The reality that if you have Borderline Personality Disorder, you must experience yet another abandonment in order to recover from Borderline Personality Disorder is explored.
For those with Borderline Personality Disorder the reality is that One More Abandonment In Borderline Personality Will Lead to the Road to Recovery. That abandonment is the borderline’s active choice to abandon his or her previously abandoned pain, to face and welcome in that pain, to tolerate its distress, to regulate the emotions connected to the pain, to grieve the pain, and to eventually let the pain go.
A borderline who cannot recognize or who refuses to recognize and subsequently articulate his/her intra-psychic pain is stuck. Even in a therapeutic situation or relationship there is little that can be done until the borderline develops a certain amount of self-awareness. There must be willingness on the part of the borderline to admit and acknowledge that much of what she thinks she knows and much of her relational style is:
- a) a re-enactment of past trauma
- b) not age-appropriate
- c) further alienating him/her from self and others which then causes even more pain that is “felt” and expressed in destructive self-sabotaging ways; namely through rage, push/pull, needy and demanding, lying, sudden cold distancing, manipulation and so forth.
Does this mean that one can never change?
