Transcription
[Music] Often times I feel that I have this great self-hatred, and that I feel that I don't deserve to be here. I feel that if, if, um, you know, if I had gone away, that no one would notice. I feel those things, but I know that that's not true.
How do you understand it when you feel one way, but you know that there's another way? One way to understand that is if you think of borderline patients, or many of them, as having particularly high standards. But there's something about the mind of many borderline patients that has a kind of an absolute quality, all or nothing. And I find that a lot of borderline patients are very uncompromising about others and about themselves. If you don't fit this very ideal view of what a person should be, and if you don't live up to the ideal, then you think you're a failure. You feel no value. You feel worthless. And it kind of justifies the kind of self-hatred you're talking about.
I think part of our work as therapists is to engage somebody to develop more realistic acceptance of what it is to be human, to not be so perfectionistic. And how, how would you start? How would you start? A good question. Um, first of all, by helping somebody observe their system. Somebody usually does this unconsciously and automatically. They're not sort of sitting there reflecting, you know, I'm judging myself as inadequate, or I'm hating myself because I know I have this internal standard and the rest of me doesn't think I'm meeting up to it. The internal standard is not seen as a mental creation, if you will. The internal standard, it gets back to this distinction between what's internal, what's external. People think, you know, that's just what a person has to be to feel good about themselves.
If you can get somebody to realize that's kind of their creation, that they could question that, they have the capacity to modify, so that they can come to a more realistic image of what it is to be an okay person. And if you can help somebody realize you don't have to hold on. It's, let me put it this way, it's nice to aspire to that, but you don't have to be it all the time to feel like you deserve to exist. As human beings, we all have to deal with emotions that some of which come from evolutionary periods when humans existed in society, well before the kind of civilized society we live in. And it was more okay, and maybe even necessary, to have just raw expression of intense emotions, loving emotions, aggressive emotions. As we've become civilized, we all have the challenge of how to find satisfaction for those emotional drives in a way that we can feel as acceptable. Everybody has that challenge, not just borderline people. How do we, you know, act out our loving urges within a system that's socially okay and morally okay to us? How do we act out our aggressive urges in a way that doesn't hurt anybody and doesn't offend our moral values?
So this is what I'm describing as part of a psychodynamic view of the individual, which is there are all these competing moving forces. Our lives, the prohibitions of society, our internal prohibitions based on our value system. And to find the balance of that is not easy. It's particularly not easy if you're a borderline person whose value system might be skewed towards, I have to be perfect, might tell you any manifestation of aggression is wrong and makes me a horrible person. If you haven't mastered this integration of your urges, how to fit them into a system that's both socially acceptable and morally acceptable to you, then you don't have a full sense of who you are. If that's not nicely put together, then you're sort of left like a ship at sea without a rudder.
Like explains a lot. It explains a lot. Okay.