I Hate You--Don't Leave Me - Jerold J. Kreisman [9]
These unstable relationships carry over into adolescence and adulthood, where romantic attachments are highly charged and usually short-lived. The borderline will frantically pursue a man (or woman) one day and send him packing the next. Longer romances—usually measured in weeks or months rather than years—are usually filled with turbulence and rage, wonder, and excitement.
Splitting: The Black-and-White World of the Borderline
The world of a borderline, like that of a child, is split into heroes and villains. A child emotionally, the borderline cannot tolerate human inconsistencies and ambiguities; he cannot reconcile another’s good and bad qualities into a constant, coherent understanding of that person. At any particular moment, one is either “good” or “evil”; there is no in-between, no gray area. Nuances and shadings are grasped with great difficulty, if at all. Lovers and mates, mothers and fathers, siblings, friends, and psychotherapists may be idolized one day, totally devalued and dismissed the next.
When the idealized person finally disappoints (as we all do, sooner or later), the borderline must drastically restructure his strict, inflexible conceptualization. Either the idol is banished to the dungeon or the borderline banishes himself in order to preserve the “all-good” image of the other person.
This type of behavior, called “splitting,” is the primary defense mechanism employed by the borderline. Technically defined, splitting is the rigid separation of positive and negative thoughts and feelings about oneself and others; that is, the inability to synthesize these feelings. Most individuals can experience ambivalence and perceive two contradictory feeling states at one time; borderlines characteristically shift back and forth, entirely unaware of one emotional state while immersed in another.
Splitting creates an escape hatch from anxiety: the borderline typically experiences a close friend or relation (call him “Joe”) as two separate people at different times. One day, she can admire “Good Joe” without reservation, perceiving him as completely good; his negative qualities do not exist; they have been purged and attributed to “Bad Joe.” Other days, she can guiltlessly and totally despise “Bad Joe” and rage at his evil without self-reproach—for now his positive traits do not exist; he fully deserves the rage.
Intended to shield the borderline from a barrage of contradictory feelings and images—and from the anxiety of trying to reconcile those images—the splitting mechanism often and ironically achieves the opposite effect: the frays in the personality fabric become full-fledged rips; the sense of her own identity and the identities of others shift even more dramatically and frequently.
Stormy Relationships
Despite feeling continually victimized by others, a borderline desperately seeks out new relationships; for solitude, even temporary aloneness, is more intolerable than mistreatment. To escape the loneliness, the borderline will flee to singles bars, the arms of recent pickups, somewhere—anywhere—to meet someone who might save her from the torment of her own thoughts. The borderline is constantly searching for Mr. Goodbar.
In the relentless search for a structured role in life, the borderline is typically attracted to—and attracts to her—others with complementary personality traits. The domineering, narcissistic personality of Jennifer’s husband, for example, cast her in a well-defined role with little effort. He was able to give her an identity even if the identity involved submissiveness and mistreatment.
Yet, for a borderline, relationships often disintegrate quickly. Maintaining closeness with a borderline requires an understanding of the syndrome and a willingness to walk a long, perilous tight-rope. Too much closeness threatens the borderline with suffocation. Keeping one’s distance or leaving a borderline alone—even for brief periods—recalls the sense of abandonment he felt as a child. In either case,