Archive for the ‘A.J.’s 2007 Articles’ Category

Loved ones of those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are constantly searching for the answer or asnwers as to why the person with BPD in their lives does what he or she does. Loved ones also can’t understand why the person with BPD doesn’t do what he or she won’t do. Loved ones are often confused about and/or by the behavior, choices, actions, or inaction of people in their lives who have BPD. Why do people with BPD do what they do is a question A.J. Mahari, in her capacity as a life coach is asked.

Are you a loved one in a significant other relationship or family relationship, with someone who you suspect or know has Borderline Personality Disorder?

Are you confused and hurting because you don’t know whether you are coming or going? Are you hurt and/or upset often? Are you experiencing this boy/girlfriend or spouse or partner as loving one minute, angry, raging, and/or abusive the next minute? Are you walking on egg shells?

The question I am asked most often in life coaching, and there are many, relates to what I think is the confusion of many loved ones of people with BPD.
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Whether or not the question is asked in these words or not, most coaching sessions include this question phrased one way or another, <i>“Why Does The Borderline Do What He or She Does?”

And usually after that part of the many coaching session and emails I get each week from non borderlines who are seeking deeper understanding of what is going on their relationships, loved ones - non borderlines – go on to describe very painful and often tragic experiences with those with BPD. And even in the face of all that many borderlines do to nons – including all forms of abuse – even physical abuse – non borderlines continue to wonder what they can do to create change or help the borderline – rescue or save the borderline – and to make the relationship better.

Bob W., of Ottawa, Ontario, related the following to me: “I have a girlfriend who really acts in ways that I find strange and very hurtful. Ways that leave me feeling crazy actually. Is it me? She can be very loving one minute and then suddenly fly into these very frightening rages. I really don’t understand what she’s raging about. It really seems to me that much of what she rages about is from whatever is in her head and not really from anything actually going on – does that make sense? I feel like I am always walking on eggshells. Often, in fact, usually, after each rage, and I have been physically assaulted now 6 times during her rages, she will cry and say that she didn’t know what she was thinking or why she did what she just did. She says she loves me a lot. She can be so sweet. Then she accuses me almost daily of cheating on her. I am so confused. She often disappears for hours at a time with no explanation whatsoever.”

“If I want to go out or go home, when I leave she cries and if I decide to stay when she cries because I think that is what she wants me to do she says I am crowding her. Then he put Next thing you know she will tell me how wonderful I am and how handsome I am only to turn around seconds later and tell me I am full of myself, rude, uncaring, and ugly. How do I make sense out of this? Is it about her abandonment issues? She also is drinking and using drugs and most often lies about both. Can you help me? I am really suffering.”

Mary Armstrong, from the U.K., asked me, in a life coaching session, “I think I am married to a man who likely has BPD. I have been in this roller coaster marriage for 30 years. He can be a very decent and caring man on the one hand. On the other hand he often will just fly into a rage over what seem like endless triggers. There aren’t even enough egg shells for me to walk on anymore. He is very moody. His moods are dark and dangerous.

I have tried and tried to get him to go to therapy. He went a couple of times but really only gave it lip service and refused to go back. Finally, a few years later he did go to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for a while but absolutely nothing changed. He told me that he was sexually abused as child. I really feel for him. I know he’s in a lot of pain. He only rages and gets abusive with my, my children (now adults) and no one else. Everyone I have tried over the years to talk to about him listens but doesn’t seem to believe me really. The really weird thing to me is that if I try to talk about how I feel, scared, or anxious, and those kinds of things he goes nuts. It seems like if I am okay – he is okay. I don’t understand this. This life I’ve  been leading is really taking a toll on my health now. I am 66 years old and left to wonder, there must be more to life than this right?”

People with Borderline Personality Disorder are, even when they don’t realize it, in a great deal of pain. However, each one of us can only address our own pain. We cannot influence or make someone else want to heal their pain. If the borderline you are with refused to go to therapy and really work at it then you have to rationally know that nothing is going to change. At this point any hope you are holding onto is false hope.

Non borderlines who put most, if not all, of their focus on the borderline risk losing themselves and living very unhappy, unfulfilled and stressful lives.

Non borderlines often justify the behaviour of the borderline in their life. One non borderline wrote to me describing many similar things as the two nons above did but she made a point to say that although the borderline in her life – her husband – raged at her and verbally and emotionally was doing a lot of damage to her, at least, he didn’t hit her.

What happens to people who get involved with those with BPD that they can rationalize verbal and emotional abuse and think that it is okay or choose to “take it” thinking it isn’t important or something because they haven’t been hit? And how is it that so many nons stay with borderlines who have hit them, verbally and emotionally also abused them and who will do this time and time again?

Are you one of those confused and hurting loved ones? Are you putting up with unspeakable pain, misery, unpredictability and unhappiness? If so, why? I can’t tell you why you are making the choices that you are making or what you “should” do, but, I can tell you that you deserve much better and challenge you to really think about the choices that you are making. What is the pay-off for the choices that you are making? What is your investment in that pay-off?

 In an audio program I have available now for loved ones of those with BPD Breaking Free From The Maze of BPD – Recovery For Non Borderlines” I address these issues (described above). Issues that in one way or another, most, if not all my non borderline life coaching clients are wrestling with and trying to understand. I know that this audio program, from all the feedback I’ve received, really will give you the food for thought and the understanding that you may still need to hear from someone else to know that they aren’t alone and that they aren’t crazy.

If you are a non borderline and living in the kind of situations and relationships that the nons above are I hope that you will think about purchasing this audio program and take the journey that I present for you in it to go deeper and to think about what it is that you really want and need in your life.

As someone who has recovered from BPD, and who then was in a relationship with someone who has BPD, I can tell you that doing the same things, living the same life, putting up with the excuses, the borderline behaviour and lack of personal responsibility cannot be changed by you = no matter how hard or how long you try.

I ended the relationship with the borderline I was with because it was crazy-making, painful and unhealthy. I was not prepared to, in any way, settle for that. I did try to rescue my borderline ex and so I speak from experience when I say that as non borderlines it simply cannot be done. If you can believe that, if you know
that, at least, intellectually, then you must ask yourself, today, what am I doing and why?

My question to you today is if you are still stuck in the painful circles of worrying about or wondering why borderlines do what they do, what about you? What about you? I could actually, as I do, in many of my articles and ebooks, explain most everything to you about Borderline Personality Disorder and why borderlines do what they do – and if you want to understand more please do check out those articles and ebooks, but the truth is this – no matter how much you know about, or understand BPD you cannot rescue, save, or change the borderline in your life.

I had BPD for 33 years of my life. I know it inside and out. I write about it. I have these web sites, and guess what, I still ended up, not only in a relationship with someone with BPD, but trying to rescue, help, and save them, and humbly, I say to you, that in spite of all that I do know about both sides of BPD  I could not save my borderline parents or borderline/narcissistic ex at all – I had to save myself. Each and every one of us can only effect change in our own lives – we cannot do this in the lives of others, no matter how much we may love them or care about them – and not even when we NEED that change to save a relationship – not even then.

I know you know this in your head. You really do. However, your heart has other investments in this person with BPD in your life. Right now, if you are confused and hurting, it is time to listen to and follow your head – calm, cool, unemotional logic is what will help you to save yourself.

My audio program might be a very helpful and supportive exploration for you of what might still have you confused or even in denial. I hope that you will find  a way to stop negating the reality of your situation. Haven’t you suffered enough?

And please know there is no magical amount of suffering, even, that will bring the borderline around because you so want and need them to change.

You need to begin, if you haven’t already, to radically accept who and how the person in your life with BPD is.

The more you are confused and hurt the more you need to sit still, find some space, and take stock of what all the red-waving flags are trying to get you to pay attention to. From this type of introspection, you can then begin to figure out what you truly need and want in your own life.

 © A.J. Mahari 2007

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Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is highly associated with the verbal abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, physical abuse, and/or domestic violence often suffered by those who are non borderline. The propensity for abusiveness in those with BPD is instigated by the narcissistic injury that is at the heart of the core wound of abandonment. 

Those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or those with BPD who may not even know they have it, are more likely than the general population to be verbally, emotionally/psychologically, and physically abusive.

The reality of this is such because borderlines lack a known consistent self and they struggle with abandonment fears and abandonment depression that stem directly from a primal core wound of abandonment that arrests their emotional and psychological development in the very first few months of life.

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This arrested development impacts most, if not all, areas of relating and leaves borderlines unable to interact in age-appropriate healthy ways. Ways of relating that unfold in the present and that aren’t layered with deep intra-psychic pain – pain that is unresolved.

The roots of abuse in BPD, particularly in intimate significant other relationships with Non Borderlines have their genesis in the borderline’s re-living of this deep intra-psychic pain. Pain that is triggered through attempts to be emotionally intimate with someone else. The intimacy that non-personality-disordered people enjoy is stressful and overwhelming to the borderline. It enlivens the borderline’s worst nightmare – the unresolved pain of the core wound of abandonment. It arouses all the maladaptive defences of the borderline because he/she re-experiences the terror and panic of either his/her past experience of feeling annihilated or engulfed and/or his/her fear of being annihilated or engulfed, often alternately, when trying to be close to someone one else.

This sets up an approach-avoidance conflict, a “get-away-closer” style of trying to relate that has its roots in the “I hate-you-don’t-leave-me” struggle of the borderline who experiences any withdrawal of intense, close, (albeit also threatening) intimacy, attachment or bond as a threat to his or her safety at best, and entire existence (psychologically) at worst.

Add to this that when there is any distancing or break in the intensity and symbiotic-like closeness (if in fact closeness is ultimately achieved) the borderline then fears, and/or feels abandoned.

This conflict of fearing or re-experiencing annihilation versus engulfment and then the re-experiencing of the fear of or actual feelings of abandonment that the borderline experiences, often subconsciously, in trying to be in relationship to other, causes the borderline to be triggered back to his/her original core wound of abandonment feelings in such a way as to trigger the primal feelings of helplessness, loss of control, needs equalling survival, thwarted needs being akin with the death of the lost self. This whirlwind of unregulated emotion meeting with fear and distrust generates the original feelings of rage that this core wound of abandonment aroused in the first place.

The core wound of abandonment, when one is very young and experiences it, is the experience of psychological death. It is intense and arouses the borderline to fight for survival while they experience the sheer terror of feeling like they might actually just die or be killed by what they are feeling. This heightened state of arousal is both psychological and biological – it is physiological. It is a strong drive to survive and rage is at its core. Rage is the most primal feeling generated and the most protective defence that a young infant can muster to try to have the caregiver return to once again provide some sense of being for the infant.

Feelings and reactions of rage are experienced by those who go on to develop BPD so early in life that they precede cognitive and verbal development. This is what makes rage so primal, so intense, and in the case of the borderline so raw and unmanaged. It is pain that has long-since been dissociated from and abandoned by the borderline. This abandoned pain of BPD is the ignition switch that needs only the hint or flicker of an emotional flame to ignite a combustible, all-too-often abusive rage like no other.

This is what the borderline regresses to. When the borderline is in a regressed and to varying degrees dissociated experience, the non borderline partner is experienced by the borderline as that withdrawing or abandoning caretaker from the past that was needed for literal physical and psychological survival.

When the non borderline partner, living, On The Other Side of BPD isn’t focusing 100% of his or her attention on the borderline (especially if you have actually attained closeness) and there is any experienced or even perceived break in the symbiotic connection that enables the borderline to feel somewhat secure (like the non having to attend to a child, or go to the washroom or any simple thing) – even when stressed by the closeness – and already beginning to cycle to the fear of the loss of it – the borderline will often react from this cesspool of ever-churning rage which is the protection for the very vulnerable and young abandoned pain of the borderline.

All rage is not expressed the same way. All borderlines do not abuse in the same ways. As you will see in my next article, there are many different forms that the abuse generated by this narcissistic woundedness takes. Some borderlines rage, literally, they scream and yell and throw things or hit people. While other borderlines (known as quiet or “acting in” borderlines) may rage in such passive-aggressive ways that the non borderline might not realize that the borderline is raging.

This inherent free-floating, always-at-the-ready rage, if you will, is the root source of a lot of the varying types and styles of abuse that non borderlines are bombarded with. It can often be sudden and seem to come out of nowhere because the source of it is deep inside the psyche of the borderline.

Borderlines lack a known self. They have not been able to emotionally or psychologically mature beyond a very early stage of emotional developmental arrest. An emotional/psychological arrest that takes place when the developing authentic self essentially experiences a death, is lost to the borderline, and is then supplanted by the false self.

Life, for those with BPD, is to say the least, one devastatingly painful experience of trying to live and exist in the absence of a known self in the fragmented pieces of the blurred experience of the here and now enmeshed with the past. It is one perpetual separation-individuation crisis void of the big picture until and unless it can be resolved.

Borderlines do not learn how to cope with the feelings that they have in the here and now, that trigger past intense unresolved feelings of the actual loss of the psychological self.

Borderlines lack the ability to hold in any consistent or congruent way object constancy. They experience relatedness as being as fragile as out of sight out of mind. A bond that a non borderline feels exists between him/herself and the borderline whether he/she is in the presence of the borderline or not is not something that the borderline can psychologically remember, trust, or believe. Object constancy or any connectedness or attachment that could be defined as “secure” is fleeting for the borderline who has not been able to develop object constancy.

This loss of the authentic psychological self is re-experienced over and over again and the fear of it and the fear of the pain of it grows each and every time one is triggered back to it. This builds both anger and a continually proliferating inability to cope with it in any constructive way. Anything short of intense symbiotic connection that is uninterrupted will once again send the borderline cycling back around the re-experiencing of everything associated with the core wound of abandonment.

As the borderline cycles back to this enraging and vulnerable – which isn’t tolerable – place of abandonment depression (Masterson) and abandonment trauma so too begins the apex of the likelihood of abuse.

Along with abuse of all sorts, the result of this cycle is often a punishing talionic impulse acted on in the heat of the triggered-dissociated moment by the borderline in what are known as repetition compulsions

Most borderlines, until and unless they have substantial and successful therapy are not consciously aware of what I am describing here. Some are totally oblivious to their behaviour. Some see their behaviour as a means to an end and take little to no responsibility for it or any of its consequences. Others understand that they have acted poorly again, pissed someone off, have once again made real the threat of and/or fear abandonment and loss, but they do not understand why they’ve done it. Similarly they have no clue how to stop it. Others project it out onto the non borderline and think that everything that has come from them was actually done to them by the non borderline. This can be a crazy-making experience for the nonbp.

This is of little consolation to the non borderline, however. This does not, at all, justify the abuse. However, clearly I write about this here to say that if a borderline is not getting treatment, and I mean for real, not just going through the motions type of treatment, there is no logical reason to even begin to believe that the abuse that any borderline in your life is perpetrating upon you will stop.

The very thing that you most want from your borderline (or wanted if you’ve left the relationship) in terms of what it means to have a relationship and to relate was not ever even on the table because the borderline is not an emotionally/psychologically mature being.

The borderline is still a very wounded and very young child, emotionally, in terms of the ability or understanding of how to actually relate to others. This is the case because what borderlines do is not relate to others for who they are but as an extension of the borderline – and more to the point – as an extension of the parent (usually mother) that most failed them or by whom the borderline most feels abandoned, for whatever reason(s).

The borderline has no idea who he/she really is. He/she often feels as if he/she does not exist if the borderline does not have an other to project all of his/her feelings out onto and an other from whom they then require the mirroring back of an identity of what is a painful lack of known self.

In her book, The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple, Joan Lachkar, Ph.D., writes, “For the borderline the focus is primarily on bonding and attachment issues. Borderlines often form addictive love relationships (including normal dependency), they form parasitic relationships, and project their needs in hostile, threatening ways. Because their defenses and demands are excessive, borderlines tend to remain in the dance, rarely achieving their aims.”

The dance that Lachkar refers to, in my past, for me, as I look back now many years into recovery, when I was borderline, was one of seeking to re-invent, re-experience, re-do, the ruptured relationship with my mother that caused me to lose my authentic self to the defensive and manipulative abusing narcissistically defended false self in such a way that would once and for all satiate the developmental needs arrested at the time of my core wound of abandonment and teach me how to actually bond without feeling like it would kill me.

The dance, for me, was one of seeking to recreate and recapture that symbiotic relationship that I never had the chance to have with my mother, through others, in an end-justifies-the-means kind of way, that was, at times, very abusive to others in my life, in the past, on my part.

That dance was a complicated punishing and unforgiving dance of codependency through which I sought to resolve what for years seemed like the unresolvable woundedness that was the source of my rage and the abuse that I perpetrated against others in the name of trying to actually be psychologically born which is necessary in order to get on and stay on the road to recovery.

Most, if not all borderlines, have, as a result of this core wound of abandonment, a well-developed defence mechanism of narcissism and also have varying degrees of narcissistic injury that manifests in the and through the false self.

This narcissistic injury or wound and its subsequent usage as a defence mechanism along with the narcissism seen in the false self of those with BPD is not to be lumped together with Narcissistic Personality Disorder – they are not one in the same at all.

Borderlines who live from a false self and who do not have an active and keen awareness of their own core wound of abandonment and their abandoned pain are not capable of age-appropriate adult intimacy or relating.

It is from the core of this emotional dysfunction that borderlines end up abusing either themselves, others, or both. Non borderlines, are often on the receiving end of many types of abuse. The very nature of borderline relating makes for a dysfunctional and toxic relational style that non borderlines will benefit greatly from learning more about so that they can deepen their understanding of BPD and also take care of themselves. Many non borderlines come to realize that they want and/or need to Break Free from the puzzling and painful maze that is borderline relating. Relating that is more often than not abusive.

If you are a non borderline and you are being abused by someone with BPD, you need tp take care of yourself. It won’d do you or the borderline any good to deny or excuse his or her abuse and think that having a personality disorder justifies it in any way – it does not. You cannot control what a person with BPD does, but, you can make choices about what you will and what you will not live with. Once you make that choice you need to identify and make known boundaries that are firmly explained and firmly enforced consistently.

Many non borderlines do not realize that the sane choice for them, if the borderline in their lives is not getting help and/or cannot take personal responsibility and stop and change any and all abusive behaviour and/or relating, is to leave, break free and take care of themselves.

 © A.J. Mahari, January 20, 2007

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Those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are often abusive to loved ones, family members and/or (ex) partners – non borderlines and that abuse stems from the borderline’s the core wound of abandonment core wound(s) of abandonment.

The Abandonment Fears of those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) Lead To Loved Ones – Non Borderlines – Being Abused by Many With BPD

Those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are often abusive to non borderlines due to a lack of interpersonal skill and a lack of emotional maturity. It is the narcissistic injury of the core wound of abandonment that renders them incapable of the mutuality and reciprocity that is required for healthy adult relating.

The definition of BPD, in the DSM-IV, lists the first trait of BPD as, “Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.” It is these very frantic attempts to avoid real or imagined abandonment that see those with BPD often be very emotionally manipulative. Borderlines manipulate others and even entire environments because they experience both as extensions of themselves.

• The Puzzle and Mystery of Hope on the Other Side of BPD
• Inside The Borderline Mind
• The Shame of Abandonment In BPD
• Breaking Free of The Borderline Maze – Recovery For Nons
  
• Facing the Facts of BPD – On The Other Side For Nons
• Overcoming Denial About BPD and Love

           Audio Programs For Loved Ones of BPD © A.J. Mahari

Lacking a real known authentic sense of self, borderlines, in and out of this lack of known self, have no boundaries between where they end and the non borderline begins. This is often experienced by non borderlines relating to borderlines as an impenetrable wall of narcissistic self-absorption of which the borderline seems very unaware.

If the non borderline trying to relate to the borderline is not validating them, the borderline will experience that as negating, rejecting, and/or abandoning. Even the slightest comment experienced as invalidating by the borderline can set off an abusive eruption of unmitigated rage that can seem to come out of nowhere.

Some with BPD express that rage in the form of aggressive verbal, emotional, and/or physical abuse. Others express it in much more quiet, passive-aggressive sniping ways that can be crazy-making and undermine the reality of the non-borderline.

Borderlines, fearing abandonment, often relate to others with the expectations of younger children. That is to say, they are re-playing out the unsatisfactory and unresolved abandonment from a parent or parents in their intimate relationships. This does not auger well for the intimate partner of most with BPD. Lacking interpersonal skill and emotional maturity the borderline is more often than not abusive because he/she does not know any other way to be. They are often effectively raging young children in adult bodies.

• 3 Non Borderline Ebooks
• 6 Non Borderline Ebooks
• 3 Core Wound of Abandonment in BPD Series of Ebooks
• Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder The Lost Self The Impact of The Core Wound of Abandonment Ebook 1
• Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder The Rock and a Hard Place in BPD The Impact of The Core Wound of Abandonment Ebook 2

Ebooks © A.J. Mahari

When many borderlines aren’t raging they are demandingly needy in ways that cannot be soothed or satiated by the non borderline because he/she is not the parent that the borderline is regressing to relate to over and over again. This regression occurs after the false self of the borderline has sensed or felt some actually unfolding or perceived abandonment. The false self of the borderline kicks into defend at all cost mode and that sets the stage for the narcissistic and often abusive behaviour of many with BPD.

The regressive nature of borderlines who risk beyond their abandonment fears and anxieties is prevalent and pervasive. It leaves many a non borderline feeling invisible and like they do not exist as anything more than a conduit for the borderline’s efforts to satiate his/her insatiable needs.

Borderlines have not developed the emotional maturity to relate to an intimate other in healthy, mutual, and reciprocal ways. The result is often an inordinate amount of time and energy spent focused on the borderline.

Abuse is rampant from many borderlines in the form of aggressive verbal abuse, threats, intimidation, as they rage at others upon whom they’ve displaced their unresolved issues of abandonment fear, abandonment depression, abandonment anxiety, and insecure attachment issues.

When a borderline acts out their unresolved abandonment issues any real hope for intimacy in an adult relationship is annihilated in much the same way the borderline felt annihilated when they were first abandoned.

The verbal, emotional, and/or physical abuse of those with BPD, is a reenactment of the very abandonment and rejection that they suffered as a young child. Borderlines are developmentally stuck in a phase of early childhood development that was interrupted by the trauma of abandonment.

Until and unless a borderline can heal the unresolved grief of the core wound of abandonment they will continue to be abusive as they play out their pasts and transfer their unresolved childhood issues onto intimate partners who are such parent figures to them that they are invisible as the intimate other that they may still hope to be to their borderline partner.

© A.J. Mahari, February 28, 2007