What Happens if Adults with Borderline Behavior Start to Act Better?

People who have dealt with those who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often wonder why those folks persist in their often infuriating as well as self-destructive behavior when it seems so obvious that they are making themselves as well as everyone who cares about them completely miserable. 

When I first started to treat them, I know I did. These patients were not psychotic, nor were they stupid, so why did they persist in dysfunctional behaviors in the face of overwhelming evidence of their consequences. So I started asking the magic, Adlerian question: What would happen if you got better and stayed better?

As I described in that previous post, patients would often answer with the non-answers, "I'd just find some other way to screw things up" or "I cannot even imagine what that would be like." I would not accept those "answers" and pressed on.

When the answers finally started to emerge, I was totally amazed. One thing that might happen was described in my very last post. If a patient with BPD got better, their families would run for the hills. Exile them. Shun them. Abandon them. Anyone wonder why those with BPD have "abandonment issues?" Wonder no more.

But abandonment was far from the worst or the most likely outcome when patients acted beter.

I found that something family therapy pioneer Murray Bowen described was quite real - only that it was the just the first thing that would begin to happen before things got far far worse.

I found that the power of family members to invalidate anything a therapist tries to teach a patient should not be underestimated. As first pointed out by Dr. Bowen, they will literally gang up on a patient with messages that scream, roughly translated, "You're wrong! Change back!"  Previously uninvolved family members may come out of the woodwork, and previously sympathetic family members may suddenly turn on the patient and scream things like, "HOW CAN YOU TREAT YOUR MOTHER LIKE THAT!?!" 

I dubbed this phenomenon "clustering." Try to imagine what it would be like if everyone you know and loved started to come after you like that. If you don't think you would wilt, you are kidding yourself. And that would be true even if you came from a family that was relatively functional to begin with. Imagine having been invalidated like that for your whole life.

As I said earlier, however, that would only be the first thing that would happen if someone with BPD started to act better. The next thing that happens is that the parents start to act out in alarming and frightening ways. I'm talking about things like parents making suicide threats or actual attempts, increasing drug or alcohol abuse to alarming levels, worsening domestic violence, family members getting thrown out on the streets penniless, or any children left in the home starting to be abused, neglected or molested. You know, minor, inconsequential stuff.

Furthermore, as first pointed out by Lorna Smith Benjamin, in "borderline families" all these problems would be blamed on the patient, who would be subtly expected to somehow exert control over them.

Think you'd be able to turn your back on your family if all this happened to you? Very few can. Even if you could, it would only be because your family would, through their own behavior, engineer your dismissive attitude - so that you would continue to not only be their scapegoat, but so they could also label you as an uncaring son of a bitch as well. 

Americans like to think that they don't care what their families think of them. Horse manure!

In response to all of this, individuals with BPD usually start to actively undermine ("spoil") any efforts anyone might make to encourage them to continue with their "good" behavior - without telling anyone (including a therapist if they have one) about any of their family's behavior - and revert right back to the way they had always been.