by Helen Borel, RN,MFA,PhD
The Baby Monkey Experiment
Decades ago, psychiatric scientists performed a sad experiment. They set up two separate
rooms into each of which they introduced an infant monkey. Only one object, for each of
the infant monkeys to cling to, was installed in each room.
In one otherwise bare empty room, stood a big, flimsy-looking, black wire “mother”
(a construct like a “head” with a “body”, loosely made of metal webbing).
In the second also bare empty room, soft white terrycloth toweling completely covered
a similar “wire mother”.
Both the cold metal and terrycloth “mothers” had nippled bottles of milk attached to the
“body” areas.
The results of this cruel experiment were predictable by any nonscientist with common
sense. The infant simian placed with the “terrycloth mother” drank the milk, cuddled
with the “mother,” and thrived. The infant simian abandoned by the heartless “scientists”
with the cold, “wire mother” shriveled emotionally and developed schizophrenia-like
symptoms.
________________________________________________________________________
To access Expert, Empathic PsychoTherapy
visit
http://www.PsychDocNYC.com
YOUR EMOTIONAL COMFORT ZONE
(See more Personal Therapy information at the end of this blog.)
________________________________________________________________________
The Myth of the “Schizophrenogenic Mother”
Caution: Of course, this ethically-questionable “experiment” took place in an era when the,
now discredited, concept of a so-called “schizophrenogenic mother” was rife in psychiatric
circles. The idea, that a mother alternating, warm “come-to-me-I-love-you” messages with
cold “get-away-from-me, I’ve-no-feeling-for-you” messages confused her child with
painful inconsistency thereby precipitating schizophrenia, though false, damaged the lives
of these mothers on top of the burden they had to bear of seeing their beloved children
descend into worsening psychosis.
Due to this faulty notion, too many mothers of severely ill schizophrenics, so mislabeled,
blamed, and baffled by befuddled psychiatrists, were themselves emotionally wounded while
trying to help their psychotic young adult children who were floundering in a sea of voices
and visions now known to be generated by cerebral pathology.
The Anatomy and Physiology of Major Mental Disorders
The lesson here: Many psychiatric illnesses are genetic, especially psychotic conditions like
bipolar disorder (swings between mania and depression), schizophrenia, and severe chronic
depression with delusions.
Other conditions, like personalities warped by childhood traumas, might be attributable to
actions of adult miscreants toward the developing child.
However, conditions like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Attention Deficit Hyper-
activity Disorder (ADHD), Asperger’s syndrome, Autism, even Shyness, Excessive Anxiety,
and uncontrollable Anger Outbursts as in Borderline patients are all attributable to some
cerebral malfunction, whether anomalous brain anatomy (some distorted or absent key
brain tissue) or disordered brain chemistry (an imbalance between feel-good neurochemicals
and mood-lowering or mood-agitating neurochemicals). Both of the latter anatomical and/or
physiologic disruptions, which interact with each other to produce disordered thoughts and
repetitive strange and dysfunctional behaviors, are known to be etiologic (causative) of
psychiatric illnesses. Not mothers!
Empathic, Interactive PsychoTherapy Improves Suffering Patients’ Lives
Expert, high quality PsychoTherapy that identifies causes of suffering, brings them to
the surface of consciousness, and helps you reformulate a view of who you are which is
healthy and consciously Self-Loving, often reduces and even eliminates mental anguish
and emotional suffering. Which allows you to move on to a healthier you...emotionally,
socially, careerwise, and also on to love-relationship success.
TO HELP YOU TRANSITION FROM EMOTIONAL PAIN
TO FEELING GOOD MOST OF THE TIME
CALL for my Expert, Compassionate PsychoTherapy**
(212) 873-5640
7 days a week, 12 Noon to 10 pm New York City time
IN-PERSON SESSIONS – Manhattan, New York City
TELEPHONE SESSIONS – NYC, all USA states, and WorldWide
**Low, subsidized fees. **You pay only what you can afford.
...and do visit my
PsychDocNYC.com
Your Emotional Comfort Zone
Whatever emotional distress or psychiatric diagnosis you are living
with, PsychoTherapy will help you feel better and live happier. So don’t
delay. The sooner you get my help, the faster your life will become better
and better.
(c) Copyright 2017 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
Friday, August 11, 2017
Saturday, August 5, 2017
LONELINESS HURTS.
PsychoTherapy Gets You a Quality Social Life.
by Helen Borel, RN,MFA,PhD
Your loneliness comes from many sources. Fortuitously, PsychoTherapy
helps you retrieve the causes of your isolation. It helps you overcome them.
Then it helps you reach out for human contact and succeed in making friends.
Out of your sessions, as a result, you are able to recognize the difference
between toxic people and those who’d make valuable friends.This awareness,
then, enables you to find and keep just the right love partner.
____________________________________________
You CAN build Social Skills, Gain Friends,
and have A True Love Life NOW!
Find out who you really are and how to
connect with others by entering
YOUR EMOTIONAL COMFORT ZONE
at my PsychDocNYC.com
(More therapy-contact info at the close of this article.)
SOME CAUSES OF LONELINESS
Weak or Unreliable Emotional Attachments from a Troubled Childhood
Self reliance and confidence come from an inner emotional steadiness, a
strength in knowing who you uniquely are. This awareness solidifies, slowly
and surely, in the loving, nurturing emotional zone your mother cradles you
in from birth. It further deepens in the atmosphere of loving paternal and
maternal parents who adapt to you and encourage you to be you as you
grow physically, intellectually and emotionally.
But repeated physical abuse or verbal torture from emotionally immature
or mentally ill parents, or other caretakers, disrupts the evolution of your
Real Self which, unbeknownst to you, slips underground into your
Unconscious. And there it remains, protected from harm but unable to
mature further, until PsychoTherapy helps you bring it into conscious awareness.
Then, when you recognize, welcome, and embrace the magnificence of who
you really are, the profound nature of your Real Self, reaching out to others
gets easier.
Abandonment Experiences
Feelings of isolation and loneliness can come from growing up in a one-parent
family, whether your absent parent died or whether he or she deserted your
family. In childhood, you need the perspectives of both a mother and a father to
gain a well-rounded view of your ever-widening world and the other people
in it. Absent some of these crucial positive influences, you will suffer some
low self-esteem issues that could cause you to isolate from others.
This course of your emotional life, with even more overwhelming feelings
of loss, disruption and abandonment, is worsened if you grew up in an
orphanage, or suffered a negative foster care childhood.
Inborn Shyness
This is genetic. Innate Shyness causes hesitation in reaching out to others.
And when others don’t make the first move with a friendly smile, an invitation,
a willingness to converse, engage and interact, a shy person retreats and then
tends to feel more unwanted.
When these unsuccessful socializings repeat again and again, a shy person
assumes this is further confirmation of his/her “unwantedness” and tends to
retreat to a habitual solitariness. Thus sets in motion a repetitive cycle of
Self-Negation and feelings of Low Self-Worth.
High Creativity
Artistic Personalities often appear to be, or are, “loners”. This is not
necessarily because you as an artist prefer to be alone, nor because you are
antisocial.
It’s because, given a 24-hour day, you sleep 8, you work at a salaried job 8,
and, with travel, miscellanea, meals, and more, there’s little time left to paint,
compose, write, invent, etc. Let alone nurture friendships. It’s difficult,
therefore, for you as a creative being to develop the varied interactive skills
necessary to socialize and make special friends successfully.
Negative Self-Talk
This is a habitual mental health problem that everyone falls into at times.
Some people more than others. However, if you tell these self-negatives to
your brain on a consistent basis and if you are determined to believe these
falsehoods about your Self, not only will you lack peace of mind and be
haunted by anxiety and worry, but your ability to engage others and enjoy
their company will be grossly impaired. Like seeing new people through
a trick mirror that misrepresents them. Like seeing your physical self
distorted, too, by your faulty thinking.
Thus, you can’t trust others with your thoughts and feelings, you can’t
allow yourself to get close to others, if you keep convincing yourself there
is so much wrong with you. This is essentially a kind of paranoia, where
you’re convinced others are viewing you as inferior and experiencing you as
defective because you are projecting your own self-negatives onto others
erroneously. This pathologic ideation results in you assuming that others
view you negatively, that they can’t like you, nor care about you, nor love you.
THERE IS A CURE FOR LONELINESS THROUGH PSYCHOTHERAPY
PsychoTherapy helps you retrieve unresolved traumas, abandonments,
misunderstandings. It helps you straighten out distorted memories and
troubled feelings from early childhood when you had neither the vocabulary
nor the emotional development to fully grasp and describe to yourself what
you were going through.
By positive contrast, PsychoTherapy also helps you retrieve buried memories
of some warm, wonderful, loving times that you unconsciously submerged
to protect them from expected future damage.
Once your past sufferings and joys are emerged, through talk and (sometimes)
tears, through laughter and struggles of growth, through actual new life
experiences and dreams, all of your Real Self is free to feel all your Real Feelings
in the present. Now, being more and more open to your Real True Self, you can
more easily interact with others.
At this stage, as you’ll experience it, your PsychoTherapy will concentrate on
what’s happening NOW in your life. It will focus on who you actually are currently
relating to, on how you can achieve your goal of emergence from your loneliness
and sustain new friendships. Your therapy, then, helps you build on these Self-
solidifying experiences to achieve the love relationship you’ve been longing for.
TO HELP YOU TRANSITION FROM
FEELING LONELY TO BEING SOCIALLY CONNECTED
CALL for my Expert, Compassionate PsychoTherapy**
(212) 873-5640
7 days a week, 12 Noon to 10 pm New York City time
IN-PERSON SESSIONS – Manhattan, New York City
TELEPHONE SESSIONS – NYC, all USA states, and WorldWide
**Low, subsidized fees. **You pay only what you can afford.
...and do visit my
PsychDocNYC.com
Your Emotional Comfort Zone
Whether you’re lonely or suffer any other emotional distress or psychiatric
diagnosis, PsychoTherapy will help you feel better and live happier. So don’t
delay. The sooner you get my help, the faster your life will become better
and better.
(c) Copyright 2017 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
by Helen Borel, RN,MFA,PhD
Your loneliness comes from many sources. Fortuitously, PsychoTherapy
helps you retrieve the causes of your isolation. It helps you overcome them.
Then it helps you reach out for human contact and succeed in making friends.
Out of your sessions, as a result, you are able to recognize the difference
between toxic people and those who’d make valuable friends.This awareness,
then, enables you to find and keep just the right love partner.
____________________________________________
You CAN build Social Skills, Gain Friends,
and have A True Love Life NOW!
Find out who you really are and how to
connect with others by entering
YOUR EMOTIONAL COMFORT ZONE
at my PsychDocNYC.com
(More therapy-contact info at the close of this article.)
SOME CAUSES OF LONELINESS
Weak or Unreliable Emotional Attachments from a Troubled Childhood
Self reliance and confidence come from an inner emotional steadiness, a
strength in knowing who you uniquely are. This awareness solidifies, slowly
and surely, in the loving, nurturing emotional zone your mother cradles you
in from birth. It further deepens in the atmosphere of loving paternal and
maternal parents who adapt to you and encourage you to be you as you
grow physically, intellectually and emotionally.
But repeated physical abuse or verbal torture from emotionally immature
or mentally ill parents, or other caretakers, disrupts the evolution of your
Real Self which, unbeknownst to you, slips underground into your
Unconscious. And there it remains, protected from harm but unable to
mature further, until PsychoTherapy helps you bring it into conscious awareness.
Then, when you recognize, welcome, and embrace the magnificence of who
you really are, the profound nature of your Real Self, reaching out to others
gets easier.
Abandonment Experiences
Feelings of isolation and loneliness can come from growing up in a one-parent
family, whether your absent parent died or whether he or she deserted your
family. In childhood, you need the perspectives of both a mother and a father to
gain a well-rounded view of your ever-widening world and the other people
in it. Absent some of these crucial positive influences, you will suffer some
low self-esteem issues that could cause you to isolate from others.
This course of your emotional life, with even more overwhelming feelings
of loss, disruption and abandonment, is worsened if you grew up in an
orphanage, or suffered a negative foster care childhood.
Inborn Shyness
This is genetic. Innate Shyness causes hesitation in reaching out to others.
And when others don’t make the first move with a friendly smile, an invitation,
a willingness to converse, engage and interact, a shy person retreats and then
tends to feel more unwanted.
When these unsuccessful socializings repeat again and again, a shy person
assumes this is further confirmation of his/her “unwantedness” and tends to
retreat to a habitual solitariness. Thus sets in motion a repetitive cycle of
Self-Negation and feelings of Low Self-Worth.
High Creativity
Artistic Personalities often appear to be, or are, “loners”. This is not
necessarily because you as an artist prefer to be alone, nor because you are
antisocial.
It’s because, given a 24-hour day, you sleep 8, you work at a salaried job 8,
and, with travel, miscellanea, meals, and more, there’s little time left to paint,
compose, write, invent, etc. Let alone nurture friendships. It’s difficult,
therefore, for you as a creative being to develop the varied interactive skills
necessary to socialize and make special friends successfully.
Negative Self-Talk
This is a habitual mental health problem that everyone falls into at times.
Some people more than others. However, if you tell these self-negatives to
your brain on a consistent basis and if you are determined to believe these
falsehoods about your Self, not only will you lack peace of mind and be
haunted by anxiety and worry, but your ability to engage others and enjoy
their company will be grossly impaired. Like seeing new people through
a trick mirror that misrepresents them. Like seeing your physical self
distorted, too, by your faulty thinking.
Thus, you can’t trust others with your thoughts and feelings, you can’t
allow yourself to get close to others, if you keep convincing yourself there
is so much wrong with you. This is essentially a kind of paranoia, where
you’re convinced others are viewing you as inferior and experiencing you as
defective because you are projecting your own self-negatives onto others
erroneously. This pathologic ideation results in you assuming that others
view you negatively, that they can’t like you, nor care about you, nor love you.
THERE IS A CURE FOR LONELINESS THROUGH PSYCHOTHERAPY
PsychoTherapy helps you retrieve unresolved traumas, abandonments,
misunderstandings. It helps you straighten out distorted memories and
troubled feelings from early childhood when you had neither the vocabulary
nor the emotional development to fully grasp and describe to yourself what
you were going through.
By positive contrast, PsychoTherapy also helps you retrieve buried memories
of some warm, wonderful, loving times that you unconsciously submerged
to protect them from expected future damage.
Once your past sufferings and joys are emerged, through talk and (sometimes)
tears, through laughter and struggles of growth, through actual new life
experiences and dreams, all of your Real Self is free to feel all your Real Feelings
in the present. Now, being more and more open to your Real True Self, you can
more easily interact with others.
At this stage, as you’ll experience it, your PsychoTherapy will concentrate on
what’s happening NOW in your life. It will focus on who you actually are currently
relating to, on how you can achieve your goal of emergence from your loneliness
and sustain new friendships. Your therapy, then, helps you build on these Self-
solidifying experiences to achieve the love relationship you’ve been longing for.
TO HELP YOU TRANSITION FROM
FEELING LONELY TO BEING SOCIALLY CONNECTED
CALL for my Expert, Compassionate PsychoTherapy**
(212) 873-5640
7 days a week, 12 Noon to 10 pm New York City time
IN-PERSON SESSIONS – Manhattan, New York City
TELEPHONE SESSIONS – NYC, all USA states, and WorldWide
**Low, subsidized fees. **You pay only what you can afford.
...and do visit my
PsychDocNYC.com
Your Emotional Comfort Zone
Whether you’re lonely or suffer any other emotional distress or psychiatric
diagnosis, PsychoTherapy will help you feel better and live happier. So don’t
delay. The sooner you get my help, the faster your life will become better
and better.
(c) Copyright 2017 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
Friday, August 21, 2015
INTERACTIVE, INTERVENTIONAL PSYCHOTHERAPY in SESSION with AN ARTIST
"THE OPAQUE WINDOW"
VOICE-OVER = Helen Borel, R.N.,Ph.D.
I invite you to visit this
"Art-in-Progress"/"Art-in-Process"
Visual and Aural Experience
Yes, yes...the artist recorded me in a session
(deleting the patient's expressions
that elicited the therapeutic and
creativity interventions)
Experience it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THEIkkIE_zc
VOICE-OVER = Helen Borel, R.N.,Ph.D.
I invite you to visit this
"Art-in-Progress"/"Art-in-Process"
Visual and Aural Experience
Yes, yes...the artist recorded me in a session
(deleting the patient's expressions
that elicited the therapeutic and
creativity interventions)
Experience it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THEIkkIE_zc
Saturday, August 1, 2015
NEW BLOOD TEST PREDICTS SCHIZOPHRENIA
NOBEL-LEVEL BREAKTHROUGH
IDENTIFIES FUTURE SCHIZOPHRENIA
ALLOWING ADVANCE NEUROPROTECTION
By Helen Borel, R.N.,Ph.D.
According to Reuters Health Information via Medscape.com, a panel of 26 blood "biomarkers" can PREDICT SCHIZOPHRENIA in patients "years before symptoms appear". The University of Cambridge (U.K.) scientist who developed this test, Dr. Sabine Bahn along with her research colleagues said, "The biomarker panel...represents a validated set of biomarkers from which a definitive signature for diagnosis and prediction of schizophrenia ...could be developed. [T]he use of such a test in conjunction with a psychiatric assessment will help position schizophrenia among other biological disorders, such as diabetes and heart disease...providing hope for better diagnostic and treatment approaches."
This, to all healthcare professionals who've ever treated and taken care of patients with
schizophrenia, is marvelous news. Also, in recent years, the concept of NEUROPROTECTION (advance treatment of a known brain condition to forestall severe and worsening symptoms, particularly in the case of impending schizophrenia) has been put forth...and I believe it's in practice when some psychiatrists are treating with psychotropic protection patients who haven't even manifested the disease yet, but who are identified as future schizophrenics.
Because of the advent of this panel of 26 biomarkers for impending schizophrenia...
And because of the REVOLUTION IN THE CARE OF SCHIZOPHRENICS and in
the potential to ward off this awful brain disease altogether by pre-empting via
NEUROPROTECTIVE PHARMACEUTICALS, even the manifestation of this illness...
HERE IS MY RESPONSE at the Medscape site TO THIS WONDERFUL NEWS:
This report of biomarkers for incipient schizophrenia represents a significant breakthrough in
anticipating the approach of schizophrenia in a patient BEFORE this severe brain disorder
manifests. It will be wonderful when doctors and other healthcare professionals can intercept,
with prophylactic pharmaceuticals, this dire disease by providing what has been called, by others, "NEUROPROTECTION".
The proposal that schizophrenia may soon be managed "like other biological disorders" such as
diabetes mellitus and cardiac disease...more in approaches that ward off drastic symptoms
(e.g. excess blood glucose, e.g. bradycardia or atrial fibrillation) such as protecting identified
vulnerable patients from the development of delusions and hearing voices and disordered
behaviors...seems like a miracle to us who trained and worked in a time when "schizophrenia"
meant "hopelessly forever mentally deranged" and lifetime protective care was essential.
The scientists who imagined and developed this kind of "pre-diagnostic"
tool for predicting schizophrenic propensity with its promise for directing
"pre-treatment prophylaxis" against this tragic illness should be candidates for
The Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Helen Borel,RN,PhD...Medical/Psych/Pharm and Fiction Writer and PsychoTherapist
© copyright 2015 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
For permissions and rights, email me: medical-healthalerts@earthlink.net
For Interactive, Interventional, Creative PsychoTherapy - by this author of
Journey Into Self: Holistic Interactive Integrative Psychoanalysis - that
gets your life, your career, and your love relationship away from suffering
and on to fulfillment, contact me: emotional_health@earthlink.net
...and You can call me Dr. Helen
IDENTIFIES FUTURE SCHIZOPHRENIA
ALLOWING ADVANCE NEUROPROTECTION
By Helen Borel, R.N.,Ph.D.
According to Reuters Health Information via Medscape.com, a panel of 26 blood "biomarkers" can PREDICT SCHIZOPHRENIA in patients "years before symptoms appear". The University of Cambridge (U.K.) scientist who developed this test, Dr. Sabine Bahn along with her research colleagues said, "The biomarker panel...represents a validated set of biomarkers from which a definitive signature for diagnosis and prediction of schizophrenia ...could be developed. [T]he use of such a test in conjunction with a psychiatric assessment will help position schizophrenia among other biological disorders, such as diabetes and heart disease...providing hope for better diagnostic and treatment approaches."
This, to all healthcare professionals who've ever treated and taken care of patients with
schizophrenia, is marvelous news. Also, in recent years, the concept of NEUROPROTECTION (advance treatment of a known brain condition to forestall severe and worsening symptoms, particularly in the case of impending schizophrenia) has been put forth...and I believe it's in practice when some psychiatrists are treating with psychotropic protection patients who haven't even manifested the disease yet, but who are identified as future schizophrenics.
Because of the advent of this panel of 26 biomarkers for impending schizophrenia...
And because of the REVOLUTION IN THE CARE OF SCHIZOPHRENICS and in
the potential to ward off this awful brain disease altogether by pre-empting via
NEUROPROTECTIVE PHARMACEUTICALS, even the manifestation of this illness...
HERE IS MY RESPONSE at the Medscape site TO THIS WONDERFUL NEWS:
This report of biomarkers for incipient schizophrenia represents a significant breakthrough in
anticipating the approach of schizophrenia in a patient BEFORE this severe brain disorder
manifests. It will be wonderful when doctors and other healthcare professionals can intercept,
with prophylactic pharmaceuticals, this dire disease by providing what has been called, by others, "NEUROPROTECTION".
The proposal that schizophrenia may soon be managed "like other biological disorders" such as
diabetes mellitus and cardiac disease...more in approaches that ward off drastic symptoms
(e.g. excess blood glucose, e.g. bradycardia or atrial fibrillation) such as protecting identified
vulnerable patients from the development of delusions and hearing voices and disordered
behaviors...seems like a miracle to us who trained and worked in a time when "schizophrenia"
meant "hopelessly forever mentally deranged" and lifetime protective care was essential.
The scientists who imagined and developed this kind of "pre-diagnostic"
tool for predicting schizophrenic propensity with its promise for directing
"pre-treatment prophylaxis" against this tragic illness should be candidates for
The Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Helen Borel,RN,PhD...Medical/Psych/Pharm and Fiction Writer and PsychoTherapist
© copyright 2015 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
For permissions and rights, email me: medical-healthalerts@earthlink.net
For Interactive, Interventional, Creative PsychoTherapy - by this author of
Journey Into Self: Holistic Interactive Integrative Psychoanalysis - that
gets your life, your career, and your love relationship away from suffering
and on to fulfillment, contact me: emotional_health@earthlink.net
...and You can call me Dr. Helen
Monday, July 20, 2015
BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER - Article 2
A FOLLOW-UP WARNING
By Helen Borel, R.N.,Ph.D.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a life-long psychological illness where the patient has nearly zero sense of self. Such an emotionally erratic individual doesn’t feel self-grounded, feels loose emotionally, and so crosses your psychological space, time and time again, due to trouble recognizing that the You that Is YOU is not the She that is SHE. (Males have this disorder, too.)
In other words, the Borderline Personality IS BOUNDARY-LESS. In a relationship with others, the borderline exhibits frequent anger and rage both of which are way out of proportion to anything the normal person in the relationship did or said. A relationship with a borderline is doomed from the outset. This is because...proven by varied and in-depth neuropsychiatric research...there is volumetric brain loss (decrease in imperative brain elements) and other decrements...and the source of these deficits, relative to causation of the cerebral defects, has not been as yet determined.
Suffice to point out, there’s less brain tissue in Borderlines, compared to normal brains, in the regions that regulate unpleasant emotions. So, the Borderline can’t calm herself down; everything she’s feeling that’s uncomfortable is someone else’s fault. And if you’re her significant other, her rage will routinely be directed at you.
To let you, the normal person in the relationship, down easy: A borderline can’t change this unreasonable, irritating, demanding, relationship-destructive behavior because there’s a glitch in her brain that, so far, no one has come up with a specific medication or a neurosurgical operation nor an eletroshock-type zapping that could alter and improve the Borderline’s incapacity to regulate anger and rage.
“Borderlines” were originally labeled thus because the malignancy of the emotional disruptions in their own lives and those they cause within the emotional lives of their family members and lovers is so severe as to appear to reside on the border between psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia and neurotic illnesses like chronic anxiousness. Borderlines do, at times, slip into unreality, a feature of insanity. Caught up in troubled feelings that their brains can’t modulate as normal brains can, they wreak havoc on themselves (sometimes cutting themselves and having to be psychiatrically hospitalized) and are a disaster for the recipient of their rages.
Borderlines don’t tend to benefit from Psychotherapy. Because they either storm out of sessions
due to some imagined slight, or even a direct compliment can elicit anger. Baffling behaviors
for professionals to deal with. Therefore, don’t blame yourself if you find your borderline’s
behavior incomprehensible and unnerving. And don’t look for any change toward improvement.
Outbursts will continue. Except you’ll usually be blindsided by them due to their unpredictable
timing and due to the lability of the borderline’s emotional states.
You can’t, therefore, rely on a peaceful, predictable relationship of love and acceptance and growth and in-depth understanding. The borderline is all for herself . In the equation of life, you don’t matter. It’s “I need to feel better fast or I’ll cause immediate trouble and disruption in others’ lives.”
Contrary to what others in the fields of psychology and psychiatry have said, leaning
toward sympathy for the borderline and her imagined issues and slights, it’s difficult to
sympathize with a person who does nothing but destroy friendships, destroy work
relationships and destroy love relationships...not to mention what destructive outbursts and
calumny they inflict on their own close family members from their childhoods onward.
Also, contrary to many presumed “experts” in psychiatry: I believe (of course due to the abnormalities lately being found in the brains of borderlines from varied neuroscience sources) that not only do the parents of the borderline have nothing to do with creating this emotional “monster,” [similar to the disproven accusatory misnomer by psychiatrists decades ago, blaming the maternal parent for the advent of schizophrenia in her child...mislabeling these beleaguered women “SCHIZOPHRENOGENIC MOTHERS]...
but that, you can be sure THE BORDERLINE CAUSED A GREAT DEAL OF DISRUPTION IN THE FAMILY AND EMOTIONALLY-VICTIMIZED HER PARENTS AND SIBLINGS FROM TODDLERHOOD ONWARD.
Any hypothesis about parental causation in the advent of Borderline Personality Disorder is utterly false! The child is born with a brain deficit. The fault, dear Doctor, lies in the faulty brain. A neurologic condition which will, I believe, one day be treated with a very specific, targeted chemical medicine that may help the brain modulate distressing feelings. Or a neurosurgeon will come up with a way to restore lost brain volume or perform some surgical magic that will mask the emotional dyscontrol deficit. Or one of our physiologic psychiatric treatments, such as ECT (electroshock) or other cerebral-electrical therapies or something else maybe on the horizon will zap the brain into more normal functioning, more normal capacity to regulate unpleasant feelings.
In the meantime, we don’t have these miraculous chemical cures or lifetime treatments for Borderline Personalities. So my advice is, steer clear of these troubled types. They feel better when you attend to THEIR needs. They become distraught, accusatory, rageful and emotionally destructive to you when you are seeking a balanced relationship. If you choose to stay in a relationship with such a brain-disordered person, expect periodic chaos, disruption in your peace of mind, inexplicable attacks, yelling and screaming, storming out, begging to come back, promising to act more mature from then on...but NEVER BEING ABLE TO GET BEYOND THESE, SO FAR, UNCHANGEABLE DEFICITS IN THINKING AND BEHAVIORS.
Trying to make peace with a Borderline type is futile. The negative, painful behavior toward you is guaranteed to repeat itself over and over again. Listen: If your lover were diagnosed with
Tuberculosis, even if on Isoniazid, it’s a bad idea to kiss and intermingle that person’s saliva with
your own because of the tubercle bacillus. You want to avoid infection.
I warn you: Nothing you’re going to do will soften the Borderline's ways of dealing with inner feelings they don’t like. In her mind, whatever occurs that she doesn’t approve of will always be YOUR FAULT...at which she’ll justify her outlandish rageful words and behaviors.
LISTEN: It’s not only dating and “love” relationships I’m referring to here. My expertise
arises mostly from patients in my psychotherapy practice who’ve suffered...and are often still suffering
well into their 40s and 50s...from a RAGING BORDERLINE MOTHER. And so, they tend to
pick their dates and spouses from that familiar pool of screaming manipulative females
whose counterparts still live rent-free in their heads.
When you first meet such an individual, she will tend to get too close too fast. Be wary. This is a sign of LACK OF BOUNDARIES, of inability to see you as a separate individual, a being
unto yourself. Do not mistake seeming immediate warmth for maturity and potential for mature love and emotional growth. Also, never mistake a high intelligence and/or a creative talent for
emotional maturity. These do not equate!!! A person can be highly intelligent and may be gifted in some art or other; beware though, the person can still be an emotional infant. That’s the case with borderlines. So don’t be fooled. Be wary too, because this kind of personality is destructive as a parent to the emotional well-being of any children they may give birth to. Woe unto you if you’re the normal parent in such a family. You’ll not be able to shield your offspring from the
rages and diatribes of your Borderline spouse. And those children will be forever wounded by
such a defective parent.
Be smart. There are safer lovers out there for you to choose among. They’ve a mature view of
themselves and they take full responsibility for their own feelings and don’t play the blame game against you, nor blanket you with frequent destructive rages and dysphoric feelings. As soon as you realize you’re in a relationship with a Borderline, get out of it. The longer you put up with the uncontrollable behaviors, the deeper you’ll be hurt, the more distant will be your chances to be open to a real, mature love relationship.
(If you’re asking me, a healthcare and psychiatric professional, why it’s hard to fully empathize with Borderlines, here’s my answer: Because, though I know their brains can’t help it, they wreak such havoc, cause so much pain in others who only mean them well, and destroy what good and what love does come their way, that it feels like an exercise in futility to sympathize with them when I must have empathy for their victims, MY PATIENTS and all the others out there in the world who Borderlines’ misbehaviors harm.)
© Copyright 2015 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
You may reach me at medical-healthalerts@earthlink.net
for permissions and quotations from this original article.
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By Helen Borel, R.N.,Ph.D.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a life-long psychological illness where the patient has nearly zero sense of self. Such an emotionally erratic individual doesn’t feel self-grounded, feels loose emotionally, and so crosses your psychological space, time and time again, due to trouble recognizing that the You that Is YOU is not the She that is SHE. (Males have this disorder, too.)
In other words, the Borderline Personality IS BOUNDARY-LESS. In a relationship with others, the borderline exhibits frequent anger and rage both of which are way out of proportion to anything the normal person in the relationship did or said. A relationship with a borderline is doomed from the outset. This is because...proven by varied and in-depth neuropsychiatric research...there is volumetric brain loss (decrease in imperative brain elements) and other decrements...and the source of these deficits, relative to causation of the cerebral defects, has not been as yet determined.
Suffice to point out, there’s less brain tissue in Borderlines, compared to normal brains, in the regions that regulate unpleasant emotions. So, the Borderline can’t calm herself down; everything she’s feeling that’s uncomfortable is someone else’s fault. And if you’re her significant other, her rage will routinely be directed at you.
To let you, the normal person in the relationship, down easy: A borderline can’t change this unreasonable, irritating, demanding, relationship-destructive behavior because there’s a glitch in her brain that, so far, no one has come up with a specific medication or a neurosurgical operation nor an eletroshock-type zapping that could alter and improve the Borderline’s incapacity to regulate anger and rage.
“Borderlines” were originally labeled thus because the malignancy of the emotional disruptions in their own lives and those they cause within the emotional lives of their family members and lovers is so severe as to appear to reside on the border between psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia and neurotic illnesses like chronic anxiousness. Borderlines do, at times, slip into unreality, a feature of insanity. Caught up in troubled feelings that their brains can’t modulate as normal brains can, they wreak havoc on themselves (sometimes cutting themselves and having to be psychiatrically hospitalized) and are a disaster for the recipient of their rages.
Borderlines don’t tend to benefit from Psychotherapy. Because they either storm out of sessions
due to some imagined slight, or even a direct compliment can elicit anger. Baffling behaviors
for professionals to deal with. Therefore, don’t blame yourself if you find your borderline’s
behavior incomprehensible and unnerving. And don’t look for any change toward improvement.
Outbursts will continue. Except you’ll usually be blindsided by them due to their unpredictable
timing and due to the lability of the borderline’s emotional states.
You can’t, therefore, rely on a peaceful, predictable relationship of love and acceptance and growth and in-depth understanding. The borderline is all for herself . In the equation of life, you don’t matter. It’s “I need to feel better fast or I’ll cause immediate trouble and disruption in others’ lives.”
Contrary to what others in the fields of psychology and psychiatry have said, leaning
toward sympathy for the borderline and her imagined issues and slights, it’s difficult to
sympathize with a person who does nothing but destroy friendships, destroy work
relationships and destroy love relationships...not to mention what destructive outbursts and
calumny they inflict on their own close family members from their childhoods onward.
Also, contrary to many presumed “experts” in psychiatry: I believe (of course due to the abnormalities lately being found in the brains of borderlines from varied neuroscience sources) that not only do the parents of the borderline have nothing to do with creating this emotional “monster,” [similar to the disproven accusatory misnomer by psychiatrists decades ago, blaming the maternal parent for the advent of schizophrenia in her child...mislabeling these beleaguered women “SCHIZOPHRENOGENIC MOTHERS]...
but that, you can be sure THE BORDERLINE CAUSED A GREAT DEAL OF DISRUPTION IN THE FAMILY AND EMOTIONALLY-VICTIMIZED HER PARENTS AND SIBLINGS FROM TODDLERHOOD ONWARD.
Any hypothesis about parental causation in the advent of Borderline Personality Disorder is utterly false! The child is born with a brain deficit. The fault, dear Doctor, lies in the faulty brain. A neurologic condition which will, I believe, one day be treated with a very specific, targeted chemical medicine that may help the brain modulate distressing feelings. Or a neurosurgeon will come up with a way to restore lost brain volume or perform some surgical magic that will mask the emotional dyscontrol deficit. Or one of our physiologic psychiatric treatments, such as ECT (electroshock) or other cerebral-electrical therapies or something else maybe on the horizon will zap the brain into more normal functioning, more normal capacity to regulate unpleasant feelings.
In the meantime, we don’t have these miraculous chemical cures or lifetime treatments for Borderline Personalities. So my advice is, steer clear of these troubled types. They feel better when you attend to THEIR needs. They become distraught, accusatory, rageful and emotionally destructive to you when you are seeking a balanced relationship. If you choose to stay in a relationship with such a brain-disordered person, expect periodic chaos, disruption in your peace of mind, inexplicable attacks, yelling and screaming, storming out, begging to come back, promising to act more mature from then on...but NEVER BEING ABLE TO GET BEYOND THESE, SO FAR, UNCHANGEABLE DEFICITS IN THINKING AND BEHAVIORS.
Trying to make peace with a Borderline type is futile. The negative, painful behavior toward you is guaranteed to repeat itself over and over again. Listen: If your lover were diagnosed with
Tuberculosis, even if on Isoniazid, it’s a bad idea to kiss and intermingle that person’s saliva with
your own because of the tubercle bacillus. You want to avoid infection.
I warn you: Nothing you’re going to do will soften the Borderline's ways of dealing with inner feelings they don’t like. In her mind, whatever occurs that she doesn’t approve of will always be YOUR FAULT...at which she’ll justify her outlandish rageful words and behaviors.
LISTEN: It’s not only dating and “love” relationships I’m referring to here. My expertise
arises mostly from patients in my psychotherapy practice who’ve suffered...and are often still suffering
well into their 40s and 50s...from a RAGING BORDERLINE MOTHER. And so, they tend to
pick their dates and spouses from that familiar pool of screaming manipulative females
whose counterparts still live rent-free in their heads.
When you first meet such an individual, she will tend to get too close too fast. Be wary. This is a sign of LACK OF BOUNDARIES, of inability to see you as a separate individual, a being
unto yourself. Do not mistake seeming immediate warmth for maturity and potential for mature love and emotional growth. Also, never mistake a high intelligence and/or a creative talent for
emotional maturity. These do not equate!!! A person can be highly intelligent and may be gifted in some art or other; beware though, the person can still be an emotional infant. That’s the case with borderlines. So don’t be fooled. Be wary too, because this kind of personality is destructive as a parent to the emotional well-being of any children they may give birth to. Woe unto you if you’re the normal parent in such a family. You’ll not be able to shield your offspring from the
rages and diatribes of your Borderline spouse. And those children will be forever wounded by
such a defective parent.
Be smart. There are safer lovers out there for you to choose among. They’ve a mature view of
themselves and they take full responsibility for their own feelings and don’t play the blame game against you, nor blanket you with frequent destructive rages and dysphoric feelings. As soon as you realize you’re in a relationship with a Borderline, get out of it. The longer you put up with the uncontrollable behaviors, the deeper you’ll be hurt, the more distant will be your chances to be open to a real, mature love relationship.
(If you’re asking me, a healthcare and psychiatric professional, why it’s hard to fully empathize with Borderlines, here’s my answer: Because, though I know their brains can’t help it, they wreak such havoc, cause so much pain in others who only mean them well, and destroy what good and what love does come their way, that it feels like an exercise in futility to sympathize with them when I must have empathy for their victims, MY PATIENTS and all the others out there in the world who Borderlines’ misbehaviors harm.)
© Copyright 2015 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
You may reach me at medical-healthalerts@earthlink.net
for permissions and quotations from this original article.
To reprint this article in full for the benefit of other
readers of other publications, kindly contact me to
arrange to pay a modest fee to help support this psych site.
To reprint this article in full for the benefit of other readers of
other publications,
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
OVERCOMING NEEDINESS by FOCUSING ON YOU, YOUR SELF
Self-Focus Heals Neediness
by Helen Borel, R.N.,Ph.D.
Summing up from my companion article "Neediness Hurts. Self Focus Heals." :
Neediness on your part arises out of insecurities and confusion about mixed messages and lack of feedback from others. These disturbing, disrespectful and often out-of-the-blue behaviors by others evoke - in you - core vulnerabilities from a time you were too young to fully feel secure about who you are and about your loveability and acceptability to others beyond your childhood family.
When LOVE turns to REJECTION When a seeming "love relationship" turns to the pain of rejection, you can't allow your anger and anxiety to cause you to fall apart. Instead, you must unearth what your partner's distancing behavior echoes inside of you. Then you should recognize that your true, full Self has nothing do with his awful-feeling behavior. And you can't demean your Self by allowing your emotional pain to dictate what you'll do next.
His Distancing Actions are Not Your Fault Not that you did or said anything wrong in the first place that would have driven a mentally healthy man, sure of his own needs and character, away! It's also possible that you never acted needy at all, at least at first...but that, if you find yourself with a guy whose initial facade hid an insecure personality, or his behavior makes it clearer and clearer that you remind him of his mother (who must have had both positive and negative traits) who made him anxious, and so forth, he's going to become distant at some point anyway.
Maybe He's Looking to be Rejected by You And maybe he wants you to reject him due to some paradoxical need to have you do so because, for some unexamined reason from his childhood, he feels rejectable. So he'd rather do something to push you away early in the "relationship," before he invests more of his love into it and ends up being rejected by you...a final blow he may feel he couldn't suffer easily.
In other words, his fear of rejection by you may cause him to unconsciously provoke rejection by you...the very thing he may believe he doesn't want, but that his counterproductive behavior induces in others, particularly when he gets involved in a "love relationship."
Clear Communications Let Others Feel Your Strengths Clear communications come from knowing what you want, knowing what and who you don't want in your life, knowing what you will absolutely not put up with.
Not begging, cajoling, arguing, accusing, blaming. Not comparing now with before. Not asking, "Why?" The other person usually doesn't know why they are acting badly either, so asking why only confuses him more and often precludes a coherent answer. Certainly, you're better off not expecting one that, you may imagine, will satisfy your "needs" of the moment.
Stop Being a Doormat...and Get Back Up on Your Pedestal Haven't you learned yet that you really can't figure other people out? (The first person who is able to do that will, most surely, win a Nobel Prize in Archeology of the Mind.)
It's not sane to think we can figure someone else out when not a one of us can figure ourselves out. Partially perhaps, a little bit most likely, but never fully. We never fully know our Selves throughout our lives. We can only get somewhat better at this Self-knowing as time passes.
So, you certainly can't change others - who you can never fully know - or mold them into some fantasy of what you'd like them to be. The only one you can change is Your Self...but being not fully known to your Self, that may not even be wise, that is if you are considering re-molding your Self to please some other person.
Don't become a Caricature of Your Real Self Again, don't twist your Self into an emotional caricature of who You really are. It's never worth it. Not for any reason! Not for anyone!
When you force your Self to be compliant, available, loving without loving support in return, giving without a true balance of giving forthcoming from the other person, and the like, you will appear needy. You will be a doormat.
And nobody likes a doormat...except to wipe their muddy shoes on and then ignore. So don't be subordinate this way, or ever in any way. But, if you should take on this needy role, you will pay a high price for it in unrelenting anxiety (due to the true ANGER simmering inside you at being mistreated), sadness, tearfulness, hopelessness...an agglomeration of symptoms that, if they continue, can lead to depressive mood states.
These low moods will alter the balance of your neurotransmitters (your brain chemicals), making you more vulnerable to even lower moods which will automatically make you feel more needy, more confused, more unsure of your Self. A vicious cycle you should do everything in your power to avoid.
Don't let another person's distancing behavior egg you on to becoming someone you are not - a sniveling, demanding, lonely, uncertain waif - waiting for the other person to respond in a mature and loving way. It won't happen!
The Main Principle to Combat Neediness: TAKE CARE OF YOUR SELF FIRST When you take care of your SELF and your real needs FIRST, everything else works. And believe me, HE is not your real need. Even if he should turn out to behave himself and be the person you at first believed him to be, he is STILL NOT what you really need.
Another person is only a part, and often only a small part of what each of us needs in our lives! No one can fill gaps or holes that we perceive in our existence to make us feel filled up and all better all the time. Only you can do that, to some degree, for your Self. Yes, others will play roles, some more important and some less often, in your life. But NO ONE CAN GIVE YOU EVERYTHING!
So, being and acting needy (and sometimes, if you're honest with your Self, you'll realize you are not truly "needy," you just think you are) are behaviors that interfere with your real reality.
Don't do it anymore and your life will be better. Take a chance. Let the person, who has distanced himself from you, go. Do everything you want to do to make your Self feel good and whole. Don't ever rely on any one individual for your feelings of Self worth and Self-deserved love.
Get various kinds of love from various life situations, from work you care about, and from varied friends and family. When you put the spotlight back on your own Self, fully focusing on You, you won't need to be needy anymore!
What is Neediness? How Does It Feel When You’re Suffering with It? You'll find the answers in Part One of this series: "Neediness Hurts You...Part One of Causes and Cures”
Note: "Neediness" can come from some perceived "lack" or "loss" in childhood. Which can be easily worked through to a more secure level of functioning and feeling with a gifted psychotherapist. Welcome, then, to My PsychoTherapy Zone.
© copyright 2008-2015 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
For permissions and rights, email me: emotional_health@earthlink.net
For interactive, interventional, Creative PsychoTherapy - by this author of Journey Into Self: Holistic Interactive Integrative Psychoanalysis - that gets your life, your career, and your love relationship away from suffering and on to fulfillment, contact me at: emotional_health@earthlink.net
...and You can call me Dr. Helen
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