From Cute Little Girl to Borderline Personality

One of the prominent commonalities usually found in folks diagnosed with BPD (borderline personality disorder) is their fear of abandonment. Could it be possible that women and men with BPD fear abandonment because they do things that motivate people in their lives to want to get rid of them? Their angry behavior, for instance, is a losing formula for how to make a relationship last.

I am in no way intending to blame the victim. People with borderline disorders are victims of their emotional hyper-reactivity, often stemming from earlier-in-life traumas and a resultant hyper-reactive amygdala. At the same time, the fears of a person who fears abandonment are totally appropriate because that person's provocative behaviors invite rejection.

I also am not saying that the behavior of people with borderline disorders is on purpose. I am saying, though, that high-intensity negative emotions, and especially high-intensity expressions of anger, can drive others away.

Why would someone want to abandon a person with BPD?

Allowing a person who acts in hurtful ways to remain involved in your life may sign you up for too much emotional turbulence. The kind of BPD emotional over-reactions I am referring to are the kind that bite off your head with their anger: "Off with your head!" like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland.

Note that all people with BPD do not rage in this way. Many suffer silently. Some, however, definitely do.

I learned this lesson the hard way, from experience.

Fortunately, the experience was short. It ended however with my behaving in a rejecting manner that at the time I could hardly believe was in my behavioral repertoire. I was responding to the situation as a worn-out parent and a protector of my children, not from my therapist perspective. Using the tone of voice my mother used to refer to as 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 6-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. This is by no means behavior that I would normally do.

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

The Triggering Event

It started when I invited six cute little girls to join my soon-to-be-7-year-old daughter and our family for a birthday weekend in the mountains. We live in Colorado. 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 the girls, that is, 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 among the trees, every cluster of two or three girls that included Ginny Mae ended up with tears, anger, yelling and sometimes even hitting.

The repeated eruptions of emotional upset turned me into a firefighter. By the end of the weekend, I was exhausted. The last fight, an argument Ginny Mae initiated with several of the other girls about who would ride home in which car, finally flipped my switch. I transformed from warm helpful host to a sternly rejecting, fed up, totally overwhelmed, protective of the other children, angry 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 the words forcefully to be certain that Ginny Mae got the point. Though she lived just a block or so down across the street from us, from this moment forward I never again wanted her to appear in my world.

I succeeded in ejecting Ginny Mae.

I pretty much succeeded. I never saw Ginny Mae 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 also ended up attending my daughter's same college. Fortunately, my daughter by then understood that Ginny Mae was herself the victim of her habit of picking fights. By then, she and I understood that Ginny Mae suffered sadly and badly. Ginny Mae herself was the main victim of her overly intense emotional reaction patterns.

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 has become particularly effective with clients who show borderline traits like Ginny Mae's—patterns of emotional hyper-reactivity, seeing situations and people as all good or all bad, having a divisive impact on groups (splitting), misinterpreting situations in ways that lead to feeling like a victim, and repeatedly putting themselves in situations that prove hurtful to themselves.

This incident with Ginny Mae, though it happened now over 30 years ago, continues to intrigue me.

Specifically, how do some young people, male and female, develop personality patterns that create chaos and fighting wherever they go?

Four theories currently common in the psychological literature come to mind for me when I work with clients who show borderline patterns.

One possibility is that the problem began with the parenting they received, parenting which had 'collapsed hierarchy." Collapsed hierarchy refers to parenting in a manner that conveys to the child that the child has more power than the adults in the family.

A second hypothesis is that their tendency to create chaos comes from biological sources.

A third explanation might be that adult individuals with borderline personality disorder begin to be particularly emotionally sensitive in response to an experience of trauma 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.

In addition, Mom may have been 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.

I have a hunch that Ginny Mae's dad played a role as well. The more he treated his daughter as his special can-do-no-wrong little girl, the more he undermined his wife's ability to tame her tantrums.

Girls with a tendency to excessive anger need a strong parental unit. Divide and conquer can be the daughter's highly effective strategy for taking charge, and that's to everyone's detriment, hers included.

The second theory, positing biological predispositions, is particularly ably set forth by Barbara Oakley in her book Evil Genes. That's her title, not mine, as it can sound quite harsh. The book however makes interesting observations.

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 a 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.

Like Ginny Mae, Bonnie could be charmingly cute. At other times, according to her mom, Bonnie would become sullen, provocative, play the victim role, and then strike out, mostly verbally, at her siblings and her friends. Bonnie's Mom, who accompanied her to treatment sessions, seemed to be warmly empathic and appropriately authoritative as a parent. She did report that from infancy Bonny was a needier-than normal child, needing to be held far more of the time than her siblings had needed when they were babies, and engaging more parental attention than the other kids in the family. Still, the young girl's frequent anger outbursts were wearing down the patience of her parents and siblings.

Using techniques from the treatment method invented by Bradley Nelson termed The Body Code, Dale helped Bonnie and her mother to identify an incident that had occurred in Bonnie's nursery school when she was three years old. Another child in her class had entered the classroom when Bonnie was in the room alone. That child, known as a bully, had terrified Bonnie. The minute they identified this incident, Bonnie's face clouded over. Suddenly a cloudburst of tears erupted. As Bonnie later described it, "I began to vomit out tears." When the sobbing episode had passed and the tears had dried, Bonnie described feeling a huge sense of relief. From that point forward, the frequency of her fighting with other children radically diminished. Even more importantly, her self-confidence began to flourish, and she became a vastly happier and emotionally robust child.

Energy therapy techniques such as Bradley Nelson's Emotion Code, I do believe, are especially essential in treatment with borderline personality patterns. They seem to be able to neutralize psychological reversal (the tendency to be self-sabotaging). They can neutralize also the deeply-held subconscious belief, if it is present, that "I am not lovable." Without reversing these two phenomena, treatment is unlikely to make massive or long-lasting progress.

The fourth hypothesis is that people who function in the manner of a person with borderline personality disorder need to upgrade their emotional self-regulation and conflict resolution skills.

People with borderline disorders explode in anger instead of calmly engaging in problem-solving. Living with them is like living in a field of landmines. Whatever their childhood experiences, to be successful in adulthood these children do need to learn skills for handling anger. They need to learn to exit the situation instead of by exploding in a manner that risks harming others and themselves as well.

Borderline functioning tends to involve a pattern of experiencing difficulties through the lens of victimhood. Once they feel hurt, up pops the mantra "I'm a victim so I have a right to victimize you." Lacking effective relationship repair tools, people with borderline habits make matters worse after upsets by aiming to get even instead of healing the wounds. Angrily getting even is just a wrong idea of how to enjoy gratifying relationships.

Similarly, when they want something and fear they may not get it, people with borderline personality patterns typically lack how-tos for creating win-win solutions, a skill that's essential for sustaining harmonious relationships.

The hyper-reactive emotions of someone with a borderline disorder pose extra challenges. Collaborative problem-solving dialogue generally only works if both participants are operating from a calm zone. When people feel angry, therefore, they have to be able to pause and even exit the problem situation to give themselves time to return to a calm emotional state. At that point, though, skills at win-win problem-solving can create a happy ending.

The moral of the story?

First and foremost, fair or not, borderline behaviors can cause people to want to get away from them.

Second, with regard to the cause of the tendency to create emotional turbulence, I believe that all four theories of how and why borderline personality disorders develop merit consideration. In any given case, one, two, three, or all the factors may turn out to be relevant.

Finally, these understandings can enable people with borderline personality syndromes to enjoy more gratifying lives and smoother relationships...if they want to. Too much success at getting their way via anger, however, alas, can make it hard for people with borderline patterns to accept that what seems to work for them in gaining domination makes them losers in sustaining positive relationships.

I am a Denver clinical psychologist and the author of multiple publications including a book and workbook for learning the skills that make relationships last, The Power of Two.