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Introduction |
The Rage from Feeling
Abandoned | To
Heal the Rage |
Love: The Imitation of
Christ | The
Mystical Price of Love
Psychoanalytic writers tend to focus on identity—or,
to be more precise, the lack of a stable identity—as the core of Borderline
Personality Disorder (BPD). But in my experience, given what
I know about
identity (it’s all a
fraud—a social
illusion), the real core of BPD,
and other personality problems with
BPD elements, is rage. Rage is a raw and primitive
form of anger as a response to the fear of
intellectual, physical, or emotional abandonment.
The Rage from
Feeling Abandoned
If you have problems with borderline
symptomatology, and if you look closely, you will see that all of your
interpersonal difficulties in both the past and the present were—and
are—based in feelings of rage as a result of being—or
feeling—abandoned. You will find that your whole being is given
over—consciously or
unconsciously—to inflicting hurtful
revenge on the world around you for abandoning you
emotionally.
In essence, this rage is a sort
of knee-jerk attempt to “get back at” the person who injured you.
Even masochistic self-abuse (also called
self-mutilation) can have a component of this revenge. In cutting, for example,
a person lets out her rage in slow, “controlled” doses; in seeing
her blood, she sees herself showing her wound—her life’s blood—to
the “Other” who, she feels, has disavowed the value of her
life.
So, too, attempts at
suicide are attempts at revenge. “I’ll show
them! Maybe when I’m dead they will realize how miserably they’ve
treated me!”
Of course, suicide can also have
the component of a desire to silence the rage. Drugs, alcohol, and
sexuality can also be used to
“silence” the rage. But none of these attempts to distract
your attention from your rage can ever be successful. What is rage, after
all, but a frightened infant crying because she has been abandoned? Ignoring
her and walking away won’t silence her crying. The only way to soothe
her is to pick her up and find out what she needs in the midst of her
fear—precisely what your parents didn’t bother to do.
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Now, it’s
a difficult thing to admit that your parents did not love you. Most likely,
though, they didn’t love you because they couldn’t love
because they were afraid of love because their parents didn’t
love them.
And what is the
proof of this?
Well, the whole
purpose of bringing a child into the world is to take responsibility for
guiding an innocent soul into mature purity before God. If your childhood
was filled with loving trust in God because your parents lived in chaste
loving trust in God, then we can say your parents loved you. But if your
childhood was filled with self-loathing, disobedience, insecurity, and hostility,
then you have the truth right under your nose. All you have to do is see
it.
Yes, all you
have to do is see it.
Sadly, some persons
prefer to destroy themselves by suicide or by slow self-sabotage rather than
admit that they hate their parents for not loving them. |
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To Heal the
Rage
Now, some persons will insist
that because your original wound is pre-verbal, the healing requires someone
who will take on the role of a caring, supportive parent to you until you
can experience pre-verbal healing and then progress to a higher level of
development. Well, that idea misses the point that you are now an adult with
adult language skills, and that the point of the treatment is to give adult
linguistic expression to a trauma that overwhelmed you as an infant precisely
because the trauma could not be contained
symbolically in language.
Learning to speak about the
pre-verbal pain and terror provides a sense of safety, through an
acceptance of your thoughts and feelings as non-threatening; it
desensitizes you to the troubling aspects of your memories of the
traumatic experience; and it integrates positive growth into your
lifestyle. Thus you can draw wisdom from pain
and tragedy.
So, to heal this rage, you (a)
have to recognize that it affects you to the core of your very being—that
is, you have to recognize how every childhood wound from your parent’s
lack of real love continues to live in every emotional hurt inflicted on
you in the present. It takes good, honest
scrutiny to do this, along with
patience and emotional sensitivity. Then
you (b) have to recognize in the moment how feelings of rage follow
right on the heels of feelings of insult and
abandonment. Then you (c) have to make the conscious decision to push past
your fear and respond to that insult without
rage.
(a) |
The Triggers
of Anger |
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Learn to look for
the actual events (notice the plural) that have been bothering you recently.
Take each one separately. What are all the
feelings about that event? (It won’t be
just anger, because anger is the final, hostile
reaction to all the other feelings.) When you have them all separated out,
then you have an idea of what is really happening to you, apart from the
anger.
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(b) |
The Emotional
Bridge |
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Next, follow each
example of hurt back into its roots in the past to all those times and
circumstances when you felt the same way. Carefully
scrutinize your childhood and examine your memories
of painful events to discover what you were really feeling then.
Remember, your impulsive
reactions to present injuries are the unconscious expression of the original
emotions and fantasies you experienced, but suppressed, in childhood.
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(c) |
The
Remedy |
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Having understood
the previous two steps, now deal with each event separately, according to
the thoughts and emotions specific to that event. Do something constructive
and creative about each problem individually. Choose something different
from our pagan culture’s Satanic Rule: “Do to others what they
do to you.” Choose something based in true Christian values:
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Finally, all of you,
be of one mind, sympathetic, loving toward one another, compassionate, humble.
Do not return evil for evil, or insult for insult; but, on the contrary,
a blessing. . . . |
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— 1 Peter
3:8-9a |
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It’s as simple as a-b-c.
And that difficult. Because, essentially, you have to surrender your unconscious
satisfaction in
being a victim, and you have to learn to give to the
world around you the very thing your parents failed to give to you:
real love. Then you can turn to your parents and
say, “In spite of your failures, I still managed to discover true love.
So I offer you my success as my love for
you.”
In the realm of pure psychology,
constantly making that decision to love, rather than hate, can be very difficult.
Religion, however, offers an elegant solution: Christ.
Love: The Imitation
of Christ
Christ endured intense
suffering for our sake and he promised never to
abandon us. And he left us His sacraments to
console us and strengthen us.
Thus, whenever you feel
insulted by anyone, put it in perspective. Compared
to the embrace of divine love, all human insult is irrelevant. Christ can
pick up the crying infant and soothe her. With Christ, there’s nothing
to fear about anyone. All human insult is irrelevant. “Jesus, I trust
in You!” He will never abandon us.
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In psychology
there is an axiom that anxiety and relaxation cannot both exist in a person
at the same time; this fact has become the empirical basis for
systematic desensitization, a procedure for treating
phobias. The spiritual realm has a similar axiom: you cannot hate a person
and pray for him at the same time. And so, if you train yourself to pray
for the repentance and conversion of anyone
who insults or offends you, then it becomes impossible to hate that
person—and all of your primitive rage therefore dissolves. |
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The Mystical
Price of Love
Yet there is a price to all this.
Just as Christ suffered for us, to redeem us from
sin, so we, in accepting His loving embrace, must
embrace our own suffering for the sake of others.
You must, therefore, not only set aside all desire to
avenge your injuries (because this desire serves
only to hide your wretchedness by defending your
pride) but you must do so in the hope that your
refusal to fall blindly into anger will be a source
of healing for others.
This, then, explains why so many
“Christians” fail at being Christian. No matter how much they say,
Jesus, I trust in You! they really don’t trust in Him at all
because they fear the “price” they will have to pay in order to
trust Him: everything they have. That is, they have to stop living in
defense of their own
pride and they have to die to themselves and start
making sacrifices of love for others.
But somewhere, deep in their
hearts, they cling to the sweet taste of their own rage with a secret,
unconscious trust they have known like a good friend all their lives. They
sin out of pride, knowing
that it’s sin, but, in the moment at least, it tastes good. And then,
in their own fear, they create excuses to tell
themselves that they really had no choice because they are such weak persons.
And it’s all a cunning unconscious fraud to avoid the
responsibility of true
love.
It takes hard work to be a real
Christian. The Catholic mystics have said this for ages. The only path to
true love is through prayer
and sacrifice in total obedience to Christ.
There’s no room in this for protest. Protest,
after all, is a constant symptom of Borderline Personality
Disorder.
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A
reader’s view of the healing process
