I continue to be astounded by the sense of entitlement shredders assume in carving us up. The Last Psychiatrist is riffing on “borderline” today, and invites us to draw inferences. Alrighty, let’s begin. This is not okay:
“If the borderline sounds like a 15 year old girl, that’s because that’s what she is. The difference, of course, is the actual 15 year old girl is supposed to be flaky, testing identities and philosophies and looks until she finally lands on the one that’s “her.” But if you’re 30 and doing that, well…”
Well hell you tell me. Laughingstock? So 30’s the arbitrary cut-off and so much for Karen Horney’s “tyranny of shoulds.” But she was a borderline too, which all of us are to some degree, and the worst thing a woman can be. Funny how that works out.
So you’re female, over 30 and still having a ball with your experimental, playful, artsy quirky public persona, princess gowns, lingerie, uh oh he’s talking about me. Yep, I have an old psych evaluation here, which has landed on many expert desks overs the years, and begins with a non sequitur: she arrived wearing a cocktail dress. In the middle of the day.
The reader is to draw his own expert conclusions, so long as they point to sleazy character and deviance.
Jesus Christ. Who died and made these guys Elvis?
But you see it’s about the private, godlike interpretation, if we were being reasonable the shrink would have asked me, what’s with the dress? And I’d have given a brief and cogent explanation of the macro realities (It all began with the Reagan years, now my whole subculture dresses in black) and that would have been that. Instead we’re left with his unctuous inferences, no more significant than the fevered imaginings of anyone else, except for the “expert” part accorded his professional station. And there was a statement across the top of the evaluation warning that the patient should not have access to it lest his opinion cause irreversible psychological damage. The hubris made me laugh out loud.
They own the bully pulpit. They gave us Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, the character written specifically to epitomize the borderline woman, sans the supernatural powers to pop up and stab after being drowned to death in a bathtub but hey it’s not about the details so much as the truthiness.
Truth is psychiatrists refer to BPD colloquially as the “wastebasket” diagnosis. Well, see, we have this cohort of personalities that are centered around their terror of being discarded. What should we name them? I know, wastebaskets! Get it? Ha ha, no mockery intended, now fix me a sandwich, bitch. Vampire, zero, cipher, bunny-boiler, stalker, Sartre’s glistening black hole, space, nothing, emptiness, a vessel, she’s poison, right, a receptacle of mind-boggingly hateful projections, big fat wonder she’s poison, though innit?
Just to be clear, I almost consider BPD a “transference-based” construct. What psychiatrists label women they can’t get along with.
My disdain for BPD is prolly what cured me of it. If I ever had it, if it exists anywhere outside the rabbit hole. I don’t want to play this game. And lucky for me, my treaters were ass-kicking empaths, who skipped my 3 personality disorders and went straight for the PTSD.
The borderline label sucks, the nosology does too. The micro concentration blows chunks. It’s not all about the individual, this is a political issue effecting largely women and is never dealt with as such. Goddamn right I’m pissed, I’ve had it.
Women are the Other and borderlines are the most Otherly of women. The majority grew up with horrifying physical, sexual and mental abuse. They’re our willfully misunderstood and speculative victim class, spread open before us in errant lipstick, white high heels, haystack hair and outstretched hand, clutching a certificate of untreatability. Wastebaskets.
If the analogy for narcissism is “being the main character in their own movie,” then the analogy for borderline is being an actress.
We get that alot. Dr. Last’s post is valuable in being theoretically sound, reflecting standard uncritical dogma. Read the whole thing to get the full flavor of empathic failure (which he prescribes as therapeutic “neutrality”). Come away with a seething desire to wrest control of this discourse:
Ironically, the borderline is a borderline only in relationship to other people. The borderline has a problem with identity only because other people in the world have stronger identities. Your Dad wants you to be one way, so you do it. Your boyfriend wants a different woman; so you do it. Your husband wants something else; so you do it. Who the hell are you, really? You have no idea, because you are always molding yourself based on the dominant personality in your life.
…If a borderline is dating a guy who loves the Dallas Cowboys, then for sure, she will love the Dallas Cowboys. If, however, she breaks up with him, and then dates a guy who loves the Giants, then she’ll love the Giants. But here’s what makes her a borderline: she will actually believe the Giants are better. She’s not lying, and she’s not doing it for him; she actually thinks she thinks it’s true. Everyone else on the outside sees that it is obviously a function of whom she’s dating, but she is sure she came up with it on her own. And she’s not play acting: at that moment that she believes, with every fiber of her being, that the Giants are better.
She’s an actress except when she’s not. There are better ways to talk about this.
The term actress is reductive, pejorative, and connotes manipulative self-dramatization.
I get that the borderline morphs. She’s always hated Hank Williams, this year she declares she’s been a lifelong fan and plays his records endlessly because Hank is her boyfriend’s hero, and she’s channeling her boyfriend now, she forgot who she used to be and I grew up with this, it’s hell on her, and the people around her, but she’s lost and pathetic and can’t hang onto herself beyond this very minute.
Dr. Last reminds us that borderlines tend to hook up romantically with rotters, or, “narcissists”, because a narc needs someone to grovel and she needs someone to tell her who to be:
The narcissist thrives with the borderline because she provides for him the validation that he is, in fact, the lead; the borderline thrives with the narcissist because he defines her.
…it is vital to her own psychological survival that he actually be who he says he is, that he actually have a stable identity that things happen to, because her identity depends on his being a foundation.
A folie a deux. Intriguing. Where’s the compassion to make my tired heart sing?
I submit that a borderline personality is one that has been utterly fucked with. She is sort of deaf dumb and blind and does of course have an unstable sense of self. Duh. She’s been driven insane by whatever she perceives real people want her to be, gone mad from striving to fulfill unspoken, internalized, guessed at, approximated expectations that circulate non-stop in her stream-of-conscious, which is always “on”, evaluating, hectoring and measuring her performance in relation to external standards of what she needs to affect in order to feel secure. She fails to meet the criteria, security is impossible, she lashes out, but not at those impossible standards, her locus of control is shot and she accepts existential torment as the price for being worth your time, which should raise questions about prior suffering in relationship, her compulsion to repeat traumatizations and all that relevant but unsexy personal history that made her what she is, when it’s so much more compelling to imagine her a freak of nature.
All women are raised to be insane. Some resent being subordinated and defy the cultural imperatives and attempt to establish person-hood in spite of the odds against her. Full-on borderlines have swallowed patriarchy and its whole stinking female-psycho mythology hook line and sinker.
My psychologists gave me the following antidote: bibliotherapy to introduce me to the workings of my mind, tools to monitor and interrogate its contents, a feminist analysis to recognize when I perform my gender to the point of parody, permission to embrace and reject according to my own mercurial proclivities, and a pragmatic introduction to connected, empathic, mutually self-disclosing and egalitarian relationship.
My therapists explicitly rejected the borderline construct, and would not let me get away with denying I had a self. What I needed was access, a way to it. I guess they could have followed the party line and filled me to the brim with some dude:
That’s why the therapist has to maintain such neutrality, consistency in the sessions. It’s not just to avoid conflicts; by being the most dominant (read: consistent) personality, the borderline can begin to construct one for herself using the blueprints of yours as a guide.
If that’s not the most shameless description of colonization I’ve ever seen I don’t know what. I can’t stomach those words, not after having also read these:
The narcissist creates an identity, then tries to force everyone else to buy into it. The borderline waits to meet someone, and then constructs a personality suitable to that person.
Someone’s gonna make her mine, make her mine, make her, yeah, winner take all and beat their rivals but good.
I’d like to hear from women who identify as borderline now, I know I get riled up at length. You tell me what I misunderstand.
Writhe Safely 
I have to disagree with you that “Dr. Last’s post is valuable in being theoretically sound, reflecting standard uncritical dogma.”
The post is riddled with what I would argue are gross mis-characterizations and over-generalizations even within the rubric of reductionist DSM-style thinking and thus doesn’t even get dogma right.
You might be interested to know that the entirety of the DSM and in particular the personality disorders are being re-considered in light of their well-documented scientific unverifiability. What those doing the re-considering come up with may be equally awful and certainly will be problematic necessarily in as much as diagnostic labeling is always reductive but I’ve heard it discussed in thoughtful, undogmatic ways, which strikes me as at least a positive sign.
A new diagnostic manual called the PDM (Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual) has recently come out which allows, I think, for much more nuanced, rounded, empathic thinking about symtomotology and character. I’d be interested in your reactions to it.
Your therapists, by the way, though they work, it seems, somewhat differently than I do, sound marvelous.
Thanks for your comment, that’s good disagreeing Psychoa. I am following the DSM wars. The term “borderline” has got to go, and there needs to be a psychosis reflecting victimization. I’m looking forward to reading the PDM, if I could get my hands on a copy.
From what you’ve written, there does seem to be a link between socialisation (or the abuse or lack thereof) and psychological state. This may or may not be quite tangential, but here is a black Zimbabean poet writing on oppression:
Bootsie sang:
I got nothing to tell you
That’s not skin off my back.
I got every
little thing to hide
And win respect a mile wide.
But I don’t do nothing
for nobody
‘Cos nobody does nothing for me.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2006/10/zimbabwean-childrens-liberation.html
There is a link. In social constructivism reality is made up of the interaction between our personal, subjective experience and our social environment. That view contrasts with logical positivism which holds the individual solely responsible for experience. This perspective rules mental health, and assumes reality is unitary, observable and manifest, and denies the effect of the knower on the known, the questioner on the inquiry and the answer obtained. Of course, the master is the authority on the slave. Social and phenomenological interaction must be taken up if we are to understand the borderline from the inside out. The fact that they are overwhelmingly female should be a bell-ringing clue. In other words, I’m reading up on theory, thanks for your comment.
This is such an excellent post I’d like to save a copy if you don’t mind?
I’ve only been to the Last Psychiatrist’s blog twice, and both times I was astounded at the open sexism. It wasn’t the common I-don’t-realize-what-an-ass-I’m-being bias, it was open hostility and scorn directed at women. I think the part that got me the most was the psychiatrist as personality template. Your point deserves to be screamed: it *is* colonization. I’m so glad your therapists are different.
I don’t think you misunderstood a thing (though I’m not borderline). I think you saw right through him.
Thanks SE, and for all the work you do. It does matter, you work hard and your allies appreciate it. I am okay with the last psychiatrist for now, he contacted me with an open mind and we talked about things and he asked intelligent questions. I”ll be reading his blog for where he goes with his attitude, right now am dealing with all the momstuff that came up. Take care and thanks for the positive take on my take.
Thank you for this.
Thank you Burrow. I actually hesitated to post it thinking about you reading it and getting triggered like I did. I don’t want to lose you as a friend and visitor, so let me say if I ever link to something that gives you a bad reaction I’ll be accountable to you, you’re special to me and I can sit with whatever comes up, in email or my message board, or whatever. This is powerful, what we’re doing, I go a little nuts near everyday online.
the worst BPD person i ever met was male, AND had all the traits of narcissistic personality disorder. i like your idea that it is a “transference-based” construct, though.
I won’t argue with that, having met my mom in the tortured men I’ve tried to love. I spent time close up in it with one who was diagnosed with BPD, he met every single one of the nine criteria, and I’ve yet to know a woman who has the whole package. But there is more to anyone than this nosology of disorder, it’s no way to understand anyone, man or woman.
Cocktail dresses are certainly appropriate whenever the fuck you think they are. Not when the psych-guy thinks they are. What is he fucking Emily Post?
Did you have opera gloves? I love those.
PTSD diagnosis saved me because every borderline I ever knew was too creepy to be me. And me here. And don’t forget the male borderlines you have met. I don’t like them either.
Of course I am the actress/hero of my own movie. Who else do they want me to be? I am still big, the pictures got small. I am not going to be the best supporting co star, goddamnit. And when the script sucks I sure as hell am going to complain.
I don’t like the scripts I am handed by some psychettes.
I have a great doctor now. Two actually. One medicates the other talks. And they both have issues with their professions and that lets me know that they are cool. But goddamnit it is hard to find the right therapist.
My big issue is I am so protective of my pain, I don’t like anyone to see it. I am working on that. And I am sure it is because I was trained not to hurt others and certainly not to need others.
No opera glasses, but I see some things. Therapists suck so much today, if I was just starting my first question would be “do you believe in the unconscious?” — because so many do not, they just dismiss the deep and have no way to address defenses, dreams, somatic cues, figurative language and Freudian slips, no training and no analytic skilz beyond correcting illogical thoughts and behavior. The entire history of clinical psychology is based on psychological fads, whatever is popular at the time, and what happens to the client dependent on the ruling sophistry of her era.
When I first went for professional help 28 years ago, hippy providers were falling from the sky; my first treaters were Gestalt therapists, the most radical of all, and they ruled the free United Way mental health clinic. Back then humanistic psychology was the model, as dominant as the bio-pharma-CBT fad is today, based on equality, mutual disclosure and a non-pathological approach, the opposite of the disrespect and coercion that greets the poor in community mental health today. And psychologists usurped psychiatrists on the client’s treatment team.
Today’s model bears no resemblance, and it really is a matter of fighting for the old school, and finding the providers who adhere to the humanistic ethos, who are still out there, but consumers are discouraged from really knowing about competing psychological schools, so the first thing we need to do is recognize that ideology drives our treatment, and then learn something about the theories, and go in with an ability to ask intelligent questions, which will not be forthcoming without a push from the client, who has enough on their plate without having to know the difference between theoretical underpinnings, but it’s crucial knowledge that’s hoarded by professional organizations. The fact that they don’t want to have to answer to us should be motivation enough to make them.
My man is a Freudian. He knows that some of it is bullshit and what wouldn’t be developed in such a stilted atmosphere–well to do neurotic Jewish women in Vienna in Victorian (there are some messed up folks) but the basic observations that there is an unconscious that can really throw a gal for a loop, that mommy and daddy are where we begin our training. A pill won’t do it. Somatic responses are so very real.
And don’t think that I don’t here, “Your therapist is a Freudian and a man? Eeww–yuck. He is so messing you up, making you are little footsoldier for the patriarchy, blah, blah, blah.”
The man gets me. He is so amazing. Loves women, awesome women in his life. I needed a father figure who wasn’t a psycho-racist, misogynist, dry drunk and this therapist got me way out of the “I am okay and you are a victim forever,” mode.
So, old school is the way. The sixties pseudo therapist who is really in need of a good kick in the self obsessed pants has killed the science and it is tragic.
No one is going to save us and we have to be smart consumers, however, we need the tools to save ourselves and by all means call “bullshit” when we see it.