The borderline personality pattern is formed in a family
dynamic where frequent boundary incursions and crises make it difficult for the
child to establish a reliable identity. Rather, the child experiences confluence
with the parent, in which thoughts and feelings are all tangled into knots. It
seems impossible to establish where one’s identity begins and another's ends.
This amorphous merging prevents the child from successfully developing either
attachment or individuation. Lacking sufficient self-boundaries, the child is
stuck in an undifferentiated limbo. Communications are taken personally and
reacted against, rather than responded to or understood.
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| Family Chaos |
The child interprets these garbled communications as his
or her fault or the fault of others. Parents may act out through incessant
arguing, drunken fury, physical combativeness, suicide attempts, or incestuous
abuse. The child learns to become center-stage in this chaos, discovering how
to create a similar chaos in others.
Family members perceive
attempts toward autonomy and individuality as betrayal, and punish the child
accordingly. With no Self Compass for balance, the child remains dependent upon
family members while feeling rage against them for the invasion of one’s
personhood. Inner pain that erupts in volatile explosions seems perfectly
normal.
CLINICAL LITERATURE
Schneider first employed the
term “labile” to accentuate the volatile nature of the borderline pattern. Indeed,
this term is more descriptive than “borderline,” capturing the pattern’s
predictable inconsistency.
Stern characterized this
pattern as a “borderline group of neuroses” exhibiting contradictory traits:
narcissistic grandiosity combined with feelings of inferiority, and psychic
rigidity combined with inordinate hypersensitivity. Stern coined the term
“psychic bleeding” to convey the anxious desperation that drives this unstable
pattern.
Schmidberg viewed the
borderline personality as “stable in his instability, whatever ups and downs he
has, and often keeps constant his pattern of peculiarity.” More recently,
Kernberg has described the pattern as a “mutual dissociation of contradictory
ego states.”
COMPASS THERAPY INTERPRETATION
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| Borderline Self Compass: Dr. Dan & Kate Montgomery |
The self-system of the
borderline pattern fluctuates drastically as emotional explosions are
interspersed with the boundless need for reassurance. When caught in the grip
of anxiety (Weakness compass point) or longing for nurturance (Love compass
point), the person seeks assurance in the manner of the Worrier or Pleaser
patterns. This sends others an SOS signal that elicits a desire to rescue the
borderline patterned person from depression or loneliness. But since one
demands assurance that is absolute and comforting that is perfect, these demands
can never be met.
Then self-righteous judgment
erupts. Furiously accusing others of neglect, disregard, and untrustworthiness,
one’s behavior then more closely resembles that of the Arguer and Boaster patterns.
“Just look at this pizza. The crust is thick! You know I like thin crust. Some treat you brought me. You did this just to make me miserable. Well, you succeeded admirably. I’ll never trust you again!”
- Extreme lability of affect, erratic shifts between neediness and aggression, and a lack of basic trust make the Self Compass highly unstable.
- Such instability is accentuated by the ever-present but contradictory feelings of dependent anger and anxious superiority toward others.
For more read:
Christian Psychology In Action
and
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| Compass Psychotheology |
