I Hate You — Don’t Leave Me

She was begging for limits and controls and structure but couldn’t acknowledge this dependency. So she acted outrageously to make controls necessary, and then got angry and denied her desire for them.

Similarly, Princess Diana, rejected by her mother and reared by a cold, withdrawn father, exhibited similar characteristics.

Borderlines are often very intelligent and display striking artistic abilities; fueled by easy access to powerful emotions, they can be creative and successful professionally.

A borderline suffers a kind of “emotional hemophilia”; she lacks the clotting mechanism needed to moderate her spurts of feeling. Prick the delicate “skin” of a borderline and she will emotionally bleed to death. Sustained periods of contentment are foreign to the borderline. Chronic emptiness depletes him until he is forced to do anything to escape. In the grip of these lows, the borderline is prone to a myriad of impulsive, self-destructive acts

insistence, before the end of her junior year. She quit school and began working as a receptionist, but her employer recognized her intelligence and promoted her to more responsible jobs

Borderlines typically respond to depression, anxiety, frustration, or anger with more layers of these same feelings. Because of the borderline’s perfectionism and tendency to perceive things in black-and-white extremes, he attempts to obliterate unpleasant feelings rather than understand or cope with them. When he finds that he cannot simply erase these bad feelings, he becomes even more frustrated or guilty. Since feeling bad is unacceptable, he feels bad about feeling bad. When this makes him feel worse, he becomes caught in a seemingly bottomless downward spiral.

The borderline shifts her personality like a rotating kaleidoscope, rearranging the fragmented glass of her being into different formations—each collage different, yet each, her. Like a chameleon, the borderline transforms herself into any shape that she imagines will please the viewer.

Norman Mailer described the effect of an absent parent on Marilyn Monroe, who never knew her father. Though his absence would contribute to her emotional instability in later

Major traumas—parental loss, neglect, rejection, physical or sexual abuse—during the early years of development can increase the probability of BPD in adolescence and adulthood.

BPD and Pain