Attachment Fear BLOCKS a Borderline's Ability to Recover.

And psychotherapeutic complacency condones it!

The average layman and psychotherapist has accepted the notion that Borderlines are afraid of abandonment. Nothing could be farther from the truth about those who have Borderline Personality Disorder.

Fear of attaching is the primary anxiety from which all people with BPD suffer. If they didn’t, they would not push lovers, friends and spouses away the moment anything that resembles genuine intimacy and closeness with someone, occurs.

Attachment for a Borderline, essentially means the Loss of Self (what precious little they have), so it must be avoided at any cost. I have witnessed ‘fear of attachment’ issues play out hundreds of times within the lives of many clients and friends.

When you listen for months and even years to a friend who bitches about their lover or spouse, you can bet they have attachment issues. People afraid to love and bond deeply, tend to ‘settle’ for less than they need in a partner. They’ll never leave that relationship, because risking they might not find someone who’s a better fit for ‘em immediately, means learning to hang out with themselves in a non-abusive manner. If you remain with someone who isn’t quite right for ya, you’re afraid of being alone with YOU.

Every man or woman who has explored real healing, is terrified of the nourishing bond that may arise within a solid, therapeutic alliance. On one hand, there’s a recognized need for this. On the other, emotional dependence on anyone can feel threatening, if one has always lacked opportunity to experience it! We can hardly blame someone for feeling the anxiety this triggers, yet their inability or unwillingness to slowly bond with a consistently nurturant source, blocks one’s capacity to outgrow personality disorder traits.

Borderlines learn throughout infancy, not to trust that their basic emotional needs can be met by a maternal object who’s unable to intuit what her baby needs at any given time. This misattunement is due to her lifelong dissociation from her own emotions and senses. When one is disconnected from their own feelings and needs, they cannot identify with nor relate to another’s. Their higher senses (instinct and intuition) cannot function for ‘em, and when they DO, they’re not trusted.

Borderlines live in their head, not their body. When her infant cries, the BPD mother may check to see if its diaper needs changing, or perhaps he’s hungry. Perfunctory care measures are all well and good~ but is an emotionally dissociated, mis-unattuned mother capable of sensing a baby’s needs for physical embrace, bodily warmth and closeness??

We spend 8 - 9 months developing in our mother’s womb, during which time we form an intrinsic, unshakable bond with her. We hear the rhythmic sounds of her heartbeat and breathing, which often lull us to sleep. We co-experience her emotional states (everything she feels, we simultaneously do, too), we learn the sound of her voice, the cadence of her speech and the way she uniquely enunciates her words. I pronounce various words exactly as my mother did.

Nobody learns to love their mother once they are born. We are all in love with that female, long before we emerge from her body. A fetus knows nothing other than, “we are one. She is me, and I am Her.” This bond is so profoundly and deeply entrenched, we’ll search endlessly during our teen and adult years for the kind of nourishing, vibrant connection with someone we missed out on, during our earliest experiences with Mother.

Males seek the missing maternal attachment they painfully longed for during infancy, and so do females. They are both desperate to find a welcoming, accepting, adoring maternal bond, for it is central to our sense of worth and lovability.

Little girls don’t have relationship difficulties when they’re grown, due to an emotionally unresponsive or absent father~ though this is often their only way of understanding a litany of failed relationship endeavors! In truth, they cannot find or create a healthy, nourishing attachment bond with another, due to serious maternal deficits that existed during their earliest phase of life.

If you’ve never been able to fully trust that your own mother loves you~ how can you trust that anyone ever will?! How might you grow to adulthood, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re good enough and lovable~ or will you always feel anxiously attached, nervously waiting for your relationship to end?

If someone you meet is warm, responsive and adoring, does it stir a subtle anxiety within, that’s has you waiting for the other shoe to drop? If so, might you act-out this anxiety and retreat, push away or pick a fight with your lover, to feel more dominion and control over that potentially imminent threat to your comfort or contentment??

Borderlines often engage in a mating ritual called, “love-bombing.” They’ll say things to us that perhaps we’ve always wanted to hear, which are wonderfully validating to one who’s lives with insecurities, but is it even possible that someone who barely knows you, can actually “love” you? Millions of people confuse feelings of infatuation with the emotion of love.

Infatuation for the most part, is feeling like we have intrinsic value under the adoring gaze of an appealing other. For many, these episodes represent the only time in their life they’ve felt like they might actually be ‘lovable’~ never having had this mirrored, validated or confirmed for ‘em during infancy or childhood.

I believe most all clients in treatment are deeply in need of re-parenting~ but this need is dramatically heightened among people who have BPD traits. This is not to say they should be handled with kid gloves at all times, for part of solid parenting is preventing a child’s inclination to engage in potentially dangerous or self-harming behaviors. A firm, direct therapeutic approach is often referred to as, “tough love.”

So, when a client chooses to step away from treatment once they’re on the other side of a recent crisis (an extremely common practice among borderline disordered clients), it’s vital to help ‘em understand that if they only reach out when they’re hurting or feeling destabilized, no growth or healing can occur. In essence, their foundation remains broken, which means the same careless, self-sabotaging choices and behaviors will keep repeating indefinitely.

A nourishing and meaningful therapeutic alliance is dedicated to providing corrective emotional experiences for each client. These are vastly different from what they experienced in his or her home of origin. This is not achievable in all cases, because borderline disordered clients will test their therapist and push the envelope (so to speak) to elicit highly-focused attention from any source that’s willing to supply it. The BPD individual is an attention seeker. If you give them more time and attention when they’re acting-out difficult feelings, you’re reinforcing bad behavior.

Drama, chaos, conflicts, and anxiety are traumatic events in a Borderline’s life~ but the sad reality is, they thrive on these, because sensations of ‘aliveness’ are triggered by intense emotions, and for one who lives with a dissociative disorder, it’s profoundly uncomfortable to live without intense (often painful) feelings. Dead people do not feel pain. One cannot help but access sensations of aliveness, when one is hurting.

The problem for Borderlines within a nourishing, comforting relationship dyad is that subtle anxiety get triggered, the closer one feels to another. Even when a bond begins to form with a healing professional, anxiety is evoked. Often, before one even begins meaningful inner work, dependency concerns are activated.

Standard psychotherapy attempts to help its clients/patients feel better~ whereas a growth and healing modality patiently and persistently teaches clients how to feel virtually everything, without experiencing familiar dread or fear, so that Emotional Development and self-esteem repair inevitably result.

Most Borderlines are exceptionally bright, and many are wonderfully talented. There is literally nothing wrong with a Borderline’s mind. It may seem this way to us, because they can fail to grasp the simplest of concepts, no matter how many times we attempt to explain them. People with BPD are for the most part, incapable of constructing mental abstractions, which is a higher order of thinking that for many (not all, sadly), is acquired as we enter adulthood.

Being able to think in abstract terms means, if I tell you that honey bees thrive on sucking the nectar from a particular flowering plant, you may immediately be curious as to whether ALL bees are drawn to that same flower’s nectar. The ability to make abstractions, is considered a higher order of thinking. ADD’ers are quite facile at this incidentally, due to the fact they’re right-brain dominant. Attention Deficit issues tend to favor artistic and/or highly creative thinkers. All creative people have some degree of ADD traits~ even if it just manifests in over-procrastination (this can be easily remedied).

Borderlines don’t need ‘head’ repair, although they may have significant, long-held misconceptions about life and love that have impeded or derailed their personal and professional endeavors. With specialized care, these can be corrected to pave the way for richer and more gratifying reality.

When we’re dealing with core wounds that started during infancy due to lack of emotional attunement and ability to bond with Mother, pain resulting from that early trauma resides in the Heart. The mind tirelessly tries to make sense of and analyze emotional pain felt in the body, which temporarily distracts from and initiates the emotional dissociation process. This is the root cause of personality disorders.

BPD is a developmental arrest issue~ not a mental illness. With proper guidance, education and care, one can literally outgrow their personality disorder traits, and emotional retardation is completely resolved.