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Notes -
Do you know where I can read up on this?
Check out Out of the FOG, it's got a lot of good info on personality disorders, associated behaviors, and best ways to preserve oneself. If you're interested specifically in Borderline mothers, I'd highly recommend reading Understanding the Borderline Mother which is, of course, out of print and relatively expensive. AFAIK it's pretty much the reference material on how BPD presents to children and spouses, regardless of sex.
Source: my mother is BPD as are many women on her side of the family.
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I may be falling prey to Google being a fairly lousy search engine these days, but that was my experience when researching it as a teenager/younger adult. In fact, the first time I read about BPD was when reading about high-conflict divorces (because I was still a teenager stuck in the middle of one). Search for "son of borderline mother" versus "daughter of borderline mother" and you'll get more results for the latter. Search for "borderline ex-wife" and you'll get more material than either of the first two. That may just reflect there being more stuff out there about abusive/crazy spouses than parents.
It kind of makes sense. BPD is more common in women (to roughly the same extent that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common in men), so it's unlikely that women are going to wind up in a closer relationship with someone suffering from that condition than that with their mother, while adult men are more likely to encounter BPD in the setting of a romantic relationship (which at that point will be a far more acute crisis than past mommy issues).
As for the disorder itself, This and in particular this are about the two best blog-length posts I've seen on the subject.
Scott also has a good essay about BPD https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/
Has no one ever told Scott about color contrast best practices? That's not even close to a pleasant reading experience.
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An interesting article. Comparing this to Astral Codex, I can’t help wondering if Lorien is where Scott has been investing the majority of his time and intellect.
I think he’s mostly played out on normal essays. I could pretty much boil his late output down to EA is good, AI is not so good, and Everything is Fine. I don’t demand constant contrarianism for the sake of it but there’s a self-satisfaction bordering on incuriosity in his recent stuff that I don’t like much. Moving to California seems like it was good for his life but bad for his brain.
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I don't know where you can read more on it, but I can provide more evidence in that direction.
From my experiences, the Cluster B disorders tend to fall out (roughly) in this fashion.
Antisocial - male dominated (used to be called sociopathy). Tends towards anger as it's primary emotion. Borderline - female dominated (I've heard it called, derogatorily, "crazy bitch disease"). Tends towards fear of abandonment. Histrionic - slightly female biased. Doesn't get a lot of media attention (think of like, the mothers of child stars). Tends towards performative actions (my mother, who fell into this bucket, would run away from home every Christmas and make the whole family persuade her to return). Narcissistic - male biased. Extreme selfishness which is expressed as unending need.
Edit: I just realized all of the above sound extremely similar, so let me provide an example.
If you were, for example, trying to go out for an evening:
All of the above fall into cluster B behaviors, so it's not like they're exclusive to one or another; it just tends to be the predominant form of expression.
For reading purposes I'd recommend just looking at DSM criteria or searching pubmed and finding what seems to be a reasonable review article.
Correctly making these diagnosis can be hard, and many cases seem obvious but aren't. While Borderline (BPD) is more common in women we find that Antisocial (ASPD) is over-diagnosed in men (not all criminals have it but...) and under-diagnosed in women. Borderline is the opposite (just because this dude murdered someone doesn't mean he isn't borderline). People with disordered personality who hurt people almost always get an ASPD diagnosis but people with severe BPD often hurt others. Impulsivity is a cardinal symptom in both (contra organized serial killer stereotypes). Often the dx just gets thrown out on gender lines, which is sometimes accurate but not always.
ASPD can be thought of us being a fucking asshole in mild to moderate cases and evil in moderate to severe cases (as demonstrated by disregard for the rights of others).
People with BPD in contrast care too much about others to some extent. There's been an attempt to rebrand it as "Emotional Dysregulation Disorder" which is instructive. Impulsive, passionate, lots of relationships that end abruptly, things like "I LOVE YOU, I HATE YOU" (splitting). For most they'll pattern match to a moody teenager, but in an adult body.
This is also a core part of what Cluster-B disorders often are, over expression of immature coping mechanisms aka acting like a kid. Also one of the reasons why they often burn off with age.
Severe borderline looks like psychosis (inability to determine what's real) and that's what the border in borderline is named for. There's an attendant identity instability which sometimes leads to being trans. Severe antisocial is lizard people types.
Histrionic is less interesting, you can call it stereotypical energetic Italian disorder if you like and wouldn't be too far off.
Narcissistic is simple at a basic level - Trump often gets accused of this (although I'm not sure I buy that). It gets pretty complicated if you look deeper though, most mass shooters are a subtype of this and not ASPD.
People often overweight anger in antisocials, it is often present but the lack of emotion is frequently more startling - lack of remorse, lack of respect for others, lack of love for partners). Often violence, anger, and intimidation happen because they are cheat codes towards getting whatever utility they are seeking, not because of investment leading to anger.
Most mental health conditions have heritable elements and we suspect that ASPD and BPD are two-hit situations (lived experience and genetic predisposition). Raisedby types may have it themselves, and failing that some shit happens with mothers and daughters - boys will just leave or pushback physically and be able to protect themselves, would be my guess.
In contrast crazy bitch exes are of interest to men because a lot of borderline traits are desirable (most stereotypical: abundant, quality sexual activity) and unlike mothers, exes can be more easily a legal or financial threat.
Uhhh that rambling went on longer than I thought it would, sorry. Everything I said is shortcuts/oversimplification.
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