It's not pc to blame the victim.  If a woman has fears, we should be sympathetic, right?  Or maybe not.  Maybe the fears of a person who fears abandonment are totally appropriate because that person's provocative behaviors invite rejection.  

Why would someone want to abandon a person with bpd?  Because allowing her to remain involved in their life signs them up for too much emotional turbulence. 

I learned this lesson the hard way, from experience. 

Fortunately, the experience was short.  It ended however with my behaving in a manner that at the time I could hardly believe was in my behavioral repertoire.  Using the tone of voice my mother used to call talking 'in no uncertain terms,'  I sternly told little Ginny Mae, "I will never allow you to cross the doorstep of my house again.  You are never again welcome to enter my house." 

Those words were harsh, especially for speaking to a six year old girl.  Were they words of abandonment?  Yes.  Or worse.  I didn't merely walk away from Ginny Mae.  I told her that I would never allow her in my home again.  I ejected her from my life.

My secretary describes me as unflappable.  People usually like me and I usually like them.  How could I have spoken so meanly to poor young Ginny May?

It started when I invited six cute little girls to join my soon-to-be-seven-year-old daughter and our family for a birthday weekend in the mountains.  We live in Colorado and my daughter and our family were relishing a fun weekend with the children at a cabin in the woods.

For two and a half days, the girls played with each other delightfully, all except Ginny Mae.  Every time a group of girls included Ginny Mae in their activity, fighting erupted.   Whether they played with dolls, built forts out of branches, baked cookies in the kitchen, or played hide and go seek amongst the trees, every two-some or three-some that included Ginny Mae ended up in tears, anger, yelling and sometimes even hitting.

The repeated eruptions of anger turned me into a firefighter.  By the end of the weekend, I was exhausted.  The last fight, an argument about who would ride home in which car, finally flipped my switch.  I transformed from warm helpful host to sternly rejecting, fed up, overwhelmed mother bear. 

"I do not want you ever again to set foot in my house!" I spewed out.  "You are never, that's never, to come play with my daughter again!" I repeated forcefully to be certain that Ginny Mae got the point that from this point forward she was to stay totally out of my world.

I succeeded in ejecting Ginny Mae from my world.  

I pretty much never saw her again.  Ginny Mae did however continue in the same grade as my daughter, who for years felt fearful at the sight of her provocative, quick-to-pick-a-fight friend.  

As it turned out, Ginny Mae even ended up attending my daughter's same college, but fortunately my daughter by then understood that Ginny Mae was herself the victim of her habit of picking fight.

Actually, my daughter's youthful experiences with Ginny Mae may have served to help her as an adult to understand borderline patterns of functioning.  Now a clinical psychologist herself, my daughter is particularly effective with clients who show borderline patterns such as emotional hyperreactivity, seeing situations and people as all good or all bad, having a divisive impact on groups (splitting), misinterpreting situations in ways that lead them to feel like a victim, and repeatedly putting themselves in situations that prove hurtful to themselves.  With regard to her, and my, learning this story has at least a partially happy ending.  

In addition, this incident with Ginny Mae that happened now over thirty years ago continues to intrigue me.

Specifically, how do some young people, most often but not limited to female, develop personality patterns that create chaos and fighting wherever they go? 

Four theories come to mind for me when I work with clients with borderline patterns.  One possibility is that the problem begins with their parenting.  A second hypothesis is that the tendency to create chaos comes from biological sources.  A third explanation might be that adult individuals with borderline personality disorder begin as children who are particularly sensitive and experience traumas in their youthful years. A fourth explanation may lie in a paucity of mature habits for handling emotions and for collaborative resolution of conflicts.

Let's look first at parenting glitches. 

I do think that Ginny Mae's mom may have been part of the problem.  On the brink of a second divorce, she probably was feeling highly stressed at the time.  I have a hunch too that the mom modeled anger as a means of forcing her husband and children to do what she wanted.  Perhaps also Mom was too overwhelmed with her own problems to be able to take charge of Ginny Mae.  I had a hunch that Ginny Mae used her anger to control everyone in the household, including her parents, in a classic case of collapsed hierarchy. No adults stopped Ginny Mae's quarrelsome habits, so she continued to use them.

The second theory, positing biological predispositions, is particularly ably set forth by Barbara Oakley in her book Evil Genes. 

Written to come to terms with the life of her deceased borderline sister, the book seeks to understand the biological factors that can underlie this syndrome.   Could biological factors explain a personality characterized by quickness to take personal affront in situations that others would not, quickness to anger escalations by which she controls others, and a tendency to unscrupulously manipulate situations for personal benefit? While the book does tend to lump borderlines, sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists in a relatively undifferentiated diagnostic heap, there's justification for this muddying of the diagnostic picture given how much overlap these syndromes seem to have with each other. 

I myself am sympathetic to Oakley's biological theory, having had in my practice two families in which one daughter in a set of girl twins appeared from infancy to be "borderline."  The aggressive twin would pick on the sister, repeatedly causing her to cry and suffer pain.  This pattern continued or worsened as the twins grew older.  The parents gradually gave up, creating collapsed hierarchy with the difficult twin ruling everyone in the family.  

I have treated similar patterns in other families, with siblings rather than twins, in which the parents could never come to terms with a difficult child who was eventually labeled borderline.

Typically, one aspect of the inefficacy of the parents was that the difficult daughter showered affection on the dad, and hid her aggressiveness toward others in the family from him.  As a result, the dad never accepted the mom's assessment that the problematic child was disturbed and excessively disturbing to others.  With a divided parental unit, the difficult child continued to conquer and rule the roost.

The third theory, positing prior trauma, also merits credibility. 

While my work as a psychologist focuses mainly on adults and couples, I often work jointly with an energy therapist, my colleague Dale Petterson.  In one session Dale treated an attractive third-grade girl named Bonnie.  Bonnie looked to me quite borderline.  She immediately brought to mind for me young Ginny Mae. (please continue on next page)