These rigid thought patterns actually trap people in the active throes of Borderline Personality Disorder until and unless they get professional help to begin to learn how to think beyond the distorted and constricted magical thinking of a primitive concept of "self" and "other". The all-or-nothing, black-and-white, cognitively distorted thoughts that are a hallmark of Borderline Personality Disorder begin in early childhood and are compounded over time resulting in people with BPD, in adulthood, being triggered back to past unresolved psychological woundedness that has its center in what I refer to as the core wound of abandonment.
Rigid thinking, in people who go on to be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, is created by the following key experiences and or perceptions. Our experiences and perceptions form the foundation of our core beliefs. Core beliefs that, for those who go on to be diagnosed with BPD, are for the most part, negative cognitive distortions that result from the abandonment that was experienced and/or perceived. Abandonment, whether it is actual or perceived, lays the foundation for these rigid thought patterns that are entrenched in negative and painful experience and become fixed or set often by 3-7 years of age.
1) Insecure attachment or failure to bond: For many varied reasons, people who are diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder as they get older, have not experienced a secure attachment or bond with the primary parent or care-taker. This is experienced and/or perceived as an abandonment. It leaves the young infant, toddler, or child, feeling unsafe. When one feels unsafe it is a natural reflex to try in whatever way one can to protect oneself from these very overwhelming feelings that one has no tools or skills to cope with at such a young age. When protection - one's survival mechanism kicks in and one begins to fight feeling abandoned and unsafe development gets severely compromised. We cannot learn and protect at the same time. If one is protecting from a very early age, one cannot be learning all that is necessary to mature in healthy emotional/psychological ways.
2) Abandonment - actual or perceived - Many people think abandonment means only physical abandonment, when a parent or care-taker is no longer there. While that can be experienced as abandonment if a parent or care-taker leaves or dies, abandonment is a much more encompassing experience than that. Abandonment can be experienced or perceived when attachment or bonding is not unfolding in firm and secure ways necessary for healthy successful progression through the early stages and phases of childhood development... Abandonment is a reaction to feeling unsafe. It is a terrifying feeling for a young infant, toddler, or child, whose survival depends upon the care of others.
When attachment is not secure and bonding fails or is absent the abandonment felt is so disrupting to child development that what is set in motion is arrested emotional development. This is why so much of borderline behaviour is comparable to the thought patterns (or lack thereof) and the reactions of a very young child. People with BPD have not been able to mature beyond emotional arrests in their development from very early stages of human development. Abandonment is also experienced and/or perceived when a young child's emotional/psychological and/or physical needs are not met.
3) Unmet Needs: Unmet emotional, psychological, and developmental needs, for whatever constellation of reasons creates the experience or perception of abandonment. Feeling that a parent or care-giver is not emotionally available creates an invalidating relational experience for the young child whose needs are not being met. The seeds are being planted for negative core beliefs that will form long before one can be consciously aware of them. Defense mechanisms emerge and are employed much more often than are healthy for a young child. Conflicts arise around attachment and relating. When one develops a distrust for the very person that his or her survival depends upon this is an impossible conflict. It is one that sets the stage for splitting - cycles of idealization and devaluation of others - that is a major challenge for those with BPD. The child needs mommy - needs "good mommy" so when mother responds with food or basic needs, mommy is seen as "all-good". When mommy doesn't respond to a need of a young child, and it causes pain, fear, and insecurity, the child feels abandonment, needy, scared, helpless, and unsafe creating the perception that mommy is "all-bad. The child in this predicament is having a split or damaging dualistic, inconsistent and incongruent experience of what John Bradshaw called, "the original face" - mother, "one's first love" (1)
Rigid thought patterns based upon beliefs created around experience - negative "feeling" experience - emerge from these formative years and the profound experience and/or perception of abandonment that is so central to the development of Borderline Personality Disorder. Thought patterns that support protection versus learning. Thought patterns that are often over-compensating for feeling so vulnerable, in so much pain, so unsafe, as to feel that one is going to die because everything comes to feel threatening. Thought patterns that are black and white because a young child cannot integrate the inherent conflict of needing someone for survival who is in one way or another (actual or perception-based) hurting him or her and causing him or her to feel first unsafe, and subsequently as he/she gets a bit older - invalidated, unloved, and unworthy...
Rigid thought patterns are actually developed from a very young age. They continue to find validation in the child's experience and are validated by that experience or perception and are strengthened by it in unconscious and subconscious ways. There is a tremendous amount of intra-psychic pain associated with insecure or lack of attachment and bonding, abandonment, and unmet needs. The experience of these three foundational building blocks of rigid thought patterns is very painful. It is all much more pain than a young child has any way of processing or coping with.
Insecure attachment or failure to bond, Abandonment - actual or perceived, and Unmet Needs are an emotionally terrorizing triad of negative and unstable emotional experience that leaves those who go on to be diganosed with BPD re-experiencing this relational rupture and, as John Bradshaw refers to it in his book, "Homecoming", the loss of one's first love - one's mother. One's mother or primary care-taker is one's first love object. To the young infant the mother's face is not only the "original face" as Bradshaw says but it is the first world that we interact with and experience. If mirroring is not in sync between mother and infant the infant can experience this as an abandonment and the loss of self. The experience of self before we have any ability to conceptualize the self is rooted first in our experience of self through other - mother or primary care-taker. So, one's mother or primary care-taker is one's object other. The object other that is meant to mirror self back to the young infant whose self is yet to begin to develop apart from this most significant symbiotic experience.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_relations_theory)
A.J. Mahari is a Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self-Improvement Coach and is the author of 20+ Ebooks and Author/Narrator of 35+ Audio Programs that can be found at http://phoenixrisingpublications.ca and also has over 10 websites online on a wide variety of topics with many blogs, podcasts, and videos available free that you can find linked at http://ajmahari.com
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