 SYCHOANALYTIC writers tend
to focus on identity—or, to be more precise, the lack of a stable
identity—as the core of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). But in
my experience, given what I know about identity
(it’s all a fraud—a social illusion),
the real core of BPD, and other personality problems with Borderline elements,
is rage. Rage is a raw and primitive form of
anger as a response to intellectual, physical, or
emotional abandonment.
The Rage from
Feeling Abandoned
If you have problems
with borderline symptomatology, and if you look closely, you will see that
all of your interpersonal difficulties in both the past and the present
were—and are—based in feelings of rage as a result of being—or
feeling—unnoticed and emotionally abandoned. You will find that your
whole being is given over—consciously or
unconsciously—to inflicting hurtful
revenge on the world around you for neglecting your
emotional and physical needs.
In essence, this
rage is a dramatic attempt to “get
back at” the person who injured you. Even
masochistic self-abuse (also called
self-mutilation) can have a component of this revenge. In cutting, for example,
you let out your rage in slow, “controlled” doses; in seeing your
blood, you see yourself showing your wound—your life’s blood—to
the “Other” who, you feel, has disavowed the value of your
life.
So, too, attempts
at suicide are attempts at revenge. “I’ll
show them! Maybe when I’m dead they will realize how miserably they’ve
treated me!”
Of course, suicide
can also have the component of a desire to silence the rage. Drugs, alcohol,
and sexuality can also be used to
“silence” the rage. But none of these attempts to distract
your attention from your rage can ever be successful. What is rage, after
all, but an infant crying because she has been abandoned? Ignoring her and
walking away won’t silence her crying. The only way to soothe her is
to pick her up and find out what she needs—precisely what your parents
didn’t bother to do.
The Rage Continues:
Pushing Away
Yes, when you
were a child, your father abandoned you
emotionally, if not also physically. Maybe your mother abandoned you as well.
And to cope with that pain, you protected yourself by pushing them away.
You found your revenge on them by becoming emotionally
closed off; you hid your true feelings from them, and you
acted out in
disobedience to hurt them.
But now, as you
are older, the rage continues. Whenever others offend you, you become enraged
and you push them away, just as you pushed your parents away. Everyone who
offends you, you push away.
|
The dynamic of
pushing away actually begins as a benign defense in childhood when,
confronted with your parents’s anger and criticism, you say, if only
silently to yourself in frustration, “Stop!” All you want is for
the abuse to stop. But then this initial protective act grows into an aggressive
act. You slowly transition from passively trying to stop the abuse to actively
getting revenge by pushing away anyone who offends you. |
|
Sooner or later,
then, you will look around and feel completely alone. “Look!” you
say to yourself. “I’m all alone! Even God has abandoned me!”
But God hasn’t abandoned you. You did it all to yourself. You pushed
them all away yourself. You pushed them away in rage.
“It’s
Your Fault!”
When children
have to cope with dysfunctional parents—especially when the mother is
demanding and the father is absent physically or emotionally—they learn
to suppress their own needs and capitulate to the needs of the parents.
Essentially, the children learn that hiding their true thoughts and feelings
is the surest way to survive.
Eventually, the
child will carry this emotional hiding right into adulthood, where it will
cause frustrating difficulties in interpersonal relationships. Always holding
back your true thoughts and feelings, you will feel constantly misunderstood.
And then something odd happens. Blind to your own psychological
defenses, and unable to see your role in the communication
difficulties, you will blame others for everything. “It’s your
fault!” You will always be at odds with others because, in blaming them,
you fail to see that you are unconsciously speaking
the angry words—“It’s your fault!”—you feared so
deeply to say to you own parents.
|
This dynamic
explains why BPD clients are so dreaded by many psychotherapists. If the
psychotherapists haven’t done their own
psychological scrutiny to immunize themselves
from from getting caught in the unconscious of their
clients, those unwary psychotherapists will find that no matter how hard
they work, no matter how much of an effort they make, it only takes one BPD
client to make them feel like miserable failures. |
|
How can there
ever be healing when those words of blame—“It’s your
fault!”—are constantly on your lips?
The Imaginary,
the Real, and the Symbolic
Now, some persons
will insist that because your original wound happened in your early infancy,
before you could communicate with language (that is, in a pre-verbal
psychological state), the psychotherapist must take on the actions of a caring,
supportive parent until you can experience pre-verbal healing, and then you
can progress to a higher, cognitive level of treatment. Well, that idea misses
the point that you are now an adult with adult language skills, and that
the point of the treatment is to give adult linguistic expression to a trauma
that overwhelmed you as an infant precisely because the
trauma could not be contained symbolically in
language.
So what does
“symbolically in language” mean? Well, here it will be necessary
to explain the three realms of psychological experience.
The
Imaginary
The
Realm of the Imaginary derives from the
pre-verbal state of childhood. As children, we need—and desire—others
to take care of our needs, but, without language, we conceive of this caretaking
imaginally; that is, as images in our minds. Hence the realm of the
imaginary is all in our heads, so to speak; it’s all based in the
expectation that your needs should be fulfilled, and it provokes
anger when your needs aren’t
fulfilled.
|
Now, when a parent
takes care of a helpless infant, the caretaking can be an act of
pure—rather than imaginary—love in which the parent is concerned
only for the infant’s ultimate good.
But once the child becomes capable of language and independent thought, then
caretaking can fall back into the imaginary realm and degenerate into mere
bribery, in which a parent “gives” only to manipulate the child
with game-playing and guilt into behaviors more
suited to the parent’s comfort than the child’s
well-being.
Even in adulthood the desire for romantic fulfillment in another person resides
in the realm of the imaginary because romantic fulfillment depends on fantasies
of someone giving you what makes you feel good. As hard as it is to
admit it, and as much as it contradicts popular culture,
romantic sentiment is based in self-indulgence,
not in a selfless love.
Furthermore,
the pursuit of happiness, which characterizes contemporary culture, also
belongs to the realm of the imaginary. Whether it be the “happiness”
of drugs or alcohol or food or sexual stimulation or extreme risk-taking
or athletic triumph or political triumph, it all points back to an infant
wrapped in unconscious bliss, protected—at least momentarily—from
the reality of its own vulnerability. |
|
The
Real
The
Realm of the Real is the place
of our essential fragmentation, vulnerability, and
death. It’s the “place” where we find
ourselves wounded and helpless. To most persons, it’s a terrifying place,
and so most persons will do most anything to hide this reality from their
own awareness. In fact, that’s the psychological function of a
symptom: to hide a horrifying reality behind mental and physical
manifestations such as addictions,
anxiety,
depressed mood, insomnia, lethargy,
nightmares, weight
gain, and so on.
Psychologically,
then, when you encounter the real you
experience a trauma. Or, more precisely stated, you
experience a trauma if you encounter the real with nothing
but symptoms and defenses from the Imaginary
Realm.
The
Symbolic
The
Realm of the Symbolic is the realm of
language. The truth is, when “bad” things happen to you, that
is reality, but when, under the guidance of someone trained to interpret
the unconscious, you learn to voice your pain openly
and honestly in language, you enter into a
psychotherapeutic aspect of the Realm of the Symbolic, and horror can be
given containment. Learning to speak about pain and
terror provides a sense of safety through a compassionate acceptance
and “taming,” as it were, of your “wild” unspoken—and
secret—thoughts and feelings. Thus it truly becomes possible to draw
wisdom from pain and tragedy. For example, as a result of talking about
dreams, or of exploring mental associations of one
thing to another, an image can be formed of the hidden desires that may be
motivating your self-defeating behavior.
To Heal the
Rage
So, to heal your
rage, it will be necessary (a) to recognize that your rage affects you to
the core of your very being. It usually takes good, competent
psychotherapy to do this—and it takes patience
and emotional sensitivity. Then it will be necessary (b) to recognize in
the moment how feelings of rage follow right on the heels of feelings
of insult, abandonment, and helplessness. And then it will be necessary (c)
to push past your fear and make the conscious decision
to respond to that insult without rage.
(a) |
The Triggers
of Anger |
|
Learn to look
for the actual events (notice the plural) that have been bothering you recently.
Take each one separately. What are all the
feelings about that event? (It won’t be just
anger, because anger is the final, hostile reaction
to all the other feelings.) When you have them all separated out, then you
have an idea of what is really happening to you, apart from the
anger.
|
(b) |
The Emotional
Bridge |
|
Next, follow
each example of hurt back into its roots in the past to other times and
circumstances when you felt the same way. Carefully scrutinize your childhood
and examine your memories of painful events to discover what you were really
feeling then, in those circumstances.
|
Remember, your
impulsive reactions to present injuries are the
unconscious expression of the emotions and fantasies
you originally experienced, but suppressed, in childhood.
|
|
|
(c) |
The
Remedy |
|
Having understood
the previous two steps, now deal with each event separately, according to
the thoughts and emotions specific to that event. Do something constructive
and creative about each problem individually, something emotionally
honest and not based in the desire to hurt the
other as you have been hurt. That is, choose something different from our
culturally popular Satanic Rule: “Do to others what they do to you.”
Choose something based in true
love.
|
Keep in mind
here that the part of you that falls into rage has
the emotional maturity of a two year old child. When you feel frightened,
it’s as if you become two years old again; you become a terrified and
angry victim, and all rationality and trust
flies out the window.
It will be important,
then, that the adult part of you be able to listen to the frightened
child part of you, as a wise adult would listen to a child: with patience
and kindness. Be gentle while the child cries and screams. Give the child
permission to cry. Then be firm in guidance. “You’re crying because
you feel unloved, right? Well, to be loved it is necessary to show love to
others. So let’s dry your tears, understand what happened, and find
a way for everyone to be treated with respect.”
|
|
|
It’s as
simple as a-b-c. And that difficult. Because, essentially, the healing process
requires that you surrender your unconscious satisfaction in
being a victim and then learn to give to the world
around you the very thing your parents failed to give to you: real
love.
You have been
rejecting love. You are even now rejecting love. Nothing in your life will
make sense until you remedy this problem.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
|
|
Additional
Resources
Related pages within A Guide to Psychology and
its Practice:
Anger
Autogenics
Training
Choosing a
Psychologist
Confidentiality
Fear of
Psychotherapy
Forgiveness
Identity
Multiple Personalities
and Ego States
Progressive Muscle
Relaxation
Questions and Answers
about Psychotherapy
Reasons to Consult
a Psychologist
Spiritual
Healing
Stress
Systematic
Desensitization
Trauma and PTSD
CONTACT ME
INDEX of all subjects
on this website
SEARCH this
website
|
|
If this website has helped
you, then
his is a
FREEWILL WEBSITE with NO
ADVERTISING. If you find this page to be informative and helpful,
please send a
