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rising-psyche · 4 months ago

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Jeffrey Dahmer and Borderline Personality Disorder.

{Borderline personality disorder is one of its diagnoses, a part and not the only one}.

Of all the mental diagnoses that Jeffrey Dahmer received before and even after his death, Borderline personality disorder is the one in which you see meaning in everything if you investigate what his motivations for his crimes were, as he declared. Not only that, but how his behavior appeared in his childhood and especially in his adolescence.

• What is Borderline Personality Disorder?

It is a mental disorder that is quite difficult to deal with for those who have it, characterized by emotional instability that manifests itself in all personal areas of that person. There is a hypersensitivity to everything where the bearer will always feel things around them in a greater way than others, which is why feelings and emotions are almost constantly on the surface - which makes Borderline people extremely intense.

These excesses that the disorder causes are far from being just something about the individual who has the problem, but something in which he sees himself under power to the point that his "overly emotional sense" spreads to his interpersonal relationships or the way he sees any contact with any other person where he feels the need for affection and permanence.

— The symptoms:

Extreme emotional instability

Impulsiveness

Constant insecurity

Feelings of worthlessness and self-deprecating thoughts

Negative image of yourself

Frequent fear of rejection and abandonment

Tendency to self-destructive habits such as drinking excessively, taking drugs, etc.

Strong irritability, aggressiveness when something upsets you and severe anxiety

Tendency to isolate

Need for affirmation to feel safe

If we look closely at the symptoms and how the disorder dominates the sufferer, it is easy to understand why this diagnosis is so logical in Dahmer's case. When you read about his life and what he himself said during interrogations, you see that he demonstrated all of these characteristics long before he became a murderer.

The reasons why the disorder may arise are vague to say, but generally the incentives come from the lack of family structure where the person grew up as a child, moments of maternal or paternal neglect and even witnessing the separation of parents during childhood - especially if it's a turbulent divorce like it was between Joyce and Lionel Dahmer.

And here I will explain why this can interfere with that child developing the disorder:

There is no doubt that Joyce and Lionel Dahmer were often more concerned with settling their own issues than giving the necessary attention to the effects that the problems between them could have on their children, and this was most triggered by Jeffrey. Descriptions of what he was like are typical, seen as withdrawn, shy and quiet, but his parents probably thought it was just "his way" and nothing more. Some of this may be true, some may not. Jeffrey never knew how to express himself or say at least a little about how he felt, so he expressed it in other ways. Perhaps the trigger for his mind to slowly become ill is the fact that he blamed himself for his mother's illnesses, which got worse after his birth (this is a common Borderline behavior that puts oneself in a position of "burden" and uselessness).

"Jeff's response was classic. He blamed himself for his mother's illness. He had known for as long as he could remember that she was depressed after her birth and that he had caused her illness. He must also have caused each relapse. He couldn't articulate his pain, for fear of pushing his mother over the edge again. He had to keep to himself, say little and do even less, to protect her, to keep some calm in the house. The more she saw of him, the worse it would be for her. His brother David said: '[Jeff] never learned to be open with his feelings of frustration…he went into the woods alone and cut down trees for firewood.' They could hear it banging against tree trunks from inside the house. It felt like vented anger". (The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brian Masters)

Access to the emotion of anger was already present from an early age, but Jeffrey suffocated everything he felt for himself and we see how this continued throughout his life until, fatally, he lost control of everything.

When his mother divorced his father and left with David, even if Dahmer didn't express it at that moment when his mother asked him not to tell his father that they were leaving, it is clear that the feeling of abandonment hit him. His mother asked him to accompany them, yes, but it's fair to speculate that perhaps Jeffrey wanted her to give up and everyone to stay home.

"He was now almost eighteen, and perhaps old enough to look after himself, but it was significant that he was not consulted, and also that the Dahmers were so involved in their quarrel that they did not realize how dangerously disconnected their eldest son was now". (The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brian Masters)

Many times, there were episodes of inattention and negligence on the part of their parents that would make an increasing difference from the beginning to the years. It's safe to say that his aversion to abandonment or at least his suspicion of it came from a solid foundation when he experienced it between his parents. When Dahmer decided to isolate himself so strongly and over time, his contained desperation for attention and some affection took on gigantic proportions and would finally become evident in a tragic way.

Dahmer's indifference during adolescence, from another angle, was just a camouflage because he refused expression. The disorder forms from adolescence to early adulthood, and here we have another characteristic point: obsessions as an occupation of the inner void. Dahmer developed his fascination with dead animal bones and had a cabin with an animal cemetery where he spent most of his hours. This can be explained as an escape, it was his first true interest and when he met him, he dedicated himself to it, worrying Lionel Dahmer who wanted his son to leave his own world instead of just experimenting with animal bodies and bones.

Another detail is how Jeffrey always used alcohol as an alternative to alleviate what he felt and didn't express it. During the period of separation, his self-destructive habit largely increased. So, he resorted to isolation and drinking as his technique to not suffer so much from the divorce.

It is surprisingly common to see this contrast in the formation of Borderline personality disorder: on one side there is a true purposeful loneliness that others may associate with "not caring" when, in reality, on the other side there is a great wound and a lot to be said. It's like a silenced scream.

"It was my way of blocking out any painful thoughts, just putting on an attitude of not caring or pretending not to care, to spare myself the pain of what was going on with the divorce. Maybe it started then. It was effective, it worked." (Dahmer in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brian Masters).

• Inside the crimes.

It is by emptying the mind to look at Dahmer's perspective on his actions that we can find one of the feelings that best fits this diagnosis.

Unlike someone who would kill simply for cruelty and pleasure, in his testimony, Dahmer stated that he killed because he wanted those boys to "remain." There were the morbid fantasies and again, the screaming urgency of not wanting to be alone again. He made everyone sleep with sleeping pills because according to him, that's the only way to make them stay as long as he wanted. Whenever one of them said they needed to go at that time or mentioned that they needed to go the next day, for Dahmer, it was like a threat where the desperate feeling of not being left screamed. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, one of the most latent behaviors of a Borderline is the panic of being left, abandoned. Here, of course, Jeffrey created criminal means in search of company, but if you look at the beginning and how he negatively withdrew throughout his life, in addition to dealing with dark thoughts and the prison of painful feelings, you realize how impossible it was that a good result would come out of it. He was seriously ill and no one knew either because of him or others who had investigated him before and although they did, they did not make a deeper study of his mind when Dahmer said he was "in significant psychological distress".

Even in how he kept the victims' remains because he "felt their presence like that" and didn't want to get rid of them because he "wanted to spend more time with them", there is great awareness of how a person with the disorder can be so desperate for a minimum of affection and contact that is unimaginable. Obviously Dahmer's problems were several and all complex, but the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder for Dahmer is coherent and assertive based on his speeches, history and also what, in his distorted vision, he intended when he murdered.

*****

The impulsiveness in his actions is also quite evident, since Dahmer's murders in particular were completely reckless and became sloppy. And about this lack of care that he started to have, we see how Jeffrey was someone who really had his self-esteem destroyed because everything that involved him, he didn't care what happened to him - part of it because he knew what he was doing was wrong, the distinction between right and wrong was never lacking (for this and several other reasons it is irrational to diagnose him as a psychopath, he was many things but psychopathy really doesn't fit).

It is important to highlight that the overwhelming feeling of emptiness is one of the "ghosts" of BPD, causing the individual to view his own existence as something often without purpose or meaning. It is an internal emptiness where nothing truly satisfies him, it is as if Dahmer saw no reason for anything on a daily basis because one of the things that depressed him was precisely this dense emptiness.

During school, as illustrated in the book "My Friend Dahmer", despite his shyness, it is notable how Jeffrey had long shown wanting attention and wanting to belong somewhere when he played embarrassing pranks. This is nothing more, within the Borderline spectrum, than the manifestation of a much observed feeling, which is the need for validation, belonging, to "fit in" with other people. This was his way of getting attention at the time.

Irritability always existed, but he rudely stifled his emotions and expressed them non-verbally, which would have been appropriate on several occasions. Instead, for example, hitting tree trunks with pieces of trunk was more viable.

It is a certainty that Jeffrey Dahmer was a Borderline and this can be confirmed only by evaluating the behavior, his triggers for crimes, childhood and adolescence occasions and others. This is by no means all, Dahmer had an absolutely vast psychic field and this is what makes so many people interested in him/his story.

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