Sorry a little late posting this but here we got…. So!
The guide to problem-solving. by Susan Heitler, Ph.D.
Specifically,
how do some young people, most often but not limited to female,
develop personality patterns that create chaos and fighting wherever
they go?
Four theories come to mind for me when I work with
clients with borderline patterns. One possibility is that the problem
begins with their parenting. A second hypothesis is that the
tendency to create chaos comes from biological sources. A third
explanation might be that adult individuals with borderline personality
disorder begin as children who are particularly sensitive and
experience traumas in their youthful years. A fourth explanation
may lie in a paucity of mature habits for handling emotions and for
collaborative resolution of conflicts.
1.) Let's look first at parenting
glitches.
I do think that Ginny Mae's mom may have been part of
the problem. On the brink of a second divorce, she probably was
feeling highly stressed at the time. I have a hunch too that the mom
modeled anger as a means of forcing her husband and children to do what she
wanted.
In addition, Mom may have been too overwhelmed with her
own problems to be able to take charge of Ginny Mae. I had a hunch that
Ginny Mae used her anger to control everyone in the household, including her
parents, in a classic case of collapsed hierarchy. No adults stopped Ginny
Mae's quarrelsome habits, so she continued to use them.
I have a hunch that Ginny Mae's dad played a role as
well. The more he treated his daughter as his special
can-do-no-wrong little girl, the more he undermined his wife's ability to
tame her tantrums.
Girls with a tendency to excessive anger need a strong
parental unit. Divide and conquer can be the daughter's highly effective
strategy for taking charge, and that's to everyone's detriment, hers included.
2.) The second theory, positing biological
predispositions, is particularly ably set forth by Barbara Oakley in her
book Evil Genes.
Written to come to terms with the life of her deceased
borderline sister, the book seeks to understand the biological factors that can
underlie this syndrome. Could biological factors explain a personality
characterized by quickness to take personal affront in situations that others
would not, quickness to anger escalations by which she controls others, and a
tendency to unscrupulously manipulate situations for personal benefit?
While the book does tend to lump borderlines,
sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists in a relatively undifferentiated
diagnostic heap, there's justification for this muddying of the diagnostic
picture given how much overlap these syndromes seem to have with each
other.
I absolutely disagree with this. At this point most professionals
disagree with this as well. There is a great deal of difference between all of
these diagnoses. Most notably in the ability to express and feel emotions,
experience self-awareness, and recover, which are all possible for Borderlines.
I myself am sympathetic to Oakley's biological theory,
having had in my practice two families in which one daughter in a set of girl
twins appeared from infancy to be "borderline." The aggressive
twin would pick on the sister, repeatedly causing her to cry and suffer
pain. This pattern continued or worsened as the twins grew older.
The parents gradually gave up, creating collapsed hierarchy with the
difficult twin ruling everyone in the family.
I have treated similar patterns in other families, with
siblings rather than twins, in which the parents could never come to terms with
a difficult child who was eventually labeled borderline.
Typically, one aspect of the inefficacy of the
parents was that the difficult daughter showered affection on the dad, and hid
her aggressiveness toward others in the family from him. As a result, the
dad never accepted the mom's assessment that the problematic child was
disturbed and excessively disturbing to others. With a divided parental
unit, the difficult child continued to conquer and rule the roost.
3.) The third theory, positing prior
trauma, also merits credibility.
While my work as a psychologist focuses mainly on
adults and couples, I often work jointly with an energy therapist, my colleague
Dale Petterson. In one session Dale treated an attractive third-grade
girl named Bonnie. Bonnie looked to me quite borderline. She
immediately brought to mind for me young Ginny Mae. (please continue on
next page)
Like Ginny Mae, Bonnie could be charmingly cute.
At other times, according to her mom, Bonnie would become sullen,
provocative, play the victim role, and then strike out, mostly verbally, at her
siblings and her friends. Bonnie's Mom, who accompanied her
to treatment sessions, seemed to be warmly empathic and appropriately
authoritative as a parent. She did report that from infancy Bonny was a
needier-than normal child, needing to be held far more of the time than her
siblings had needed when they were babies, and engaging more parental attention
than the other kids in the family. Still, the young girl's frequent anger
outbursts were wearing down the patience of her parents and sibs, and she
seemed to get into considerably more frequent spats than most kids of that age.
Using techniques from the treatment method invented by
Bradley Nelson termed The Body Code, Dale helped Bonnie and her mother to
identify an incident that had occurred in Bonnie's nursery school when she was
three years old. Another child in her class had entered the classroom
when Bonnie was in the room alone. That child, known as a bully, had
terrified Bonnie. The minute they identified this incident, Bonnie's face
clouded over. Suddenly a cloudburst of tears erupted. As Bonnie
later described it, "I began to vomit out tears." When the
sobbing episode had passed and the tears had dried, Bonnie described feeling a
huge sense of relief. From that point forward, the frequency of her
fighting with other children radically diminished. Even more importantly,
her self-confidence began to flourish, and she became a vastly happier and
emotionally robust child.
Energy therapy techniques, I believe, are
especially essential in treatment with borderline personality patterns
for neutralizing psychological reversal (the tendency to be
self-sabotaging) and the deeply held subconscious belief, if it is
present, that "I am not lovable." Without reversing these two
phenomena, treatment is unlikely to make massive or long-lasting progress.
Of all the hypothesis presented this one resonated most with me.
Talking to my mother I didn’t begin to get extremely disruptive until I was
about 12, but I was much needier than both my siblings and I displayed
abandonment issues beginning from the time I was 2.5 years old. My mother told
me I was actually very charming, calm, and seemingly happy for most of my
childhood, but I was also very anxious and didn’t like to be left alone, sleep
alone, or to leave my family.
4.) The fourth hypothesis is that people
who function in the manner of a person with borderline personality
disorder need to upgrade their emotional self-regulation and conflict
resolution skills.
Borderlines explode instead of engaging in
problem-solving. Living with them is like living in a field of land
mines. Whatever their childhood experiences, to be successful in adulthood
they need to learn skills for handling anger by exiting instead of
by exploding in a manner that risks harming others and themselves as
well.
Borderline functioning involves a pattern of
experiencing difficulties through the lens of victimhood. Once they
feel hurt, up pops the mantra "I'm a victim so I have a right to
victimize you." Lacking effective relationship repair
tools, people with borderline habits make matters worse after upsets by aiming
to get even instead of healing the wounds. Angrily getting even is
just a wrong idea of how to enjoy gratifying relationships.
I find this disgusting. This is actually how my Evil-Ex used to
operate. He felt the world was out to get him, so he would get it first. He was
malicious and vengeful. I’m sorry, but no. I know how it feels to be treated
how horribly I’ve been treated. I would never in my life want anyone else to
ever feel that way.
Similarly, when they want something and fear they may
not get it, people with borderline personality patterns typically lack how-to's
for creating win-win solutions, a skill that's essentially for sustaining
harmonious relationships.
This may be were being an engineer has helped me personally.
Creative solutions are something I’m pretty good at. I also tend to be someone
that likes to take care of other people, especially people that I’m close to.
Therapist will tell you that my problem is actually putting enough effort into
thinking about myself and not just into the other person, because I will do too
much for other people to the detriment of what is good for me.
The
moral of the story?
First and foremost, borderline behaviors do cause
people to want to get away from them.
But this is not the most well rounded of articles and clearly doesn’t
illustrate everyone with BPD.
Second, with regard to the cause of the tendency to
create emotional turbulences, I believe that all four theories of how and why
borderline personality disorders develop merit consideration in assessing the
sources of borderline personality disorders. In any given case, one, two
or most likely all three factors may turn out to be relevant.
I think they’re certainly relevant, but I’m not sure that there is
enough here to quite cover everything. I like a little more neuroscience in
some of my psychology.
Finally, the most important question is how to use
these understandings to enable people with borderline personality
syndromes to enjoy more gratifying lives and smoother relationships...if they
want to. Too much success at getting their way via anger can make it hard
to accept that what seems to work for them in gaining domination is what makes
them losers in able to sustain positive relationships.
----------------------------------------------
Susan Heitler, PhD, a Denver Clinical psychologist, is
author of multiple publications including From Conflict to
Resolution and The Power of Two. A graduate of Harvard and NYU,
Dr. Heitler's most recent project is a marriage skills
website, PowerOfTwoMarriage.com.
