Are People With BPD Manipulative?

So...last night the wonderful @NikNik ran topic Tuesday, which was focused on BPD. You can read it here: Topic-Tuesday-Living-with-BPD-your-questions-answered. It was super cool (even if it did mildly fry my brain). One of the issues that was discussed was whether or not people with BPD are manipulative. I found it intriguing that several people with BPD self-identified as being manipulative. Personally, I do not self-identify as being manipulative despite being told a bazillion times by others that I am. I subscribe to the view articulated by Marsha Linehan. The following is her perspective on whether people with BPD are manipulative, and I would be very interested in hearing what other people think about this perspective. The remainder of this post is taken directly from pp. 16-18 of the following source:

Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. New York: Guilford Press.

The verb "manipulative" is defined as "to influence or manage shrewdly or deviously" in the American Heritage Dictionary (Morris, 1979, p. 794) and as "to manage or control artfully or by shrewd use of influence, often in an unfair or fraudulent way" by Webster's New World Dictionary (Guralnik, 1980, p. 863). Both definitions suggest that the manipulating individual intends to influence another person by indirect, insidious, or devious means.

Is this typical behaviour of borderline individuals? In my own experience, it has not been. Indeed, when they are trying to influence someone, borderline individuals are typically direct, forceful, and, if anything, unartful. It is surely the case that borderline individuals do influence others. Often the most influential behaviour is parasuicide or the threat of impending suicide; at other times, the behaviours that have the most influence are communications of intense pain and agony, or current crises that the individuals cannot solve themselves. Such behaviours and communications, or course, are not by themselves evidence of manipulation. Otherwise, we would have to say that people in pain or crises are "manipulating" us if we respond to their communications of distress. The central question is whether or not borderline individuals purposely use these behaviours or communications to influence others artfully, shrewdly, and fraudulently. Such an interpretation is rarely in accord with borderline individuals' own self-perceptions of their intent. Since behavioural intent can only be measured by self-report, to maintain that the intent is present in spite of the individuals' denial would require us either to view borderline individuals as chronic liars or to construct a notion of unconscious behavioural intent.

It is difficult to answer contentions by some theorists that borderline individuals frequently lie. With one exception, that has not been my experience. The exception has to do with use of illicit and prescription drugs in an environment that is highly controlling of drugs. My own experience in working with suicidal borderline patients has been that the frequent interpretation of their suicidal behaviour as "manipulative" is a major source of their feelings of invalidation and of being misunderstood. From their own point of view, suicidal behaviour is a reflection of serious and at times frantic suicide ideation and ambivalence over whether to continue life or not. Although the patients' communication of extreme ideas or enactment of extreme behaviours may be accompanied by the desire to be helped or rescued by the persons they are communicating with, this does not necessarily mean that they are acting in this manner in order to get help.

These individuals' numerous suicidal behaviours and suicide threats, extreme reactions to criticism and rejection, and frequent inability to articulate which of a number of factors are directly influencing their own behaviour do at times make other people feel manipulated. However, inferring behavioural intent from one or more of the effects of the behaviour - in this case, making others feel manipulated - is simply an error in logic. The fact that a behaviour is influenced by its effects on the environment ("operant behaviour" in behavioural terms) says little if anything about an individual's intent with respect to that behaviour. Function does not prove intention. For example, a person may quite predictably threaten suicide whenever criticized. If the criticism then always turns to reassurance, we can be quite confident that the relationship between criticism and suicide threats will grow. However, the fact of the correlation in no way implies that the person is trying or intending to change the criticizer's behaviour with threats, or is even aware of the correlation. Thus, the behaviour is not manipulative in any standard use of the term. To say then that the "manipulation" is unconscious is a tautology based on clinical inference. Both the pejorative nature of such inferences and the low reliability of clinical inferences in general make such a practice unwarranted in most cases.