Intervention tidbit #3: Borderline eggshells and land mines

A client is probably about to marry a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, Persecutory-Type.*  I cannot yet tell if deep within him he actually wants to, or if in the majority he is depressively terrified to lose this lifeline dependency, or if he is little-boy scared to say “no” to the Master.  I suspect all three.

The diagnosis is an educated guess at this point, as I have not seen the woman but have only heard the man’s detailed, anguished accounts of her behaviors over the course of a dozen sessions.  Based on these it is obvious that we are looking at a seamless personality, a mindset, that justifies violence, prisoner-of-war-type monitoring and ownership-level control, regardless of whether her mood is rosy or hellish, if she is idealizing him or devaluing him.

I am not optimistic.  He has asked my opinion and assessment any number of times and I have told him.  It seems not to be what he wants to hear.  I have had to look at him and say – “I can’t help you bend over and stand up at the same time.”  I have actually said a hundred different things from bleak to hopeful, theoretical to practical.  She will need to go into her own therapy.  I wondered to him if we were wrong to talk so much about Borderline and, through him, convey the conjectural diagnosis to her: Maybe she wouldn’t have angrily resisted it had she found it herself, or heard it from a therapist who broached the subject in a nice, delicate way.

The most recent intervention, though extremely simple, may be the strongest, the most cleansing of his battered sickened mind.  The suggestion was to give her his own rendition of this:

“We all have problems, personalities.  Mine is difficult, yours is difficult.  There is no ‘one’ Borderline Personality.  Maybe you qualify for the generic idea of it.  But you are the person I love – that’s the person, or ‘personality’ that I don’t want to change.  But I will not tolerate certain behaviors.  You will not hit me, scratch me, shove me, nothing at all.  You will not try to control me, give me ultimatums, demand to know who I talked to at work.  There will be no unfairness such that you can buy something but I can’t, we go where you want but not where I want, you can do something hurtful now because I had an indiscretion in the past, before we began dating.  And when I hear this kind of blatant irrationality from you that makes no sense in the real world, I will shoot it down and will not watch it get up again.

“For my part, I will continue to be a good person.  But I will be standing up, not bending over.

“Have a nice day.”

The book Stop Walking On Eggshells advises the family member of a Borderline to save himself, guard his self-esteem, help the sick person, “stop taking the Borderline’s actions personally,”  “detach with love,” not “delay your own happiness,” face one’s “issues about being needed,” and more.  I’m sure this information will be helpful to some partners, but it misses essentials.  Howard I. Weinberg, PhD, is quoted: “If you care about someone with BPD, remember that you did not choose the borderline because you are sick.  You chose this person because they were important to you.”**  This is an incompetent and dishonest statement: Psychotherapists should know it is our unhealth that is attracted to unhealthy people: Only a wounded person will be drawn to the persona of a Borderline, a persona informed by underlying severe childhood abort and dysfunction.  Only a sick person will stay with one.  And though I may have missed it in my perusal of the book, I did not see any help for the individual who is yet free and facing the choice and danger of committing to a Borderline.

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* There are no specifiers within the DSM’s description of Borderline.  Christine Lawson poignantly describes the Queen, Waif, Hermit and Witch types (and subtypes), and there may be other writers’ typologies.  It makes sense to perceive that some Borderlines are predominately persecutory, vicious and violent; some more sexualized and without violence; some rageful and self-injurious, etc.

** Paul T. Mason, MS and Randi Kreger, Stop Walking On Eggshells – taking your life back when someone you care about has Borderline Personality Disorder, Second Edition, 2010, New Harbinger Publications, Inc., pp. 96-97. 

Pessimistic Newton

Early in my counseling career I noticed what may be a psycho-analogue to Newton’s third law – ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’  Though less reliable than physics, it is:

The specific kind of psychic injury a child suffers is the specific kind he feels impelled to suffer upon others later in life.

A man who was humiliated as a child feels right to humiliate his own children or other people.  The patronized girl will someday condescend to those who strike her as inferior, or possibly, superior.  The “sarcastrated” child will, as father or coworker, shoot sarcastic darts and believe it’s just humor.  The physically abused boy presents a good, though imaginary, illustration of this process.  Picture a young person in whom a muscular indentation is pounded, progressively, into his chest by an angry father.  At some point the indentation, under great pressure, will feel forced to push itself back out, explosively.  A poisonous splinter is embedded in him: It is that splinter, with that poison, that needs to come out, not a laugh, or passive-aggressive vengeance, or codependent martyrdom, or some soft-spoken grievance.  Individuals who practice such convoluted mis-translations of their true feeling are neurological liars to themselves.

Alice Miller describes one retribution shard of what I believe is a bigger hand grenade:

“Why, indeed, did these parents behave with so little empathy? . . . Why did they both stand there laughing, eating so slowly and showing so little concern about the child’s obvious distress?  They were not unkind or cold parents; the father spoke to his child very tenderly.  Nevertheless, at least at this moment, they displayed a lack of empathy.

“We can only solve this riddle if we manage to see the parents, too, as insecure children – children who have at last found a weaker creature, in comparison with whom they can now feel very strong.  What child has never been laughed at for his fears and been told, ‘You don’t need to be afraid of a thing like that’?  What child will then not feel shamed and despised because he could not assess the danger correctly?  And will that little person not take the next opportunity to pass these feelings on to a still smaller child?  Such experiences come in all shades and varieties.  Common to them all is the sense of strength it gives the adult, who cannot control his or her own fears, to face the weak and helpless child’s fear and be able to control fear in another person.

. . . . “Disregard for those who are smaller and weaker is thus the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness: it is an expression of this split-off weakness.”*

DeMause’s theory of the “poison container” describes a reciprocal dynamic:

“The main psychological mechanism that operates in all child abuse involves using children as what I have termed poison containers – receptacles into which adults project disowned parts of their psyches, so they can control these feelings in another body without danger to themselves.  In good parenting, the child uses the caretaker as a poison container, much as it earlier used the mother’s placenta as a poison container for cleansing its polluted blood.  A good mother reacts with calming actions to the cries of a baby and helps it ‘detoxify’ its dangerous emotions.  But when an immature mother’s baby cries, she cannot stand the screaming, and strikes out at the child.  As one battering mother put it, ‘I have never felt loved all my life.  When the baby was born, I thought he would love me.  When he cried, it meant he didn’t love me.  So I hit him.’  Rather than the child being able to use the parent to detoxify its fears and anger, the parent instead injects his or her bad feelings into the child and uses it to cleanse his or herself of depression and anger.”**

I once read a study that related toddlers’ repellent social personalities to the kind of parenting received.  In daycare, they did not bully other children in common ways but by a peculiar invasive badgering, a persecutory hovering.  One can picture how the parent’s mental smothering and picking and demeaning torture into her child – an unwrapped festering package from her own parents – would come to discolor the child’s innocent and good character.

Is it possible that there is a unique poison, a special hue of hurt breathed by children of a cheating parent, which compels them twenty years later to be unfaithful to their own spouse?  If so, it would have to be discerned in the body-feeling through the Focusing process,*** too complex for emotion words and psychiatric labels.

Regressive psychotherapy offers an explanation for the equal-and-opposite dynamic.  Pain, we know, must be discharged by holistic expression such as crying or raging, twisting and grimacing, doubling-over and “primal screaming” and vomiting and whimpering – whatever the body knows, contains.  Defenses protect the child who can’t express – protect him from others and from himself.  If we conceive each kind of pain having its own chemistry, it makes sense to see that chemical, and only it, lying beneath the defense, whether we send it to another person or change it from lead to fake gold.

I value this Newtonian logic in a client because he or she needs to feel the exact pain and bring it home to its source, its parent.  Sometimes we know this pain only through its revenge: anger or contempt or narcissistic haughtiness toward others, including the therapist.

Casual though it is, this idea may help us understand those who murder in signature ways.  Children who set fires or torture animals; the beheadings; choking or smothering (the BTK strangler).  We might go deeper inside the equation that a killer is someone who already feels killed, dead or un-alive,**** to the particular chemistry of his deadness.  What happened in Dennis Rader’s childhood that was answered by watching a child or adult failing to breathe?  What inner death might a future terrorist feel –

“It is not surprising that these mutilated, battered women make less than ideal mothers, reinflicting their own miseries upon their children.  Visitors to families throughout fundamentalist Muslim societies report on the ‘slapping, striking, whipping and thrashing’ of children, with constant shaming and humiliation, often being told by their mothers that they are ‘cowards’ if they don’t hit others.  Physical abuse of children is continuous. . . .”*****

– that lets him desecrate the temple of a man’s mind and soul?

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* Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, revised edition 1997, Basic Books.  Part 3, “The Vicious Circle of Contempt,” pp. 71-72.

** Lloyd deMause at psychohistory website.  Article, “The History of Child Abuse” at http://psychohistory.com/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse/.

*** See Eugene Gendlin, PhD’s books on Focusing, plus the website and youtube videos.

**** Search references to James Gilligan, M.D., maximum security prison psychiatrist and Shengold’s concept of “soul murder” in this blog’s posts.

***** deMause’s chapter, “The Childhood Origins of Terrorism” at http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emotional-life-of-nations/chapter-3-the-childhood-origins-of-terrorism/.

Our nervous system creates our philosophy

A client, early twenties but unsettlingly savvy about his psychological self, has for much of his life felt he is the only human being.  Earliest-age sense of difference and alienation, even from his friends, evolved into chronic depersonalization and derealization, living in the clouds.  “I can relate to not being able to interface with reality” was one of several fluidly uttered variations of his self-sense.  Parents’ divorce, father’s Asperger’s-like cloister-like silence and isolation, mother’s “drama” and being beaten by boyfriends, and their moving often probably grew the roots of two branches: his early, even infancy-stage perceptual-neurological desynchronization from live stimulation – nervous system being “out of phase” with others, mother then the rest of the world; and the resultant safety-making dissociation from everything.

I believe I could empathize with the young man because I’ve long been aware of my own fundamental “out-of-phase” with people.  It doesn’t stop me from loving and empathizing and even communing with others: I guess we are too complicated to be ruled by one neural strand.  But it is real enough to have taught me how birth trauma and social gaucheness and shyness and “social phobia” and dissociation and “amotivation” and dysthymia may all be one family.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many people could, if so inclined, track layers of fronts of connectivity to others within their psyche.  Before my latency-stage anxious disconnect grew, I had rich loving feelings toward a friend or two; but I would have felt crippled or anesthetized to touch them: A basic out-of-phase already existed.  At all times when I touch an object or a pet or a person, I know I am not fully feeling it.  The wall of separation is impossible to describe, both subtle yet deep as the ocean.  But I know it is the master hand behind my cognitive states, my view of life, my philosophies, my maleness, the sometimes ungainly-artificial feel of my walk, the feminine-textural curves of my signature, my potent or obnoxious turns of phrase, my preferring chewy to crunchy foods, the quality of my eye contact, of all my relationships, the substance and possibilities of my future.  I remember a young Asian woman, during my first counseling internship, who told the social worker that she didn’t know how to walk.  She, too, was trapped, wine in hand, in Montresor's crypt.*


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* Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Intervention tidbit #2: A thread tied to everything

A client in his early 20’s, massively personality disordered, happy-manic one day and blasé suicidal the next, knew this about himself: When he found an interest, any interest, it faded the moment he revealed it to his mother, and died when she approved it.

One thread in a cloying mother-hating mother-needing stunted character, this curiosity might have just struck my prejudice as immaturity.  But then I remembered experiencing the same strange “disappearing act” in my teens and twenties.  The simple naming of an interest or goal to my mother’s accepting face would end it.  I remembered, too, having read some inspirational fluff many years later that reframed the problem through rose-tinted glasses: ‘When you have a dream, guard its preciousness, don’t share it with the world’ – or some such.  The inspirational wisdom did not explain why.

As I see it in myself and in the young man, this one strand connects to every facet and turn of the human time-kaleidoscope.  Here are some personal notions about its sources.

Many teens and young adults have interests that are either unreal or sapped by depression.  The seeds of curiosity and covetousness embedded in human potential may never grow or are killed.  What forms then are symbolic illusion or depressive shadow interests.  A young man “wants” to be an ophthalmologist, but he doesn’t care about eyes.  Teens I see think they like marine biology – but not the life sciences.  I initially majored in philosophy.  Had I looked inside, I would have felt the subject to be an ivory tower prison.  A suicidal seventeen-year-old “wants” to be a lawyer like all the men in his family line.

Such interests will usually reveal themselves, in time, as ghosts no matter what.  But when the illusion is named to the parent who created the illusory person in the first place – the never-validated, unseen child – the unreality spreads like flash fire within and blinds him.  A ghost can’t be seen in the white light of it.

What if the parent disagrees with her adolescent’s idea or vision?  Here is the fork in the psyche.  Some tenuous egos will disappear at the parent’s nix, but others will feel themselves harshly defined by (and only by) the contrast and conflict.  They might have been the “oppositional-defiant” latency child whose “no!” prevented engulfment by the neurotic parent’s power, maintained a sliver of identity.

Probably most of our clients have prosthetic selves, substitutes for an intrinsic good feeling nurtured in childhood.  My client was part-self-by-contrast, part-self-by-symbiosis, based in a religious and incestuous mother.  In him, an interest was a lifesaver to keep him from drowning, but which he leapt from the safety of the boat to cling to.  As we talked, I suggested the simple idea: Next time you find something that’s meaningful to you, don’t share it with your mother.  He smiled apprehensively.  This had not occurred to him.

I do not remember if he found it possible.