While
some of my Borderline clients were physically abused as small children,
most were not actively abused by their parents. The three most common
childhood experiences they report were some combination of the
following:
- Early abandonment trauma
- Having to help their mother manage her emotions
- Receiving little or no training or encouragement in how to become an independent adult
Example 1: Early Abandonment—Sandy the Unwanted Child
Sandy
knew from early childhood that she was an unwanted child. When she was a
toddler, her mother was pregnant with another child and due to give
birth soon. She dropped Sandy off at an aunt’s house. The aunt was asked
to take care of Sandy for a few weeks after the new baby was due to be
born until things were more settled.
Sandy
at 18 months had no sense of time and cried for her mother every day.
Not only did her mother never visit her, but she left her there for two
years. She appeared to have forgotten Sandy existed and was content to
leave her with the aunt forever.
Finally
the aunt confronted Sandy’s mother and told her that she needed to
raise her own child and it was time to take Sandy home. After she went
back to live with her mother, Sandy realized that her mother had little
or no interest in her.
By
the time she was six years old and in school, she became a “latch key
child.” This meant that she wore the key to the apartment on a string
around her neck under her clothes. She was expected to walk home from
school by herself, let herself in with the key, and wait for her mother
to get back from work.
Therapy: By
the time Sandy came to me for therapy, she was thoroughly messed up
emotionally, convinced she was unlovable, and very afraid of being
abandoned again. She was also very, very Borderline!
Just to mention a few of her coping mechanisms:
- She banged her head against the wall when she could no longer bear her own thoughts and feelings.
- She was barely functional. She worked as a waitress in a diner despite (as it turned out) having a very high IQ.
- She
had decided that her only way to get revenge on her mother was to fail
at everything she did. She told me that she wanted to be a “living
reproach” to her mother. She was willing to ruin her own life so that
everyone would know that her mother had failed at the job of raising
her.
Talionic Revenge: James F. Masterson in his book, The Narcissistic and Borderline Disorders (1981), introduces
the concept of “Talionic Revenge” to describe one of the issues that
needs to be resolved in the therapy of Borderline clients. The name
“Talionic Revenge” is taken from the Biblical law “Lex Talionis” which
requires “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” for justice to be
served.
Masterson
asserts that at some point towards the end of therapy, the Borderline
client reaches a crossroads. One road involves staying Borderline and
continuing to seek revenge against their parents to make up for their
childhood mistreatment, while the other road to full healing involves
relinquishing this wish for revenge and moving forward.
Sandy
reached this milestone eventually and gave up acting crazy, went back
to school, and then to graduate school where she trained for a
profession more in keeping with the actual level of her talents.
Resolving Abandonment: During
the first two years of her therapy, Sandy did something strange. She
chose to leave every therapy session 10 minutes early, before her
session was over. I sensed this was a very important and sensitive
topic. I waited till Sandy had worked through many of her other issues
before I asked her why she did this. Her answer made me glad that I had
trusted my instincts. Sandy said;
It
was very important to me that you never commented on me leaving early. I
might not have been able to talk about that then. I might have even
dropped out of therapy. I watched the clock and left early because I
knew that I could not stand to hear you tell me: “ Sandy, you must go
now.”
By the
time we had the above conversation, Sandy had developed enough internal
support to be able to speak about her abandonment trauma and how it had
affected every area of her life.
Example 2: Helping Mother Manage Her Emotions—Billy and his Stomach Aches
Billy’s
parents moved to the suburbs away from their extended families before
he was born. His father Dave was very proud that he could provide his
wife June with a beautiful new house in the suburbs. Unfortunately they
knew no one else who lived there and June was lonely because Dave was
gone all day at work or commuting to and from work. June missed her
siblings and parents.
Dave
thought that having children was the solution to June's unhappiness and
in a very short time she found herself pregnant with Billy. She had a
lonely, miserable pregnancy where she was sick a lot and homesick for
her extended family.
June
had post-partum depression and the depression lingered for years in one
form or another. Billy loved his mother, was a very empathetic child,
and he sensed her unhappiness. He tried to cheer her up.
Dave
was happy to encourage Billy to spend lots of time with June because
this made him feel less guilty for leaving her every day.
By
the time Billy was supposed to go to school, he felt torn between going
out into the wider world, learning new things, and making friends and
his sense that his mother could not cope without him. He started to
develop stomachaches whenever it was time to leave for school.
The Parentified Child: Billy
became a parentified child. This means that instead of his mother
fulfilling the parental role and taking care of Billy’s emotional needs
and encouraging him to learn the skills necessary to become an
independent adult, the opposite happened. Billy remained “Mommy’s little
man” and stayed a child to take care of her emotional needs.
Therapy: By
the time Billy was grown and had entered therapy with me, he was
immature, conflicted, and still spoke to his mother by phone every day.
On an unconscious level, he believed that something terrible would
happen if he actually grew up, left his mother behind, and became an
independent person following his own desires.
Separation Fears: James
F. Masterson in his books on Borderline Disorders notes that many
Borderline clients unconsciously believe that if they fully separate
from their mother and become adults one or both of them will die or go
crazy.
In Billy’s case these buried beliefs showed up in a dream towards the end of his therapy:
I
am waving goodbye to my mother. I am leaving to go to college. My
mother cannot go with me. I come to a big bridge that I must cross. I
suddenly get very afraid. I look back and see my mother standing at the
beginning of the bridge. I am about a third of the way across and I
stop.
I
suddenly realize that if I cross over without my mother, something
terrible will happen. We will be truly separate and nothing will be the
same between us ever again. After a long pause, I decide to risk it and
go forward.
Punchline: Not
every child who develops a Borderline adaptation was overtly abused—and
many children who are abused do not become Borderline. Two key features
are often present in the childhood of children who do develop
Borderline Personality Disorder: Abandonment in early childhood (before
age 4) or engulfment by the emotional needs of their mother or other
primary caretaker.
-Elinor Greenberg, PhD
