The managers are more accessible but very dictatorial, always making absolute declarations and demanding I do things a certain way. I lump them all into a part I call the manage-atrix. She’s the mother of all management: She organizes, plans, controls, and criticizes every action. Her role, supposedly, is to protect me from anything bad, but as I grow more mindful of her, I see that she seems to rule by threats and judgments. I feel bludgeoned by the manage-atrix’s unrelenting harshness, her rigidity and insistence that the smallest mistake will cause my entire life to cave in. My mother and grandmother are embedded in her like faces in a totem pole. And for all of the manage-atrix’s yearning to keep me “perfect” and “presentable,” she’s the voice of self-hatred, inner shame, and invalidation. The manage-atrix can be the dominatrix, too, or the image of a vast audience watching me, whispering and judging. Yet this multifaceted thing within me is also the part that struggles to make sure I survive, even at the cost of my hating myself and others.
So, no more diary cards. I’m obviously becoming well versed in the DBT skills, but the most critical now are mindfulness and acceptance. This “parts work” requires a deeper attention to what happens within. Just as in stage one, I have to learn how to not react and not try to escape from what is. Thank god for Ethan and for Olivia’s group. Because if anyone else heard me talking about the parts, they’d think I’d developed another disorder. When I arrive at therapy in a meltdown, Ethan has me sit quietly while he leads me through a meditation exercise, and then when I’m aware enough, we ask my inner world, “What’s happening? Who is there?” And it’s spooky—spooky!—because the parts respond. I begin to have conversations with them, but it takes a while to get to this point, because it turns out that I’m angry with a lot of my parts and attack whatever arises inside me. I’m mad at the exiles because they embody so much pain. Mad at the managers because they’re always criticizing and shaming me. And mad at the firefighters, who think self-destruction is a way to stay safe.
21
Crossing the Mom Divide
Early that summer my mother’s best friend, Sally, calls me. She says, “You’re breaking your mother’s heart,” and begs me to call my mom. Sally is a seasoned guidance counselor and therefore well-meaning, but she’s also hazy in her understanding of psychiatric disorders. “Sally says you can’t possibly have BPD,” my mother told me early on, as though her best friend’s opinion was more weighty than any evidence I or a doctor could provide. I’m mistrustful of both of them. “Just call her,” Sally begs. “Every time we talk, she cries about you.”
There is only one way I’m going to reenter this mother-daughter gauntlet: We have to see a professional. So this is how, after twenty years of working on myself with therapists, I am finally joined by my mother. We will meet once a week with Janna, a couples counselor with a tasteful office in Cambridge. Janna has been my mother’s therapist off and on for a few years, mainly in times of crisis. My mother uses therapy like an enema, whereas I use it like a feeding tube. I’m not sure where that puts us with Janna, but it’s clear that we need her. We need someone who can dislodge us from the pain we cause each other.
Janna is my mother’s age, wears big ethnic jewelry, and has a poker face similar to Ethan’s when it comes to looking neutral. And she has a plan. My mother and I are to work on seeing each other’s perspective, and to learn how to be together in a way that can accommodate both of our experiences (very dialectical…). We begin by describing, each in her own opinion, why we’re in therapy now. And of course we have different reasons. My mother wants all the baggage dropped; she wants to live in the present and doesn’t want to focus on negative things like mental illness. She hopes I can learn to let go more and be less judgmental. In her mind, when that happens we can have a good relationship.
I listen with my heart pounding. I’m the one who’s judgmental? “Mom, you’re the one who told me I was always making myself look like a freak at school. You don’t call that judgmental?” Oops… I’m already starting an argument.
My mother retorts, “You did make yourself look like a freak! Every day you’d come out of your room with some outlandish outfit, your eyebrows painted blue, wearing curtains, shaving your hair or dyeing it.”
“I was expressing myself. It’s called being creative.”
“You were trying to get attention!”
Janna raises her hand and interrupts. She’s going to need a foghorn before long. She suggests that we stick to stating our goals for therapy. I swallow hard and think about my first session with Ethan and our first goal: safety. That’s pretty much what I want from my mother: to be able to be in her presence and feel accepted, not judged, not dictated to, not minimized, not shamed, and not treated like a burden and the cause of all her pain. I want to be able to be truthful about what I’m feeling. And I want her to understand that I have BPD and learn how to help me with it. How do I summarize that? “I want my mother to understand and accept who I am,” I finally say. “All of me.”
“I do accept you!” my mom interjects. “Have I ever told you to be a certain way? I’ve always said I just want you to be happy. Be anything you want!”
“Except a depressed, suicidal, drug-addicted mental patient. That’s unacceptable to you.”
“I don’t think any parent wants that for their child.”
“I’m not saying you should have wanted it. You just didn’t want to recognize it or be around for that part.”
“What was I supposed to do? Both you and your brother were completely out of control! I didn’t ignore it. I found you therapists. I tried to get you help.”
Janna is looking a bit flustered now. One of us should have warned her that we could go on like this indefinitely.
“Getting back to goals…” She pushes forward. “Can we agree that, as I suggested in the beginning, both of you try to find a way to communicate and understand each other that will honor each of your perspectives?”
Even as my mother and I nod hesitantly, I’m thinking, But I’m the one who is right.
Right about what? Are we trying to prove who’s the bigger victim in our relationship? Who has been in more pain? Is that what this is about? We set another appointment and my mother and I leave the office. It’s the first time we’ve been alone in many months. We stand awkwardly, watching the cars pass.
“So…,” my mom says, “that was pretty hard, wasn’t it?”
I nod, then burst into tears. I don’t want to be in a fight with her. I wish to God I could let go of the past and not be so focused on this illness. “I want to work through this,” I say as she hugs me.
“Me too.” She starts crying. We are both such criers. Janna will have to keep the tissues, and her own sanity, in full supply.
My mom and I meet for therapy every Wednesday afternoon for the rest of the summer. Since Janna’s office is down the street from a local meditation center, I linger around Central Square after therapy until I can go to the Center’s evening meditation class and subject myself to forty-five minutes of torture. This place teaches a type of meditation called “Vipassana” or insight meditation. It’s one of a number of meditation centers around Boston and Cambridge that I’ve been eyeballing ever since I left the DBT skills group, knowing that if I’m going to keep practicing mindfulness, the best bet is to find another community to do it in.
Linehan (1993a) makes a point of distinguishing meditation from mindfulness, but as you start to make mindfulness the foundation of your life, the idea of meditating becomes more compelling. As for the difference between the two, I think the answer depends on who you ask. Pure awareness, opening yourself to the present moment, nonjudgment, acceptance of what is—all are aspects of meditation practice as the instructors describe it. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between that and the core mindfulness practice taught in the DBT skills group. On the other hand, this meditation involves a much more sustained effort: You sit for longer. You observe without describing. You get more leg cramps. I susp
ect the reason people meditate in groups is because it’s hard to get up and turn on the TV with thirty people sitting around you.
The trick, the instructors say repeatedly, is to focus on your breath and watch the thoughts and feelings come and go; just observe and let them pass, just like in those DBT exercises—leaves floating down a stream, clouds passing through the sky. The breath is an added anchor, and a helpful one, because no matter what happens you can always go back to it. The instructors insist that eventually sitting meditation stops feeling like wrestling with porcupines. It is, indeed, intensely painful, even the posture. As I sit on a cushion, cross-legged and unmoving, all of the subtle aches and pains in my body flare under the magnifying glass of the stillness. So on those Wednesday evenings after the session with Janna and my mother, I sit in the meditation hall with thirty other silent people and watch as my mind revisits every word in the therapy conversation. I go into long, heated imaginary arguments in which Janna and my mother are submissively humbled by the force of my pain. All the while, I feel my lower back throbbing, my knees aching, and my neck muscles contracting.
Like a windup toy clattering in circles until it exhausts itself, the tension in my body and mind spins out in the space of doing nothing, and I have two choices: Jump up and leave the room, or stay seated and ride it out. On a cushion nearby, a large man snores. This I don’t understand—how people can actually sleep in a sitting position. And there are so many of them! Here it’s like adult nap time, only no one is allowed to lie down. If you open your eyes and look around, there’s a sea of bobbling heads, people nodding off and then catching themselves before falling over. I’m waiting for the snoring man next to me to fall over into my lap, and that makes me even more tense.
If I’m lucky, I can pay attention to my breath for thirty seconds. It’s another level of exposure, really. To be present to yourself at the most fundamental and basic level without running—and then staying there. Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs. When the meditation leader rings the bell after forty-five minutes, I raise my eyes and am amazed. It’s just as they said in both DBT and IFS: If you pay attention and stay aware, things do change. It’s subtle, to be sure. My body is still tight. Thoughts still streak past. Anxiety at being around so many people floats in my chest. And yet there is also looseness. Or call it slipperiness to the things that just an hour ago felt overwhelming. I can close my eyes and return to the image of Janna’s office without the singe of anger. A freedom develops in this doing nothing.
Attachment to your version of reality is a terrible setup. It’s this way for everyone, but especially for us borderlines, because we have such difficulty making room for the perspective of others. Extreme emotion automatically narrows attention. Cognitive filters, activated parts, core schemas, call them what you will—they make flexibility even more difficult. That’s why DBT places so much emphasis on recognizing opposing truths and practicing skills like radical acceptance. You have to let go of absolutes and polarizations. No one ever shares your perspective entirely, even, or maybe especially, not your mother. For every incident I bring up from the past where I felt ignored or misunderstood, she comes back with a different version. I say she didn’t take my problems seriously; she says she did, but she didn’t know what to do. I say she treated my brother better than me; she says that my brother was more open to being loved. I say she always blamed me for being willful and difficult, as opposed to seeing me as mentally ill and desperate; she says that she couldn’t see me as mentally ill and desperate because I was such a good artist, athlete, etc., etc. I say she ignored me in my times of deepest need; she says that those were times when she was compelled to take care of herself. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s a tennis match and it’s never love-love. But then again, it is. There’s a bond between us that scares me with its intensity and polarity. I tell her that I never felt protected; she says that she didn’t know the world could be so cruel.
As we go through our versions of reality, I try to concede to her point of view, but whenever I do it feels like I’m erased in the process. I know she was overworked and had a difficult time herself, yet I need her to know how I felt she failed me: how she always left me alone when I was in the most pain; how, when I came into her room hyperventilating because I thought I was dying, she treated it like a bad dream, saying, “Just go to bed and think good thoughts”; how she didn’t say anything when my stepfather found me smoking pot and stabbed the joint out on my face; how she let me go from one hospital to another, one treatment to another, and never got involved; how, in her most trying moments, she declared I was ruining her life when I was just a kid and didn’t have any control over the situation—or myself.
My mother listens and tries not to cry, but the tears gather and flood down her cheeks. I recount these neglects out of anger and hurt that until now I’ve never been able to express, and at the same time, I can feel her pain and helplessness. She says, “I did everything possible to take care of you and Ben. I raised you with love. I took that job at the school to give you a good future. I worked seven days a week so we could stop living on welfare. I sent you to summer camps and after-school programs. I threw birthday parties, went to your soccer games, bought you the clothes you wanted, and took you on trips. I have loved you in every way I could.”
As I listen to her defense, I feel my heart breaking because there is nothing malicious; there is only her description of the pain and fear she felt as she watched me turn from an affectionate, happy child into someone who wore only black, hated herself, and was angry with the world. She says, “I watched you destroying your life and couldn’t fix it. What else could I have done? Don’t you understand that? You can’t blame me for not doing the right things. No one helped me. I had to be the perfect teacher at a perfect school. I made all the money while your father didn’t pay child support and your stepfather refused to work a full-time job. If you only knew how overwhelmed I was that whole time, how anxious and alone. I was hanging on by a thread myself!”
My mom and I are both crying, and Janna asks us to take some deep breaths.
“I just wanted a mother who would be there for me when I cried,” I say, crying. “Why couldn’t you have just been there for me? Why did I have be called ‘bad’ and ‘rebellious’ and ‘attention seeking’ and a ‘burden’? Why couldn’t you just understand that I was in unbearable pain?”
My mother shakes her head. “I knew you were in pain. That’s what hurt the most. I couldn’t sleep at night because both you and Ben and your lives were in my head. Everything went wrong and I didn’t know how to fix it. Anything I said or did was because I felt so frustrated. I was just trying to cope…”
Janna leans in and asks my mother, “How did you cope when you experienced that kind of pain?”
My mother pauses and wipes her eyes. Tissues for all. “I suppose… I guess I just learned to live with it.”
“But how did you live with it?” Janna presses.
“She left the country,” I say. “Every vacation, every summer, anytime there was a break in the school schedule, she got on a plane and took off.”
“It’s an escape,” my mother nods. “I admit to that. But it’s kept me sane.” She turns to me. “Kiera, you wouldn’t even have had a mother if I hadn’t learned how to take care of myself.”
“What else did you do to take care of yourself?”
“I pretended,” my mother says. Janna raises her eyebrows. “I mean, I just focused on other things, and that way I wouldn’t get overwhelmed.”
“They call that denial,” I throw in.
“But you recognized that things were in trouble,” Janna says.
“Of course I did! I just… I don’t know… I knew I had to keep going on, so I’d turn the channel. Focus on positive things. I know that when you stew in problems, it only makes them worse, as does complaining.”
I’m about to disagree, to say that it’s only
when you recognize and deal with problems that they get better, but Janna holds her hand up. “I’d like to suggest that you two have very different coping styles for getting through life. And that is why each of you feels like the other doesn’t understand.”
I think about that for a second. It is true. It’s like we’re from two different planets. She puts all of her pain into a box and walks away. And I’m like a pain magnet: Millions of metal filings—anger, hurt, fear, anxiety, hatred—fly at me from all sides and break through my skin, going straight into my bloodstream. The only solution I know is to erase myself in order to escape it. My mom’s solution is erase the situation itself.
“Beth, you compartmentalize,” Janna says. “It’s a management technique. Everyone manages pain differently. You somehow learned that it was best to not talk about things, to shelve and maybe even forget them as a way to keep going on. If you were overwhelmed with Kiera’s pain—with all of the troubles your children faced—then you had no choice but to do whatever you could to keep functioning. Unfortunately,” Janna turns to me, “that wasn’t what could help you, Kiera. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Buddha and the Borderline Page 20
