Repost. An essay on rejecting reactivity.
I wrote this when I was a peer counselor for borderline families. The application is, of course, wider.
The Borderline Family Dynamic: Three strategies that promote our families’ welfare
Those of us who live with Borderline Personality Disorder are hardworking people. We‘re very sensitive, both within ourselves and to each other. We’re good at finding many solutions to the problems we face. We have relationships we care deeply about: I can’t think of another group of people who love as fiercely as we do.
And for years, since I became "one of us", I've been trying use this sensitivity, this ability to find solutions, this deep kind of connection, to help me locate the point at which I start to enact my husband's BPD. The point at which the family becomes complicit with his illness.
It was difficult enough for us to secure medical attention that produced an accurate diagnosis. And yet, when the label was in place, the idea that one of us had Borderline Personality Disorder launched us into the mistaken assumption that the illness was contained in one body, rather than dynamic in our family as it in fact is. So, all this while I’ve been trying to understand my own contribution, I’ve been asking the wrong question.
The question isn’t when I begin to enact his illness; the question should be, when do I step into the dynamic that exists in our family situation? Because although BPD originates in one brain, the whole family becomes involved as soon as brain chemistry turns into emotion and behavior.
I’ve understood that the moment we locate the problem in the person, our family member, and not in the situation, being in the Borderline dynamic, we're stepping into the Zone. That is the moment we become participants -- whether we have BPD or whether we merely live with it.
This sounds at once too simple and too confusing. Let's think together for a moment, and do it as peers in a group. That is, not as people who are "borderline" or who are not. Let’s think together as people who all live with BPD.
Borderline Personality Disorder confuses and invalidates anyone within hugging distance of itself. It makes us doubt ourselves and everyone around us - especially the people we most love. So, our families become fearful that the person they love intentionally sets out to hurt them.
Indeed, this belief has been broadcast in self help literature and also over the internet by "experts". It’s likely that anyone spreading such a belief has a relationship to the disorder that is still under construction. Let's be careful with anyone who seeks to increase our families’ quotient of fear. ("Sell crazy somewhere else; we're all stocked up here!" – As Good As It Gets) We have been all stocked up on fear in our families.
And we've been angry, as well, because we suspect at times that our love is purposefully being wasted or hated. The good news: this isn’t a fact. In our families, there are steps we have to take before we reach the situation "I want to hurt you" or "I am hurt".
I've been on email support lists for our families for more than six years now. The majority of them struggle to understand BPD as a process, let alone to understand it as a situation in a family. And yet, without this understanding, we've little hope to do anything but participate actively in the illness.
None of us really want to do that. None of us purposely enter or prolong that misery.
We have been afraid; we have been angry. Perhaps, too afraid and too angry to think, or to know how to stay out of the illness. I’d like us to try to see how this situation is created.
The Borderline dynamic works a little like a pyramid scheme, or like a vector in the environment. My husband has a fearfully distressing internal event: he at that moment believes I'm his assailant. If we're not careful, he lashes out at me. That's the illness in one person.
If I'm not careful, I pick up his fearful, distressed thought "You are my assailant!" and hike it back to him. "No, you are my assailant!" At that moment, I am locating "the problem" (as well as much of my own discomfort) in him. That's the illness now at the level of the family, incorporated as a dynamic.
If the professionals we rely upon are not careful, they are fearfully outraged and they pick up this distressed thinking as well. "You two are abusive with each other. Get help!" -- a gesture which is not really an intervention, but a collusion that picks up the original belief unself-consciously and asserts it as a fact. The clinician has located "the problem" in the people, rather than in the situation. This is the illness at the level of community, and now we have something like the conditions for an epidemic . . .
So, how do we step out of this dynamic? Here's an exercise I ask you to road test. The next time you see your family member (yourself, your client) become irritable, and you feel that first twinge of dread, at that very moment you have a choice. Your system is telling you something very important. It's saying: "You need to be careful now: stay aware and use your tools in this situation. " It's not saying this: "This person you love wants to hurt you."
If you listen to yourself well, you can stay out of the dynamic. You can handle the situation. If you allow yourself to be fearful and to become angry with the person, the floor will tilt and soon, you and yours will have one more incident to regret.
This is our choice to make. And the more practiced we become at choosing to stay out of the dynamic, the better success we can achieve.
I don't know how I managed to hang on to my family without knowing this piece of information. The dynamic of our reactive fear and anger created chaos in my home for years, like a swarm of bees now attacking here, now amassing over there. Oddly, anyone who knows us would describe each of us as gentle individuals. Yet, the Borderline dynamic has propelled us into danger, near ruin, so much pain. Most of the time, I felt like we were being pulled apart limb by limb, and that there was no hope of keeping this family intact. And of course, my fear and anger infected everyone around me, so all I heard from my friends and family was "Leave him, get out. What are you doing?" (Notice: that’s the illness again, at the level of community?)
The moment I started dealing with the situation of being in this family, instead of fearing the person who was my husband, the air in the house changed, became calmer in a profound way. As a friend recently had occasion to remind me, our home is still under construction. I thank her. Being in the process of healing is such a gift compared to living in eroding daily fear and pain.
I'm not an expert on Borderline Personality Disorder. I'm only a person who lives with projective illness – literally, illness that locates our own painful emotions in another person. I can never be completely outside of the rules of that illness. But in learning the rules, we become better players, better members of the families we care so deeply about.
1. The first rule for our families is, become aware of yourself and take charge of your reactions. Learn to deal, not from your reaction to a person, but with the challenge of the situation. There are many tools for our families ready to be picked up and used. To be good craftsmen, we must become adept with our best tool, ourselves. When I was bound up in my own reaction to my husband's illness, the most effective therapy in the world wouldn’t have done us one bit of good. My reactions alone could keep the dynamic of the illness in play, feed it, encourage it.
2. The second rule is, we all need to do the same work for our families. Little or no progress was made at our house until the family as a whole set about developing precisely the same skills: mindfulness; impulse control; communication; anger management; trusting; reality checking. My husband and I are as different as two people could be in many ways; but, we are both in this family and we both need to attend to the needs, challenges, aspirations of a borderline family. Sending a borderline family member into treatment will yield little unless we are willing to undertake that journey as well. You can’t send one foot on a walk by itself.
3. The third rule is, we collaborate with each other whenever possible, in our relationships, in our families, in our community. The Borderline dynamic seeks to fragment our selves, split up our families, divide our community. We can counter the dynamic through our collaborative efforts. I never could have come to this understanding without being in a supportive group of my peers that allowed me to think without defensiveness, without being ruled by fear, anger or hasty judgment -- a group that, thankfully, includes my husband.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=276&topic_id=1036&mesg_id=1041
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