Borderlines & The Family Dynamics

See Also:  the page for Non-BPD's

Forgiving Abusive Parents     
Family Dynamics  
 

Does One Need to Forgive Abusive Parents to Heal?   Forgiveness is impossible if someone is still hurting you.  Published on March 26, 2012 by David M. Allen, M.D. in A Matter of Personality  

One of the most frequent questions I get when I start working on altering ongoing dysfunctional family dynamics with patients who have had previously abusive parents or other primary caretakers is, "Do I have to forgive them?"

"Well, no, you do not have to...," I answer."...but if this goes well you will probably want to." Forgiveness is not an end in itself but a byproduct of the process of reconciliation.

My patients also tell me, when I am encouraging them to re-establish contact with abusive parents, is that they do not want their parents in their lives. I reply, "That's because of the way that they treat you now. I don't blame you. However, if they stopped treating you like that, you probably would want them in your life." Having no loving family to call our own is not a predicament that we are naturally built for. 

Although we may not want to or be able to forget past misdeeds, most of us could readily find it in our hearts to forgive family members for bad past behavior if only they would let us. 

But if the offending family members are still mistreating you, acting as if the abuse never even happened, or are in some other way invalidating you if you even bring it up, how can you possibly forgive them?  If they blame you for their past misdeeds, how on earth can you possibly forgive them? If they demand you leave your children in the care of an abuser and act as if you are unreasonable for refusing to do so, ditto. Forgiveness in these situations is impossible.

The most difficult and time-consuming part of doing the type of psychotherapy I do, called unified therapy, is convincing my patients that it is in their interest to find a way to metacommunicate with their family of origin members so that these horrible interactions in the present can be stopped. That means attempting to get past everyone's formidable defensiveness, denial, and resistance and talk about their family dynamics. This reluctance is especially acute—and understandable—if the parents had been severely abusive to the patient when the patient was a child.  

Patients think I am asking them to somehow change the past. That is obviously impossible.  However, we can change the effect the past has on us. The goal of the process is to change how things are right now, in the present. The problem is, in fact, not in the past at all. Dysfunctional family patterns, in modified forms, usually keep going on long after children grow up. Unless something is done, they have a strong tendency to go on and on until the parents die, although the patterns often do mellow somewhat as time goes on.  

In order to "get over" the abuse and move forward without passing on negative family interactional patterns and conflicts to future generations, I believe it is extremely important to come to a mutual understanding with major family of origin members. Whether you want to continue having a relationship with them after metacommunication is successful, or whether or not you decide you want to forgive them, is in a way beside the point. But you probably will. 

Another point is that the job under consideration here is not to "fix" one's parents. That is not possible. What people can fix is their own relationships with their parents. The parents may still go on and have the same problems with other people. However, if anything is going to help the parents with their other relationships, metacommunication about family dynamics stands the best chance. But that is not the goal I am advocating for here.  

In most cases, I would not recommend that people who come from violent, severely abusive, or extremely discordant families attempt to reconcile with other family members without the help of a therapist. There is a major risk that a person can fail in an attempt to alter current dysfunctional interactions that concern the history of family relationships, and this can be devastating. Attempting to do so and doing it badly is far worse than never trying to do it all.  

Although some people may naturally be very good at researching their genogram—a sort of emotional family tree—in order to try to understand and empathize with their parents, and then finding ways to gently get past family resistances in order to metacommunicate in a way that successfully changes problematic patterns, most are not.  

Of course, even if done under the guidance of a therapist, there is no guarantee of success, and my patients know this going in. In therapy, I always prepare patients for the worst responses, and plan with them what to do if and when they get them. Fortunately, patients are very good at predicting exactly how family members are going to react to various strategies. After all, they've lived with them all their lives.  

I use a therapy technique called "role reversal" to see what they are up against. They play the targeted relative and I try out various approaches to see which ones have the best chances of success. 

The patient and I also extensively explore the parents' backgrounds using the genogram, so I generally have a pretty good idea about why the parents react the way they do.  

After we find a workable strategy, I switch roles with the patient and the patient practices the strategy we decided on with me playing the parent. 

When I play the targeted parents, I play them as worst case scenarios—as bad as the parents are likely to act—to prepare the patient for the worst. Luckily they seldom get it if we work out the strategy well, but sometimes they do. If that happens, I tell the patient to back away immediately and say something to the parent to the effect of "Let me think about this and get back to you." The patient is told to write down the conversation as close to verbatim as possible and bring it back to me. We then figure out what went wrong and revise the strategy.  

To be successful, individuals often have to tackle a family member's multiple levels of denial one after the other, and weather outside attacks from well-meaning relatives or even family friends or clergymen. They must be prepared for vicious counterattacks, guilt trips, feigned outrage, and a host of other maneuvers. If this were an easy task, they probably would have done it years ago.  Usually the help of an expert who has more knowledge about the reasons for odd human behavior and how to counter it is needed.

Often, other family members have multiple strategies for defeating efforts at metacommunication. Take the whole issue of denial, for example. Barrett and Trepper, in an article in the Family Therapy Networker (now the Psychotherapy Networker) in 1992, pointed out that families have multiple layers of denial, which often come out in the same order. As one breaks through each of these resistances, the next one pops up in its place. 

The presence of multiple resistances represents multiple problems to be solved, not multiple reasons for giving up.  Forewarned is forearmed. Knowing that these maneuvers may be forthcoming from perpetrators helps former or even current victims steel themselves in order to maintain an empathic stance throughout what may be a lengthy process. 

Barrett and Trepper's predictable stages of denial are as follows: 

1. Denial of facts ("it never happened; you're a liar!"), followed by: 

2. Denial of awareness ("I was drunk," or "I didn't realize I was neglecting you; you should have told me"), followed by: 

3. Denial of responsibility ("You were the one who was seductive," or "If your mother didn't deny me, I wouldn't have to have turned to you.") and finally: 

4. Denial of impact ("It only happened a few times," or "It was only fondling," or "OK, so I beat you. Why do you always have to dwell on the past? You're just too sensitive; get over it!"). 

Finding a therapist who does this sort of work well can be a daunting challenge, but they are well worth searching for.

In addition to my own treatment paradigm called unified therapy, I would recommend therapists who are familiar with techniques from Bowen family systems therapy, Lorna Benjamin's interpersonal reconstructive therapy, Paul Wachtel's relational therapy, Jeffrey Magnavita's personality-guided relational psychotherapy, Anthony Ryle's cognitive analytic therapy, or Jeffrey Young's schema therapy. 

Many therapists will just tell you to divorce your family, but I don't think that is the best possible outcome (although getting a restraining order and doing whatever it takes to enforce it might be better in many cases than continuing to be abused—if one is unable or unwilling to obtain the help one needs). 

Other therapists who do help with efforts at family reconciliation make what I consider to be two basic mistakes that can lead to a bad outcome. The first is using what I refer to as an ambush interview.  

Bringing unsuspecting family members to a session with the patient and then revealing or bringing up for the first time some past misbehavior of a family member that the patient has told the therapist about is hazardous and counterproductive. In this situation, the family members feel cornered as well as humiliated, and their reactions are not pretty. In fact, springing this on a family can scuttle future attempts by the patient to metacommunicate, and may also lead to a malpractice suit against the therapist.  

The second error is the related problem of not allowing formerly abusive parents to save face.  Some therapists even advise their patients to take legal action against abusive parents or go public with their accusations. My advice is that if a therapist suggests that you do that, find another therapist. Publically humiliating your relatives is no way to try to make peace with them. Both public revelations and ambush interviews do not allow the parents to save face. 

Some popular authors who write self-help books that advise individuals who were sexually abused as children about how to discuss the issue with the abuser say that a parent who has done such awful things has forfeited the right to save face. I completely disagree. The object of discussing past injustices with parents should not be to make them eat crow for what they have done. Crow tastes terrible, and asking them to eat it is not likely to lead them towards a conciliatory response.  

One last question involves a situation that may develop after a successful reconciliation. The question often comes up about leaving grandchildren alone with a previously abusive grandparent.  Certainly people can and do change and mellow out as they get older. But leaving children alone with them? Answer: Hell no. 

If your parents cannot seem to understand why you would take that position, then they have probably not come to terms with what they did to you in the past. 

Top
 

The role of the "Spoiler"

In my last post, I discussed how children act out certain roles in their family of origin in order to try to emotionally stabilize parents who are emotional unstable. Doing so also has the effect of maintaining dysfunctional relationship patterns so that the family operates in predictable ways (family homeostasis). 

In today's post, I will look at the role that is played by the patient with borderline personality disorder (BPD), which I call the Spoiler.  I will look at the dysfunctional family dynamics that I believe help to create the disorder. 

For readers who are not familiar with the disorder, BPD is sort of the "jack of all trades" of personality dysfunction.  People who have the diagnosis show gross disturbances in their ability to control their emotions, in their extremely chaotic interpersonal relationships, in their impulse control, and in their attempts to understand who or what they want to be in life (identity confusion).  

These are the people who are not psychotic but who seem to show very poor judgment in interpersonal relationships, and who often seem to misinterpret in a negative way the most innocent-sounding comments made to them by others.  They often cut, burn, or in other ways injure themselves.  They make suicide threats and attempts and have anger control problems.  They do not trust others easily, and they often "space out" or dissociate when under stress. 

They engage in behavior referred to by therapists as splitting: Everyone else is treated either like a god or a complete pile of manure, with nothing in between.  Interestingly, patients with BPD are often described by therapists as being superb manipulators.  One must wonder how anyone who cannot simultaneously evaluate another person's strengths and weaknesses could possibly be a good manipulator.  Simple answer:  They could not.  While the tendency of thes individuals to "split" others into all good or all bad does derive from the bewildering contradictory behavior of the patient's parents or primary caretakers, usually it is just an act. 

Their behavior is often so extreme that is natural to start to think that they must have some sort of brain disease.  While genetics may predispose some individuals to be more prone to develop these characteristics than others, I am not among the psychiatrists who think BPD is a disease rather than dysfunctional personality traits that tend to co-occur in some children from some disturbed families. 

Why do I say this?  Mainly for two reasons.  First, once I figured out how best to respond to patients with BPD in psychotherapy - and many of the therapists who see a lot of these patients independently stumbled upon the same techniques that I use - I noticed that patients with BPD could turn most of their symptoms off and on like a faucet - and at a moment's notice.  Patients with what I believe to have significant brain disorders such as those with schizophrenia or melancholic depression, are not able to do this.  Second, when I finally get the real story of their lives, these patients nearly always seem to come from families that have severe family pathology. 

According to a large number of studies, child abuse and/or neglect is the single most common biological, psychological, or social risk factors seen in individuals who develop the disorder.  Of course, not every abused or neglected child develops BPD, and many patients who have the disorder were never sexually or physically abused.  

On my Family Dysfunction and Mental Health blog, I discuss the movie Thirteen, which is almost an instruction manual on how to create patients with BPD without abusing them.  It is not abuse per se, but the conflicting double messages given off by the parents that are most likely to create borderline behavior in offspring. 

The basic problem in the "borderline" family - to make a complicated and highly variable story tremendously oversimplified - is that the parents in such families see the role of being parents as the end all and be all of human existence, yet, at the same time, deep down they hate being parents and/or see their children as an impediment to their personal fulfillment. 

(It's all well and good to try to understand the behavior of the individual with BPD in terms of a response to parental problems, but that just kicks the question of an explanation for the disorder back a generation. Why parents would develop such a strange conflict will be the subject of future posts. In many families, the parents' conflicting emotions are focused on one or more of their children, so that their other children may escape relatively unscathed.  The reasons for that will also be elucidated later). 

The conflict over the role of "parent" leads to a pattern in which the parents go back and forth between hostile over-involvement with or without abuse, and hostile under-involvement with or without neglect. 

The double message inherent in this pattern in turn leads the children to perceive a message from their parents that roughly translates into, "I need you, but I hate you." The over-involvement or under-involvement polarity may predominate in a particular family, but if one waits long enough, the other extreme rears its ugly head. 

In order to stabilize the family homeostasis, the child who becomes the focus of the parents' ambivalence has to figure out the answer to the following question: How can he or she remain central in the parents' lives (even if contact seems very limited) and still provide them with an easy justification and outlet for their anger so they do not have to feel guilty about it?    

The role of the Spoiler is the perfect solution, and it is absolutely ingenious.  

Spoiling behavior was first described by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who though it had something to do with a child's primitive envy of the mother's breast. I just could not get my head around this almost psychotic-sounding explanation, but I had to admit that she was describing a very real pattern of adult behavior. 

The spoiler child refuses to grow up, remains dependent in some way on the parent or a parent surrogate, and ruins and/or denigrates everything the parents try to do for them. A female child might start to lose or mistreat valuable designer clothes, and then demand both replacement of the expensive gifts and more of her mother's time. 

Nothing the parent does or says is ever good enough. The "child" - and this continues well into adulthood - will figuratively piss all over everything the parent does for them. The parents' motives are consistently misinterpreted and they are constantly accused of being selfish, overly-demanding, stupid, or downright evil. They are treated with utter contempt. 

This treatment of the parents is a form of invalidation.   

Marsha Linehan, the developer of one of the most prominent psychotherapy treatment models for BPD, theorizes than an "invalidating environment" is, along with a genetic tendency to be over-emotional, one of the two major causes of BPD. She does not really specify which environment she is talking about, but it is obviously the family in which the person grew up.  

Invalidating someone else is not merely disagreeing with something that the other person says. It is a process in which individuals communicate to another that the opinions and emotions of the target are invalid, irrational, selfish, uncaring, stupid, most likely insane, and wrong, wrong, wrong. Invalidators let it be known directly or indirectly that their target's views and feelings do not count for anything to anybody at any time or in any way. In some families, the invalidation becomes extreme, leading to physical abuse and even murder. However, invalidation can also be accomplished by verbal manipulations that invalidate in ways both subtle and confusing. 

In families that produce a BPD offspring, invalidation of the child by the parents is omnipresent.  After a while, the child starts doing to the parents exactly what the parents have been doing to the child.  They start to give at least as good as they get.

Spoilers never become independent of their parents because they never really function as competent adults. This allows the parents to remain obsessed with the child, as seems to be their fervent desire.  At the same time, the outrageous and scandalous behavior of the child gives the parents a much needed excuse to vent their often unacknowledged hostility at their offspring. 

They often still nonetheless feel guilty over their poor performance in the parenting role, which again leads them to become unstable.  In response, the child will start to try to "regulate" their emotions.  If the parents get too angry, the child makes them feel guilty.  If they start to feel too guilty, the child makes them angry! 

The spoiler role is difficult to maintain, so the child needs to continually practice it with other people.  The usual candidates for them to practice on are lovers, spouses, and of course therapists. No one else will continue to put up with them. 

It is also important to realize that an adult who exhibits BPD behavior volunteers to perform the spoiler role, so their behavior cannot be blamed entirely on the parents.  As I stated earlier, past a certain point, patients with BPD give as good as they get. 

Top