Borderline Personality - Circumstantial?

[GreyMonkey]

I'm very sorry for my late reply.

I can't recall any early trauma, I did move house a lot, being the youngest I was blamed for many small things such as stealing and breaking items. I was self-educated until the age of 8, however I was still blamed for stealing and lying. That may have played a part.

Why were you self educated?

 

[azucaramargo]

I'm very sorry for my late reply.

I can't recall any early trauma, I did move house a lot, being the youngest I was blamed for many small things such as stealing and breaking items. I was self-educated until the age of 8, however I was still blamed for stealing and lying. That may have played a part.

For what it's worth, multiple childhood moves were traumatic AF for me, too.

 

[8yy8uiyhbij]

Why were you self educated?

Due to how often we moved house

 

[Chantal]

To be honest I personally don't believe this disorder exists. I mean disorders do exist but here they just mixed a bunch of notions, some of which are vague ('unstable sense of self'), others are commonplace like 'impulsivity', 'anger', 'unstable relationships' etc. Honestly it looks like they payed a random bum on the street and told him 'write 9 things that sound kinda like a guy is having some emotional issues'. He wrote 10 things but they still liked number 9, so they had to squeze 2 notions under 9th. Voila.

The nine (9) BPD criteria, per the DSM-5:
(wording simplified)

(1) Fear of abandonment
(2) Unstable and intense relationships
(3) Unstable self-image or sense of self
(4) Impulsivity
(5) Recurrent suicidal behavior
(6) Affective instability
(7) Chronic feelings of emptiness
(8) Anger or difficulty controlling anger
(9) Paranoia or disassociation

I posit to this group that:
- These symptoms are NOT the result of personality or anything "from within";
- Rather, they are entirely reactions to external circumstances;
- Any individual - literally, anyone - will exhibit these behaviours in response to sufficiently traumatic circumstances; and,
- Chronic exposure to such circumstances will erode resilience and create maladaptive instincts, conditioning the individual to resort to these behaviours whether or not circumstances warrant.

It follows that the correct response should not be to fault the individual or the "personality", but rather to:
- Remove the sources of circumstantial damage / trauma; and,
- Immerse the individual in healthy affection until such time as their resilience is rebuilt and their instincts are re-conditioned.

This approach was arguably part of dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) as it was originally practised by its founder, Dr. Marsha Linehan, as part of a DBT whole alongside the less-important skills training - but alas, DBT has become eroded over time into skills training alone, not because skills training is what sufferers need, but rather, out of laziness and apathy, since skills training is cheap and easy to deliver, which the preceding is certainly not.

Would love reactions / opinions.

This thread is very enlightening.

 

[eve2004]

I re-read this thread... i know that some abuse is more seriously threatening to a child's future personality than others, but in every "perfect" household you'll find something that psychologists will consider as "abuse". Excluding the blantantly illegal ones that require mandated reporting like murder, psychical abuse resulting in serious chronic injury, sexual assault/abuse of any kind... I think parents especially first time parents do what they know and can do, no one on the planet has/had perfect parents and there's no way to even describe what a "perfect" parent is. It's not like a recipe... you cannot just follow directions like caring for gold fish. Humans (kids) react differently and are simply born with different personalities.

I'm not sure that pointing to something a parent did or did not do (except in those obvious mandated to report cases) and focusing the therapy on that is useful. For everyone sitting in therapy for something, there are others who have gone through the same and maybe should be in therapy or are functioning and living smooth lives.

I'm not saying that circumstances (parental or life or other) aren't to "blame" for someone's way of coping but I find therapists focus too much on how or why it happened rather than helping them cope better or even change the way they cope and support them by helping them look at how they view the "issues" are affecting their current lives. 9 times out of 10, a therapist is digging for something or someone to blame, meanwhile its nice to know why but can they do something to help alleviate the pain or help the person build skills or change the ones the client feels is hindering their happiness...?

For things like eating disorders for example, there is a clearly unhealthy behaviour that can lead to medical issues and death. But the other ones described here, and I would add bereavement issues as well, are just pretty ordinary responses to life events. To what extent the issue is hindering their life and how to work around it or fix it should be the focus, not just simply making a list and labeling them and treating it like it will never change. That's setting up the client for failure because even the therapist is showing no hope that it will ever change. And Hope is far more powerful than any therapy or a pill can do for a human in distress/pain.

Sorry, maybe I'm ranting. But I really feel that this particular disorder and some others, the simple labeling of them as abnormal is wrong. It's totally normal for people to react in those ways in certain situations, and whether you like it or not, no parent is going to give the "ideal" or "perfect" (which can't even be qualified or quantified) amount of emotion attention, love, affection etc. People learn how to work around it through different means (friends, activities, therapy, meds). We are only hearing about the ones therapist report and diagnose, but if it was mandatory for every single person to have a therapist, everyone would have this disorder...!

 

[Grey-zone]

The modern psychotherapy focus is on trauma. This is the "hot" concept in psychology now, "x" causes trauma, which leads to "y" (or the trauma of one's ancestors, as the popular conception of epigenetics goes). As the above poster pointed out however, trauma is at heart not particularly well-defined, or defined so broadly that a large portion of life's circumstances can be considered as traumatic. Evolution, natural selection, these are all inherently fucking traumatic processes, "Nature red in tooth and claw"--I mean, it's not as if humans were ever an exception to the ruthlessness of biological life. It is simply not possible to have a non-traumatic life, only to minimize it. Few people really know how to do that, as history has shown. In the past starvation, mass murder, etc. was rife, or predation by superior animals (before we got around to slaughtering them with our tool-making abilities).
The best solution imho is to create a society in which people do not have to struggle to live or manage a rat-race, but none of the successful individuals in our world would want this, because their success and careers wouldn't matter as much.

 

[Hunter100]

The nine (9) BPD criteria, per the DSM-5:
(wording simplified)

(1) Fear of abandonment
(2) Unstable and intense relationships
(3) Unstable self-image or sense of self
(4) Impulsivity
(5) Recurrent suicidal behavior
(6) Affective instability
(7) Chronic feelings of emptiness
(8) Anger or difficulty controlling anger
(9) Paranoia or disassociation

I posit to this group that:
- These symptoms are NOT the result of personality or anything "from within";
- Rather, they are entirely reactions to external circumstances;
- Any individual - literally, anyone - will exhibit these behaviours in response to sufficiently traumatic circumstances; and,
- Chronic exposure to such circumstances will erode resilience and create maladaptive instincts, conditioning the individual to resort to these behaviours whether or not circumstances warrant.
Would love reactions / opinions.

See this is where you are absolutely wrong and obviously do not have bpd. We don't need "trauma to set off these "characteristics"
Mine literally happen over nothing. BPD is NOT situational! This thought is why my parents don't even believe in BPD even though I'm a extreme case and was diagnosed 16 years ago at 15 yrs old.

 

[moon_r4]

See this is where you are absolutely wrong and obviously do not have bpd. We don't need "trauma to set off these "characteristics"
Mine literally happen over nothing. BPD is NOT situational! This thought is why my parents don't even believe in BPD even though I'm a extreme case and was diagnosed 16 years ago at 15 yrs old.

I also have bpd and second this. A big part of the disorder for me is specifically about it not being situational and having emotional reactions that aren't proportional to the situation.