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WHEN ALARM BELLS SHOULD RING:
Recognizing Personality Disorders
By
Susan Schwartz Senstad, M.A., M.F.T., M.F.A.
Doing Bonding Pattern
work with a client/student with a personality Disordered parent
and/or partner
Once issues of safety have been addressed, Bonding Pattern work
with someone in relationship to a Personality Disordered partner
or parent is a superb approach. In John Coroneos’ Newsletter,
Sidra and Hal Stone detailed some of the gifts of learning that
came from the analysis of the Bonding Patterns of one woman with
a disturbed mother:
"Terese's mother was very abusive. She was charming, beautiful,
and clever; she looked great in public. But when she was home alone
with her children she was both emotionally and physically abusive.
Living with her was like living in a nightmare, a nightmare that
nobody else suspected. To the rest of the world their mother looked
great and their complaints would sound unrealistic - maybe even
disturbed.
The children were terrified of their mother and vowed never to be
like her when they grew up…So Terese grew up to be a very
responsible, loving, understanding human being. She was identified
with her feelings and was very empathic. She disowned any parts
of her that might even remotely resemble her mother. She disowned
her aggression…She disowned her own selfishness or narcissism
to such an extent that she couldn't say no to anyone in the fear
of hurting them; she couldn't set any kind of boundary to protect
her own time and space. Her feelings always came last.
… [Terese’s] therapist helped her to understand her
own feelings and taught her about her mother's pathology. Terese's
mother was a borderline personality and, as such, was extremely
difficult to live with. Terese read books and got new ideas about
how to deal with - and how impossible it was to deal with - her
mother.
Interestingly enough, it was the selfishness, the ‘my needs
first’ quality of her mother that Terese had disowned but
she now needed to integrate before she was able to deal with her
mother more objectively and set the necessary boundaries. Terese
needed to separate from her nurturing, responsible and compassionate
primary selves in order to protect her own vulnerable child and
to deal with her mother more effectively. As she did this, as she
developed an Aware Ego process, she had more choice and made more
creative decisions. (See http://www.bodymindinformation.com)
From an increasingly Aware Ego, Terese’s attachment to toxic
relationships becomes easier to break. She can protect her vulnerability
better once she is less identified with a conciliatory and compassionate
primary self system, and she can gain access to her own feelings
and honor them. Terese can learn to stand before crazy-making disturbance,
or get away from it, with the sober objectivity required to keep
reality in its proper perspective. From an Aware Ego, she can learn
to set limits that really hold.
And yet, Terese may feel panic when asked to define her encounters
with her mother or others with Personality Disorders solely in terms
of a Bonding Pattern. And she will be right to resist doing so.
Terese, like so many people who have Personality Disordered parents
or partners, already takes more than her fair share of the responsibility
for her surroundings. A VD practitioner unfamiliar with the realities
of being in relationship with a disturbed person, and not quite
grasping the function of Bonding Pattern analyses, may unwittingly
re-traumatize Terese. When things keep going wrong in Terese’s
relationship, her facilitator may well respond by encouraging her
to work even harder at seeing what she has to learn about herself
from the dynamic. The facilitator can, unknowingly, place Terese,
once again, in the destructive and painful situation of having the
abuse to which she has been subjected remain unvalidated and her
abuser’s disturbance remain unacknowledged.
It is true that changing her inner stance through a Bonding Pattern
understanding may radically alter how easily Terese gets hooked
by manipulations or accepts abuse. It will not, however, stop the
disturbed person from continuing to attempt to manipulate or behave
abusively. Clichés such as “it takes two to tango,”
and, “if you send out a different energy you’ll get
a different reaction,” and, “every conflict has two
sides,” send the wounding message that Terese is partly to
blame for her being abused!
A dispute can not be defined as a ‘conflict with two sides’
if one of the participants is incapable of consciousness; in a dispute
between one person who is seeking power and/or control and another
person who is seeking to learn, the learner loses every time.
It needs to be made clear in working with Bonding Patterns that
there’s a point where reciprocity ends and the other person’s
internal demons begin. We need to remember that changing ourselves
will not change the disturbed other. Terese needs help to grasp
that while her responses may have triggered a PD’s outbursts,
they did not cause them and no change that she makes in herself
can heal them.
Thus, as soon as pathology enters the relationship picture, the
normal person needs an additional kind of help – not INSTEAD
of grasping and moving out of her own Bonding Patterns, but IN ADDITION
to that work. Now, with her Aware Ego process strengthened through
Bonding Pattern work, she may need help to see the other person
clearly. She may need skills for how to recognize disturbance and
abuse when it’s there and to know that attacks coming from
damaged people should not be tolerated. In particular, she may need
permission to protect herself and skills for how to do so. That
means knowing how to separate not just from the internalized pattern
but also, if necessary, from the disturbed person himself.
This aspect of Aware Ego work – learning where our responsibility
stops and the other’s begins and then to take appropriate
action – is available to those of us fortunate enough to have
the capacity to do it.
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Table of Contents
Aims of this article
What is ‘normal’?
What is ‘abnormal’
Warning signs that a potential client/student
may suffer from a Personality Disorder
What to do – but first, what NOT to
do
Working with a client/student whose parent
and/or partner suffers from a Personality Disorder
Doing Bonding Pattern work with a client/student
with a Personality Disordered parent and/or partner
About the author
Appendix 1: References and Useful Books
& Websites
Appendix 2: DSM IV – Personality
Disorders
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