Borderlines and Boundaries~ an Oxymoron.
Like oil and water, they just don't mix.
Ever try to set boundaries for a friend or lover, and it seems that no matter how much you stress the importance of ‘em respecting your space or honoring your needs, their behavior doesn’t change? If it feels like you’ve been talking to a brick, you’re not alone!
Three of the most prominent traits in folks who have BPD is their lack of empathy, impulse control and boundaries. Just as you’d never expect a toddler to resist getting into your jewelry case, medicine cabinet or tool box, you can’t expect a Borderline to understand what’s off limits to ‘em~ even when it involves their own safety! Why else do the parents of very young kids have to “child-proof” their homes?!
Part of loving someone, is respecting their boundaries. This applies to areas of personal sensitivity, as well as topics another feels strongly about. Metaphorically speaking, if you know someone close to you has a painful emotional or bodily injury, you carefully avoid bumping up against it IF you give a damn about their comfort and well-being.
Lack of empathy in Borderlines precludes them from honoring your sensitivities and sensibilities. They’ll incessantly press and nag at you for the same things over and over again, until you relent and give-in to ‘em, thinking this’ll put an end to their relentless pestering, and you’ll finally get some peace. It doesn’t~ and if you think it will, you’re just dreaming (or painfully naive).
As soon as you satisfy one wish, whim or demand a Borderline makes, another pops up almost immediately! In short, their haranguing never ends, and neither do the insults and character assassinations, when they don’t instantly get what they want from you.
Does this sound familiar? Have you spent any real time in the presence of a toddler? Are you familiar with “The Terrible Two’s” and infantile tantrums that accompany this stage in a young child’s development? Welcome to living with a Borderline.
This aspect in Borderlines is as complex as a lasagna’s many layers, and it’s crucial to learn why when someone with BPD traits actually GETS what they’ve been wanting and hammering you about, they respond with acting-out behaviors that sound and look like anger and disappointment. How does any rational human being make sense of this? (“When I give my lover what they’ve been hounding me for, they either turn on me or retreat!”)
Borderlines are deeply fractured people. Hundreds of disconnected, tiny shards of ceramic make up their internal sense of Self. You might regard their inner life as a mosaic of sorts, that wants to become a whole, cohesive and definable self image, yet there’s no grout or glue holding all those broken, jagged fragments of pottery together.
This is why Borderlines respond best to fairly rigid structure and parameters they might find within a hyper-religious, yogic, Buddhist or rigorous gym (workout) practice that functions like a proscribed container that teaches them what and how to think and behave, to achieve desirable results. And mustn’t we discipline young children similarly??
Poor self-worth is always at the heart of BPD, so Borderlines are on a never-ending search for “Happiness,” which always eludes one who lacks self-esteem. When a Borderline mentally conjures up what they THINK will make them happy, they pursue it like their life depends on it! In essence, they believe it does~ but we’re observing a very young child who’s trapped in an adult-sized body~ so, the demarcation lines between fantasy and reality are always blurred for these poor souls.
Borderlines acquired their diagnostic name, because they are able at times, to appear rational, logical and practical, in contrast to other times when they seem irrational, illogical and somewhat crazy. The actual definition of psychosis is the inability to discern between fantasy and reality. One who has BPD features, lives on the very edge (or border-line) of psychosis.
If you’ve ever been with a lover who will not forgive you for a minor slight, or see your side of a relationship speed-bump no matter how many times you explain yourself or apologize, you have some idea of what it’s like to try and reach conflict resolution with one of these individuals, or get ‘em to back off from the incessant pressure they exert on you to give ‘em what they think they want~ until they actually get it, that is.
Once the Borderline GETS whatever they’ve been telling you they want or need, and that ‘milestone’ fails to (once and for all) supply feelings of ‘happiness’ they’ve fantasized about and have convinced themselves they’ll finally be able to experience, they they take their profound anger about this disappointment out on You! It’s not your fault of course. Nobody can fill the ghastly hole at the base of a Borderline’s bottomless pit of need (which might make you question why I love working with ‘em so much).
Remember, Borderlines cannot tolerate feelings of delayed gratification any better than toddlers can! Their feelings of resentment and anger over the slightest disappointments or setbacks, have nothing whatsoever to do with you. The rage they direct at you, is leftover from childhood pain associated with an impaired maternal connection that made it impossible for them to get the warmth, affection and adoration they desperately needed as children to grow healthy self-esteem.
Borderlines are mad at themselves for not being able to experience joy or contentment, no matter what you or their outer world bestows on them. They’re sitting on mountains of unresolved pain, disappointment and rage from infancy onward, due to having grown up with a mother who herself, had no blueprint for knowing how to love a child. All Borderlines had a mother~ but never a Mommy.
Children learn best from example. IF no healthy, nourishing example was available to them during childhood, they merely replicate what they subconsciously recorded and learned about “loving,” despite their best efforts (as adults) to “do it differently” than their mother did, from the very first time a stressful event knocks ‘em out of their homeostatic orbit.
Nobody with BPD traits believes they’ll replicate the pain they experienced in childhood, with their own children. Why would they, after working so long and hard to get well? But Borderlines beget Borderlines, and the defenses we learned in early childhood in order to survive the pain we couldn’t escape in any other way, come flooding back to assert themselves when our sense of survival is threatened, whether by a lover or our own kid.
The horrifying stories you’ve heard in the news of women drowning their infants or shaking ‘em until their little necks break when they can’t stop crying, are real. These events do not occur with emotionally well-developed, self-actualized women who’ve acquired empathy, impulse control and healthy boundaries. In short, they’ve grown fully into their adulthood, which means they’re capable of feeling and self-regulating their emotions, so their children never have to suffer from emotional and/or physical abuse and neglect . . . and neither do You, if by some chance you’ve fallen hopelessly in love with one of these poor, fractured souls.
Healing BPD is not difficult (contrary to popular belief). It simply takes a very different mindset and approach, which fosters a bond of emotional trust within the therapeutic dynamic~ regardless of how long it takes. Besides, most clinicians have not resolved their own BPD traits, so how are they even remotely equipped to help others?!
You cannot expect a Borderline to “get well” with insight based or cognitive-behavioral interventions. Literally millions have tried these modalities of “treatment,” which have repeatedly failed to help people with BPD to become emotionally whole, self-actualized, happy beings.