Many family members, loved ones, or relationship partners of those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) (non borderlines) often think and believe that the borderline in their lives is just seeking attention when they engage in self harm or self-harming behaviour.
Why Do Borderlines Often Discuss Their Troubled Pasts Repeatedly?
Those with Borderline Personality Disorder – especially if they aren’t getting treatment – not only often discuss their troubled pasts but they are re-living them more often than not. Troubled aspects of the borderline’s past are triggered in many ways but most commonly and most often through attempts to relate to others. This is the primary basis of so much of the behaviour (and often abuse) that family members or relationships partners of those with BPD (non borderlines) see and often have imposed upon them.
Borderline Personality Disorder – The Inner Child
Each person diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder has the lonelist inner child. Until and unless the inner child is embraced through therapy the borderline continues to live a life split-off from him or her – dissociated from this lonely, needy, inner child that is in tremendous pain. Borderlines need to meet, greet, and learn how to soothe that lonely inner child in order to get on the road to recovery.
Everyone has an inner child. Do those diagnosed with BPD have the loneliest inner children? Often those with BPD abandon and re-abandon their aching and terrified inner children over and over again which in large part is the reason for so much of what is dubbed “borderline behaviour”. I urge borderlines to make the choice to get to know and to free their inner children. It is a vital part of healing.
Radical Acceptance – The Pathway to Freedom
Whether you have a mental illness, personality disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, love and care about someone who does, or whether you are stressed out, often anxious, or if you have been sexually abused or had a traumatic or even a merely difficult up-bringing (most have some wounds from childhood) or consider yourself to be healthy and just fine Radical Acceptance can and will enhance your overall quality of life and your spiritual experience in and of everyday life.
Toward Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder leaves those diagnosed with it and family members or loved ones alike often puzzled as to what to do and how to cope. It is important for both the borderline and the non borderline to continue to pursue a clearer understanding.
Relationships: The Borderline Dance of I-Hate-You-Don’t-Leave-Me
“I hate you, don’t leave me” is a borderline mantra. It is a theme driven by a lack of known true self and primitive fear and anxiety generated by profound intrapsychic wounds in early developmental years by those later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This dance or dynamic of pathological regressed relating on the part of those with BPD is the root cause of so much pain for those with BPD and those who love and care about them in relationships. It is a central causative reality as to why so many relationships fail.
Can a Non-Borderline help or Rescue a Borderline?
Can a non borderline help a borderline? Can a nonbp rescue a borderline? From my experience as both someone who had BPD and as a non borderline in a relationship with someone who had BPD (after my recovery) my answer is – NO. Those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder must take responsibility for their own lives, personality disorder, abandonment wounds, abandonment fears, abandonment depression, and more to the point, they must take responsibility for their actions, words, and their own recovery.
What Is Abandonment?
Abandonment has often been thought of by many to be of a physical nature – as in desertion and neglect or primarily of an emotional nature – as in when a child is not nurtured or given the necessary attention and healthy love to feel safe and secure.
Both of these situations or realities do constitute forms of abandonment. There are other types of abandonment that are often significant in the lives of those who end up diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.
If one has experienced the most prolific and painful wound of all, the core wound of abandonment without any balance for that experience, any subsequent loss and/or abandonment in life can turn your life upside down. Each and every loss or abandonment is experienced as it happens with the added pain of layers and layers of repressed pain and unresolved grief.
