Buddha and the Borderline

by Kiera Van Gelder

  “I can’t remember any!”

  Ethan goes over the list with me—self-soothe, improve the moment, accept reality…

  “I don’t want to accept reality!” I wail. Ethan waits while I blow my nose.

  “How about distracting from the pain?”

  I look around me. There’s an ice cream parlor down the street… But what do I do after ice cream? I can see what’s coming: The thought of this woman will start to blow up like a balloon inside my head, forcing out reason, curiosity, and patience. I’ll end up kicking furniture in the bedroom while Taylor and Tanya have a civilized dinner in his dining room.

  Ethan suggests that I draw up a plan for the rest of the day—a distraction and self-soothe plan so that when thoughts of Tanya come up, I can turn my attention somewhere else. “And what do I do about this sleepover?” I ask Ethan. “Tell me what to do!”

  He won’t. He says that when I get back into wise mind, I’ll be better equipped to figure that out.

  “Look at all of this as information,” he concludes. “You’re gathering data points about Taylor, the same way you would if you were making a decision about anything else. You don’t know yet what his relationship with Tanya is. You barely know him. Everything that’s happening is good information. Just take note.”

  I agree to try, but it’s hard to look at any of this as data. In my mind, we are already a couple, and Tanya is already a threat. There was a turning point sometime these past few weeks. Was it the kiss, or when he caught my thumb between his two fingers? Whichever small capture, now it binds me.

  I feel like I’ve detoured from the kiddie ski slopes onto treacherous black diamond trails. I’m careening downhill with skis strapped to my feet, and every small bump with Taylor throws me off course. I’d thought that being in a relationship would force me to call on more interpersonal effectiveness skills. Wrong. I’m working with distress tolerance all the time. Apparently the emotional experiences I’m learning to deal with in stage two are all about abandonment, and Taylor’s relationship with Tanya lays the groundwork for all of my previous fears to be rekindled. Shortly after the sleepover issue (which we both deftly sidestepped with a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell”), I arrive at his house for dinner and discover a pair of women’s pants on his dining room table. Actually, many odd things reside on Taylor’s dining room table: a windup plastic ladybug with tiny wheels and flapping wings, a computer hard drive partially dismantled, finger puppets, mail from the 1980s—and now a pair of women’s pants.

  I stand in the dining room on the edge of hysteria and point at the jeans lying on the table. My only consolation is that they’re a size 18.

  “Whose are these?”

  Taylor is washing his hands in the kitchen and doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  I hold the jeans up as he walks in. “Oh, those are Tanya’s.”

  “What are her pants doing on your dining room table?”

  “She stopped by after work yesterday to pick up her bicycle.”

  “And she just happened to leave her pants behind?”

  Taylor thinks for a second and I scan his face for guilt. “I think she changed out of her work clothes when she came over.” He shrugs. I can almost hear bombs exploding in my brain and the shrapnel trying to force its way out of my mouth.

  “What the fuck?”

  “What the fuck what?”

  “First of all, I’ve explained to you I have problems with you being close to her. Second of all, I have BPD, and I’ve told you that this situation triggers me. Don’t you get it?”

  Taylor shakes his head. “But there’s nothing to be threatened by. I’m not even close to her.”

  “Just enough for her to accidentally leave her pants behind.”

  “That doesn’t prove closeness, just that she’s a space cadet.”

  Talking to Taylor only increases my upset. What do I feel? Observe and describe! I feel rage, hurt, betrayal, and then I want to slam my head into a wall. “I can’t talk about this anymore,” I say, as the fury inside me builds. Disengage, I tell myself, turning toward Taylor’s bedroom. Think of this as an opportunity to practice the skills. Fucking skills. Just knowing that he doesn’t understand amplifies my rage. Usually I’d escalate at this point. As I go into his bedroom, the pressure in my chest becomes unbearable and I notice that my left hand aches. It’s as though a dull knifepoint is pushing into the skin on my palm, but when I turn my hand over to see if I’ve accidentally done something, there’s nothing there. I’m craving Taylor’s assurance like crack, even though I still want to berate him. Climbing into his bed, I assume he’s going to come in and check on me. But he doesn’t. Underneath the floor, coming from the basement, I hear the clatter of tools and the cadence of a voice on an NPR talk radio show.

  Wait! He’s not supposed to do that. He’s supposed to apologize and pull me into his arms. Now what do I do with this pain?! I want comfort and understanding, and as the pain increases, I start to cry. The ache in my palm turns sharp, like a stigmata. I hold my hand and sob, and consider my options: Do I go into the basement and say, “I’m sorry; I overreacted,” and ask for a hug? I seriously consider whether I’m overreacting. I know the emotions are huge, cataclysmic, but there’s no smoking gun—just a very large pair of pants. Still, emotion mind is in full force. I’ve been triggered, as we learn to say in CBT. The idea of another person taking Taylor away from me is as powerful as Alexis sitting next to me at the dinner table with Bennet. I feel too vulnerable now to go to the basement, so I burrow under the covers, where it smells like Taylor—like when we wake up in the morning, his body fit perfectly behind mine, one hand cupping my breast. I pull the pillows all around me and weep. And when he finally comes to bed, I wrap myself around him like a vine, hair and legs and arms, as close as I can be without breaking the contract. I want to possess him completely.

  “What evidence do you have that he’s being unfaithful?” Ethan asks. We’ve spent the past half hour doing an extensive behavioral analysis of the pants incident, teasing out the thoughts and feelings that led to my meltdown. We look at my vulnerabilities, such as spending all my free time with Taylor, not grounding into my own life, not going to the gym and working out, and sitting at a desk seven hours a day with these thoughts and fears constantly barraging my mind. All of this has disconnected me from myself and turned Taylor into the hub of my life. And if he is the center of my world, of course Tanya becomes a threat. But how much of a threat is she, really?

  At the end of the behavioral analysis, I still don’t know. I see I made the assumption that they’d had sex. Then I made the assumption that if they didn’t have sex, Tanya left the pants on purpose: to torture me and to sabotage my relationship with Taylor, because she must know he’s clueless about these things. That’s what is most upsetting in all of this, that Taylor doesn’t get how painful this is for me. Taylor and I are so different that sometimes it’s like we’re living in parallel universes. And yet it’s what draws me to him: this counterbalance, our wildly different natures equalizing each other. Taylor sees this as well and jokes that we’re like the nursery rhyme: “Jack sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean.” We’re polar opposites: I live in emotion mind; Taylor in reason mind. I’m impulsive; he’s calculating. I read social sub-subtexts; Taylor recognizes only the concrete and literal. He is spatial to my relational, cool blue to my burning red, earth and rock to my hailstorms and hurricanes. He tells me from the very first, “Don’t expect me to know what you need. Be explicit.” He’d rather I poke him in the stomach when I need his attention than storm off because I feel ignored, rather that I ask for clarification and information before I jump to any conclusions. This is highly unnatural for me, so it’s exactly what I need to practice.

  But I need his help. I say, “When I start to get agitated, it helps me the most if you can stay calm, and for you to pay attention to me when I feel unmoored and alone. And instead of trying to convince me I’m being paranoid, ju
st help me ride out the storm, then I’ll be able to think straight again.” Taylor has no problem with the calm part; he’s unflappable in the face of intense emotions. And his sense of curiosity, scientific and probing, means I can tell him anything and his first impulse is to figure it out, not pass judgment on it. He can’t, however, see things from my perspective, and, ultimately, this is more devastating than any imagined betrayal, because it feels like I am still alone.

  I don’t understand until many months into the relationship that Taylor’s temperament and way of relating to the world is as deeply entrenched as my own. On one level, this forces us to move closer to a middle ground, reeling both of us in from our extremes. On another level, our opposing natures cause pain—at least in me. There’s the ongoing ex-girlfriend issue, and then there’s his house, which all the magical brooms of Fantasia couldn’t sweep clear of a decade’s worth of dirt, detritus, and low-grade hoarding. But mostly, it’s that despite my freedom to tell him how I’m feeling, he doesn’t understand it from his own experience. And so I must constantly remind him: “Please look at me when we’re in social situations.” “Please ask me how I’m feeling.” “Please remember that it’s hard for me to ask for things more than once.” And “Please, please, please move the litter box out of the kitchen!”

  Dr. Linehan says that one of the primary experiences of BPD is having a failure in dialectics (1993a). But in reality, this inability to reconcile opposing views and extremes is a fundamental human tendency. Borderlines just have it in a more exaggerated way. So when I finally conclude that Taylor isn’t going to grasp things in terms of my feeling states, I have to resist the urge to accuse him of willfully neglecting me or not caring. Rather than digging in my heels and deepening my opposition, I try a more “interpersonally effective” tactic. Instead of asking him to understand my experience, I try to translate it into his. I explain that I have an operating manual, and that BPD symptoms are like dashboard lights: an indication that there may be trouble. I say that there are DBT tools for when I get broken or need a tune-up. I give him some of the lingo, like the word “dysregulated.” I ask him to use that term when he sees that I’m getting upset, because often I don’t see the emotion coming and I need him to notice and mention it to me. If I still escalate to the point of being unreasonable, he should step back and not try to fix me. It would be better to say something like “I know you’re upset. I’m really sorry you’re feeling this way.” If I’m crying hysterically, he can offer to hold me. If I’m slamming doors, he can promise he doesn’t hate me and suggest I take a break.

  I don’t rage often, like I hear some borderlines do, but my intensity is the same. I’m a crier extraordinaire. With Taylor, the pattern is that I accuse, we argue, and I cry and accuse some more. If I’m feeling horribly victimized, I might crawl into bed and not come out. If my anger reaches the point where I’m afraid of what I might do, I pick up my bags and head out the door. Although I’m becoming well-versed in the DBT skills and Ethan’s pager number is in my phone, my ability to slow down my reactions during an “episode” and consciously choose a strategy seems to disappear when things get rough with Taylor.

  In DBT, distress tolerance skills are the first line of defense against making things worse. And for these skills, especially, I need coaching from Ethan or well-phrased suggestions from Taylor. There’s something about the other person simply knowing and acknowledging how I feel that shifts the intensity. The first time Taylor does it, I see the change. “You’re getting a bit dysregulated,” he comments as I storm around the living room, upset that he’s made plans with Tanya again. She’s planning on moving to Europe, and while this is the best news I’ve had all year, Taylor, being ever helpful and handy, is helping her with some of the logistics.

  “Doesn’t she have her own boyfriend?” I ask. Apparently she does, but Taylor has a bigger car. When he tells me I’m dysregulated, my first impulse is to tell him to fuck off. But I don’t.

  The floor stops spinning and I focus my eyes on him. “It really sucks that you’re doing this.”

  “I know,” Taylor says. I’m still pissed, but the anger is loosening. I’m not accusing him of forsaking me. Instead, I take a shower and focus on the hot water hitting my body. I admit, I turn the water temperature a bit too high so it’s close to scalding, but it does the trick. I’m soft, pink, and calmer when I emerge. Taylor hands me a cup of Sleepytime tea with milk and honey when I return to him wearing my pajamas.

  “Can you understand that I can be with you and still care about someone else?” No. I don’t understand how that is possible. But I’m willing to try, if he’s willing to give me more concrete reassurance.

  We sit across from each other at the dining room table. I take his hands. “I need you to look at me,” I say, “and tell me that I’m the one you want to be with. I’m the only one. And you need to say it often. I’m the only one.”

  Taylor, for all his own stubbornness when it comes to changing himself, understands that this relationship is my in vivo training and that I need a lot of help from him. He also gets that I’m building up a new life from scratch. I warn him that my tendency is to make the other person my world and then lose myself. Taylor says that he’s willing to share as much of his world as I want, and that he supports me in having my own life, as well. The funny thing about awareness, though, is that you can know and acknowledge a problem and yet still make the same mistakes over and over. And so it is with Taylor. I mouth the words “I want a life of my own” and “I need to discover who I am,” but I’m constantly attached to him by this emotional umbilical cord, so I can’t create the distance necessary for having a separate sense of self. If I think about buying a pair of shoes, I wonder if he’d like them. My musical taste now dips toward folk, as that’s what he has in his CD collection. I find that I’m willing to take up motorcycle riding, and even to learn HTML coding—anything that will keep me close to his center. Almost every evening after work I go to his house and spend the night, pitching my Kiera-tent in the midst of his chaos, and actually feeling soothed by the smell of cat pee greeting me as soon as I walk through the door. I find that as long as Taylor is accessible, emailing me when I send a message, answering his phone when I call, and hugging me when I ask him to, I remain on stable ground. But who can do that all the time? As soon as he gets a call from Tanya, doesn’t reply to a message, or doesn’t say the right thing to make me feel special, the sirens go off and I’m…dysregulated, as we now say.

  One the reasons I’m always at Taylor’s place is that he doesn’t like coming over to my studio. A couple of times we tried to spend the night there. His head grazes the studio’s ceiling, and after all, it’s only one room, with no TV or Internet. So after a few hours, during which he plays solitaire or fiddles with the kitchenette plumbing, we always end up back at his place, watching a movie. In just a couple of months, my studio has turned into a mausoleum, a giant abandoned suitcase holding the few small scraps of my past lives.

  I sit with Ethan and say, “I’m losing myself. I can feel it.” We draw up a plan for me to spend a weekend at home while Taylor visits friends. When the time comes, I regret the decision. I think I’ve mastered a lot of the skills; I mean, I can almost tolerate Taylor hanging out with his ex. But as soon as I’m alone in that studio, I’m defenseless against the pain. Sleep is accompanied by a sense of doom, and in the morning, the bottom falls out so quickly I can only lie on the floor and sob.

  My box of light is now a casket. My source of life is gone, off playing stupid board games with his friends. The pain in my left palm flares more than ever, so I hold ice cubes to create a distraction and countersensation—a trick one of the women in DBT group shared. Distress tolerance skills are good for not causing more damage or pain, but they’re stopgap measures, holding your place until you can return and move forward. Only I don’t see any way out. Taylor’s absence strips me of any accurate sense of time.

  I page Ethan, who validates my terror and suggests
more skills to use. Then I cry, eat pints of ice cream, leave messages on Taylor’s phone ranging from hostile to apologetic, and finally resort to praying: Please make this go away. Please stop this from happening. I know that my response is because of BPD, not Taylor. It’s a symptom and also a wound, a pus-filled, festering wound in my core that opens like a night-blooming flower and unleashes a toxic scent. This is the emotional experiencing I try to avoid at all costs. It’s why Jimmy, the boy at arts camp so long ago, got letters written in blood, and it’s why I’m now curled in a ball, wailing, while Taylor plays Cosmic Encounter with three other IT guys and eats too many cheese doodles. This is part of stage two. I’m exposing myself to emotions that I cannot, will not, tolerate—that I’ve never been able to tolerate. And yet I have to experience them. After a lifetime of being an escape artist, I finally understand that the only way out is through.

  16

  Learning to Ride

  All summer I bounce back and forth between being triggered and being in love, between the desire to merge and the urge to flee. I feel threatened one minute and divinely held the next. The most stable parts of my life are Ethan and my work, where four days each week I continue to attend to the trivial details of other people’s lives while receiving words of thanks and encouragement that feel like strings of gold stars after my name.

  Taylor is currently out of work—the months right after the burst of the dot.com bubble aren’t a good time for IT guys—so much of his time is spent tending to his five sport bikes in the basement. When he asks me if I want to learn how to ride a motorcycle, I say yes without any hesitation. I definitely want to learn to ride. Not only will it be a way for us to spend time together, but a part of me has always wanted to be a biker chick: in control of a powerful machine between my legs, decked in leather, hair streaming behind me. Men will gawk and women will be envious as I pull up at a stoplight and casually rev the engine. I have visions of a cat-woman outfit, but Taylor is a safety nut and insists that, before he teaches me anything, I purchase a full-face helmet and a waterproof, full-body, armored moon suit. When they arrive and I put them on, I look like a futuristic gladiator in an unearthly color called high-vis yellow—decidedly not sexy.