Histrionic Borderlines~ and how to QUIT circling the drain with 'em!

We’ve all heard of smacking someone when they’re hysterical, right? Well, I’m not suggesting you physically go to these lengths when your Borderline lover is having a meltdown, but a little ‘shock treatment’ can go a long way toward helping them (and you) deter their hysteria, and rebalance.

There are times when a sharp, loud voice (“STOP!”) serves to disrupt the compulsive mind chatter, divert a ‘spinout,’ shock ‘em into the present, and ground them. It may feel out of character for you to assert yourself in this manner~ but as the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Obsessive-Compulsive thinking is extremely common among Borderlines, due to having dissociated from their emotions from the tender age of around 2 years old. They live in their head 99% percent of the time, because this is how they’ve learned to survive their pain, since they were little. Tragically, this inclination is typical among people working in the psychotherapeutic field. (Do the math.)

A young child may invent an imaginary friend in the midst of feeling lonely and disconnected from his family members. Often, acquiring this defense against their feelings of isolation and despair, saves their life. Many clients have told me over the past few decades, they never felt a sense of belonging, and felt like “an alien” in their family. This sad reality is far more prevalent than you might expect. These children often grow up believing something’s wrong with them, which can easily lay the groundwork for Social Anxiety issues later in life.

A child in emotional pain who hasn’t constructed an imaginary friend, starts talking to himself as soon as he has acquired vocabulary. He can’t understand the deep ache he feels inside, and grows very curious about why it persists. He questions himself about this pain with the hope of identifying its basis so he can change or fix it~ and to some degree during this process, he can! This is the beginning of emotional dissociation.

This kid’s inner pain hasn’t mitigated, but he’s at least found a way to distract from it while he’s in up his head. Anything that eases our agony, even if it’s temporary and only to a minor extent, we’ll return to again and again (which is the etiology of all addiction). Mentally analyzing our pain started for us as toddlers, because it provided a modicum of relief. This practice then became habituated, because there’s a payoff in it.

When a Borderline turns irrational and histrionic, you cannot reason with ‘em. Logic is utterly useless. As much as you wanna talk ‘em down from the ledge, you can’t. They will endlessly circle their drain in a dramatic, hyper-reactive state of emotional chaos and trauma, and you’ll feel impotent to help them.

This underdeveloped child living in an adult’s body is basically having an adult-sized tantrum. Their need for comfort and soothing is enormous at these times, but how do you effectively respond to someone who’s crying uncontrollably, and declaring they “feel so alone” when they’re surrounded by you and others??

If this causes you to think to yourself, “what am I~ chopped liver?” your reaction is completely understandable and normal. I coached a male client to wrap his arms around his wife to offer comfort, when she was in the midst of what he described as a “meltdown,” which occurred once or twice a week. It’s the broken little girl (inside her) who needs soothing, I told him. He gleefully reported, it worked like a charm.

This is all well and good, when we’re physically and emotionally able to provide that kind of care to a partner~ but what if we’re experiencing stressors of our own? What happens when we have needs?? Who’s gonna be responsive to us when we require understanding, encouragement or comforting~ or do we see it as our job to only give, and not receive? I wrote and published a book on this very topic about 5 years ago. It’s title is, DO YOU LOVE TO BE NEEDED, OR NEED TO BE LOVED? (click on the following link, if you’d like to preview the book on Kindle, and read over 50 comments from people who’ve been enlightened by it). https://www.amazon.com/You-Love-Needed-Need-Loved/dp/1478791020

The Borderline cannot conceive of anyone other than him/herself having any needs, which exemplifies their narcissism in a nutshell. It’s not unusual for them to descend into fits and tantrums late at night, just before bedtime. And there you are, dead tired from having worked all day, and dealing once again with your partner’s histrionics! Add to this, if you can’t be ultra-responsive to their meltdown, they’ll guilt you for just wanting calm and peace, so you can get to sleep! (A captive audience isn’t allowed this, didn’t ya know?)

Millions of men have tried their best to roll with the punches, while living with a BPD female. It’s not at all unusual for them to become sickly or develop severe physical and/or psychological conditions, no matter how health-conscious they’ve been prior to that relationship.

Relationship stress of this kind can literally kill. Men are prone to developing cancer in the evacuation centers of their body: The kidneys, liver, colon, prostate and bladder (ya can’t routinely feel pissed off, and expect the body to ignore it). Women in highly stressful relationships are likely to develop cancerous growths in the estrogen centers of their body: The breasts, uterus and ovaries.

The average working man is busy all day, putting out fires and slaying dragons in his professional world. He needs a soft place to land and regroup, when he arrives back at home. No such thing exists, when you’re married to a Borderline. “Home” is for him, the center of frequent chaotic and dramatic upsets. A man may yearn for serenity, yet staying in a high-maintenance coupling triggers regular adrenaline surges that help him access sensations of aliveness, he’s unable to produce for himself.

Thus, living with a borderline disordered partner can feel tormenting and painful, yet provide him with the payoff of feeling enlivened~ whether the stimulus is positive or negative. Men in these situations typically grew up with high-conflict parents. Their home was a war zone. They became adrenaline-addicted, and feel dead, empty or bored with partners who don’t trigger its release in the bloodstream.

There may be brief, sporadic episodes of respite in-between all the drama, strife and emotional withdrawals/silent treatments (where ya can’t figure out for the life of you, what you may have ‘done wrong’ to trigger these painful events)~ but can you trust that you’ll one day get to have a consistently loving, harmonious bond, and your relationship infrastructure will become “normal??” Never.

Borderlines are not “bad people.” They can be emotionally castrating, and create havoc and anguish in your life (making you wish you’d never met ‘em), but they aren’t inherently evil. These are developmentally arrested, childlike individuals who’ve always felt insecure, and somewhat out of place in the world.

Imagine leaving a three year-old out on the street, and expecting him/her to survive, and effectively navigate their frightening new environment. Would they not feel terrified and desperate? Would they latch onto the first grown-up they see, in hopes of feeling safer or more stable? Of course they would~ wouldn’t You, in their position?

A Borderline Personality ‘meltdown’ is akin to a 9-point earthquake on the Richter Scale. They feel completely destabilized, just as a small child would right after hitting a patch of uneven pavement, and taking a painful tumble off their tricycle. Along with incurring scrapes, cuts and bruises, they’re in shock.

Borderlines can’t self-regulate their emotions nor rebalance and restabilize within a reasonable time frame, as you and I can. Any crisis, or even significant change in routine can send them into an overwhelming tailspin that could take weeks, months or years to recover from (take this is as a serious warning to new mothers!).

Borderlines have no container (think, epidermis) holding them in, which is why it can seem like intense/heightened emotions gush out of ’em all over the place. Molehills turn into mountains and minor upsets morph into frantic catastrophes. You might think of these people as comprised of thousands of ceramic shards they continually try to piece together into a mosaic of sorts, to suggest a cohesive, definable self-image.

Sadly, the mortar they often seek to glue their fragmented internal parts together, is sought within romantic endeavors, which they hope will magically repair their inner carnage. It won’t. No lover can compensate for, nor mend the maternal deficits that left these people emotionally underdeveloped and deeply impaired. That requires unconventional, highly specialized professional care.

If you’re a clinician, you might have altruistic fantasies of helping these people heal, but talk therapy and mind work are antithetical to what Borderlines actually need in order to develop emotionally, and outgrow their entrenched BPD traits. Helping a Borderline client fully recover, entails healing the Heart Trauma that’s clung to them since infancy, and providing concrete self-worth building tools with which they can construct a wholesome, genuinely empowered sense of Self.