"Just what IS a Borderline?"
A new friend asked me recently, "what in your opinion, is a Borderline?" because he's been familiar with my writings for years, has referred some of his clients to my BPD site materials, and really wanted to know.
I replied that if I had to sum it up simply, it's a fear of bonding and attaching fully to another. Borderlines like to TELL themselves they're emotionally available, and it's sorta easy for em to believe it, but how often do they choose lovers or partners who are truly emotionally AVAILABLE?
If one partner is doing all the pursuing, chasing and anxiously awaiting another's responsiveness, he/she will feel convinced they CAN step closer~ but is it to someone who's able or willing to meet them half way? The one who does the chasing, is usually the one deluding themselves about Themselves.
Our painful longing and yearning in this scenario convinces us we really DO LOVE that other person, but these sensations have nothing to do with genuine love. They're merely intense feelings we came to ASSOCIATE with loving an emotionally unavailable parent who failed to reciprocate our affection, during infancy and childhood. In short, our definition for what "love" is, became grossly distorted when we were very young.
Oh yes, those sensations we feel for someone are intense, a little dangerous, and always result in feelings of infatuation, IF we never had a healthy frame of reference during childhood, for what it FEELS like to be cherished, adored and loved in return.
If you return a Borderline's intense "love," their appreciation of it and you are very fleeting, because RECEIVING stable, safe and secure love from another feels foreign and a bit uncomfortable to a Borderline. All They know is, pain = love, and vice-versa.
If you ask someone with BPD what happened to all their past lovers who were kind, considerate, thoughtful, caring and really present for them, they'll tell you they lost interest in those people. Someone who provides consistency of love and care, is boring to a Borderline, because dramatic, somewhat painful feelings of longing and yearning are not part of that mix.
A Borderline can in fact, ONLY want someone who is inconsistently around for him or her. This is what keeps intense emotions alive for them. Without the presence of intermittent PAIN in their romantic dynamic, every Borderline determines it can't possibly be "true love," because it feels too calm and copasetic. In short, an AVAILABLE lover feels lackluster and boring to 'em.
The core of this issue spawns from emotional dissociation since the Borderline was very young. Given they cannot connect to their own full repertoire of emotions and experience sensations of 'aliveness' that are NOT dependent on another triggering in 'em, they constantly seek exhilarating associations! Sadly, BPD people are forever addicted to up and down roller-coaster rides with emotionally UNSTABLE partners who force them to experience dramatic intensity on a routine basis.
When I talk to you about like attracting like, this is what I'm trying to put across. The 'obvious' Borderline is forced to carry and express all the feeling states their partner has disowned within themselves since early childhood~ yet does so in explosive, non-appropriate, childish ways, due to their own, lifelong emotional dissociation. The caregiver/codependent is no more healthy nor emotionally whole, than their "crazy" BPD lover.
Are ya starting to connect these dots and see the BIG picture?? The ONLY 'cure' for Borderlines, is emotional development, or Feeling Work. Once you connect a BPD client with (all) their own feelings, and help them learn to tolerate em in the body, while staying the fuck outta their head, they begin to grow a threshold for enduring and shrinking their own emptiness, and can break their addictive response to inappropriately intense, unbalanced lovers.
Till then, they'll circle the drain indefinitely. They'll finally move past their addiction to one ex, and eventually pick right up with another. The 'packaging' may look a bit different in the next person they choose, but their outcome is always identical.