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Emotional Dysregulation, Pseudo-Borderline Behavior and the Original Wound
Pseudo-Borderline Behavior: Post Romantic Stress Disorder (Pt.2)
Posted September 9, 2009
In the first article of this suite, we considered how we often choose a relational system because, in part, that relationship activates a memory map that leads back to an Original Wound, or because we are attempting to revisit, re-shape or fix a relationship associated with that wound. These habit patterns left unexamined and without revision because of a failure to recognize the source of the choice, can lead us to a dysfunctional emotional state that ranges from passive resignation to pathological mourning.
Object relationships are, in and of themselves, neither bad, nor good; they are neutral. Returning to the language of Jung - language made considerably more palatable by writers like Robert A. Johnson and Jean Shinoda Bolen - there exist, for all of us, universal archetypes and complexes, which lead to the development of object relationships. Recognition of an archetype activates a complex and, to one degree or another, influences how we establish and experience both our object relationships and our social relationships.
What influences how we establish and experience an object relationship is determined, in part, by the template that we hold for that object, and its associated complex. If you have a "good enough" mother, your Mother Complex might be activated by a person or situation that balances independence and vigilance. If you were raised an orthodox Roman Catholic, your Father Complex might be activated by a person or situation that offers clear structure and strict consequences, and so on. Plainly put, both unconsciously and super-consciously, we tend to go with what we know.
More to our point here, relationships driven by object representations often break, or, at the very least, become uncomfortable, for two reasons. The first is that the person exercising the object is not fully in relationship to their partner; they are, in part, in relationship to the relationship. The second is that the partner is an unwitting accomplice to the person exercising the object and, unless this is somehow revealed, -- as in the case of Imago therapy where the complicity of the partners is part of the evolutionary process -- the partner has no program to follow.
In either case, the relationship is, ultimately, inauthentic and eventually becomes untenable under the weight of its archetypal imperative(s). That's a really fancy way of saying that, when we are in the grips of an object relationship, we are quite often dancing to a tune that no one else hears.
What this creates for us, eventually, is a state of interior dissonance. As we are trying to jam our actual relationship into the template of the ideal - for good or ill -- to which we are clinging and we begin to discover that this just doesn't work. Eventually, this leads to a sense of disenfranchisement and disconnection -- a vague feeling of unease and not quite belonging that remains to us indefinable, but is connected to the palatable primally wired fear and anxiety of being left behind by the tribe to die in the forest alone.
Our reaction to this state of dissonance often leads to a degree of emotional dysregulation that can look very much like something almost pseudo-borderline. Our responses can range from the withdrawal and social dissonance of the demure borderline to the desperate and socially untenable behavior of the violent borderline.
In some ways this reaction makes a great deal of sense in that, by definition, the actual BPD patient feels consistently and universally disconnected and disenfranchised. What we are describing is a similar situation state in that it is driven by the inability to resolve the dissonance between our expectations about an object relationship and the reality with which we are confronted. Basically we find ourselves in an extreme state of trying to manage someone else's emotions in order to get our needs met, but, again, the only one playing the game is us.
This circumstance might be likened to a Tibetan singing bowl, which behaves much like a stemmed crystal glass when you run your finger over the rim. With the singing bowl what you do is run a wooden pestle around the rim of the bowl and it "sings". In untrained hands (here, we are referring to someone unaware of their attempts to exercise an object relationship) the bowl will sing at first and then the vibration will make the pestle start to bounce on the outer side of the rim. The resulting harmonic dissonance quickly builds to a resonant sound that can be quite unbearable, even tortuous. Something wholly beautiful is thus transformed into something wholly undesirable because of a lack of understanding of how the thing works, despite the fact that it is apparently working.
Ultimately, we are all individuals. We are born alone, we live alone and we die alone. The cross-weave within the fabric of society that binds us together as a community is, in part, formed by these archetypes, complexes and object relationships. An awareness of these elements can make that fabric stronger or tear it apart. Working toward an understanding of how that fabric is woven, where a thread starts and where it ends, can bring us to a broader vision of ourselves, our community and the larger global community in which we live.
© 2009 Michael J. Formica, All Rights Reserved
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