My theory on Borderline
After long considerations and many conversations about this subject, here's my theory on what borderline is about:
Unfamiliarity with your own self
If parents do it the right way, a child slowly gets to know his own self. There are several steps to this:
The recognition of feelings: 'I feel something'
Separating them from eachother: 'Oh, what I am feeling now is different from what I felt earlier'
and then also name them: 'oh, is this sadness I am feeling'
The child goes through these stages because the parents acknowledge the feelings the child shows, are able to separate these feelings from other feelings the child shows and are able to name these feelings. By asking after a particular event 'were you afraid' or by saying 'boy, are YOU angry!' parents show that these are certain feelings that you could have in these circumstances. The child learns that he is ALLOWED to feel this way. Also it's stimulated to have opinions and ideas.
My parents denied I had a self. All signs I showed that pointed at my own self were either ignored or punished. This way I learned that I wasn't allowed to look inside. The message was: if you want to know what to do you don't look inside for an answer, you look at me. If you want to know what to feel about something, you won't try to find your own feeling but you listen to how I feel. Systematically every sign of my own self was repressed. And the ultimate punishment was the loss of love, and death follows automatically: when people won't love a little child they won't take care of him and he will die. So the ultimate punishment was death. Well, then you won't do ANYTHING that might bring that upon you, then you learn to repress your own self.
So I learned not to look inside. If I felt something I repressed it. I learned not to acknowledge my own feelings, and by learning this I didn't learn to separate different feelings and name them. I depended on my parents to know what to do and how to feel. I didn't get to know myself, I didn't become an independent individual but I remained attached to my parents. I learned to be good and to be what others wanted me to be (or to be what I thought other people wanted me to be anyhow).
As a consequence I also didn't learn to connect things that happened or things I did to how I felt within. Because my feelings within didn't exist for me. When something went wrong I couldn't look inside for a solution or a cause, because inside it was all blank. So, if I wanted to know what I should do, I did it the way other people did it, or I did it exactly NOT the way others did it. If I wanted to know what to think about something, I took over the opinions of other people or I chose an opinion that was exactly the opposite.
Attachment disorder
Attachment is a strong bond between parents and a child. A good attachment makes a child feel safe with his parents and his surroundings. He develops curiosity and feels supported by his parents to explore his world and find the boundaries. By all this he will finally be able to disengage himself of his parents and be a separate individual, without breaking this bond with his parents.
In my case this attachment went wrong. My parents were so busy with themselves that there wasn't much room for me in a emotional sense. This made me a child that was very afraid. I never knew if my parents would approve of me, never knew for certain that my parents still would be there if I'd leave and come back later. I didn't dare to go away, literally and figuratively, out of fear to loose that little bit of security I had left. Because imagine that while I was away they found out they enjoyed that I was away and that they would decide to keep it that way! So I stayed inside, figuratively spoken. I wasn't curious to the world around me, because what's the use of being curious if you aren't able to explore the world. That would only confront me with a situation to which I couldn't chance anything. So rather than having feelings on which I couldn't act, I put them away, until I couldn't find them again.
When I was older and went to school and HAD to go into the world, I remained afraid. Other children at school were frightening and even more unpredictable. The demands they made on friendship were really puzzling me. The only form of making contact that I knew was clinging desperately, out of the fear that my parents were about to leave. Of course the result of this was usually that friends left me, because I asked for something they couldn't give: take care of me, determine for me how to act, tell my how you want me to be.
And when I got even older and had closed myself off even further after all the misery, by then all the care I DID receive didn't have any effect whatsoever. I didn't believe it was genuine, couldn't accept this care. This made the situation very awkward: on the one hand I 'made' people to take care of me, on the other hand I turned away this care.
Arrest of the emotional and psychological development
The emotional arrest is a consequence of 'splitting', a mechanism that's used by ALL little children to make the world neater arranged and therefore safer.
A little child is only interested in ONE thing: will this person who's with me now take care of me or not. This is a question of vital interest: without care a little child dies. So it's important that it is very clear which one it'll be: care or no care. Being able to see gradations confuses the answer, so it's safer not to look at gradations. It's safer to think in terms like good/bad, yes/no, love/hate. This black and white view is everywhere: hot/cold, ugly/beautiful, nice/stupid etc.
However, the sharpest contrast is this one: feeling/reason. A little child can't connect things that happen to him, the feelings inside him that arouse from these events, his behaviour that arouses from these feelings, the reactions his actions evoke in his environment and again the feelings inside him that are aroused by these reactions. A little child doesn't know that certain feeling lead to certain behaviour. He also doesn't understand that his actions have consequences for how other people handle him.
The healthy child learns to connect all these things because:
his parents name his feelings every time and ask about them;
the child gets older and gets better in handling unsafety;
his parents make clear by punishment and rewards that certain behaviour evokes certain reactions;
he gets a larger vocabulary (because you can't name gradations if you don't have the words).
But since my parents DIDN'T do all these things with me, I never was able to connect feeling and reason, connect black and white. In the first place I couldn't acknowledge my own feelings. Secondly I wasn't able to connect my feelings to my behaviours or other peoples behaviours. Thirdly I remained dependent on other people to asses how I should be and how I should act, so it remained necessary for me to see very quickly if the person who was with was going to take care of me or not.
Because I couldn't make this connection I could only grow rationally. Emotionally I remained at a very young age, with a maximum of 2.5 years ( I can't asses this age more precise, in any case 2.5 years is about the age at which 'splitting' stops in healthy children). This had very serious consequences. Many of the all too well known symptoms of borderline, like the raised level of impulsivity, come from this part of borderline.
One of the results is this: everything that I seem to have learned is only outside appearance. I've made it my own only in the mind, not in the feeling. It didn't become a part of my personality, of my experience. That's also the reason why I can't learn from the things that happen with me. I can react in a certain situation in a certain way and I can see it works. In another situation I can react in exactly the same way, while the situation really applies for adjustments of this reaction. The logic behind reactions that work and those that don't eludes me completely, I am not capable of making a universal rule out of it. It looks like the store of The Discreet Hans by the brothers Grimm: Hans went to his girlfriend who gave him a needle. He carried it home in a wagon loaded with hay. His mother said: you should have put it on your sleeve. The next day he got a knife from his girlfriend and he put it up his sleeve, thus wrecking it. His mother said that he should have put it in his pocket. The next day he gets a young goat and he puts it in his coat where it suffocates. His mother said: you should have put it on a rope. The next day he gets a piece of bacon and he puts it on a rope and the dogs ate it on the road home. His mother said: you should have carried it on your head. The next day he gets a calf and he puts it up his head and the calf scratches his face all over. His mother said: you should have led the calf home and put it in the stall. The next day his girlfriend doesn't give him something, she is coming with him, so he leads her home and tied her up in the stall. Hans wasn't able to make an universal rule out of the advise his mother gave him: things that can walk you let walk, things that are small you put away on an easy spot and things that are dangerous you put away on a safe spot. This is my way of learning things too. I can't make an universal rule of things, because I don't have an inner source to draw on. Of course I learned certain behaviours and reactions, but since it's clinging to the outside only time and again application is difficult. Because how do you determine when to apply a certain behaviour and when not? And when you can behave in the same way or when you have to adapt it a little bit or completely?
I've learned to recognise this part as behaviour of a two-year old because I started to see my own behaviour in my children. I saw my oldest son doing things in a certain way and I suddenly saw myself doing those things the same way. Shortly after that I met my little girl in therapy.
List with symptoms and consequences of these three disorders
