BPD and Boundaries
“You cannot spend your entire life waiting for people to get back to you. At some point you will wake up and think: I simply cannot do this. I cannot do another day.”
There’s boundaries, respect, and control. They intermingle, and are impossible to exist without one another. “That sounds pathological to say that boundaries are control.” Not all control is bad. It is control that precisely allows you to live the life you do in certainty. The life you are living now makes it certain for you to be unhappy, who controls that? You might really be happier being on drugs all the time, but maybe there’s a reason we have controls on that. Turns out rules exist for a reason.
That is respect. Acknowledging that some control is not only necessary, but good.
These form boundaries. It is controlled respect. A set of rules we have (often, silently) agreed on.
Boundaries are great for keeping yourself and others safe. They can also be a way to be horribly cruel, especially if the boundaries are prone to inconsistency or rapid change. This is one of the reasons why people with BPD or attachment issues are difficult to be around.
Not only people with BPD extremely sensitive to boundaries, they are extremely prone to violating them. For someone with BPD, finding a friend can feel like falling in love with a soulmate. They impose this boundary based on their perspective, and then are heartbroken when it is not reciprocated. The matter of whether their feelings are real is irrelevant.
Schopenhaur’s Porcupine’s dilemma articulates the reality for those with BPD. There is a survival-driven need for warmth (connection), but it is inevitably painful. People with BPD are not just extremely sensitive to the warmth, but to its absence, and to the pokes of pain that inevitably come with connection
Most people forget there’s more to the story, which articulates that through painful trial and error that they managed to find an agreeable boundary with politeness and good manners. Need drives us together, reality drives us apart. Lastly, that those who are unable to do this need to be self-sufficient to avoid hurting themselves or others, and those who take this path ultimately live unsatisfying lives.
This is what DBT largely tries to teach. Not that their feelings aren’t real, but that they need to handle themselves, their feelings, and others with politeness and good manners.
Now for another crash course in social psychology, that of the Theory of Self. You are not just yourself, but you are combined and refracted identity built on what you see yourself as, which is also based on how others see you, which in itself is based on how they see themselves which is partially built on how they think you see them. There’s more to it, but to put it simply the idea of ‘you’ is really a combination of different perspectives all of which are constantly interacting with one another. The dissonance between these perspectives is what causes identity fragmentation in those with BPD.
It creates a hypervigilant and hyperaroused nervous system that is always a nudge away from crisis mode. Their feelings are real, and many they are aware they are being irrational, but intellectualising doesn’t remove the pain nor does it remove the consequences of the feelings. It is exhausting to manage, and when that management fails the results are disastrous.
Disastrous for identity formation. Disastrous for relationships. Disastrous for long-term life satisfaction.
BPD supposedly stabilises in later life, but I have severe doubts about that. The stabilisation is not a result of intervention, such as the excision of a tumor or a run of antibiotics. It denies all we know of development to suggest that it is something that can be cured, and far more likely that people with BPD learn strategies to help them manage. Most psychologists would describe that as cured, or in remission, but the underlying mechanism isn’t gone. Psychologists, unfortunately, seem to have forgotten about the difference between symptoms and management. A good joke I have told for a long time, which is obtuse and not really true, is that if judged by the DSMV Forrest Gump would not be considered intellectually impaired for the fact that he lived a full life largely unimpaired by his disability. For the same reason that a deeply depressed 60 hour office worker isn’t considered depressed unless it impacts their ability to function, or that the fact they are depressed distresses them. There’s nothing more materialistic and nihilistic in any medical journal, people are now their function, not their experience.
All those celebrities on TV talking about their mental health struggles must feel really silly now. Sure, they’re probably actually just narcissists instead of being depressed, but they’re functioning wonderfully, and that’s what we’ve decided is the only thing that matters.
So yes, going by DSMV standards, people with BPD are often cured later in life. It sounds very optimistic on paper, but ask someone with ‘cured’ BPD what they lost and still do as the result of their condition and you might get an actual insight. If you wish you had your 20s back, just wait until you hear what they have to say. Try starting life at 30 never having experienced any of the joys of youth. Most would kill themselves, and many do.
Schopenhaur articulated that pain was essential for connection. The most common response to rejection according to social science is to look for a new connection. I have nothing but sympathy for those with BPD, whose connections are often fragile and hard to attain, who live in a world that has inadvertently made connections harder.