 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.
BPD therefore is not some shameful
illness that a person is born with. BPD is really just a collection of psychological defenses—all
related in some way to rage—that children acquire in childhood as a way to protect themselves
from the emotional trauma they experience in their families. In psychiatric terminology, these
defenses are referred to as the symptoms of a psychiatric disorder.
BPD Symptoms
Borderline
Personality Disorder applies as a descriptive
term to a person whose behavior is characterized by:
• |
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined
abandonment |
• |
Unstable relationships |
• |
Unstable self-image or sense of self |
• |
Impulsivity (usually involving sexuality,
alcohol, drugs, or food) |
• |
Suicidal attempts or threats |
• |
Periods of emotional volatility and
instability of mood |
• |
Chronic feelings of emptiness |
• |
Self-mutilation, cutting, and
self-sabotage |
• |
Frequent arguments, constant
anger, recurrent physical fights |
The clinical diagnosis of
Borderline Personality Disorder requires several specific criteria, but many
persons can experience some BPD symptoms apart from any clinical diagnosis.
These symptoms tend to
develop from early childhood experiences of chronic emotional abuse, sexual abuse,
physical abuse, or a combination of various forms of abuse and trauma.
That is, when children are not raised in an environment of loving guidance and protection,
but are instead mistreated and manipulated, they will be crippled psychologically and
spiritually with a smoldering inner sense of self-loathing, mistrust of others, and
rage.
Regardless of whether or
not the symptoms meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of BPD, the treatment is the
same: learn to understand that the symptoms derive from childhood emotional injuries,
and then learn to respond to injuries in the present without falling into
rage.
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 the trauma of
being—or feeling—unnoticed and emotionally abandoned. Abandoned, traumatized,
and helpless. 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 and leaving you helpless.
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 a frightened infant crying because he or she has been abandoned? Ignoring
the infant and walking away won’t silence the crying. The only way to soothe
the infant is to pick it up and find out what it needs in the midst of its
fear—precisely what your parents didn’t bother to do.
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Speaking of suicide,
let’s understand that the practice of cutting
is not a suicidal gesture. Cutting refers to behavior that cuts the skin
deeply enough to draw blood but not deep enough to cause death. The underlying
meaning of cutting is twofold. First, the cutter experiences a sense of control
over pain; that is, the cutter can administer physical pain in controlled “doses”
rather than feel completely helpless in the midst of overwhelming emotional pain.
Second, the cutter, by seeing her (or his) own blood, receives reassurance that
she (or he) is actually a living person rather than an abandoned, lifeless piece
of nothing. |
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The Rage Continues:
Pushing Away
Yes, when you
were a child, your father abandoned you
emotionally, if not also physically. Maybe he was alcoholic; maybe he was
emotionally distant; maybe he was weak and timid; maybe he was abusive; maybe
he abandoned the entire family. Maybe your mother was harsh and critical and, not
knowing how to accept you in real love, abandoned you
emotionally as well. Essentially, your parents pushed you away with their lack of
love, and they gave you the implied message, “You don’t matter.” So,
to cope with that pain, you protected yourself by pushing your parents 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. But you don’t push them away by cutting ties
with them, you push them away by making them reject you because you are so
desperate to be accepted.
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The dynamic of
pushing away actually begins as a benign defense in childhood when,
confronted with your parents’s general lack of real love you say, if only
silently to yourself in frustration, “Stop!” All you want is for
the mistreatment to stop. But then this initial protective act grows into an
aggressive act. You slowly transition from passively trying to stop the pain
to actively getting revenge by pushing away anyone who offends
you. |
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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—that is, something
unconscious—occurs. 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 in conflict with others because, in blaming them, you fail to
see that you are unconsciously speaking the
angry words—“It’s your
fault!”—that you feared so deeply to say to you own parents.
|
This hiding and
blaming can manifest in two particularly destructive forms of desire. First,
it can manifest as a desire to control circumstances to avoid being
“blindsided” (that is, taken by surprise), which will amplify the
defensive tendency to hide true thoughts and feelings; thus you can give others
the impression that you are manipulative, calculating, or untrustworthy. Second,
it can manifest as a desire to control others (“You need to do
[this or that]!”), which will more likely than not be followed by
outbursts of mutual anger. |
|
How can there
ever be healing when those words of blame—“It’s your
fault!”—are constantly on your lips?
|
The dynamic
of blame explains why BPD clients are so dreaded not only by friends and
spouses but also 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. |
|
The Trap of Seeking
the Acceptance of Others
Infants and very young
children are by nature helpless and entirely dependent on their parents’ care and
protection. Because parental rejection can threaten the children’s survival, children
develop a fear of rejection and an intuitive desire for parental acceptance.
In healthy families,
parents attend closely to their children’s needs and teach their growing children
the skills necessary to survive independently. Ultimately, the children will progress
from an all-encompassing desire for the parents’ acceptance to the development of their
own personal interests and desires, and they will be well prepared to enter society as
confident individuals.
In dysfunctional families,
though, constant blame and criticism by the parents will keep the children in such a
state of fear that the children will suppress their own interests in order to maintain
a vigilant focus on the necessity of having the acceptance of their parents.
Consequently, throughout
life this anxious focus on getting acceptance from others will define the nature of a
person’s locus of control (from the Latin locus,
place) as being external. Locus of control refers to the psychological “place” in
which a person puts responsibility for the outcomes of various life situations. Persons with
an external locus of control attribute outcomes not so
much to personal actions as to the actions of other people—or luck. Thus when you have an
external locus of control you essentially live in a perpetual feeling of frustration, always
blown about by the whims of the world around you. When you’re caught up in this state of mind,
it seems as if your life is being stolen from you. You can never rest, and you can never get
enough from life to feel satisfied. There is no room for your own interests and desires
because everyone always seems to get in your way, or let you down, or ignore you, or reject
you, and you always end up angry—and it all goes back to the
childhood pain of not getting the acceptance of your parents.
|
If you are always focused
on external things, you will always have a bottomless reservoir of resentment for your
rage to feed upon. |
|
In contrast, persons with an
internal locus of control perceive that they can
personally exert command over the outcome of any situation because their motivation is
always internal; that is, focused on their personal desires. With such a state of mind, you
will not be thwarted by obstruction from external events, and you will keep your focus on the
objective you are seeking. Even if you encounter a situation that is truly impossible (such
as changing the behavior of another person, or of preventing a natural or social tragedy)
you will still have command over your reactions to that situation.
Therefore, emotional healing
from the painful rejections experienced in childhood depends on your shifting your mental
focus away from what other persons do and toward a curiosity about your own inner
experiences. This process requires dedicated effort, but it can be done in psychotherapy.
If it is done well, you will recover a deep respect for your own personal interests and
desires, and you will experience the peace of mind of being free from the rage of a
wounded child.
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 |
|
In order to avoid
falling into anger as soon as you feel hurt by someone, learn to scrutinize
carefully each event that upsets you. Ask yourself in the moment these questions:
What are your feelings about that event? How have
you felt hurt? Feel the hurt. Feel the pain of your helplessness—but feel it
without getting angry. Notice how hurt always precedes anger because
anger is a hostile reaction to feeling hurt.
|
A common way to
block out unpleasant and frightening emotions, especially emotions of helplessness,
is with anger, allowing free reign to impulses of hatred and revenge. When you
get angry you don’t really allow yourself to feel your inner vulnerability and hurt.
All you can think about in the moment is your desire to get revenge, to defend your
pride, to do something—anything—to create the feeling that you have power and
importance. In essence, your outbursts of rage paradoxically hide your inner
feelings of vulnerability, so you never recognize the hurt you’re feeling that
triggers your hostile reaction. All the bitterness and hostility is a big puff of
smoke, an emotional fraud. It hardens your heart toward others so that you can
seal off your own emotional pain.
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(b) |
The Emotional
Bridge |
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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.
|
|
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(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 event 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 the
insanity of modern culture’s Satanic Rule: “Do to others what they do to
you.” Learn to express your thoughts and feelings to others without blaming
or criticizing them. Learn to express the hurt that underlies all your anger,
rather than just get angry.
|
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 your tears speak; understand what happened, and find
a way for everyone to be treated with respect.”
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|
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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.
When Someone You
Know is BPD
Individuals with BPD
symptoms are not bad persons, so it’s important to understand that, deep in their
unconscious, they want someone to stand up to them rather
than run from their rage; that is, they want someone to refuse to be pushed away by
their hostility and to have the courage to face their BPD rage with compassion.
It’s also important to keep
in mind that when they do explode in rage, their communication patterns tend to have the
quality of “insanity”; that is, they can be dramatically impulsive and irrational. Note
carefully that it is impossible to reason with insane
communication because it’s just a frenzied visceral outburst; furthermore, being
“nice” (e.g., appeasing, capitulating to demands, trying to avoid conflict, walking on
eggshells) in response to insane communication will only reinforce it, not cure
it.
Consequently, in dealing with
someone who has BPD symptoms, it will be essential that you use strong but sensitive
boundaries. Consider the following points when you set
boundaries to protect yourself.
If the person is in a BPD rage,
or is just blatantly rude, then use forceful and succinct containment of the unwanted
behavior.
• |
Contain the
insanity. When someone rants in BPD rage, more
often than not facts can be distorted, and trying to defend yourself against unjust or
unfair accusations will be futile. So calmly but firmly say, “That was inappropriate
and unnecessary. Knock it off!” or “Cut out the hostility! That’s a sad lack of
charity!” |
If the person is in a relatively
calm state of mind, then speak confidently yet politely to address the unwanted
behavior.
• |
Be careful not to tell
anyone what to do. Set boundaries by stating what
you will do under specific circumstances. For example, say, “If I hear cussing then I’m
going to [leave the room, or hang up the phone, etc.].” |
• |
Be willing to
teach. As an extension or the above point,
when someone speaks to you with hostility, smile and say calmly, “I’m not going to
listen to anything said with rudeness, but if you speak to me kindly then I will be glad
to listen to you. So go ahead, try saying it again, but with gentleness.” |
• |
Resist the temptation
to respond to accusatory e-mail, text, or telephone
messages. Responding to such messages puts you
in the impossible place of trying to reason with insanity. The only sane recourse is to
ignore all such messages. |
 The Spiritual Dimension of
Borderline Personality Disorder
and Healing the Rage
Shows how to heal the rage of BPD.
Available as a paperback book.
More
information |
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
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