Unlike "The Core Wound of Abandonment" Ebook which deals with the actual core wound of abandonment itself, the cause, and the consequences in the life and experience of those with BPD and those who try to relate to them, "The Abandoned Pain of Borderline Personality Disorder" Ebook, deals with and examines the pain that those who develop Borderline Personality Disorder end up abandoning. It is this very pain that causes distorted thoughts, leaves the borderline believing that everything being felt is actually happening in that unfolding moment - which is often not true in reality - and it is the pain that is re-lived over and over again in triggered regressive repetition compulsions. It is this very overwhelming pain that borderlines feel compelled to abandon because it threatens the survival of the false self. The false self that rose up and supplanted the emerging true self when the borderline (as a very young child) was unable to cope with the agony and fear generated by unmet and thwarted needs causing him or her to essentially place this pain outside of the self setting up the alienation from this pain that is at the heart of much of the continued suffering that those with this most complicated personality disorder experience.

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It is from my own experience with Borderline Personality Disorder, and recovering from it, that I put forth this examination of the nature and scope of abandoned pain as the driving force underneath and/or behind all things Borderline.

The process of recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder, for me, truly began when I first learned that there was a tremendous amount of quality life outside of what I thought, felt, and what I thought I knew. It began when one very significant therapist was able to get deeply enough inside of me as to begin to be a “parent figure” and to “re-parent me” teaching me most importantly that I had to face all of the pain that I was in (even though I didn’t know then I was in tremendous unending pain) and endure embracing it no matter how much it would hurt or how much grief it would cause me. Truly, with the help of many dedicated therapists along my journey each and every one helped me to clearly see that the only way out of the pain was through it.

The only way to move beyond my abandoned pain was to abandon myself once more. Abandon my false self that is. This abandoning of false self that is necessary in order to crack the shell of abandoned yet trapped pain inside of those with BPD can only take place when one truly seeks to find one’s true self and identity.

The abandonment of your pain is a very prolific, yet, profoundly self-destructive way to exist. It is not living. It is merely existing in what is an ever-increasing, all-too-familiar self-annihilating suffering. Those with Borderline Personality Disorder, by the very nature of being personality disordered, have not learned how to feel their pain in healthy and manageable ways.

Central to one of the main root causes of Borderline Personality Disorder is abandonment. Abandonment leads to profound pain. Pain that must then be abandoned. This abandonment, and its subsequent abandoned pain is the origin and the teacher of the distorted belief that pain must be escaped at all cost.

All human beings experience pain. Those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) experience a great deal of life much more sensitively than do most in the general population. The traits that define Borderline Personality Disorder are characteristics that are found in all people. The degree to which they are present in quantity and intensity is what denotes those who have BPD from those who don’t have it.

Those who have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are said to have little to no emotional skin. Why this is, is still being debated. Whether those diagnosed with BPD have some genetic predisposition to it coupled with being raised in an invalidating, or perceived to be invalidating environment is not known for sure at this point. What is known is that those with BPD experience arrested emotional development in their early formative years for whatever reasons. They do not develop the skills to cope with their very profound sensitive temperaments.

Borderlines experience agonizingly wounding emotional pain. In many cases the causes of such pain are easily understood. Lives in which sexual abuse, abuse of all kinds, an invalidating and punitive environment, abandonment, neglect and the like are present. For others the causes of the source of their pain remains more of a mystery. Nonetheless, for anyone who has BPD, regardless of what environment they were raised in, the pain is very real.

Repressed unacknowledged and unresolved emotional pain is the hallmark of this personality disorder. Emotional pain in tandem with an inability to cope with the pain that is often pushed out of active consciousness because it can feel so scary and overwhelming that many with BPD mistakenly believe that this pain lives outside of them and has a power and force big enough to kill them when in fact this abandoned pain has become a part of the false self that they have had to live through in order to just survive. Actively holding this pain at bay results in the paying of a very heavy price day after day emotionally and often physically as well and only prolongs and/or multiplies Borderline suffering.

Along with this ever-expanding stockpile of emotional pain, the inability to acquire the skill necessary to cope with this pain has long-lasting consequences that due to the nature of this personality disorder tend to accrue over the course of one’s early life, teen years and adulthood.

With the multitude of pain that those with BPD are in and the inability to cope with that pain, most if not all of the subsequent maladaptive attempts to escape or manage pain actually (consciously or subconsciously) exponentially increase the pain. An exponent, in a mathematical context, is a notation which indicates the number of times a quantity is multiplied by itself. Therefore, I apply this concept to the consequences of the abandoned pain of those with Borderline Personality Disorder because abandoned pain, over time, does indeed multiply itself and fuel an ever expanding suffering.

This ever-increasing pain, in turn, increases the active symptoms/traits of BPD which correspondingly lead to increases in maladaptive coping mechanisms. This exigently multiplies the effects of the original abandoned pain in recapitulating cycles of behaviour that cause the borderline to re-live and re-experience original wounds that have been repressed in regressive, triggered, re-enacting ways that are not age-appropriate or situationally-appropriate in the here and now.

This exigently multiplied abandoned pain coupled with the maladaptive coping mechanisms adopted by those with BPD to protect themselves from feeling all of this pain that they have no idea how to cope with are what are so often thrust out upon others making BPD a personality disorder that not only affects its sufferers profoundly but that also profoundly affects and often hurts those who care about or love or have anything to do with those who have BPD.

This is another catch 22 of this personality disorder. It is often at its worst in any and all relational contexts thus making relationships very troublesome for all. The duality of BPD being largely a relational disorder in its presentation (not totally in its genesis) also multiplies and intensifies the difficulty presented to all affected by BPD. The more those with BPD try to relate, or the more others try to relate to them, the more they will experience (as will others) the negative, biting, self-destructive tumultuous mystification of souls in the tremendous suffering that results from the abandonment of their pain and are not able to (without therapy) incorporate the reality of this pain into their sense of self or true identity. Thus, at the heart of BPD, I assert, based upon my own experience, is the false self glorified in all of its protective self-destructive duplicitous nature.

Just as those with BPD must learn to deal with facing their abandoned pain and learning the necessary skills needed to emotionally mature beyond where they experienced arrested emotional development so too must those who care about someone with BPD learn how to manage the fallout of BPD skillfully enough to avoid being engulfed in it themselves.

© Ms. A.J. Mahari, November 2005

For much more on the abandoned pain of Borderline Personality Disorder, including, the purpose of borderline pain, why it cries out to be addressed through toxic and often abusive borderline behaviour how to honour your pain, how and why those with BPD can and need to choose to heal their pain instead of endlessly and rather unsuccessfully trying to escape it and/or just put temporary and self-defeating attempted quick-fixes on it, how unacknowledged grief gets in the way of recovery, the paradox of emotional pain and the reclamation of the abandoned pain of BPD you will want to purchase my ebook, "The Abandoned Pain of Borderline Personality Disorder"

To Purchase the 3 "Core Wound of Abandonment" Series of Ebooks on BPD by A.J. Mahari - "The Abandoned Pain of BPD", "The Legacy of Abandonment In BPD" and "The Shadows and Echoes of Self - The False self in BPD" please click on the "Buy Now" button below: