A couple of months later, I’m invited to speak at another local conference, along with a group of parents with borderline children. The experience is the same—fear, release, connection. Afterward, we are surrounded by well-wishers. Parents tell me they now feel more hope for their child. Spouses say they never realized what their partners deal with. Some clinicians say they’ve never encountered a person with BPD who has come so far. It’s tempting to interpret these responses as a sign that I’m special. Who knew borderlines could be so articulate and self-aware, so capable and reflective? But I have to wonder: Am I the exception to the rule? Or has the BPD diagnosis put a muzzle on an entire population, so that there’s no yardstick for comparison?
“Your parents must be so proud of you!” a woman gushes, giving me a big hug.
“They are,” I agree, cringing just a little. (They’re especially proud that I’m not trying to move back home with them or asking for money.) Alas, people have started asking the obvious questions: They want to know how my parents have gotten through this with me. How have we kept our relationships intact? What kind of treatment and education have we gotten together? Have my parents gone through the Family Connections program started by the National Education Alliance for BPD? Have they come to hear me speak? I actually did ask my mother to come but she said she’s too busy and that the whole thing makes her feel uncomfortable, anyway. I avoid the questions by pointing to Allison and her daughter Caroline. Now standing shoulder to shoulder, the two lovely blond women have passed through the bowels of BPD hell together. The hospital put Allison and other parents together for multifamily groups, and as Caroline went through DBT, her mother went through a similar training focused on how to understand and communicate with her daughter through the lens of BPD and all of the difficulties it entails. Now they even give talks together, which impresses me and makes me jealous. Very jealous.
Periodically I approach my mother, my father, and even my mother’s parents with pamphlets and the occasional article. Now I have updates on my evolving role as a BPD advocate. Their discomfort with mental illness is visceral. After I share “Family Guidelines,” a pamphlet on BPD, with my grandparents, my mother calls me up to request that I never mention BPD again to them. She says it’s too disturbing, too complicated, that they’re old and don’t need to be thinking about such things. So at family gatherings with my mother, I try to stick to the acceptable script. Indeed, I discover that the less I say, the happier everyone seems to be with me. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off as a paraplegic or afflicted by some tragic form of cancer. The invisibility and periodicity of my disorder, along with how I often border on normalcy, allows them to evade my need for their understanding. And because our most enduring family heirloom is avoidance and denial of pain and suffering, I don’t need much prompting to shut myself down in their presence. It’s only with Ethan and Taylor that I cry about it.
At these times, Ethan asks, “Why do you need them to accept you?”
“Because they’re my family, that’s why! Isn’t that what family is supposed to do?”
“But if they can’t, why do you keep expecting them to?”
Ahh, the rigidity of expectations.
With my father, I’m more forgiving. Perhaps because of our common recovery from addiction, I have a taste of validation in that relationship. That troubled part of myself is also in him, and we’ve both had to admit and confront it. And it may be that because I’ve never found comfort and security with my father, I’m not so devastated by his lack of support as I am by that treatment from my mother and her parents.
As part of my new advocacy work, I begin to attend larger mental health conferences. The years 2003 and 2004 are a good vintage for BPD research. Technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging are starting to show the biology that causes disturbances in emotional processing in people with BPD. Our experience with physical pain, with trust, with aggression, show up as colored patterns in the brain. Parents and doctors take the stage to discuss their knowledge and experiences. These conferences are yet another level of exposure. I have to visit the bathroom to cry when the mother of a sixteen-year-old says she’s gotten her child an early diagnosis and that her daughter is now in a teenage DBT group. I’m like a spy in the house of psychiatry, and I feel hot shame and frustration at hearing doctors refer to me and my ilk as “them” and “they” and “those.” Going to learn about yourself at these events is like overhearing a conversation not intended for your ears, yet every syllable has meaning for your life.
However, my talks at the local organization have opened the door to the conferences held by the National Education Alliance for BPD, and soon I am standing on a much larger stage proclaiming my illness—and then huddling in the bathroom afterward until the shaking stops. I try to treat it like AA: “Hi, my name is Kiera, and I have BPD.” There is total attention in that room, and I want to be honest, but not too honest, because if I told everything—how I still fall apart regularly, how I freak out on Taylor, how I’m still working as a receptionist when everyone in my high school class has moved on to bigger things—the audience might wonder if I’m really all that much better. And I wonder the same thing. At this point, I feel like I have to sleep for a week after I give a talk, almost zombified from the intensity of just standing there, claiming the name, describing the pain. What will happen if I show anger? If I start to cry or get into a conflict with someone? Does that mean I’m a fraud or not truly better? The pressure to appear perfect, something that’s caused me to experience so much neglect, creeps into even this work. I feel I can’t be symptomatic or I’ll be discrediting myself and burning all of these hard-won bridges that might eventually lead me to others who are on the same path.
So there it is: yet another layer of dualism, another dialectic. I am better, and yet I can become symptomatic again suddenly and drastically. One day a professor at a local college asks me to talk to his medical students about BPD, and because the hospital is on the other side of town, I have to take two buses to an unknown city campus. My talk goes flawlessly, but as soon as I leave I have an anxiety attack. I can’t find the bus stop—can’t even find my location on my map. I sit on a bench and sob, and I don’t know what to do. I’m a total mess, when just half an hour ago I was bowing to their applause.
Ethan always wants to know what my goal is, and what the pros and cons of each action are. With this new advocacy role, the con is I get totally dysregulated. But on the other side of this brutal exposure, I experience a disarming sense of freedom. The thing that makes it so disarming is that by saying to others, “I educate people about BPD,” I am no longer defining myself as the illness. At work, I’ve started to explain my mission without any apology, and when my colleagues ask, “What is BPD?” I’m able to tell them without appearing confessional or inappropriate. I’m still the “artist in residence” at work, but my role continues to shift toward “psychologist in residence.” And not surprisingly, everyone has someone in his or her life who—officially or unofficially—struggles with a mental disorder, including BPD.
20
Control and Blame
I ask Taylor if he’d be embarrassed if I became the BPD poster child. He hugs me, smiles, and says, “I’d be proud of you.” Raymond, Renee, Gail, and Richard all pitch in, from giving me unlimited access to the supply room and copy machine, to coordinating days off for my other “career,” and even flying me to Florence, Italy, to attend a conference on personality disorders (thank you, Raymond!). Yet I’m not making progress with my family. Seeing other parents at the advocacy events has the same triggering effect that watching happy couples once did. My father is more approachable, even if he does translate everything in terms of addiction, but my mother still flinches at the idea of me talking publicly about anything personal. And while I can tell she’s proud of me for making such progress, as soon as I share details she says, for the hundredth time, that she wishes I’d explore something other than my own pro
blems—that I should get more outside myself. It seems that even my triumph over my illness needs to be swept under the rug.
I never planned to ambush her, but it was bound to happen. All my life I’ve been hearing that I need to get more outside myself and stop being so self-centered. I wish that just once she’d be capable of seeing things from inside my eyes rather than dictating what I should be doing. She calls on Christmas Eve just before I leave work and asks if I’ll have dinner with her because her boyfriend changed plans and she doesn’t want to be alone. I half dread seeing her, but the idea of her spending Christmas Eve alone is even less tolerable, so I cancel plans and meet her for Thai food. My plan is to stay at the restaurant only an hour, but as it turns out, I don’t need to worry about time. A half hour into dinner, my mom is telling me to get out of the restaurant. “Just leave!” she hisses, throwing down her silverware and burrowing her face into her hands. “Just leave, for God’s sake!”
It happens so quickly. We meet and all is well until I realize the conversation between us is completely one-sided. It’s only about her life. I start shutting down and thorns of resentment push at my skin. We both know there’s really just one thing in my life to discuss: I’m trying to recover from BPD. Therapy, work, even Taylor—they’re all avenues toward learning to get better. But she doesn’t want to talk about that. I think, screw that. It’s time for her to recognize what I’m dealing with.
So as soon as there’s a break in the conversation, I tell her how much progress I’m making. She beams and nods. “It’s so wonderful,” she says. “I’m so proud of you!” And I know she is. Then I go on to say that one of the reasons I’m doing so well is because of how much I’ve learned about BPD and DBT, especially the part about Linehan’s biosocial model and how BPD develops through a combination of biological vulnerabilities and an invalidating environment. When I explain what an “invalidating environment” is like, she stops chewing her spring roll.
If I weren’t feeling so aggressive and put off by her constant deflection, I wouldn’t have gone any further, but now I can’t stop, even as I watch her face change from beaming to confused to upset. “I grew up in a very invalidating environment,” I declare. “People didn’t take my problems seriously. I was blamed for everything I did. When I got upset, no one taught me how to take care of myself. And you were gone half the time on your trips around the world, and when you were around, you were constantly preoccupied. Even with you there, you weren’t there. I felt entirely alone.”
One look at my mom’s face tells me I’ve a crossed a line. So I backtrack. “I know you did the best you could. And I don’t blame you. I really, really don’t. But part of getting better involves acknowledging these things and learning how to not repeat them. There are DBT skills you could learn, and ways that we could deal with this together—not keep creating an invalidating environment.”
My mother forces her face into the echo of a smile, a half-grimace that tries to mask rage. Through barred teeth she says, “You always blame me for everything.” I deny this. I blame my father a lot too, only he wasn’t around, so she’s the one who actually raised me. “Why do you willfully keep bringing up the past in order to hurt me?!” she cries out. Her barely contained rage glows around us, a fierce aura, but neither of us is backing down.
“I’m not going to pretend things didn’t happen just because you don’t like to remember.” I counter. “And I’m not trying to hurt you. This is the same stuff your parents did to you: ignoring your feelings, not recognizing what you needed, invalidating you. You grew up never being taught how to be honest about what was going on inside you. You also had to pretend.”
“So now you have blame them too? It this what therapy does—teaches you to blame and hurt others to make yourself feel better?”
“I don’t see why we can’t look at the facts without judging them. No one ever talked about what was really going on in our family. We were always hiding, or ignoring, or punishing when things came to the surface.”
“That was years ago! If you can’t let go of the past, then I don’t think you’re making all that much progress. And you can tell your therapist that.” She’s waving frantically at the waiter to give her the check, even though our dinner is only half eaten. “Just go…” she hisses, not looking at me any more, fumbling for her purse. “Just leave.”
So I do.
My mother and I don’t talk for six months. At first it seems like we both need some time, then it becomes one of those chosen avoidances that grows more difficult to repair with each passing day. She sends me a letter sometime around Easter—half plea, half demand that I let the past rest so we can continue to have a relationship. I tear up the letter. There have been a hundred times my mother has removed herself from my life, so now I have a switch inside me that flips on and off and blocks the thought of her without my even noticing. It’s much the same with my father. So while I’m upset about this situation, it’s not unfamiliar. Usually my mother is traveling in Asia or Europe, or subsumed under the seven-day work schedule of a teacher at a private school. This time, she’s just in another town. But there’s one big difference: This time, I’m in control of her absence.
There are many things I want to control; for example, Taylor’s house—and the cat situation. He agreed to take Tanya’s two cats—temporarily—when she moved, just until their shots and tests for overseas have cleared. Now there are four extremely hairy cats in his small house, and they are everywhere. Tanya’s cats have some circus-freak gene compelling them to walk atop narrow doorway ledges, jump from appliances, and sail through the air like flying squirrels. Between those in the air and those underfoot, it’s hard to avoid inhaling, stepping on, or being knocked over by something feline. And the house reeks. My immune system thinks it’s being attacked by an alien horde, and I finally discover what the word “allergy” means—and why people on commercials look so miserable before they take antihistamines.
“It won’t be forever,” Taylor says. Maybe in six months or a year they’ll be put in boxes and sent to Europe on a plane. Thankfully, summer is approaching and we can open the windows. Motorcycle riding season begins and we resume a familiar pattern: work, motorcycle riding, and cookouts with Taylor’s best friends, Doug and Barbara. They stage rib-fests that involve three grills, forty pounds of meat, and eight hours of slow basting with pineapple juice. I’m gaining serious weight. I have been all along. Closing in on two years with Taylor, I’ve gained thirty pounds. I’m still not a size 18, like Tanya, but I soon could be. As far as I can tell, Taylor doesn’t notice, and this is both good and bad. He doesn’t give me compliments, which is upsetting as I obviously need constant flattery and reassurance, but on the flip side, he never seems to think I look bad, ever. He’s always happy with me being me—whoever that is at the moment.
It’s both alarming and a relief to love someone who has so little concern for appearances. I’m not sure how he got this way. His parents have made long, fruitful careers out of their sensitivity to space and form, color and shape. That he was spawned by an architect and an interior designer and yet doesn’t have any concern about his own house’s appearance, or his own appearance, doesn’t make sense. We’re both children of artists, but only one of us seems to care about visuals. I’m at the other extreme: fixated on space and image as though it has a texture that rubs against my nerves. If even one drawer in the bureau is out of place, I have to align it with the others. I can’t stand the chaos of his house. It makes my insides feel mashed up, and since his house is the center of my world, I’m in constant conflict with it. Taylor and I embody so many polarities it’s baffling: He’s immune to his surroundings, and I’m incredibly sensitive to them. His nature is unchanging and steady; mine is mercurial. I love vegetables and he’d be content to rely on iceberg lettuce. The list seems endless.
Negotiating these differences exhausts me. There have always been conflicts between our lifestyles, but as time goes on, different life goals are also emergi
ng; or, better put, I’m creating my own life despite how much I’ve been piggybacking on his, and it isn’t clear how well my new life meshes with his. When we began dating, I was like a newborn. I needed constant support, advice, teaching, and direction. Now I’m starting to find my own way, and it turns out that it doesn’t involve sitting at home playing board games with Taylor. I’m traveling to mental health conferences and giving talks. I’m starting to approach mindfulness practice more as a lifestyle than as an occasional technique. I’m considering becoming a vegetarian and going back to school to study psychology. If I had more experience with relationships, I’d say this might be the point when two people begin to drift apart. As I have never been with someone this long, I don’t know the signs. Also, I’m still orbiting Taylor despite these new directions. He’s not worried about me disappearing, but I’m worried, in that underground gurgling way that will eventually rise to the surface to surprise everyone—except me.
Meanwhile Ethan and I sit down every week and work with my parts. It’s a parts party. The more there are, the more I seem to discover, but they can be roughly grouped, like the IFS model says, into the emotionally devastated and frozen exiles, the helpful but controlling and protective managers, and the frenzied, impulsive firefighters. As in the initial exercise with Olivia’s group, I continue to home in on the six-year-old. This exile spends a lot of time feeling ashamed and needing to hide, yet her feelings and needs are incredibly powerful, because she craves love at all costs. She confuses sexuality with nurturance. She will fuck Taylor and at the same time recoil because he has become a substitute for a father. She doesn’t experience any solid ground, and her language is still caught in other countries. Then there’s the suicidal twelve-year-old, another exile, who changed her name to Kiki, drank from every bottle in the liquor cabinet, and felt like she mainlined God’s love. But the deepest exile is the part I call “the little dark one.” She’s primal in her rage, her love, and her need. I can barely get her to raise her head from her knees. She’s the one hiding in that small, secret room.
Buddha and the Borderline Page 19
