Guest Post: Borderline Family Dynamics Up Close

Today's guest post is by Lin. The writer recounts her own experience growing up in a family with issues that lead to Borderline Personality Disorder 

I was born into a highly dysfunctional family, consisting of my parents, my very domineering and generally narcissistic grandmother, and my alcoholic uncle. My parents both had physical and mental health issues and, in hindsight, I can clearly see that my mother had untreated Borderline Personality Disorder.

After my mother had 7 miscarriages and one stillbirth, they had been told that they couldn't have children. Therefore, they had planned their future without children. When I came along it was a shock; they both overjoyed to have me and also shaken that they suddenly had a new responsibility that they never thought they would have. Because I was an at risk pregnancy, I was born 8 weeks early by cesarean and, due to my mother's unstable mental health, she was unable to see me for 6 weeks. Instead I was kept in hospital while they stabilized me and I only had contact with the staff and, on his occasional visits, with my father.

From the outset I was the perfect baby. I seldom cried or asked for attention and was usually compliant. I talked and walked at an early age and was reading by the time I was 3. My earliest memory is of being that age and in my pushchair. I had a pacifier in my mouth and saw my mother walking towards my father and myself.

I remember the fear and shame of her possibly seeing me using it and I quickly hid it under a blanket. I already had learned not to upset her and felt that I was bad. I learned to hide what I did and felt.

My mother sexually abused me from the earliest age I can remember until I was 16 years old. I am sure my father was aware of it because he had a separate bed in the same room that my mother and I shared. She made me pray to God afterwards and ask for forgiveness for making her do it. She told me if I told anyone she would leave me. The abuse was the only form of physical touch I had—she never hugged me or told me she loved me or was affectionate in any way. Instead, she would buy me anything I wanted. Toys every Sunday, sugary foods in a large quantity every Thursday. I just had to ask and I would get it. All the while the abuse continued every night. I learned sexual abuse meant my mother would stay with me and I learned to equate material possessions and food with love.

I was told we were family and didn't need strangers. Strangers were the enemy. This meant I was not allowed to have friends. I was never allowed out without a parent; I was dropped off at school and picked up every lunchtime and at the end of the day in order to minimize my interaction with others. My father did have a sister but my mother forbade him from seeing her. During the times my mother was in hospital, he would take me to visit her always, saying "Don't tell anyone."

My father would often do bizarre things, such as once telling me we were going to play a game with my mother and pretend that he had been mugged on the way home from work. I thought this was a great game and having secrets with my father made me feel close to him. I learned to lie for attention.

My mother would either be very weak or overbearingly strong—sometimes both at the same time. She ruled me with a rod of iron—I always had to be perfect or I would be told I was nothing to her and then physically beaten. At the same time she appeared incredibly weak. I remember a 4 year old child once swore at her and she cried like a baby. I despised her weakness and sensed she did too, so I learned to make her angry instead at these times so we would both feel better. I learned how to manipulate her as she had manipulated me.

My mother would have frequent psychotic episodes [She was diagnosed with episodes of psychotic depression]. Either me or my father would force anti-psychotics into her mouth. She would hear voices stating we were trying to kill her and fight back. The first time I witnessed that was late at night when I was 6 years old. I ran to the corner of the bedroom in terror while my father held her down as she lashed out at him. Once she was calm my father told me I could join her in bed again. I shook my head, terrified to go near her. My father turned out the lights and went to bed himself, leaving me sitting in the corner of our bedroom all night, alone. I learned that I could be abandoned without comfort from those closest to me at any time.

By the time I was 12 I had learned to give back what they gave to me. They had taught me well. I became better at constant manipulation and control than they were. My father developed congestive heart failure and became physically weak. I would fight with him constantly to make him fight back and be strong again. My mother's mental health was worsening and she blamed my father’s lack of care now that he was ill. I learned to agree with her about how bad he was and thus make her feel stronger.

My father eventually took his own life on my 13th birthday, leaving me alone with my mother. My mother became totally dependent on me. The same spoiling behaviors I had learned would continue for the next 5 years. I would attempt to strengthen her when she was weak and weaken her when she was strong. I did not understand why I was doing this, behaving in a purely instinctual way in order to provide what we both needed. Even though we fought constantly, I was still being sexually abused by her and given whatever material things I wanted. During psychotic episodes, my mother would sob and state that her baby had been replaced at birth by a changeling of the Devil. As a Devil's spawn, I was going to murder her just as I had murdered my father. I believed I was evil and hated myself.

By the time I was 18, I had been in psychotherapy for several years. It had been arranged for me after I had told other children at school that my father had died a year before he actually had. I hated him for not stopping my mother and wanted him dead—the worst punishment I could think of. I became more aware of my motivations and becoming aware that I had a choice as to how I reacted. I moved away from home, only visiting my mother sporadically. She never ever forgave me for choosing strangers over her. Our relationship continued to be very difficult, with me despising her weakness and trying to make her strong, and her despising my new found strength and trying to make me weak. I cut her off entirely when I was 20 and she took her own life a month later. I still struggle with the guilt and self-blame for both my parents suicides.

This is all that I learned and why I have Borderline Personality Disorder.

A Great Attachment Debate?



It seems as though the nature versus nurture argument will go on forever, even though we now know a great deal about how the two of them interact in order to affect human behavior.

In the March/April issue of the Psychotherapy Networker, the cover story is titled "The Great Attachment Debate: How important is early experience?  The "debate" is over the issue of whether or not the quality of the relationship between babies and toddlers and their primary attachment figure has a profound effect on  mental health and relationships when the child grows up.  In particular, "attachment" refers to how secure the child feels and behaves with its primary caretaker.

The  two sides of the "debate" in the issue are represented by Jerome Kagan, Ph.D. on the one hand, and the tandem of Alan Sroufe, Ph.D. and Daniel Siegel, M.D. on the other. Kagan researches the effects of inborn temperament, personality, and neurobiology.  Strouffe is a developmental child psychologist.  Siegel is a UCLA psychiatrist who wrote a highly influential book called The Developing Mind.



Jerome Kagan




Alan Sroufe



Daniel Siegel

Jerome Kagan thinks that the "pro" attachment side downplays the importance of both cultural influences and inborn, genetically determined temperament in creating an adult's personality and vulnerability to psychiatric disorders.  "Temperament refers to an inborn predisposition to experience certain feelings and display particular behavior during the early years," he explains. 

The intial work on innate differences in infants in qualities such as activity levels and reactivity was done by child psychiatrists Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas.  The temperament issue represents the "nature" side of the nature-nurture debate.

The "nurture" side of this debate centers around the thesis that the emotional quality of our earliest attachments is a far most important influence on human development than inborn temperament.  Attachment theorists pay particular attention to something they call attunement, which they believe is more important in creating the quality of the infant's attachment than, say, the mother's general traits such as maternal warmth.

Sroufe and Siegal explain, "Attunement, or sensitivity, requires that the caregiver perceive, make sense of, and respond in a timely and effective manner to the actual moment-to-moment signals sent by the child."  The parent has to figure out, for example, how much emotional stimulation a baby needs at any given time.  Too much or too little can disturb the baby, and the baby's need is not a constant but varies widely over even brief periods of time.

I think this whole debate is somewhat silly and depends for its existence on an assumption about attachment that really does not make a lot of sense to me, as I will describe shortly. 

So what do I think is more important in human development, inborn temperament or attachment relationships?  Well first of all, both of these variables always contribute to development.  Second, inborn temperament itself affects and alters attachment patterns.   For example, a colicky infant with an insecure  and anxious mother is a bad combination, while the same mother with a quiet child may do a lot better parenting job in regards to attunement.

The answer to the question as to whether temperament or attachment patterns has the greater effect on ultimate development is, as with almost any question in psychology, it depends.  If the family is accepting and validates the innate predispositions of the child, you get one result.  If they invalidate and denigrate them, you get an entire different result.  The way the child acts also can elicit invalidating reactions from peers and teachers, leading to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, as Kagan points out.

Neither side talks about the importance of the choices a person makes, the reasoning they use, or their problem solving strategies in the determination of how a person ultimately acts.

Furthermore, the attunement of the parent to the baby, and what behaviors the parents validate or invalidate, can be quite different at different times. Plus,  there are literally hundreds of other influences on the child which also vary in time. 

With all these factors at work, there is also an effect from what scientists refer to as chaos, in which small changes in initial conditions can lead to big differences in complex phenomena like human behavior later on. This is known as the butterfly effect: the presence or absence of a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to creation or absence of a hurricane. 

It is interesting that the debaters do seem to agree on some points.  Both agree that serious neglect or abuse of infants during their first year or two of life can harm the child's future psychological development. 

I actually disagree somewhat and think that infants are more resilient than they seem to think.  For example, say the mother had an untreated post-partum depression during a baby's early life, but then got treated and became far more attuned to the child.  Chances are, any ill effects of the child's experience during the first two years of life would then be reversed.

 
In this vein, both sides also agree that human psychology can change depending on later experience.  If it could not, then they would both have to think that psychotherapy would be a complete waste of time.  They agree that neither biology nor parenting experience is destiny.  I should certainly hope so.  If we could not adapt to changing environments, our species would have died out eons ago.

Kagan also says another important thing which sometimes gets lost in nature versus nurture debates. Genetic influences on behavior do not determine later personality variables so much as limit them.  This is easier to see with physical traits.  No matter how much Danny DeVito might have trained as a young man, he would never have been able to swim as fast as Michael Phelps did.  Wrong constitution!  This does not mean, however, that training would not have improved DeVito's lap times.
 
A hidden assumption in the whole debate that drives me bonkers is that the most salient patterns in the primary relationship between children and their parents somehow no longer influence a child past the age of two.  Or if you are a psychoanalyst, past the age of five.  Attunement, invalidation, the interactions between the temperaments of parents and children - in short, all of the most salient aspects of their relationship - often continue on and on in slightly altered forms, almost until somebody dies. 
 
If you study the "persistence" of temperament and the security of attachment from childhood to adulthood, and draw conclusions based on just what happened in the first two years of life, you ignore this fact.  If a two year old has an insecure attachment with an unattuned mother, but is taken away from that mother and raised by someone else, you would get a very different view of this "persistence."  Similarly, if you limit the effects of attachment to only early attachment, you are ignoring the effects of extremely important family dynamics all through childhood and early adulthood. 
 
Both sides in the "debate" define attachment the same way.  Since controlling for all the variables is impossible, findings in the research literature will often conflict with each other.  Depending on how studies were structured, it is easy to find studies that over-estimate the importance of attachment in the first two years, and others that under-estimate it.   If on the other hand you assume that the early influences might continue on in time, and determine what they actually were, the "debate" all but disappears.