Borderline Personality Type

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

What is a Borderline Personality? How is it formed? What are the main features and difficulties of the mental life of people with this type of personality disorder?

So what is the essence of the borderline personality? In general, it is a healthy adaptation to an unhealthy situation in childhood. How is it expressed? Every child has a perfectly healthy need to be loved, protected, and cared for.

In addition, he himself feels the desire to safely love the object of his affection (in most cases, the mother figure), to receive care from him and to trust.

What is the most important thing here? Trust in the maternal entity - mom, dad, or both. In the event that a not very healthy situation is formed in the family (there are double messages, physical violence or punishment, moral or psychological pressure), the child does not feel that he is loved just like that (just because he is) - on the contrary, he I owe everything (attention, care, love). What line of behavior does he choose? Sacrifices himself for this love. First of all, the child does not want to notice the real attitude towards himself on the part of a loved one (for example, his mother does not love him or even hates him - situations can be different), therefore he replaces reality with some kind of splitting and dissociation, hiding deep inside his ego. As a result of this behavior, he forgets his real desires, forgets who he really is. It turns out to be a complicated and confusing situation - a small, but not yet fulfilled personality put all his ego on the altar of fictional love, in fact there is no reciprocal feeling, but hope does not die and feeds the child all the time (“Well, I’ll do something else - and my mother will finally love me! I will hide all my desires deeper, crush my needs, aggression, joy ). Thus, he puts pressure on himself in every possible way to justify the ephemeral hope of receiving his mother's love. However, the adaptive behavior that was quite successful in childhood interferes with happiness and satisfaction from life in adulthood.

What other types of maternal figure may contribute to the emergence of the borderline personality? Depressive, rejecting, in principle cold mother - narcissistic or narcissistic-hysterical, psychotic (with real psychosis), etc. In general, a mother figure with a borderline personality type will bring up the same child.

What are the main features of the borderline personality? What is the point of suffering for such people?

1. Too strong emotional attachment to the mother, to some extent painful. Having matured, a person still seeks approval and love from the mother's figure. An attempt to get what you want can also extend to personal relationships with a partner - a “hungry” need is realized through a husband or wife. Relatively speaking, the borderline sees in his partner a mother and seeks approval and love from his side.

As a rule, due to the fact that the childhood trauma is not closed, the person unconsciously chooses a cold personality similar to the mother as a partner - there is an internal unconscious need to “play out” the story from childhood, to do something so that the partner finally changes his attitude, to change the situation as a whole. Why?

We unconsciously take responsibility for the fact that the relationship with my mother did not work out. If we are fully aware of the current situation, we bring it to the level of awareness, an understanding arises - it is not my fault here, my mother was cold. However, on a psychological level, involuntarily, we are trying to complete this process and make a person love himself.

2. Identity problems. People with a borderline personality organization cannot integrate any opposing traits in relation to themselves or those around them. For example, it is difficult for them to imagine and understand that at the same time they can be angry with a person and continue to love him. This spectrum of feelings is simply incommensurate with their psyche. What can be the reaction? Up to the point that a person with a borderline personality type turns off the psyche, or he loses consciousness, if suddenly there is anger at the object of his adoration and love. This behavior is due to the fact that the borderline personality (and this can be both a man and a woman) is used to splitting, accordingly, this split part cuts out the entire psyche, a stupor or a funnel of trauma may occur. In fact, all these feelings are very strong, unbearable and at the same time denied.

Situations in which it is impossible to identify the guilty and the right, when there is uncertainty and there is no clear idea, where black and white, are complex and extraordinary.

So, people with a borderline personality organization poorly understand and feel their identity, moreover, they are afraid of losing it next to other people, they are afraid of being absorbed by others or getting into a strong split. Sometimes such personalities say: “I feel fragmented!”. In some cases (mainly with complex affective experiences or when they fall into a split part, left far behind), the picture before their eyes really splits and collapses. Accordingly, there is an acute sensation that a person seems to be assembled from pieces. This situation is similar to the childhood experience when he tried to put together his “I” and consciousness, resulting in a disintegrated psyche.

Otto F. Kernberg, a well-known psychoanalyst of our time, calls this identity a partial I or a representation of a partial object - pieces from a mother, father, grandmother that could not be put into a single picture.

3. Splitting - separate storage of affective experiences, in which negative feelings are hidden as deeply as possible in order to prevent the entire psyche from being flooded with negative affects. As a result, the positive experience is also lost. Borderline personalities also use other primitive defenses - denial, dissociation, projective identification. All this is done in order to protect yourself and your object of affection, love. Otherwise, if the person admits his anger, he must destroy the object. Alas, all this greatly destroys the realistic and sober outlook of people on life, not giving them a holistic sense of themselves and those around them, full enjoyment of life.

4. Fear of absorption and abandonment. In people with a borderline personality organization, these twin fears dominate in relationships with others - they experience absolutely any relationship as if a person will absorb them, suppress the psyche and take away their identity. As a result, because of their fear, they keep a long distance for a long time, and they experience the other person in contact (especially if it is a very close relationship) as an absorbing mother who requires merging. All of this is painful enough for the borderline personality.

On the other hand, a person is afraid of being abandoned or rejected, fears that he will be coldly treated, and eventually begins to "cling" so as not to experience oppressive feelings for him. There are situations when boundaries are blurred or skewed in these models - excessive merging, prevailing distance, rejection or distancing. However, as a rule, one line of behavior is chosen - merging or distancing.

If a person has experienced many experiences in his life, in most cases negative, he will most likely choose distancing - the hope for a warm relationship, care and love has completely left him, so in any relationship he will believe that he will not get what he wants, therefore, he will limit contact as much as possible.

5. Rage. Surprisingly, in the psyche of people with a borderline personality type, anger prevails, and often they do not let it out, especially in relationships. A burning feeling of fear of destroying a relationship with a person prevails over unbridled anger.

Why is there a feeling of intense and violent indignation? The point is that the borderline personality has not reached the point in its development when the object of attachment is felt as constant (that is, there is no feeling of stability), therefore, she is afraid to break the already delicate connection with any movement of the psyche or with an extra word. As a result, anger lives inside the consciousness. Often, borderline individuals are characterized by the manifestation of auto-aggressive behavior (up to suicidal actions). In addition, they are afraid to openly express their rage due to the fear of being punished for the anger (probably this is the experience of childhood trauma).

6. Longing. People with a borderline personality organization walk through life with a kind of insane and painful longing in their souls for an object that will love them, unconditionally accept, cherish and cherish, belong only to them all 24 hours a day. This is the longing for the maternal figure, which actually did not exist in early childhood.

Accordingly, in each next partner, they will see the hope to restore the unconditional love and acceptance that is missing in their life. In addition, they are overcome with melancholy from the fact that they cannot fully go through the stages of idealization, de-idealization and invidualization, to receive the right to personal growth next to a person, while remaining in contact with attachment.

How does this happen in a healthy psyche? Initially, we are attached to our parents and feel their omnipotence and power over us, we idealize the mother's figure, then over time we de-idealize everything that surrounds us, in adolescence, a separation rebellion occurs, and after a while there comes a period when we simply leave and develop further on our own. However, at the same time, the mother does not abandon us and does not go anywhere. Of no small importance for the soul of every person is this stable object, the feeling of the constancy of the mother's figure (it can be both mom and dad), the understanding that you can rely on it. In general, it is a strong representation of an internal object.

The borderline personality does not have this - no one gave her unconditional love, did not grant her the right to separation. Everything happens here at the same time. In addition, you need to understand that the less the parents give the rights to separation, the less the separation itself. In addition, if the child in childhood did not experience complete merging with the mother's figure (there was no feeling that the mother completely belongs to him, that she is stable, constantly nearby, does not quit, does not suppress and, most importantly, is safe), he does not want separation.

The directly borderline personality wants to re-live the entire spectrum of childhood experiences, and this creates a painful longing in the soul, which in some cases does not allow a person to live - they do not want to create, they do not want to work, they do not want to somehow develop. Such people need attachment, this merger, unconditional acceptance is vital for them.

If you think sensibly, everyone needs these feelings. However, the borderline personality is simply not lucky - she did not receive the desired sensations in the right period of time, therefore she walks through life with such longing in her heart.

What to do about it? In fact, it is very difficult for the borderline to "pull himself out of this swamp." An effective result can only be obtained in therapy when a person with a borderline personality organization can lean on another and establish attachment.

If the therapeutic alliance is successful (and this is always a difficult task - breakdowns, working remotely, distancing, etc.), trust will arise, but after a while the person will be "thrown back" again ("I am scared - I will still be absorbed or abandoned") …Accordingly, such patients are very difficult to

process, they at the same time want to separate or show individuality ("So, can I now afford separation? Or maybe individualization? No, I need even more merging, they give me too little time and attention … Yes, I don't want separation … ").

So what is most important to the therapeutic person? Affection and contact. Of course, the therapeutic relationship is in a sense artificial, but relationships in psychotherapy are still possible and real, because people in one way or another have feelings for each other. Whether these feelings are pleasant or negative is not so important, their main presence is an indicator of the dynamism of existing relationships, which has a direct impact on the recovery of the borderline personality and the closure of deep melancholy. In the course of psychotherapy, this splitting changes slightly - the inner image is integrated, identity is formed. In general, there is a really large-scale work ahead - it will be necessary to build the psyche practically from the very "scratch".

How long does it take for borderline psychotherapy? Average 7 years. The time interval is directly related to the period of our formation as a personality - from birth to 7 years, our psyche is already formed. The borderline personality just in this place has a failure - up to 4 years of age, unambiguously, and later there is no foundation on which the psyche is built.

Levels of personality organization - a conventional designation (there are three of them - neurotic, borderline and psychosis). Each zone has a continuum. What does it mean? We can all periodically fall into splitting, fall under the influence of affect, be in a borderline state. But - periodically! If a person feels that most of the time he is in some kind of unconscious diffuse state (splitting, anger, melancholy), this means that he has fallen into this zone. Don't be scared - everyone can have similar feelings, and it can be perfectly acceptable and normal. It all depends on how the whole spectrum of emotions is experienced.