Dixie enjoyed the new attention and the new feeling of power she had over him when he was finished touching her. After he was done, he would do whatever she asked him. Middle school was a drag. Once, she even punched her science teacher, whom she felt was a real jerk. She decided to run away. The way Margaret saw it, no matter what she did, it always seemed to turn out the same with Dixie: her older daughter could not be pleased.
She had tried everything to lose weight—amphetamines, booze, even the stomach operation—yet nothing seemed to work. She often wondered why Roger had married her. He was a handsome man; from the beginning she could not understand why he wanted her.
Her other daughter, Julie, was already obese at age five and seemed a lost cause. But Margaret would do anything for Dixie. She clung to her daughter like a lifeline. But the more Margaret clung, the more Dixie resented it. The last time Margaret was in the hospital they gave her electroshock treatment. And now with Roger gone and Dixie always running away, the world was closing in. After a few frantic months in Vegas, Dixie took off for Los Angeles, which was the same story as Vegas: she was promised cars and money and good times.
Well, she had ridden in a lot of cars, but the good times were few and far between. Finally, with nothing but a few dollars in her jeans, she went back home.
Dixie arrived to find Roger gone and her mother in a thick fog of depression and drug-induced numbness. At fifteen she had been hospitalized twice for chemical abuse and was treated by a number of therapists.
At sixteen, she became pregnant by a man she had met only a few weeks before. She married him soon after the pregnancy tests. Seven months later, when Kim was born, the marriage began to fall apart. By the time the baby was six months old, the marriage was over, and Dixie and Kim moved in with Margaret. It was then that Dixie became obsessed with her weight. She would go entire days without eating, and then eat frantically and voluminously only to vomit it all up in the toilet.
She exercised until sweat drenched her clothes and she was too exhausted to move. The pounds dropped off—but so did her health and her mood. She became very depressed about her life, and for the first time suicide seemed like a real alternative.
Initially she felt safe and comfortable when she was readmitted to the hospital, but soon her old self returned. As abruptly as she had gone into the hospital, she pronounced herself cured and demanded discharge, days after admission. Over the next year, she would be readmitted to the hospital several times.
She would also see several psychotherapists, none of whom seemed to understand or know how to treat her dramatic mood shifts, her depression, her loneliness, her impulsiveness with men and drugs. She began to doubt that she could ever be happy. Her mother ran the family much like Margaret ran hers. And just as Margaret clung to Dixie, so had her mother clung to Margaret, trying desperately to mold her every step of the way.
By the age of sixteen, she was grossly obese and taking large amounts of amphetamines prescribed by the family doctor to suppress her appetite.
By the age of twenty, she was drinking alcohol and taking Fiorinal to bring her down from the amphetamines. Margaret please her own daughter or husband. She had never been able to make anyone happy, she realized, not even herself. Yet she persisted in trying to please people who would not be pleased. Dixie finally told her mother how Roger had sexually abused her. And before Roger left, he had bragged all about his women. Despite everything, Margaret still missed him. He was alone, she knew, just like she was.
It was time, Dixie recognized, to do something about the plight of this self-destructive family. Or at least herself anyway. A job would be the first priority, something to combat the relentless boredom.
With characteristic compulsiveness, she flung herself into a high school equivalency program and received her diploma in a matter of months. Within days of obtaining her diploma, she was applying for loans and grants to attend college. But soon, the system showed cracks: Margaret sometimes got too drunk or depressed to be of any help. Both the grandmother and granddaughter obviously needed each other desperately, so Dixie was able to totally control the household.
Through it all, Dixie still managed to find time for men, though her frequent liaisons were usually of short duration. She seemed to follow a pattern: whenever a man started to care for her, she became bored. Distant, older men—unavailable doctors, married acquaintances, professors—were her usual type, but she would drop them the instant they responded to her flirtations. Dixie avoided women and had no female friends. She thought women were weak and uninteresting.
They were fools if they responded to her fl irtations and hypocrites if they did not. As time went on, the more Dixie succeeded in her studies, the more frightened she became. Despite good grades, she would explode in rage and threaten to kill herself when she performed below her expectations on an exam. At times like these, her mother would try to console her, but Margaret was also becoming preoccupied with suicide, and the roles often reversed.
Sometimes he came to visit; sometimes she went to the house that he shared with his mother. He always seemed awkward around her. She ignored Dixie, who responded by ignoring her. If Kim threw a tantrum, Margaret would cave in to her wishes.
The household was in an almost constant state of chaos. Are they, indeed, passed down at all? The two major theories on the causes of BPD—one emphasizing developmental psychological roots, the other constitutional biological and genetic origins—reflect the dilemma. Though empirical research on these environmental elements is limited, some professionals speculate that these factors would tend to increase the prevalence of BPD.
The available evidence points to no one definitive cause—or even type of cause—of BPD. Rather, a combination of genetic, developmental, neurobiological, and social factors contribute to the development of the illness.
Family studies suggest that first-degree relatives of borderlines are several times more likely to show signs of a personality disorder, especially BPD, than the general public.
Biological and anatomical correlations with BPD have been demonstrated. Some of the genes affecting these neurotransmitters have been associated with several psychiatric illnesses. Changes in brain metabolism and morphology or structure are also associated with BPD.
Additionally, volume changes in these parts of the brain are also associated with BPD and are correlated with these physiological changes. The ages between eighteen and thirty months, when the child begins the struggle to gain autonomy, are particularly crucial. As with Dixie, many borderlines have an absent or psychologically disturbed father. Primary mother figures who may sometimes be the father tend to be erratic and depressed and have significant psychopathology themselves, often BPD.
Many cases show an ongoing hostile or combative relationship between mother and pre-borderline child. During the next four or five months, designated the symbiotic phase, he begins to recognize others in his universe, not as separate beings, but as extensions of himself. In the following separation-individuation period, extending through ages two to three years, the child begins to separate and disengage from the primary caregiver and begins to establish a separate sense of self.
When she leaves his sight, the infant perceives her as annihilated, gone forever, and cries for her return to relieve the despair and panic. Mahler divides separation-individuation into four overlapping subphases. In this phase of development, the infant becomes aware of a world separate from mother. If the relationship with mother is supportive and comforting, reactions to strangers are mainly characterized by curious won- der.
Reunions with mother and the need for her approval shape the deepening realization that she and others are separate, real people. It is in the rapprochement phase, however, that both child and mother confront conflicts that will determine future vulnerability to the borderline syndrome. When reunited with the parent, the child is likely to feel happy as well as angry over the separation. After many separations and reunions, the child develops an enduring sense of self, love and trust for parents, and a healthy ambivalence toward others.
As a result, the child never grows into an emotionally separate human being. This fear of engulfment is well illustrated by T. If she knew, they would be damaged; violated; no longer mine. The child also begins to understand that his own rage will not destroy mother. The child becomes more responsive to father and others in the environment. Self-image becomes more positive, despite the self-critical aspects of an emerging conscience. Developmental theories propose that the borderline is never able to progress to this object constancy stage.
Because they are locked into a continual struggle to achieve object constancy, trust, and a separate identity, adult borderlines continue to rely on transitional objects for soothing. One woman, for example, always carried in her purse a newspaper article that contained quotes from her psychiatrist.
Eventually, children are confronted with the separation anxiety of starting school. Adolescent Conflicts Separation-individuation issues are repeated during adolescence, when questions of identity and closeness to others once again become vital concerns.
While the two-year-old tries to elicit approval and admiration from parents by molding his identity to emulate caregivers, the adolescent tries to emulate peers or adopts behaviors that are consciously different—even opposite—from those of parents. Behavior then becomes a quest to discover identity rather than to reinforce an established one. She even selected a college nearby so she could continue to live at home.
Norman Mailer described the effect of an absent parent on Marilyn Monroe, who never knew her father. Though his absence would contribute to her emotional instability in later life, it would also ironically be one of the motivating forces in her career:. It is no ordinary identity that will suit them, and no ordinary desperation can drive them.
Illegitimacy and insanity are the godparents of the great actor. A child who is missing either parent is a study in the search for identity and quickly becomes a candidate for actor since the most creative way to discover a new and possible identity is through the close fit of a role.
Similarly, Princess Diana, rejected by her mother and reared by a cold, withdrawn father, exhibited similar characteristics. It was her self-image that suffered the most and led to her manipulative behavior with lovers later in life.
I was very screwed up, I thought. Do the biochemical and neurological signs of the disorder cause the illness—or are they caused by the illness? Why do some people develop BPD in spite of an apparently healthy upbringing? Why do others, burdened with a background filled with trauma and abuse, not develop it? Though no evidence supports a specific BPD gene, humans may inherit chromosomal vulnerabilities that are later expressed as a particular illness, depending on a variety of contributing factors— childhood frustrations and traumas, specific stress events in life, healthy nutrition, access to health care, and so on.
Chapter Four. The Borderline Society Where there is no vision, the people perish. States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters. Her younger sister, who had asthma, was also lavished with constant attention. Lisa was never good enough, especially in the eyes of her father. But he had prevailed. He had worked his way through high school, college, and through several promotions at a national investment bank.
In , he made a fortune in the dot-com stock boom, only to lose it all a year later after some professional missteps. Lisa tried hard to care for her mother and to persuade her to stop taking the pain pills and tranquilizers that seemed to make her so foggy and distant.
Lisa felt that if she was just good enough, she could not only make her mother better but also please her father.
At one point, she thought she might want to become a doctor, but her father convinced her she would never make it. In her childhood and adolescence the Barlows moved constantly, following whatever job or promotion her father chased after. From Omaha to St. Louis to Chicago and finally to New York. Lisa hated these moves and realized later that she resented her mother for never objecting to them. Every couple of years Lisa would be packed up and shipped like baggage to a strange new city where she would attend a new school filled with strange new students.
She vowed never to make another friend so she would never have to say good-bye again. Her father rarely came home in the evenings, and when he did, it was late and he would start drinking and railing against Lisa and her mother for doing nothing all day. When her father drank too much, he became violent, sometimes hitting the kids harder than he intended. The most frightening time of all was when he was drunk and their mother was spaced out on pain pills; then there was no one to take care of the family—except Lisa, and she hated it.
In , everything started coming apart. He seemed to blame his family and especially Lisa. And then, on a clear, bright morning in September , Lisa came downstairs to find her father lying on the sofa, tears streaming down his cheeks. Had it not been for a hangover from a drinking bout the night before, he would have been killed in his office in the World Trade Center. For months afterward her father was helpless and so was her mother.
They eventually divorced six months later. During this period, Lisa felt lost and isolated. After a while she just stopped trying. The bodies of many of her friends were covered—almost literally—with tattoos and body piercings, and the local tattoo parlor became a second home for Lisa as well.
Lisa was enthralled by him and they married soon after meeting. She was relieved when he finally left her. Between the divorce settlement and her salary Lisa had enough money to return to school. She was starting to feel good again, valued and respected. But then in medical school the self-doubts returned. They criticized her for not ordering the right tests or getting lab results back in time.
Only with the patients did she feel comfortable—with them she could be whomever she needed to be: kind and compassionate when that was needed, confrontational and demanding when that was called for.
Lisa also experienced a great deal of prejudice in medical school. Psychological theories take on a different dimension when looked upon in light of the culture and time period from which they emanate.
His theory that the primary origins of neuroses were the repression of unacceptable thoughts and feelings—aggressive and especially sexual—was entirely logical in this strict social context. Now, over a century later, aggressive and sexual instincts are expressed more openly, and the social milieu is much more confused. Social, economic, and political structures are less fixed. Though social factors may not be direct causes of BPD or other forms of mental illness , they are, at the least, important indirect influences.
The lack of structure in American society, for example, is especially difficult for borderlines to handle, since they typically have immense problems creating structure for themselves. Indeed, some researchers attribute the prominence of BPD among women to this social role conflict, now so widespread in our society. The increased severity of BPD in these cases may, in turn, be transmitted to future generations through parent-child interactions, multiplying the effects over time.
For many, American culture has lost contact with the past and remains unconnected to the future. The flooding of technical advancement and information that swept over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, much of it involving computers, PDAs, cell phones, and so on, often requires greater individual commit- ment to solitary study and practice, thus sacrificing opportunities for real social interaction.
Personal, intimate, lasting relationships become difficult or even impossible to achieve, and deep-seated loneliness, self-absorption, emptiness, anxiety, depression, and loss of self-esteem ensue. The borderline syndrome represents a pathological response to these stresses. Borderline traits, which may be present to some extent in most people, are being elicited—perhaps even bred—on a wide scale by the prevailing social conditions. New York Times writer Louis Sass put it this way:.
They claim that the change is not in the prevalence of the disorder, but in the fact that it is now officially identified and defined, and so merely diagnosed more frequently.
In fact, the major reason why it has been identified and covered so widely in the clinical literature is its prevalence in both therapeutic settings and the general culture. Family structures in place for decades—the nuclear family, extended family, one-wage-earner households, geographical stability—have been replaced by a wide assortment of patterns, movements, and trends.
Divorce rates have soared. Drug and alcohol abuse and child neglect and abuse have skyrocketed. Crime, terrorism, and political assassination have become widespread, at times almost commonplace. Disruption of this rapprochement cycle often results in a lack of trust, disturbed relationships, emptiness, anxiety, and an uncertain self-image—characteristics that make up the borderline syndrome. In most areas of the country, the need for two incomes to maintain a decent standard of living forces many parents to relinquish parenting duties to others; paid parental leave or on-site day care for new parents is still relatively rare and almost always limited.
We are losing or have already lost the comforts of neighborly nearby family and consistent social roles. When the accoutrements of custom disappear, they may be replaced by a sense of abandonment, of being adrift in unchartered waters.
Our children lack a sense of history and belonging—of an anchored presence in the world. The relatively prosperous and stable s was followed by the turbulent s: financial boom-and-busts, natural catastrophes Katrina and other hurricanes, major tsunamis, earthquakes, and fires , a prolonged war, and sociopolitical movements antiwar, gay rights —bringing us almost full circle back to the s.
One of the big losers in these tectonic shifts has been group loyalties—devotion to family, neighborhood, church, occupation, and country. Like the world of the borderline, ours in many ways is a world of massive contradictions. We presume to believe in peace, yet our streets, movies, television, and sports are filled with aggression and violence. Assertiveness and action are encouraged; reflection and introspection are equated with weakness and incompetency.
Contemporary social forces implore us to embrace a mythical polarity—black or white, right or wrong, good or bad—relying on our nostalgia for simpler times, for our own childhoods. Ideally, we—as individuals and as a society—attempt to achieve a balance between nurturing the body and the mind, between work and leisure, between altruism and self-interest.
But in an increasingly materialistic society it is a small step from assertiveness to aggressiveness, from individualism to alienation, from self-preservation to self-absorption.
The microwave relieves adults from the chore of cooking. Creativity and intellectual diligence are sacrificed to convenience and precision. A healthy civilization can accept the uncomfortable ambiguities. Attempts to eradicate or ignore uncertainty tend only to encourage a borderline society. We would be naive to believe that the cumulative effect of all this change—the excruciating pull of opposing forces—has had no effect on our psyches. The price tag of social change has come in the form of stress and stress-related physical disorders, such as heart attacks, strokes, and hypertension.
Over the past four decades, therapeutic settings have seen a basic change in defining psychopathology—from symptom neuroses to character disorders. As far back as , psychiatrist Peter L. Which social and cultural factors have influenced this change in pathology? Many believe that one factor is our devaluation of the past:. To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. Time is perceived as isolated points instead of as a logical, continuous string of events influenced by past achievement, present action, and anticipation of the future.
Suicide is mentioned again and again as a strategy for dealing with the threat. About one out of fifteen young people 6. The findings are based on four years of survey data totaling 4, adolescents conducted between and by the Adolescent Risk Communication Institute of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Despite a decline in the suicide rate for ten- to twenty-four-year-olds, suicide remains the third leading cause of death in this age group.
Unable to learn from his mistakes, he is doomed to repeat them. Parents who fear the future are not likely to be engrossed by the needs of the next generation.
A modern parent, emotionally detached and alienated—yet at the same time pampering and overindulgent— becomes a likely candidate to mold future borderline personalities. Innocent—or illicit—romantic or sexual relationships can now be initiated with a few keyboard strokes or a text message.
As a result of these and other societal forces, deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marriages have become increasingly difficult to achieve and maintain. Sixty percent of marriages for couples between the ages of twenty and twenty-five end in divorce; the number is 50 percent for those over twenty-five. Borderline women, as we saw with Lisa at the start of this chapter, often marry at a young age to escape the chaos of family life.
Thanks, I needed that! Less typical, but still common, is a reversal of these roles, with a borderline male linked with a narcissistic female partner. Later in life, other partners—spouse, friends, teacher, employer, minister, doctor—renew this early confusion. In this way Ann used her beatings to exact punishment from Larry. The identification of the real victim in this relationship becomes increasingly vague.
Even when a relationship is apparently ruptured, the borderline comes crawling back for more punishment, feeling he deserves the denigration. The punishment is comfortably familiar, easier to cope with than the frightening prospect of solitude or a different partner. Conversely, the sexual withdrawal period of the late s due in part to the AIDS epidemic can be ironically therapeutic for borderline personalities.
Social fears enforce strict boundaries that can be crossed only at the risk of great physical harm; impulsivity and promiscuity now have severe penalties in the form of STDs, violent sexual deviants, and so on. This external structure can help protect the borderline from his own self-destructiveness. Earlier in the last century, social roles were fewer, well defi ned, and much more easily combined. Mother was domestic, working in the home, in charge of the children. And, together, their roles worked synchronously.
The complexities of modern society, however, dictate that the individual develop a plethora of social roles—many of which do not combine so easily. The working mother, for example, has two distinct roles and must struggle to perform both well. The policies of most employers demand that the working mom keep the home and workplace separate; as a result, many mothers feel guilty or embarrassed when problems from one impact the other.
He is no longer the owner of the local grocery who lives above the store. More likely, he works miles from home and has much less time to be with his family. Shifting role patterns over the last twenty-five years are central to theories on why BPD is identified more commonly in women. Men have also experienced new roles and expectations, of course, but not nearly so wide-ranging—nor conflicting—as women. Men have fewer adjustments to make during the evolution of relationships and marriages.
The woman not only endures the physical demands of pregnancy and childbirth and must leave her job to give birth, but it is also she who must make the transition back to work or give up her career.
She is the one who usually adjusts her plans to stay home with a sick child or waits for the repairman to come. From this perspective, it is understandable that women should be more closely associated with BPD, a disorder in which identity and role confusion are such central components. Since the end of World War II, our society has experienced striking changes in family and child-rearing patterns:.
Largely due to divorce, half of all American children born in the s will spend some part of their childhood in a single-parent home. Forty percent of working women are mothers of children under age eighteen; 71 percent of all single mothers are employed. The number of infants in day care increased 45 percent during the s. What are the psychological effects of these child-rearing changes— on both children and parents?
Child Abuse and Neglect: Destroyer of Trust Child abuse and neglect have become significant health problems. In , about 5. In fact, about 30 percent of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children, continuing the vicious cycle. Verbal or psychological abuse is the most common form, followed by physical and then sexual abuse. Physical and sexual abuse may be more dramatic in nature, but the emotionally abused child can suffer total loss of self-esteem.
Emotional child abuse can take several forms:. After a while, the child becomes convinced that he really is bad or worthless. Some child development experts have compared this form of abuse to the techniques used by terrorists to brainwash captives. If you suffered from neglect in childhood, it may cause you to go from one person to another, hoping that someone will supply whatever is missing. These restless, impulsive moves help to create the illusion of living emotionally.
Such a person may, for example, be engaged to be married to one person and simultaneously be maintaining sexual relationships with two or three others. Anyone who offers admiration and respect has appeal to them—and because their need for affection is so great, their ability to discriminate is severely impaired.
Self-esteem and autonomy are crippled. The abilities to cope with separation and to form identity do not proceed normally. Children clearly benefit from dual parenting, but they also lose more when the marriage dissolves, especially if the breakup occurs during the formative years when the child still has many crucial developmental stages to hurdle. Studies on the effects of divorce typically report profound upset, neediness, regression, and acute separation anxiety related to fears of abandonment in children of preschool age.
For example, it is typical for a child at the time of separation to ask a parent to sleep with him. A father separated from the home may demand more time with the child in order to relieve his own feelings of loneliness and deprivation. In many situations of parental separation, the child becomes the pawn in a destructive battle between his parents. These visits were usually unpleasant for the child as well as for her father and his new family, yet were used as punishment for his ex-wife, who would feel guilty and powerless at his demands.
Bobby became embroiled in conflicts between his divorced parents when his mother periodically took his father back to court to extract more child support monies. Children may even be drawn into court battles and forced to testify about their parents. In these situations neither the parents, nor the courts, nor social welfare organizations can protect the child, who is often left with a sense of overwhelming helplessness conflicts continue despite his input , or of intoxicating power his testimony controls the battle between his parents.
According to U. Without the buffering of another parent, the mother-child link can be too close to allow for healthy separating.
Though the mother often seeks to replace the missing father, in many cases it is actually the child who tries to replace the absent father. In the absence of father, the symbiotic intensity of the bond with mother is greatly magnified. Permissive Child-Rearing Practices Modern permissive child-rearing practices, involving the transfer of traditional parental functions to outside agencies—the school, mass media, industry—have significantly altered the quality of parent-child relationships.
Child rearing, in many households, takes a backseat to the demands of dual careers. Geographical Mobility: Where Is Home? We are moving more than ever before.
Though socially graceful, like Lisa they typically feel they are gracefully faking it. Traditional affiliations are lost. About 44 percent of Americans profess affinity to a different church from the one in which they were raised. Children are raised without knowing their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, losing a strong connection to the past and a source of love and warmth to nurture healthy emotional growth. The author offered two examples, Daughters of the American Revolution and the General Electric Company; if Vonnegut wrote the novel today, the examples could just as easily be Facebook or Twitter.
Since , social networking sites have rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of Internet users. More than half 55 percent of all online American youths ages twelve to seventeen use online social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. Few would dispute the growing narcissism in American culture.
As Jean M. Twenge and W. Chapter Five. Communicating with the Borderline Alright. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!
Dealing with borderline behavior can be frustrating for everyone in regular contact with the borderline personality because, as we have seen, their explosions of anger, rapid mood swings, suspiciousness, impulsive actions, unpredictable outbursts, self-destructive actions, and inconsistent communications are understandably upsetting to all around them.
During confrontations of destructive behavior, important decision-making sessions, or other crises, interactions with the borderline should invoke all three elements. UP stands for Understanding and Perseverance—the goals that all parties try to achieve. While Support and Empathy are subjective statements confirming how the principals feel, Truth statements acknowledge that a problem exists and address the practical, objective issue of what can be done to solve it. These are the consequences.
This is what I can do. What are you going to do? Communication with the borderline should attempt to include all three messages. However, even if all three parts are stated, the borderline may not integrate all of them. When either the Support or the Empathy overtures are not accepted by the borderline, further communications are not heard. When the Truth element is not clearly expressed see Figure , a more dangerous situation emerges.
Without clearly stated Truth and confrontation, the borderline continues to be overly entangled with others. His needs gratified, the borderline will insist that all is well or, at least, that things will get better.
Indeed, the evidence for this enmeshment is often a striking, temporary absence of conflict: The borderline will exhibit less hostility and anger. However, when his unrealistic expectations are eventually frustrated, the relationship collapses in a fiery maelstrom of anger and disappointment. The SET-UP principles can be used in a variety of settings in attempts to defuse unstable situations. Following are some typical borderline predicaments in which the SET strategy may be used. Frequently, the borderline will communicate one position with words, but express a contradictory message with behavior.
Gloria tells her husband Alex that she is forlorn and depressed. She says she plans to kill herself but forbids him from seeking help for her. If he attempts to list reasons why she should not kill herself, she will frustrate him with relentless counter-arguments and will ultimately condemn him for not truly understanding her pain.
If he calls the police or her doctor, he will be rejecting her requests and proving that she cannot trust him. She feels overwhelmed and helpless in the wake of her depression.
By drawing Alex into this drama, she is making him a character in her own scripted play, with an uncertain ending to be resolved not by herself, but by Alex. She faces her ambivalence about suicide by turning over to him the responsibility for her fate. Further, Gloria splits off the negative portions of her available choices and projects them onto Alex, preserving for herself the positive side of the ambivalence.
No matter how Alex responds, he will be criticized. Either way, Gloria envisions herself a helpless and self-righteous martyr—a victim who has been deprived by Alex of achieving her full potential.
Maybe you could ask for a transfer. I know you said that if I cared at all for you, I should just leave you alone. But if I cared, how could I possibly sit back and watch you destroy yourself?
And it is to that part that I feel I must respond. I want you to come with me to see a doctor to help us with these problems. Alex for forcing her into the hospital. But Truth statements should remind Gloria that she is there not so much because of what Alex did, but because of what Gloria did—threatening suicide.
Over time they may be able to work out a system of responding to each other, either on their own or within therapy, that will fulfill the needs of both. This kind of problem is especially common within families of borderlines who display prominent self-destructive behaviors. Delinquent or suicidal adolescents, alcoholics, and anorexics may present similar no-win dilemmas to their families. They actively resist help, while behaving in obviously self-destructive ways.
DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to psychology, non fiction lovers.
Your Rating:. Your Comment:. People with Borderline Personality Disorder BPD challenge those close to them with their often bewildering mood shifts and unpredictable behavior. This resource articulates specific strategies that those close to the person with BPD can use to effectively cope with these behaviors.
Woven of Many Threads. The Human Magnet Syndrome. Since the dawn of civilization, people have been magnetically and irresistibly drawn together, not so much by what they see, feel, and think, but more by invisible, unconscious romantic forces.
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