The black and white protectors of your mind
So there’s a thing I’d like to share with all of you. I read a post some years back that really opened my eyes to understanding BPD, and I find its essence relevant to anyone who may have trouble understanding what’s going on inside themselves. It will help to explain the so-called push-pull effect which happens to everyone with BPD, the constant ambivalent feelings of “I hate you/I love you”. If you are not very familiar with the push-pull effect, this post may help to make it clear, otherwise excuse my confusing ramblings.
What I want to talk about ties a lot into my previous post about childhood invalidation. As borderline, we’ve experienced or perceived abandonment in our childhood and possibly onwards. Since we are all wired to desire validation and to grow and thrive in a validating environment, we will do what we can to protect ourselves against invalidation. Invalidation is seen as a form of inconsistency in your environment, something you can’t predict or trust, and something that is essentially threatening you as a being, whether it be physical or emotional. As humans we are programmed for survival, so what do we do when we experience or perceive a threat? We defend ourselves against it.
As I mentioned in my previous post, invalidation doesn’t need to be visible and obvious, it can be subtle and hidden. The fact that you feel you cannot be you, want what you want, need what you need, or just be you, is traumatizing. It is painful. And when you grow up, you carry that trauma with you. You relive it constantly, even when you know it’s irrational. You react and feel towards something in a way that is hardly understandable to you. It is as if you don’t even have control, over what you feel, how you act, or even over who you are.
And why is this? It’s quite interesting actually. Our minds are truly complex. The trauma we experienced can be so hurtful that we try and put it away in our minds. But it doesn’t ever go away. We try and avoid that trauma, because it carries with it pain we didn’t know how to deal with at the time that we experienced it, and which we still don’t. The trauma is referred to as ‘exile’ or ‘exiles’, rather, as for the person with borderline it isn’t just one hurtful event, but a life of hurt that haunts them. You can envision the exile as a small, scared child sitting in a dark corner in the basement of your mind (and as the unified symbol of the several memories of trauma which have been exiled) - and outside the room you find the ‘protectors’, guarding the entrance to this hurt and lonely child. The protectors are like a form of older siblings, left to deal with a younger sibling all on their own. What they are truly longing for is someone, a parent-like figure, to come and take over their burden and release the exile from its mental prison, and to find true peace and healing.
Only, it isn’t so easy. There are two specific protectors which you, if you have borderline, will be extremely familiar with and may recognize as you read this. The first one is known as the ‘recruiter’ - this protector is set on trying to find someone who can truly love you for who you are, someone who will see through you, through all the barriers, and rescue you. Someone who will take all the pain away. A ‘redeemer’. And they will idealize any such potential recruit and it will cling to them, fiercely, like a little, scared child would. But both protectors are immature and one-sided; all they care about is protecting and finding the help the exile needs, each from their own very narrow perspective, all the while they have no realistic clue how.
The second protector is the ‘distruster’. Though the ‘recruiter’ can be a strong mental force, the distruster is ever more powerful, dedicated, persistent, and absolutely destructive. As a side note: I have a tendency to see the distruster as a ‘she’ since I happen to be female, but I also enjoy personifying the distruster solely because it enables me to separate it from ‘me’. You may want to do this too if you find it helpful. Anyway. She has been the force behind my rage, my jealousy, my distrust, my despair.. Miss Distruster is a strong, tireless entity that will stop at nothing to protect me. And that is what the distruster does. It protects you. As much as it will look like self-destruction, it is always a form of protection. And once that becomes clear, perhaps you will be less hard on yourself and that part of you. Perhaps you will learn to separate it from yourself, to have conversations with it, and to calm its concerns (this is also known as the IFS process which can be quite effective for those with BPD. But I strongly advise against it for retroactive jealousy. Seriously, don’t go there. Ahem. I’ll explain why in a separate post about retroactive jealousy).
What is interesting about the distruster is she can almost split in two. I call these two separate functioning distrusters Miss Blue and Miss Red. Miss Red is outward angry. She is a super-detective always on the look out for the smallest sign of abandonment, of rejection, of anything that the exile has experienced before. She will do anything to help me avoid that pain again, even if it means sabotaging whatever I have built up for myself. She will inspect my loved one, over-analyze his facial expressions, accumulate little evidence over time and suddenly explode into rage, and she will devalue. A lot. And when this happens, it can be hard as hell to reason with me. Logic and the like fly out the window, and everything is on fire, or at least it looks that way through my eyes. And if that evokes any negative reaction from the person she’s targeted, she will only have ever more reason to be hurt and distrustful, and thus angry as hell. Sometimes she is just present in a passive aggressive mode, spitting drops of acid from the corner of my mind. Sometimes she can be handled and rationalized, other times not at all. The exile’s pain and anger from past abandonment will be directly connected to her through some form of a mental umbilical cord, from which everything will be relived. Any pain from the past, anything at all, will come to the surface at once, connected like a form of mental domino. But she does this because she wants me to be safe. Knowing that helps with my self-loathing, which I will expand on next.
Miss Blue is a lot like Miss Red. She wants to protect me, and she can get very angry and hostile. Only, it isn’t towards others. She is angry inwards. At me. She will call me all kinds of names, tell me what a loser I am, what a failure, a mistake, a stain on human history. That I’m worthless, unlovable, undesirable, unworthy of everything and anything. She is the very embodiment of the voices from past trauma, even the voices that never spoke so directly, but hinted at it through their actions. When someone ignored what I said or my attempts at communication, I rationalized that they did so because I was boring, lame, an idiot, unworthy of attention and love. That this was what was truly on their minds. When someone said “don’t be so sensitive”, I heard “get a grip, get over yourself, because you’re a whiny, attention-seeking loser”. And so forth. I internalized these hurtful actions or voices, not only because I thought that if anyone could treat me this or that way, it must be a rational thing to conclude I was worthless, but also as a means to protect myself against ever being hurt again. If I reminded myself that I was worthless, stupid, a waste of oxygen, then I would steer around people who may hurt me this way again. “You’re an idiot for even thinking he loves you”. “You’re so naive, what did you expect? You’re worth nothing, you knew it, and yet you still tried. This should teach you”. So Miss Blue can be extremely vicious and hurtful.. and self-destructive.
(Mind you, I’m not trying to describe an over-reaction to a few random comments in my life, but my negative reaction as a result of continuous and traumatizing invalidation throughout my life, to the point that any invalidation, big or small, would leave a painful scar - because a borderline’s pain is connected to all of the pain they ever experienced)
I suppose for some they could see Miss Blue and Miss Red as the one and the same distruster. It’s possible. I guess I prefer dividing the voices in my mind so to better understand these so-called protective forces that otherwise seem so destructive. In their quest for peace and safety, they destroy it. While trying to find (and recruit) the person who will finally love you and see you for who you are and take care of the burden which is the exile, they avoid, push away, and devalue.
What is then the most confusing about being borderline is when you observe these two protectors, the recruiter and the distruster, in action, fighting each other like enemies. And you may end up believing that when you are in recruiter mode that everything is safe and better, or will get better. That you will get better. But it is just the other side of the coin. Black/white, good/bad, idealize/devalue. The recruiter is not to be trusted either, as she is blinded by her idealism, and her hope for salvation. She represses all flaws and threats and pulls hard and close, until you feel engulfed and suffocated. Then the distruster will take over, push away, so that you may breathe again, feel like a separate individual, but be completely miserable. And round and round it goes.
Now, I’m not saying we are only slaves to these two opposite magnetic forces. We can find ourselves a little in between, before any of these two protectors set in again. But it’s about recognizing when one or the other is active. But they’re strong forces, and it’s darn hard not to give in to either one. But this ability can be trained and strengthened. Learning self-soothing coping mechanisms for one can help you stabilize (DBT). Learning to converse and rationalize with your protectors (IFS) is also possible. Everything is possible. What it requires though is self-awareness - and a willingness to face the exiled pain. These must be learned first. This can be difficult if your protectors are super strong, and you’re very walled up. But it’s alright. You are walled up because you care about yourself. Because you matter. These protectors, seemingly destroying everything you love and your life, actually care about you. They are just.. young, lost children who need to learn how to cope like adults. Everyone else learned subconsciously and indirectly throughout their validating childhoods and later life how to cope well with emotion and challenging situations - and oh, do I envy them - but we must make the hard journey to do this consciously. To alter our subconscious while fully aware. And damn, does that make us strong and awesome. Seriously. We deserve some credit. Because in the end, none of us chose to be hurt, traumatized, and ‘broken’. It was never a choice, so we must not blame ourselves. Anyone else who would have lived through the same experiences would have come out the same. So all we can do now is make the courageous choice to get better.
I hoped this long-ass post (’scuse my language, I’m a trashcan by nature) made any sense. For the future I plan to make a post about how to use the IFS process to calm down your distruster. Credit to whomever was the genius who came up with this understanding of self and the subsequent method of therapy.