The Nightingale Center

Are You Living a Soap Opera with a Borderline?

By Kathleen Brizendine, M.A.

Picture a ten-year-old schoolgirl who lives on the borderline between craving and despising the company of her best friends. She and her gang embrace one another and then tease one member until she cries. Borderline Personality Disorder describes an individual whose self-image remains half child and half adult.

Mirroring physical childbirth, primary caregivers hold the normal child's emerging emotional self within their own emotional womb until that child is able to maintain the integrity of selfhood on its own. Due to trauma or genetics, growth of the core personality of a borderline is arrested before emerging fully from the emotional womb. The self is not able to stand alone for any length of time. Because they are so needy and fragile borderlines see all other personalities criteria of "good caregiver" or "bad caregiver". As such others appear benevolent or sinister with no area in between. This judgment regularly swings 180 degrees within moments.

Self-image, interpersonal relationships and facial expressions of a borderline reflect these dramatic flip-flops. Open trust becomes righteous loathing and back again at the slightest provocation. The inadequately differentiated adult self of a borderline dissolves into childish anger or tears when the actions of another individual appear less than perfectly suited to the borderline's current emotional and physical needs

Exquisitely sensitive to environmental cues, a borderline is constantly frantic to avoid abandonment. "Abandon others before they abandon you" is the strategy of the borderline. They experience intense abandonment fears and inappropriate anger even when faced with a realistic time-limited separation. For example a legitimate change in schedule by a loved one, or the end of the 50-minute hour at their counselor's office might throw a borderline into feelings of hopelessness, panic or fury. These emotions are directed indiscriminately between self and other. A borderline might feel that they are hopelessly bad one moment in the next moment become actively furious with the other person.

Dating a borderline is crazy-making at best. Idealizing a potential lover at the first or second meeting, demanding a lot of time together, and sharing the most intimate details early in the relationship is the usual pattern. Soon they may switch for no apparent reason from idealizing to devaluing their lover. The reason given might be that the person does not care enough, or give enough or is not "there" enough. A borderline can empathize with and nurture others with unique sensitivity but this carries a serious payback in the form of the borderline's assumption that the nurtured person will "be there" for them through thick and thin, preferably forever. A borderline regularly demonstrates several of the following behaviors at home, at work and/or socially:

• Unstable, intense interpersonal relationships
• Rapid behavioral transitions between adult and child modalities
• Frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, real or imagined
• Destructive or impulsive behaviors in two areas such as spending, sexuality, addictions, or driving
• Talks about feelings of emptiness
• Anger problems
• Repeated suicidal threats, gestures, or behaviors
• Physically self-destructive behaviors
• Severe, stress-related worries that someone wants to hurt them
• Inability to account for periods of time