OBSESSED
WITH A BORDERLINE
A Matter of Attraction and Revulsion
By Shari Schreiber,
M.A.
www.GettinBetter.com
Whether
you're presently involved with a borderline disordered individual
or you've finally stepped away from one, you've been struggling
with wanting someone who has caused you great harm. It
seems that regardless of what they've put you through, you just
can't get them out of your head or move completely beyond the
longing you still feel, which triggers fantasies about having
them back! Don't worry, you're not going crazy--you're just hurting.
You
may be obsessing about what he or she's feeling or doing, whom
they're dating/sleeping with, and wondering if they're thinking
at all about you. Your feelings of shame and emptiness
are so unbearable, that it's easier to divert your focus to him/her,
rather than sitting with the painful emotions you have to feel
in their absence. What's happened is, you're busy living inside
their life instead of yours--and as much as you need
them to return, you could be fearing it as well.
It's
not unusual for folks to resuscitate these conflictual relationships
over and over again, anticipating that "this
time, it'll be different." You've
given a great deal of thought to both sides of this rupture--and
you're fairly sure you'll be successful, if they give you just
one more shot at making it right. But regardless of how well you've
prepared yourself for this, it never turns out the way
you've wanted it to--and in fact, it typically leaves you in more
torment and shame. You might chastise yourself for going back,
which only compounds your depression--and inevitably makes this
vicious cycle repeat.
There
are lots of little movies that play in your head about chance
meetings, finding him/her on your doorstep when you return home
from work, getting a furtive call in the middle of the night after
they've dropped you on your head and moved on to someone new--and
even though you know they're toxic for you, you've kept
wishing and hoping they'll want you again.
Yearning
for someone who's made you feel bad about yourself
confuses and confounds your rational mind, so let's begin understanding
how and why you could want somebody who's brought so
much pain and destruction into your world. Confusion feeds chaos.
You're just looking for a way out of it.
Whether
you've loved a Borderline or not, it's human nature to try and
figure out troubling/perplexing issues associated with someone's
weird or aberrant behaviors--or nobody'd be making those chilling/creepy
movies about Charles Manson, or anybody else who's displayed psychotic
or sociopathic traits! The fact that we can't relate
to these folks makes them fascinating puzzles that we keep wanting
to understand, because they don't fit with our
definition of "normal."
Several
clients
have said that their "most recent" Borderline wasn't
someone they necessarily found the most beautiful or brilliant
in their dating history, yet their obsession with this
one, has them trapped in maddening confusion. This is our clue
about childhood experiences which created an early template
of sorts, that's uncannily being dupicated within this present-day
dynamic.
Every
child is in love with their parents. They see the parent as
a god, who's entrusted with their care and protection.
When this 'god' is rejecting, critical or abusive, it's frightening
and confusing to a small child, which forces him to split
off the dangerous, injurious parts of his mother
or father in order to remain attached. You acquired this survival
tool during infancy.
A
child does not automatically stop loving his/her parent, when
they're crazy or cruel. What he/she does instead, is compartmentalize
or box-up those bad behaviors and divorce
them from the parent, so they can remain in-love with Mom or Dad.
This is exactly what you've done with your Borderline,
and it's made you deny/invalidate some very important perceptions
and feelings.
The
opposite of Love, is not Hate . . . it's Indifference.
Love
and hate are similar emotions. They both trigger passionate responses
in us, which force us to feel.
Every person who's involved with a Borderline has learned to discard
or shut-down painful emotions since early childhood,
and this has left them unable to distinguish between healthy endeavors
and harmful ones.
People
who've become adept at getting rid of difficult or dangerous emotions
since they were very young, have no inner compass to guide their
decisions. Their extra-sensory aspects (instinct and intuition)
cannot function properly and alert them to impending danger, because
when some feelings get shut- down, all feelings
become impaired. Hence, if we've gotten skilled at staving off
sadness, frustration, rage, etc., it's impossible to feel joy
and glee.
Instinct
and intuition are our built-in survival guides, which are with
us from the time we're born--but if we've grown up in an environment
that's chaotic or conflictual, or we've survived criticism and
abuse from a parent, we had to start managing excruciating emotions
about all that, by locking them away. Discarding certain feelings
early in life, leaves us with inner emptiness and deadness. We
crave a sense of aliveness, but we're unable to access it for
ourselves, which is why roller-coaster relationships are so darned
appealing.
The
Borderline reawakens intensely positive and negative
emotions--but one thing we're certain of, is that we're feeling!
When
you've adored a Borderline, you've loved the good times and
the bad. Even when their interactions have felt diminishing
and damaging, you've felt unusually alive within that
struggle. Just striving for their affection and care has been
an activating
challenge. Whether you've felt attraction or revulsion
for a Borderline, you've been flooded with passionate feelings
which catalyze heightened/intense sensations that are enlivening!
Without them, you could feel a sense of nothingness,
which has you trying to escape this feeling with someone who predictably
triggers your pain, so you can feel something. This is
the vicious cycle you learned to accommodate as a child, when
you sought affection and care from your parent--and found neglect
or abuse instead.
When
this repeatedly happened with your ex, you had the feeling that
you couldn't live without him or her, but your inner conflict
was very primitive.
It paralleled old ego wounds from childhood that have remained,
and predicted all your romantic choices.
Borderlines
are initially captivating, enchanting and irresistible. Even if
we think that he/she is out of our league, they relentlessly pursue
us to where we begin to accept that they find us worthy
of their attention/affection, and start trusting that it'll be
safe for us to let down our guard, and love them. I hate to say
this, but that's precisely when your troubling experiences begin.
Borderlines
are intoxicated by The Chase--not the capture. The moment they
sense you're hopelessly hooked, they lose interest, and their
distancing and acting-out behaviors begin. By now, you're emotionally
invested, and you're in far too deep to walk away. Even if their
positive traits are overshadowed by hurtful negative
ones, you keep fantasizing that if you try a little harder, things
will work out--but they won't. You feel toxic shame
when you fail with them, which makes you feverishly attempt to
redeem yourself in their eyes, but this is a useless exercise
that keeps you tortured (albeit
stimulated).
When
your relationship with a Borderline ends, it's incredibly painful
because you haven't just lost him or her, you've lost yourself.
When the chaos/drama of that affair stops, so does your ability
to self-activate and feel alive. When you feel nothingness, you're
spiritually bankrupt and disconnected from your Self. The despair
you've wrestled with during your dance is excruciating--but the
pain of it helps you feel something
other than deadness, so you hang onto it with
all you've got, which is key to your obsession with
this person.
The
Borderline did not author these horrible feelings in you--he/she
just reinvigorated them.
Your
persistent need to become close with this individual once again,
is your natural response to the awful shame you could feel from
being emotionally exiled. This might drudge up
childhood memories with a parent who ignored you, shut you out
emotionally, or withdrew affection and attention when you did
something that disappointed or upset them. The problem is, they
didn't treat your behavior as bad, they made you
bad--and you suffered for hours, days or weeks until you apologized
for crimes you hadn't committed, just so Mom or Dad would speak
with you again! When the Borderline rejects you, those early shame
wounds are reactivated.
When
you're apart, you feel adrift, guilty, empty and unable to focus.
Even if you're the one who's walked away, you doubt your
decision, because it feels so lousy being separated from him/her!
You may have grown up presuming that 'right' choices brought favorable
feelings, but this is a false belief. Right choices are usually
the hardest to make, because they force us to adhere
to our true convictions, which develops character and integrity.
This isn't about doing the easy stuff--if it were, everybody'd
be doing it.
With
emotional development, comes moral development. Both are attended
by adult capacity for reasoning, empathy, impulse control and
the ability to accept/tolerate delayed gratification.
This requires big-picture principles, and a reasonable threshold
for frustration. Borderlines are still infantile, in that their
capacity to manage difficult emotions and self-soothe is non-existent.
Their need for instant gratification is profound--and just like
a small child, if you're not immediately responsive to their demands,
they throw a tantrum, cut-off from you or triangulate
the relationship.
Given
that we're attracted to people who match our own level of emotional
development, the inability to self-soothe during these episodes
can have far reaching implications for non-borderlines as well.
Your compelling drive to remain in relationship with a Borderline
doesn't just happen in a vacuum--in other words, it's neither
accidental nor incidental. When adult interactions are intensely
painful and frustrating, they're replicating a relational
blueprint you struggled with as a kid.
Both
Borderlines and the people attracted to them, incurred similar
types of wounds to their developing sense of Self, and isn't it
simply natural to be drawn to someone with whom you have
things in common, or who echoes personality aspects in yourself?
Well, this coupling
is a lot like that--it feels as if you've found your 'soul mate.'
There's a similar vibration/frequency you two share, due to childhood
abandonment issues. While the nature of those early difficulties
were alike, they've played out in different ways for each of you--but
the scars from that time remain.
This
hurts as horribly as it does, because you have been here
before. You've become adept at putting your childhood anguish
behind you, and presuming it would stay buried. The BPD lover
simply excavates all that old trauma to your sense of Self, but
now is your opportunity to finally Heal.
If
you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod this app will let you hear
this material;
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/web-reader-text-to-speech/id320808874?mt=8
Click
here, to determine if you're in an abusive relationship!
COULD
MY BPD LOVER BE RIGHT ABOUT ME??
OUTGROWING
YOUR ADDICTION
THE
LESBIAN BORDERLINE
You
may phone for assistance, but I
do not offer online/written therapy. Only emails under
150 words are read, due to time constraints. Please
be clear/concise, and expect a straight answer within fourteen
days.