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January 14 - January 23, 2025
Though she enjoyed being desired, she always felt she was “fooling” or tricking them somehow.
She would spend long hours gazing at pictures of her son and husband, trying to “keep them alive in my brain.”
Jennifer felt like a child clad in the armor of an adult. She was perplexed at the respect she received from other adults; she expected them to see through her disguise at any moment, revealing her to be an empress with no clothes. She needed someone to love and protect her from the world.
Some studies have uncovered BPD in almost 50 percent of all patients admitted to a facility for an eating disorder.
she lacks the clotting mechanism needed to moderate her spurts of feeling. Prick a passion, stab a sentiment in the delicate “skin” of a borderline personality, and she will emotionally bleed to death. Sustained periods of contentment are foreign to the BPD sufferer.
To overcome their indistinct and mostly negative self-image, borderline individuals, like actors, are constantly searching for “good roles,” complete “characters” they can inhabit to fill their identity void.
for solitude, even temporary aloneness, is more intolerable than mistreatment.
The helping professions—medicine, nursing, clergy, counseling—also attract many with BPD, who strive to achieve the power or control that elude them in social relationships. Perhaps more important, in these roles they can provide the care for others—and receive the recognition from others—that they yearn for in their own lives.
However, borderline patients exhibit greater sensitivity to chronic pain. About 30 percent of patients with chronic pain (such as fibromyalgia, arthritis, back pain) also appear to suffer from BPD.17
Afflicted with self-loathing, the borderline person distrusts others’ expressions of caring. Like Groucho Marx, he would never belong to a club that would have him as a member.
borderline individual does not accept her own intelligence, attractiveness, or sensitivity as constant traits, but rather as comparative qualities to be continually re-earned and judged against others’.
Like Sisyphus, she is doomed to roll the boulder repeatedly up the hill, needing to prove herself over and over again. Self-esteem is attained only through impressing others, so pleasing others becomes critical to loving herself.
If he fails in the role, he fears he will be punished; if he succeeds, he is sure he will soon be uncovered as a fraud and be humiliated.
Perceiving themselves as static, rather than in a dynamic state of change, individuals with BPD may view any variation from this inflexible self-image as shattering.
The immediacy of the present exists in isolation, without the benefit of the experience of the past or the hopefulness of the future.
Because they are locked into a continual struggle to achieve object constancy, trust, and a separate identity, borderline adults continue to rely on transitional objects for soothing.
Masochism is a prominent characteristic of borderline relationships. Dependency coupled with pain elicits the familiar refrain “Love hurts.”
As she climbs the jungle gym of relationships, she cannot let go of the lower bar until she has firmly grasped the next one.
Although being a victim is most unpleasant, it can also be a very appealing role. Indeed, sometimes there can be a fear of giving up that identity role, expressed by persistent self-sabotaging behavior,
Friends, jobs, and skills can never be relied upon. He must keep testing and retesting all of these aspects of his life; he is in constant fear that a trusted person or situation will change into the total opposite—absolute betrayal.
He feels that if only he is attractive enough or smart enough or rich enough or demanding enough, he will ultimately get what he wants.
