous system. As a neurotypical, recouping myself after a scary incident, I have a need to start physically shaking it off.

Taylor: Yeah and it’s the exact same thing, only the body language you did would be very normal, whereas I’m making beeps and boops and singing silly songs. It’s a more awkward way of doing what everyone does, socially awkward.

Don: You feel awkward doing it because your mom didn’t want you to have any issues. So yeah, that’s why it’s a challenge for you to share that part of it. “You’re not supposed to be the autistic one. You’re supposed to be perfect because Jim is the high functioning autistic one.”

Jaena: Who is Jim?

Taylor: My brother. Have you watched The Big Bang Theory?

Jaena: Yes.

Taylor: He’s Sheldon. He said bazinga before the show came out.

Jaena: No way!

To those outside the USA, Sheldon’s character on the sitcom, The Big Bang Theory was so popular, it inspired the spinoff, Young Sheldon. Sheldon also made the term bazinga widely popular. And just to clarify, Taylor’s brother is not Jim Parsons, the actor who played Sheldon.

A Slice of Life with Autism

Taylor: I didn’t know I was autistic and I didn’t know he was autistic because we were ’80s kids. So, we thought autism was like non-functioning people, right?

Jaena: I was an ’80s kid, myself and yes, I remember that overall thinking.

Taylor: I just thought Jim was an a****** and now that I understand how his brain works, I see there’s nothing malicious. When you say something, like slang or a euphemism, he responds thinking it’s literal. He has follow up questions. It’s not him being an a******, that’s literally how he’s seeing it. If you explain to him that it’s euphemism and here’s how it is, he knows how to respond to it and no more follow up questions.

Don: The first time I met him, I walked into the house. I said, “How’s she going?” which is Canadian country slang. He looked at me confused. Then he went to follow up with me, like to ask more follow up questions, but I already was upstairs.

Taylor: Jim is married to a lovely woman who gets him. She literally has to put social rules in place for him.

Jaena: So I take it he went to ask his wife what “How’s she going” means?

Don: Yeah and she’s like, it’s slang for “How are you?” and he’s like, oh okay. Then he walks up, interrupts the conversation I’m having with someone else and goes, “I’m doing fine. Thank you.”

Taylor: Well because he realized he had made the mistake so he took the accountability.

Jaena: I think it’s adorable. Sure, having a conversation interrupted is mildly irritating. But once you understand he doesn’t understand the social norms and he’s coming from a well-intentioned place, well, you just can’t stay irritated for long.

“Social Cues…are a challenge.”

Taylor: Social cues for Jim are a challenge. So he’s not going to understand waiting for a break in the conversation or just let it lie. You don’t need to follow up on that. It’s sort of like nodding at someone in the doorway. He doesn’t need any more attention but you have to clarify it.

Jaena: So, how would you describe your range of understanding social cues?

Taylor: I find it’s just easier to say to people that I don’t get sarcasm. When you say it and if I look at you funny, I’m just not getting it.

Don: If it was a borderline [in Jim’s scenario] their logic would be, “You made me look stupid, you f***ed up by by doing something I didn’t know. You hurt me and now you have to pay for how you f***ed me over and you did it intentionally.”

Jaena: To those who are on the end the stigma on borderlines bandwagon, it is a behavior disorder and it is the result of their emotional thinking. The whitewashed version is that BPDs “feel their feelings more deeply” which is actually their dysregulated emotions and they are turning their feelings into facts. They also despise taking accountability of any kind, which is why they act out and hurt others. Someone must take the blame for their mistakes and be punished for them. This is why they are in the same cluster with narcissistic personality disorder, while autism is not.

Blunt vs. Vague

Jaena: Another contrast you’ve spoken of before, Taylor. That you tend to think and respond in the literal sense and that you associate your literal thinking with your autism. How would you compare that to BPD thinking and responding?

Taylor: Autism is literal, direct, and struggles with the vague. Borderlines thrive on the vague, thrive on the the drama. Autistic people hate drama. You wanna see me leave a party, have someone whose idea of connection is drama. I’m like Oh God, I need to go, even if it’s not the over-the-top. I just can’t deal with that, whereas borderlines love that.

Jaena: And you have an example for us.

Taylor: One of Don’s uncles is a really nice man, very sheltered and naive. He started dating a woman 30 years younger than him.

Don: He’s 74 and she’s 39.

Taylor: So we’re meeting over dinner. It’s Christmas time and I’m trying to give her the benefit of doubt but you know how the red flags start going off early.

Jeana: Yes, the lived experience plus educating ourselves helps us spot them quickly.

Taylor: By the end of dinner, I’m like, Don’s right. (Taylor addresses Don.) You’d ask questions and you’d get these big mysterious answers. Like, Where did you grow up? She said “I moved around a lot.” Because it was Christmas, So I guess you’re not spending Christmas with your family this year. She said, “Oh, my family life is complicated.” She was just like this this wrapped mystery.

“Small talk is our kryptonite.”

Taylor: An autistic person would be like, I lived here, then I lived here, then I lived here, and I lived here. We’ll start giving all these details where people are gonna be like, Oh wow, that was supposed to be a general question. And then if we’re asked, “Why aren’t you spending time with your family?” the response would be like, “Well I have serious issues with my family because right now they’re mad at me for this this and this.” It’s just direct, we give very direct answers. We don’t understand innuendo. Small talk is our kryptonite.

Don: So we started finding out more details. Where do you work? Where do you live? After we got some of those details I turned Taylor like, Now her mask will come off. She’ll crack because they have to live in the vague. They like to spin these tales and as soon as you have accountability or facts, they’re like a a drop of water in a hot frying pan. Sure enough, that last time we dealt with her, she ended up getting really drunk and started misbehaving. She was pretending that she never drank, she doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t this, she doesn’t that. Now all of a sudden, she’s sneaking out to have cigarettes.

The Couple Weighs in on the Internet’s Comparison of Autism and BPD

Don: That’s part of why I get really frustrated with that comparison of autism and BPD. It’s night and day. The internal self of autism compared to BPD is so different, the only way someone could interpret it as the same is if they’re a borderline trying to find something that doesn’t have such negativity attached or they know nothing about what it’s like to be around a borderline person. When I first heard Taylor finding these articles where people were making comparisons like this, she goes, “Did you find that?” I was like, The two are nothing alike. What you might find on the internet…

Taylor: You can find anything on the internet. But yeah, I even struggled to understand how someone could be diagnosed with borderline and autism together. So, you hear about people having the dual diagnosis – and I’m not going to say that it’s impossible because there’s all sorts of weird f***ed up s*** that can happen with the human brain – but there’s so much there that’s completely opposite.

Jaena: That’s what I say on the dual diagnosis of BPD and CPTSD. In my experienced encounters with those who have both, that behavior disorder in BPD tends to overwrite the most common symptoms in CPTSD, like self-abandonment and super-conscience (both underline terms in Trauma Glossary 2). Interestingly enough, borderlines with CPTSD aren’t struggling with self-abandonment or a conscience, for that matter. I think that the three of us can agree that there’s been a long ongoing pattern of the internet trying to lump BPD in with any diagnosis except for the Cluster B disorders that they belong to.

Thus concludes your introduction to Taylor and Dan. Next week, they will share with you their backstories, before they met.