What You Need to Know About Borderline Personality Disorder - Part ll

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. So are we simply talking about bipolars who hate getting dumped? Not really. These are people who may go to pieces when their therapist signals that time is up at the end of an appointment. Clearly, something is amiss.

Then there is the issue of unstable and intense relationships (alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation). It’s not like bipolars don’t experience unstable  relationships, either, but the idealization/devaluation dynamic adds a whole new twist. Nearly all of us have been on the receiving end:

We meet someone. We hit it off. In the eyes of that someone, we are wonderful, we can do no wrong. Naturally, we feel that we have finally connected with an individual who truly understands us. Then, one day, things unaccountably change. That someone begins to find fault with us. Next thing, we’re the Devil Incarnate. Next thing, we are being subjected to unpredictably outrageous behavior and abuse.

What happened? we can only wonder.

Now, on reflection, we begin to see that there is something more to those so-called “mood” symptoms than just mood, that cannot simply be explained away as bipolar or depression. The phenomenon we are dealing with may quack like a duck, but - clearly - it isn’t a duck.

The borderline experts are very good at providing explanations, but it was only after listening to a different type of expert - namely a patient - that a lightbulb went off.

The occasion was the 2006 NAMI national convention that featured a patient on the panel at an ask the doctors session devoted to borderline. “Anne” was very smart and personable, with a degree in creative writing, but the best job she could get was answering phones.

Those who live with individuals with borderline describe the experience as akin to walking on eggs. By contrast, Anne compared her dealings with people to "walking on shifting boards." The world is far from a safe place, she related, and the ground beneath her could collapse any second. When that happens, she went on to say, something inside of her so overwhelms her that she loses it. Or she reacts by immediately changing her situation. Sometimes slitting her wrists does it for her. Other times, it may be impulsive sex.

Clearly, this is a world far different than the one bipolars occupy. We are talking about an environment they perceive as threatening and unpredictable, even when they try to fashion it and the people in it as rosy and wonderful. We may see those with borderline as emotionally volatile and unstable. In truth, that is how the earth and every person on it appears through borderline sensibilities.

Stay tuned for Part lll ...