Borderline part 3: Justice vs. truth

 

“Betsy,” mid-30’s, with diagnosed and acknowledged borderline personality disorder, named a “principle” of justice that she adheres to. She was in angry contention with her boyfriend, “Frank”: He did not accept the principle. By use of that term, Betsy wasn’t meaning the colloquial “it’s the principle of the thing,” the quietly indignant expression of a personal feeling casually assumed to be a consensus standard of morality or behavior. She was certain that she was citing a law of human nature. The test case, here, concerned the parking space that was assigned to her apartment. An elderly neighbor had been parking his car in that space. In his disability, it was a real convenience for him. The interesting matter was that neither Betsy nor Frank owned a vehicle and did not anticipate acquiring one into the near or even distant future. Nor did they have guests who might avail themselves of the space. Betsy’s position was as adamant as intelligence and fury fused could make it: It was her parking space. She demanded that Frank confront the neighbor and order him to remove his vehicle and keep it the hell out of their rightful slot. Frank couldn’t see the point in doing that. As with any number of similar situations where Betsy found injustice in mundane places, she made this threat: Do it in your own way or I will do it with guns blazing. I believe he complied.

Over several months of weekly sessions, I had listened to Betsy’s accounts of people’s incompetence and bad character. And I will admit, the logic she conjured and the evidence she cited were consistently cogent to me. Nurses who couldn’t find a vein. Botched surgeries. Doctors’ failure to successfully petition insurance companies for alternative treatments. A landlord who screwed her over. Friends who betrayed her. Though she had been fired from several medical offices in recent years, the reason always seemed to be that she had discerned real malpractice and had gone doggedly (if not rabidly) after it.

One session, by chance or ripening insight, the scales fell from my eyes and a right idea occurred to me: “Betsy, it is not a ‘principle’ that the parking space is yours. It’s your personal ‘principle’ that has no objective correspondence in reality. It is your feeling of injustice, a feeling deeply embedded in your life, in your extremely unfair childhood. You see the world through the lens of this pain. Other people have not had your life or your bent.” She agreed, at least for a moment, and in that window I suggested that she take this fact to her couple’s therapy, where it would help her see her boyfriend as a separate person with his own valid perspective on life. Without this insight in hand, she and he would continue to fight viciously. She would never respect his personhood. She would never have a borderline personality weathered by reality.