Antisocial Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder can look similar from the outside. When you’re looking for the key differences between ASPD vs BPD, it’s important to recognize that they can be comorbid disorders.
You can often differentiate by identifying what’s going on behind the presenting symptoms. When you observe the personality traits, interpersonal functioning, and anger management of someone with either ASPD or BPD, it can be difficult to differentiate.
Even though they are distinct conditions, they are both mood disorders that can present similarly. This blog provides four ways to differentiate between ASPD vs BPD. Please note that this blog does not replace the help of a therapist and should not be used for self-diagnosis.
This post is all about ASPD vs BPD.
What is Borderline Personality Disorder?
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a mental health condition characterized by intense emotions, unstable relationships, and an intense fear of abandonment (according to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
People with BPD often experience rapid and intense mood swings, and their relationships can shift quickly from idealization to devaluation. People may also know this process as splitting.
They may struggle with a fragile sense of identity and often feel empty or unsure of who they are. This may be partially caused by the dissonance between who they think they are and their actions.
Individuals with BPD typically engage in impulsive behaviors, such as self-harming behaviors or risky behaviors, especially when they feel threatened by the possibility of being abandoned. They might also experience intense, short-lived episodes of anger, anxiety, or depression.
BPD usually begins in early adulthood and can make everyday life feel chaotic and overwhelming. However, with the right, effective treatment and support, many people can learn to manage the symptoms of BPD and build more stable, fulfilling relationships.
What is Antisocial Personality Disorder?
Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is a mental health condition in which a person consistently disregards the rights and feelings of others. People with ASPD often lie, manipulate, and act impulsively without considering the consequences.
They might break the law or hurt others without feeling guilty about it. To be diagnosed with ASPD and meet the diagnostic criteria, via DSM-5-TR, someone typically shows at least three of the following behaviors:
- repeatedly breaking the law,
- lying for either personal gain or the thrill of it,
- acting impulsively,
- being irritable or aggressive,
- disregarding safety of themselves or someone else,
- acting irresponsible, and
- lacking remorse after hurting others.
Signs of ASPD usually start in adolescence and continue into adulthood. It’s important to understand that people with ASPD often don’t see their harmful behavior as a problem, making it tough for them to seek help or change their ways.
ASPD VS BPD:
1. People with BPD struggle with unstable relationships, whereas people with ASPD may struggle to make real emotional connections
Borderline-Personality Disorder in Relationships
One of the core driving factors behind BPD is the fear of abandonment. Therefore, it makes sense that someone with BPD would struggle with relationships and that relationships can be their main stressor.
When you are trying to understand BPD, both in yourself and others, you have to recognize that people with BPD perceive a situation as dangerous or scary based on the perspective their mental illness provides rather than a rational interpretation of reality.
So, BPD changes the way that people think of their relationships and see the people around them. People with BPD often develop BPD symptoms because of a childhood trauma that forced those common symptoms to come out as a form of survival.
Therefore, when people with BPD react unpredictably to something you do or say, they are reacting in a way that they have learned is safe because of the way they grew up.
People with BPD will act in ways that sabotage healthy relationships, leading to instability and intensity, because they are used to being in unhealthy relationships and developing unhealthy ways of keeping themselves safe.
Antisocial Personality Disorder in Relationships
People with ASPD struggle with a lack of empathy, which makes genuine emotional connection hard. It can also make it easier for people with ASPD to use their relationships as a form of manipulation to get what they want.
This doesn’t necessarily mean they will manipulate people within their relationships to reach a goal. Instead, people with ASPD may only start a relationship to have sex, get a job, or achieve some goal of theirs.
The key to ASPD is that people with it do not experience remorse for the pain they cause others as a result of manipulation. In a lot of ways, ASPD relationships may look like BPD relationships.
They are unstable due to a lack of real connection and can end up hurting the other person. In the case of ASPD, the person who is hurting others is doing so because they lack empathy and, thus, remorse, for the pain they’re causing.
Similar to BPD, symptoms of Antisocial Personality Disorder can often manifest in someone because of childhood trauma in which those symptoms helped them survive.
2. People with BPD experience intense, rapid mood swings while people with ASPD can feel emotionally detached
BPD and Emotions
Borderline Personality Disorder is often known for its intense mood swings that can leave someone with BPD feeling drained and out of control. This often looks like being unable to regulate their emotions and de-escalate a situation.
In other words, people with BPD experience severe emotional distress due to their emotional dysregulation. Typically, someone with BPD will have a negative emotional experience and struggle with emotional regulation when they perceive a threat of abandonment.
This can be as simple as a friend of theirs rejecting the offer to look at a meme on their phone. It could also be as complex as their partner telling them they don’t know if they can handle dating someone with BPD.
Both of these experiences are enough to cause someone with BPD to experience emotional distress. This can cause a BPD episode to start, which can start “splitting.” During these episodes, people with BPD will often get angry.
They may develop a superiority complex in which they identify the reasons why their partner or loved one is inferior. When their anger subsides, they are left feeling confused, scared, and sad because of the anger they just felt that doesn’t always make sense to them.
ASPD and Emotions
People with ASPD struggle with empathy, which means they don’t always experience deep, complex emotions. Many people with ASPD, however, can experience some emotions with high intensity while other emotions are much harder to experience to their fullest extent.
For example, someone who does not have ASPD may stay awake in bed at 2am worrying about their father who is in the hospital. Someone who has ASPD would probably not have the experience of staying awake all night with worry.
They don’t experience emotions like sadness, guilt, and worry to the same degree as people without ASPD. Research suggests that people with ASPD don’t experience complex emotions as deeply as people without ASPD.
They typically require some degree of insight and self-reflection, both of which can be difficult for people with ASPD. That same study also found that people with ASPD may have strong emotional responses to social situations around them.
But, oftentimes, those reactions often don’t match the situation. It’s also often easier for people with ASPD to express negative emotions like anger and disappointment than it is to express positive emotions like happiness and contentment.
3. People with BPD struggle with a sense of self and identity, whereas people with ASPD may have an inflated self-image
BPD and Identity
When you combine intense mood swings with unstable relationships, it makes sense that people with BPD would struggle with self-esteem and self-image. BPD is often thought to arise in reaction to trauma
Therefore, BPD can often be a survival response to something that happened in someone’s past. However, when that context is removed, BPD feels completely unpredictable.
People with BPD are afraid of abandonment to the point that they will do just about anything to avoid feeling the pain of abandonment, even if that means self-harming behaviors and sabotaging meaningful relationships.
Therefore, someone with BPD may hurt the person they care about during a BPD episode and feel confused about who they are when that episode has ended.
If they believe they love their partner and proceed to demean and insult their partner during an angry outburst, they may lose a sense of identity and sense of self. They may think they have no idea who they are because they’re acting in ways that contradict who they think they are.
ASPD and Identity
When you hear someone talk about an “inflated sense of self,” you may think of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Narcissists do tend to have an inflated sense of self, so it’s good to distinguish what makes someone a narcissist rather than someone with ASPD.
One significant difference is that someone with NPD has created a grandiose self-narrative that is false. They also, no matter how deep down it is, know this.
People with NPD know, on some level, that their narrative is false and will melt down if anyone contradicts that narrative (and/or fails to uphold it). People with ASPD, on the other hand, disregard opinions that don’t align with the way they seem themselves.
Therefore, they can uphold an inflated self-image because they can truly stop caring about the opinions of people around them if they contradict what they think about themselves. People with ASPD also lack concern for the way they impact others.
So, if someone with ASPD causes someone else pain, they don’t care how that person reacts to them and it doesn’t affect the narrative they tell about themselves.
4. People with BPD can be more self-aware of their emotional pain and seek help, whereas people with ASPD may not recognize their behavior as problematic and may not seek help
BPD and Self-Awareness
Once a BPD episode ends, people with BPD can be intensely aware of the pain they cause both themselves and others. During an episode, someone with BPD may engage in reckless behavior because they are in survival mode and the threat to their safety is abandonment.
Therefore, they may self-harm, attempt suicide, drive recklessly, and more. They can abuse their partner and verbally abuse loved ones.
Or they may shut down and experience all of the turmoil from BPD internally because they believe their partner or loved one no longer deserves to be part of their life as a result of a perceived threat.
When a BPD episode ends, people with BPD can experience lots of pain from their actions. Whether they hurt themselves (both physically and emotionally) or they hurt someone they care about, they can be very aware of that pain and feel intense pain as a result of that aftermath.
Not everyone with BPD is self-aware and they can’t always make the connection between their actions and a BPD diagnosis. However, if they do, it can be incredibly healing to get answers that explain why they act unpredictably.
When a mental health professional or healthcare provider gives context to someone’s actions by giving them an accurate diagnosis, someone with BPD can seek treatment and improve the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder and quality of life.
ASPD and Self-Awareness
As you can imagine, people with ASPD are less likely to be self-aware because they dismiss the opinions of others if they don’t serve them. They may not see their hurtful behavior as problematic and, therefore, see no need for professional help.
The symptoms of ASPD make it hard for someone with ASPD to realize they need help. For people with BPD, the motivation to get help lies in the need to understand themselves and why they hurt themselves and others.
People with ASPD will often experience less of this because they lack empathy for the pain they cause and experience fewer negative emotions associated with caring about the opinions or rights of others.
Disclaimer
If you’re wondering whether a BPD diagnosis or ASPD diagnosis may be right for you, it’s important to get help from mental health professionals. This blog is intended to help you start your journey by asking what struggles you relate to.
However, this blog does not replace the help or diagnosis of a trained therapist. In addition, Knockoff Therapy operates from a lens of compassion and connection. Therefore, we try to avoid labels and understand each individual on their own.
With that said, we want to acknowledge that an ASPD diagnosis indicates that someone is more likely to get involved in criminal behaviors due to a lack of concern for social norms because we recognize that information may be helpful to some of our readers.
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