It has been almost two years since my aunt’s husband completed suicide. I’m sure my aunt wishes I called him, “Uncle Michael”, but I can’t pretend that someone whom I have no respect for was related to me. Michael was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder shortly after he married my aunt. He was pressured by my family to enter into psychiatric care after he told my aunt that he would kill her, and then himself, if he ever caught her cheating on him. I feel that this threat was motivated by his intense and irrational fear of abandonment.

The aforementioned incident was indicative of just one of the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. Michael displayed eight of the nine criteria listed in our textbook. He had unstable and intense relationships with both of his parents, his wife, and his siblings. He was very possessive of his son, now 18 years old, and his daughter, who is now 16. He had little contact with people outside of his family.

He worked as a choir instructor at a Christian school. From what I understand, he would befriend others quickly and then drive them away with his unstable affect and childish outbursts of anger. Besides affective instability, and inappropriate displays of anger, Michael was very impulsive. He often spent the money that my aunt was earning at her job on luxury items, such as brand new cars, that his family could barely afford.

Michael was being treated with high doses of Prozac and regularly attended therapy sessions. However, he only went to treatment because my aunt threatened to leave him if he didn’t seek help. Years went by with periods of marked improvement followed by a return to his original maladaptive behavior. In a desperate attempt to figure out what was wrong with her husband, my aunt decided to go through his things.

To her dismay, my aunt found out that her marriage was nothing more than an elaborate attempt by Michael to hide his homosexual orientation. There was incontrovertible evidence that Michael was having casual sex with various men he met on the internet. Devastated, my aunt confronted Michael with her knowledge. He confessed to years of deceitful behavior and explained that he had always had and unstable self-image. He wanted to portray to the world around him that he had all of the ingredients of a “normal” heterosexual male, i.e. a wife and children. The make believe life that he created for himself, at the expense of the people he claimed to love, left him feeling empty and alone. As a result, he created a secret life that allowed him to satiate his sexual urges and return home to the family that allowed him to feel safe from the judgment of society and the church to which he belonged.