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1. 00:00 We were just talking on the nerve the other day. There’s a big b do documentary about the artist Billy Joel that’s airing now on HBO. And he and his sister refer to his mother who had rage explosions like this. And they they describe their childhood is quote
2. 00:15 walking on eggshells as bipolar. And I think there’s a lot of confusion uh between what a a bipolar mother presents as and a borderline mother presents as. Is there much of a difference, Sam? Bipolar disorder is um cycling between moods. Mhm. And the cycles take uh very long time.
3. 00:37 Typical bipolar cycle is weeks to months. Months is very common. Whereas in manic versus depressive, manic versus what used to be called manic depressive. Yes. Hypom manic and manic. While in borderline personality disorder, the cycling is very very fast.
4. 00:55 It’s accelerated like the borderline can switch between moods within within the hour or within hours. It’s extremely rare to document a case where a mood lasts for 4 days. That’s considered to be an outlier, you know, something amazing. So that’s the first uh
5. 01:12 difference. The second difference is everything that is happening to the to the bipolar is an outcome a direct outcome and the a result of the underlying mood disorder. Whereas in borderline personality disorder, the mood disorder is ancillary is not a main clinical feature. There
6. 01:32 are other clinical features which are much more relevant in borderline and which are completely absent in bipolar disorder. Anyone who confuses the two is a bad clinician to use a British understatement. But if you’re a child or an adult child, what what is absent in
7. 01:50 the bipolar mother that is present in the borderline or vice versa? What the bipolar? The bipolar is predictable. Ah okay. You know, you know that father right now is can’t sleep is into her brain schemes of getting rich quick is so that’s a manic phase and you know for
8. 02:11 sure as a child that the next phase is father goes to bed and never leaves bed for a few months that so it’s utterly predictable. The cycling is predictable. Whereas with a borderline mother there’s no way there’s no model there’s no theory you can construct which will predict the
9. 02:30 mother’s future behavior and we say that when you are with a borderline mother there is a failure of what we call theory of mind. There’s a failure of mentalization. You cannot create a theory about your mother’s mind which would allow you to feel safe to feel
10. 02:48 that you are in a secure base and that is terrifying for a child. It’s a horror movie. There are two other there are two other issues I think with a with a borderline mother. the first I’ve mentioned which is the the the bed object the messaging that you are not
11. 03:09 good enough you’re unworthy you’re a failure you’re disappointing you’re this you’re that and the second I think uh problem is that the mother sets you up for failure you see when you as a child you’re confronted with a bad mother bad mother a dysfunctional mother
12. 03:27 dysfunctional yeah yes when you’re confronted with such a mother as a child you have two options. You can say my mother is dysfunctional. But that’s terrifying because if your mother is dysfunctional, she won’t feed you. She won’t shelter you. You may die. So no child adopts
13. 03:44 this position. No child says yeah my mother is a problem. The other option is to say I am the problem. Mhm. It’s all happening because of me. I’m doing something wrong or I am wrong. So you adopt this stance that you are the raification of wrongness. You are wrongness embodied and
14. 04:07 personified and you spend the rest of your life believing that you are wrong. Now because of that is very difficult for people to reach a level of self-awareness because it requires them to admit finally that nothing’s wrong with them that it’s mother and
15. 04:25 they still have the inner child that is terrifying of admitting this because you see if you’re 6 months old and you reach a conclusion that mother sucks and you know is not unlikely to feed you or shelter you or protect you. That’s a life that’s life-threatening.
16. 04:45 No child would do this. And we only kid ourselves when we when we distinguish these phases in life. Now we are adults. We are not children. That’s not true. We’re always children especially especially when it comes to mother. Absolutely. You know it’s fascinating in
17. 05:04 my mother’s case. She had had a true gift of relating to she was so good with babies and children, you know, once the once they hit especially kids who weren’t hers but, you know, I I found I would always say, you know, the problem is once you become an of an age where
18. 05:20 you develop your own thoughts and personality and you’re going to defy the mother and that’s where the conflict would come in with her. But I always felt her gift was so pronounced with babies and children because she was a child herself. I believe her her
19. 05:35 borderline personality developed as a result of from all of my reading the trauma of losing her mother very young, of feeling abandoned, of going through several more traumas before she even hit the age of 20. And instead of getting help again, it was a different time. It
20. 05:53 was always just the the I’ve spoken to relatives about this. The constant refrain in the house was that’s just how she is. She’s otherwise a wonderful person. Just go along to get along and we’ll just move.