Treating The Borderline. Greenberg E

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Border clients suffer from MISERY:

M (Mother) = MOTHER PROBLEMS. They have failed to completely separate and individualize from their primary parent

I (identity) = IDENTITY PROBLEMS. Border clients face two major identity issues:

They are unable to integrate opposing views of themselves and others, probably because they relied on splitting from childhood to maintain good feelings for their mother.

To survive in a home environment where they felt unloved and ignored, borderline clients adapted by suppressing their true selves.

They created a way of being in the world that was designed to please their parents and to protect themselves, as much as possible, from the pain of this situation.

Because their sense of identity is underdeveloped and made up of disintegrated views of themselves, borderline clients often express fear of losing their sense of who they are when they are with other people.

They may even claim they don't know what other people mean when they say they have a holistic, permanent sense of identity.

They often feel as if their personality consists of fragments, "pieces of other people", feeling the complete absence of a truly stable "I".

Rather than reacting to each interpersonal situation as a whole, which is stable most of the time, the borderline client can only respond within one of his partial selves.

S (Splitting) = SPLITTING. Edge client uses splitting (separate storage of opposing affective states to prevent flooding with negative affect and, ultimately, destruction of the positive) and other primitive defenses (denial, projection, projective identification, dissociation) in order to maintain good feelings towards oneself and significant others.

Unfortunately, these defenses distort reality and prevent the borderline client from seeing themselves and others as one who can have both good and bad sides.

E (Engulfment) = FEAR OF ABSORPTION AND ABANDONMENT

These twin fears dominate the borderline client's relationships with other people. They experience any intimacy as a potential threat and, as a result, cannot find a comfortable interpersonal distance.

When fears of absorption (loss of identity due to “swallowing” by another person) dominate the painting, the client responds by maintaining their emotional or physical distance. You are viewed as an absorbing mother who requires merging.

When the fear of abandonment comes to the fore, the client may "cling" and persistently demand love and support in an attempt to soften it.

If the client has been so damaged by life that he or she can no longer “cling,” assuming rejection is inevitable, distancing and withdrawal will prevail in the picture.

Clinging and detachment can quickly replace each other even during the same session, but, as a rule, the client usually chooses one of these relationship models.

R (Rage) = RAGE. Border clients are full of anger

They often feel as if a core of inner rage is hidden inside them, which has no boundaries.

This is often combined with shy behavior and fear that by allowing themselves to feel full of rage, they will forever spiral out of control.

In fact, they have repeatedly had outbursts of rage towards people with whom they feel safe, and with everyone else they are overly kind.

They perceive their anger as a great danger, not because they are afraid to act out their hostility and hurt others, but rather because of the fear of destroying valuable inner objects.

That is, the borderline does not reach the milestone in development that Margaret Mahler calls “object constancy” (Mahler, Pine and Bergman, 1975).

This means that when the borderline is angry with someone, he or she cannot maintain a positive affective connection with that person, as if the other person was completely destroyed and ceased to exist in the emotional world of the borderline client.

Therefore, any emotional security that the borderline got from the relationship with that person also completely disappears.

Moreover, they fear that you will punish them for their rage as vindictively and cruelly as sadistic, persecuting introjects.

These fears (loss of valuable internal objects and punishment or abandonment) often force borderline clients to redirect anger (retroflection).

For clients at a higher level of functioning, this takes the form of bodily stress and self-destructive thoughts and urges (for example, thinking they are bad and insulting themselves).

Clients at a lower level of functioning can actually do physical harm to themselves.

Y (Yearning) = YOUNGER. The borderline client walks through life yearning for the perfect Other

Someone who will give them unconditional love and acceptance, permission to secede, individuation and subsequent personal growth; will be betrayed twenty-four hours a day and will not demand anything in return; and all this in the context of the incredibly tense relationship in the dyad.

In short, for someone who wants to recreate the entity

childhood experience of a happy "slider" so that the borderline can finally receive adequate parental care.

This role of the perfect loving other is often projected onto the therapist due to the particular intensity of therapy sessions with the borderline client.

Border clients are constantly watching you, looking for signs of special concern and attention (or, conversely, signs that you, too, cannot be trusted, and that you are about to devour or abandon them).