Can people with personality disorders be "enlightened" and get in touch with themselves on a spiritual level?

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Of course they can. Many spiritual leaders did their best work with the mentally ill. Spiritual crisis is often disguised as mental illness. I have read many accounts of those whose mental illness was cured, instantly, by a spiritual experience.

I have witnessed, personally, the connection between madness and enlightenment. Essentially, human minds are limited, while divine grace is infinite. When minds fail, the divine takes over. An experience happens that the person cannot control, yet witnesses anyway. After the forced experience, the mind is able to reckon with the madness, the weakness that caused it, the divine resolution, and the further healing of the problem that caused the weakness.

Many episodes of mental weakness are actually moments of spiritual crisis, brought about by a God that realizes that sometimes, a harrowing journey is the best way. I have had both personal experience with this, and I have witnessed it in others.

Enlightenment is misunderstood. There are two aspects of spiritual growth. A person’s level of consciousness refers to what they are able to experience and do consciously. Enlightenment does not concern this. Enlightenment rather concerns the other aspect of spiritual existence. That of surrender.

When you work hard to do something hard, whether you manage to succeed is largely a matter of conscious effort, governed by your level of consciousness. Practice, effort, intelligence, wisdom, these are aspects that are consciously developed by things you consciously do. These abilities that are developed stay with you for as long as you can maintain your self and faculties. They are physically derived and they can be physically taken away.

Not so with your capacity to surrender. Surrender is what happens when you let go and let God. What you wish and need will be accomplished as if by magic. There is a logic to surrender that is worth understanding. Knowing when to act and when to let go is colloquially called wisdom, and as mentioned earlier, it’s an aspect of one’s conscious mind, governed by a person’s level of consciousness.

The gut aspect, that which emerges when your conscious mind fails, that is what surrender is. If you cannot surrender, then you wind up fighting yourself. Surrender means you cannot control events, but you at least stop fighting yourself. Or you fight yourself and God intervenes anyway.

Those who are mentally ill are much more in the hands of God than those who aren’t. They are relying on their ability to surrender, constantly. They can even develop a ‘deal’ of sorts with God. They do what they need to do and God makes certain assurances, assurances that lie only between that person and God, assurances that often can’t be communicated particularly well with others, especially if their faith isn’t solid.

Is this enlightenment, this sort of deal the ill have with God? Well, no. But the question isn’t about enlightenment, it’s about “enlightenment”. Enlightenment, the Buddhist practice and doctrine of meditation, is all about conscious creation of surrender. In order to start and continue down the path of meditation, conscious effort, a great deal of it, is needed. The Buddhist body of knowledge has traditionally been inaccessible to those that cannot harness their conscious minds and pursue a path of intense meditation.

But the Buddhist path is just one way of grappling with the unknown. The quotes around “enlightenment” in the question may seem like they’re denigrating what it’s possible for non-Buddhists to acquire simply by dint of their inborn abilities and willingness to let go, but it they point to an essential truth. There are all kinds of ways to grow spiritually. Just because they all essentially resolve down to two fundamental human capabilities doesn’t change anything.

Every person on this planet is suffused in an existential reality that is a mediation between their limitations and God, the entity without them. This reality has the conscious aspects of existence buttressed up against the person’s inner relationship with the infinite. There is a constant flow between the two. Occasionally the conscious gives way to surrender, most of the time the person seeks to incorporate the realm of the unconscious into conscious experience.

This activity, that of studying and learning, is the way most people understand. The other, that of purposed surrender, is less respected and is often forced upon people, both by other people and God, but it develops qualities that are often impossible to develop otherwise or would take a really long time.

Personality disorder, often said to be created through trauma, creates situations where conscious determination isn’t possible. Surrender takes over. A person can develop their ability to surrender even if they can’t pursue other kinds of growth like study and practice. It’s this capacity of surrender that actually produces what we call enlightenment. You can’t read your way to Buddhahood.