Recognize Borderline Personality Disorder in Women and Mothers (The Nerve with Maureen Callahan)

Summary

The discussion focused on defining borderline personality disorder (BPD) through key traits such as innate emptiness, emotional dysregulation, suicidal ideation, chronic anger, intense and unstable relationships, and twin anxieties of abandonment and engulfment. It highlighted that not all individuals with BPD exhibit every trait, using personal childhood examples to illustrate behaviors like sudden rage and splitting within family dynamics. The complexity of BPD was emphasized, particularly the ongoing internal conflicts and relational challenges experienced by those affected.

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Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Borderline Personality Disorder

  1. 00:00 The first question I have for you is what constitutes a borderline? I know there there are many different traits and not all border lines exhibit all of them. It can be some of them, but if you suspect that you might be the product of a borderline mother, um what would be
  2. 00:17 the significant tells? The first one I think is a sense of innate emptiness, a void, a black hole that is all consuming from the inside. Mhm. The second is what we call emotion dysregulation or effective liability. The inability to control your emotions.
  3. 00:37 They overwhelm you. They drown you. You are unable to regulate yourself. The second uh the third feature is constant suicidal ideiation, constant suicidal thinking and in 11% of the cases actually committing suicide. So suicide is a prominent feature of borderline and
  4. 00:59 vast majority of border lines selfmutilate one way or another self harm in in some way. The next feature is anger. There’s rage and fury in borderline unlike in narcissism. In narcissism we have narcissistic rage. But narcissistic rage is reactive.
  5. 01:19 If you challenge a narcissist, if you undermine the narcissist, if then the narcissist may rage upon you, but in the case of borderline personality disorder, it’s a background noise. It’s always there. The borderline is always angry, always on the verge of fury. You know
  6. 01:36 the next feature is intense relationships especially intimate relationships but not only relationships that involve highs and lows cycles of idealize idealization and devaluation of the partner h and what we call approach avoidance. I love I I I hate you. Don’t leave me this guy.
  7. 02:00 Yes. Yes. And the final feature, I’m trying to be as brief as I can. The final feature is what we call the twin anxieties. The twin anxieties are mutually exclusive. The borderline um is terrified of being abandoned and rejected. There is what we call
  8. 02:18 separation insecurity or abandonment anxiety in colloquial terms. But on the other hand, she or he is equally terrified of being intimate, of being engulf engulfed and consumed by love. Mhm. So there’s approach there’s falling in love, lirance, infatuation, idealization
  9. 02:40 and so on. And then when the other party responds in kind, when intimacy is on offer, when love is in the air, the borderline runs away. She’s terrified of the of the outcome of intimacy. So we call it the twin anxieties. Abandonment anxiety versus
  10. 02:58 engulfment anxiety. These are the key features. There are others but these are the key ones. And not again not every borderline will present with all of them. For example, I I I can for my childhood um which was normalized in the house. It was often
  11. 03:13 described as that’s just the way she is and we just all deal with it. So from a as a little child, you know, I could be sitting at my kitchen table doing my homework and it would be completely quiet and in the kitchen my mother would be making dinner and out of nowhere like
  12. 03:30 bam, you know, a pan would slam down on the rage and it would be she would be swearing and cursing and yelling and you would jump out of your skin going, “What just happened? What did I do?” And then it would just be like, “Forget that ever happened.” Um, and then you could flash
  13. 03:44 forward to teenage years, adulthood, where um, my mom would engage in what’s called, I believe, if I’m using this term properly, splitting, where one sibling is the good sibling and one sibling is the bad sibling. And you’re constantly trying to triangulate and
  14. 04:03 make alliances with your own children. And you know thirdly it would it would be those similar things of you know I hate you don’t leave
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Summary

The discussion focused on defining borderline personality disorder (BPD) through key traits such as innate emptiness, emotional dysregulation, suicidal ideation, chronic anger, intense and unstable relationships, and twin anxieties of abandonment and engulfment. It highlighted that not all individuals with BPD exhibit every trait, using personal childhood examples to illustrate behaviors like sudden rage and splitting within family dynamics. The complexity of BPD was emphasized, particularly the ongoing internal conflicts and relational challenges experienced by those affected.

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