I Hate You--Don't Leave Me - Jerold J. Kreisman [40]
To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. . . . We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.4
This loss of historical continuity reaches both backward and forward: devaluation of the past breaks the perceptual link to the future, which becomes a vast unknown, a source of dread as much as hope, a vast quicksand, from which it becomes incredibly difficult to extricate oneself. Time is perceived as isolated points instead of as a logical, continuous string of events influenced by past achievement, present action, and anticipation of the future.
The looming possibility of a catastrophic event—the threat of nuclear annihilation, another massive terrorist attack like 9/11, environmental destruction due to global warming, and so on—contributes to our lack of faith in the past and our dread of the future. Empirical studies with adolescents and children consistently show “awareness of the danger, hopelessness about surviving, a shortened time perspective, and pessimism about being able to reach life goals. Suicide is mentioned again and again as a strategy for dealing with the threat.”5 Other studies have found that the threat of nuclear war rushes children to a kind of “early adulthood,” similar to the type witnessed in pre-borderline children (like Lisa) who are forced to take control of families that are out of control due to BPD, alcoholism, and other mental disorders.6 Many U.S. youth ages fourteen to twenty-two expect to die before age thirty, according to a 2008 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. About one out of fifteen young people (6.7 percent) expressed such “unrealistic fatalism,” the study concludes. The findings are based on four years of survey data totaling 4,201 adolescents conducted between 2002 and 2005 by the Adolescent Risk Communication Institute of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Despite a decline in the suicide rate for ten- to twenty-four-year-olds, suicide remains the third leading cause of death in this age group.7
The borderline, as we have seen, personifies this orientation to the “now.” With little interest in the past, the borderline is almost a cultural amnesiac; his cupboard of warm memories (which sustain most of us in troubled times) is bare. As a result, he is doomed to suffer torment with no breathers, no cache of memories of happier times to get him through the tough periods. Unable to learn from his mistakes, he is doomed to repeat them.
Parents who fear the future are not likely to be engrossed by the needs of the next generation. A modern parent, emotionally detached and alienated—yet at the same time pampering and overindulgent—becomes a likely candidate to mold future borderline personalities.
The Jungle of Interpersonal Relationships
Perhaps the hallmark social changes over the last fifty years have come in the area of sexual mores, roles, and practices—from the suppressed sexuality of the 1950s, to the “free-love” and “open marriage” trends of the 1960s sexual revolution, to the massive sexual reevaluation in the 1980s (resulting in large part from the fear of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases), to the gay and lesbian movements over the last decade. The massive spread of dating and “matching” websites and social media has made it so easy to establish