Transcription
line mother. And it wasn't well into my adulthood while I was in therapy that I came to the realization on my own, which is a whole other discussion.
But um, over the years, you know, I've I've had friends and colleagues and acquaintances who have, in the course of discussing their own difficult mothers, would outlay a kind of similar set of traits or behaviors. And then I would ask maybe one or two questions and I would say, you know, you might really want to look into the borderline personality and and the borderline mother in particular.
Um, with one of them, it was like a light went off and that person went and did some reading and came back and was like, "Yeah, yeah." Um, and it's now one of our favorite topics of discussion, our borderline moms.
Anyway, joining me now is Sam Vachnan. He is a professor of clinical psychology at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies. He has authored several books, Malignant Self-Love, The Narcissist Mother, Narcissistic and Psychopathic Parents and Their Children, to name but a few. So, Professor Vachnan, thank you for joining us on The Nerve for this discussion.
>> Thank you for having me. Please call me Sam. Better use of the time.
>> Oh, okay. Well, thank you, Sam. Um, first I'd like to ask you, um, and I'm going to pause here, you guys. I need to see him on my screen, please.
>> Why would you want to?
>> Thank you. I want to see you so I can have a much better conversation with you. Um, Dr. Vachn, um, I suppose the first question I have for you is what constitutes a borderline? And I know there there are many different traits and not all borderlines exhibit all of them. It can be some of them. But if you suspect that you might be the product of a borderline mother. Um, what would be the significant tells?
>> First of all, it is important to realize that 80% of humanity, that's 80% of humanity, do not accept the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The diagnostic manual that is used by four fifths of humanity is known as International Classification of Diseases, ICD, and it does not contain such a diagnosis.
>> So are you saying humanity or are you saying the psychiatric profession?
>> 80% of humanity.
>> In 80%? How do you, what's the, how do we know that? I mean, I can't recall seeing a poll.
>> Because the ICD is used by 80% of humanity. There are two competing diagnostic manuals.
>> Okay.
>> One of them, one of them is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, known
>> by its acronym, the DSM
>> which we here in the West use.
>> Which we, which is used mainly in North America, actually.
>> Mhm. Oh, really? Okay.
>> And the other one is the ICD, International Classification of Diseases. It's published by the World Health Organization, and the ICD is used in four fifths of the globe. And in the ICD, and in the ICD, there's no borderline personality disorder.
>> Okay. So I would, I would say you and I are among that cohort that firmly believe that borderline personality disorder exists. Let's live to tell the tale.
>> Yeah. Let me, let me qualify what I've just said. No one disputes the fact that there is something, um, something called borderline pattern or borderline personality organization. No one is disputing this. The debate is whether this is a variant of perhaps complex trauma or whether it's merely a problem with the regulation of emotions or so. There's a lot of academic debate as to what it is. But to answer your question finally,
>> yes,
>> there are six, uh, I think there are six, um, prominent clinical features of someone who would be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in the United States. The first one, I think, is a sense of innate emptiness,
>> a void, a black hole that is all consuming from the inside.
>> Mhm.
>> The second is what we call emotion dysregulation or affective liability. The inability to control your emotions. They overwhelm you. They drown you.
>> You are unable to regulate yourself. The second, uh, the third feature is constant suicidal ideation, constant suicidal thinking, and in 11% of the cases, actually committing suicide. So suicide is a prominent feature of borderline, and the vast majority of borderlines self-mutilate one way or another, self-harm in in some way. The next feature is anger. There's rage and fury in borderline, unlike in narcissism. In narcissism, we have narcissistic rage. But narcissistic rage is reactive. If you challenge a narcissist, if you undermine the narcissist, if then the narcissist may rage upon you. But in the case of borderline personality disorder, it's a background noise. It's always there. The borderline is always angry, always on the verge of fury. You know, the next feature is intense relationships, especially intimate relationships, but not only relationships that involve highs and lows, cycles of idealization and devaluation of the partner, h and what we call approach avoidance. I love you, I I I hate you. Don't leave me. This kind of
>> Yes.
>> And so
>> Yes.
>> And the final feature, I'm trying to be as brief as I can. The final feature is what we call the twin anxieties. The twin anxieties are mutually exclusive. The borderline, um, is terrified of being abandoned and rejected. There is what we call separation insecurity or abandonment anxiety in colloquial terms. But on the other hand, she or he is equally terrified of being intimate, of being engulfed and consumed by love.
>> So there's approach, there's falling in love, limerence, infatuation, idealization, and so on. And then when the other party responds in kind, when intimacy is on offer, when love is in the air, the borderline runs away. She's terrified of the of the outcome of intimacy. So we call it the twin anxieties. Abandonment anxiety versus engulfment anxiety. These are the key features. There are others, but these are the key ones.
>> And not again, not every borderline will present with all of them. For example, I I I can for my childhood, um, which was normalized in the house. It was often described as that's just the way she is and we just all deal with it. So from a as a little child, you know, I could be sitting at my kitchen table doing my homework and it would be completely quiet and in the kitchen my mother would be making dinner and out of nowhere, like bam, you know, a pan would slam down and the rage and it would be she would be swearing and cursing and yelling and you would jump out of your skin going, "What just happened? What did I do?" And then it would just be like, "Forget that ever happened."
>> Um, and then you could flash forward to teenage years, adulthood, where, um, my mom would engage in what's called, I believe, if I'm using this term properly, splitting, where one sibling is the good sibling and one sibling is the bad sibling. And you're constantly trying to triangulate and make alliances with your own children. And, you know, thirdly, it would it would be those similar things of, you know, I hate you, don't leave me. um, when whenever it comes to a child of a borderline mother that that that is who they may be dealing with. I used to refer to my mother as a non-negotiable personality before I had the actual nomenclature for what was wrong with her or what plagued her. What does one begin to do when this this realization strikes you?
>> You can't do much as a child. Of course.
>> As a child, um, the borderline parentifies you. She expects
>> Yes.
>> She expects you to regulate her emotions. She expects you to stabilize, stabilize her moods.
>> She, in other words, she renders you the parent and she becomes childlike. I'm saying she, although currently half of all borderlines, diagnosed borderlines are men. So, this is really gender bias. Yeah. So, um, parentification is a major, a major issue. This confluence of emotional dysregulation or affective liability, inability to control emotions, coupled coupled with ever-present anger. That's what you have described because the anger is not reactive. It's not a reaction to something outside. It's a reaction to something inside.
>> These internal dynamics dictate the eruptions. It's like a volcano. It's utterly unpredictable. And the twin anxieties simply mean that the attachment that the mother fosters or the mother engenders in the child is insecure. Children of people with cluster B personality disorders, narcissists, borderlines, and so on, they grow up to be insecure as far as attachments go. They they're always a bit suspicious, a bit paranoid, a bit hypervigilant, expecting the worst, catastrophizing, and so on, so forth. There's a legacy of the borderline mother or the borderline father. Yes. But mother mostly.
>> It is mostly mothers, and you know, I, it is, there is an overlap for sure of, at least in my mother's case, you know, I think they call them comorbidities. A borderline will often display narcissistic personality disorder, uh, behaviors. You know, everything was really organized, at least in my household, growing up on placating and pleasing the mother at the expense of anybody else's real wants or needs. needs. Um, and I think probably part of the collateral damage as well is that borderlines tend to attract, in my just in my experience, equally damaged partners who can't quite recognize or are avoidant as to what may be going on in the home. Can you speak to that a little bit?
>> The main preoccupation of people with borderline personality disorder is the craving, the desire to put an end to the internal mayhem and chaos and tumult. And so they seek what we call external regulation. They seek a figure, someone, the rock, they call they call it the rock. They they want to find someone who would be able to stabilize their moods, regulate their emotions, afford them with a sense of certainty and determinacy, always be there for them, um, never abandon them, and so on, so forth. And they pick, they tend to pick people who exude a sense of self-confidence, overwhelming self-confidence and charisma, which is a great description of narcissists. It's exactly what narcissists do.
>> And so they tend to pair up with narcissists and psychopaths, regrettably, as well.
>> Oh, really?
>> Yeah. Because psychopaths are the same. Psychopaths exude this this magnetism and this overconfidence and this, you know, just follow me anywhere.
>> Mhm.
>> And so the, what the borderline does, she outsources her mind. She outsources her mind, her ego functions, her internal psychological processes to an outside subcontractor. And then when the subcontractor inevitably fails, the borderline becomes enraged and furious and vindictive and aggressive and even violent. It's not uncommon. Violence is not uncommon in borderline.
>> I love this description of outsourcing and subcontracting one's emotional, psychological, even intellectual needs.
>> And it, it seems like it's, they, the borderline themselves, they're on a hamster wheel where they keep sort of doing the same thing over and over and and hoping that it will quell the rage and the deep black hole of need in them that will never be filled by another. Because that's that's work you have to do on yourself.
>> I'm afraid, um, even, even that is not very helpful until until you get to be 30 or 35. If you were to ask me if a borderline is capable of being a good mother, my answer would be, depends on her age. Prior to age 35, a borderline is likely to be a very damaging mother, a very problematic mother. Yes. Prior. After age 35, a borderline mother could be utterly functional and perfectly okay. And the reason is that 81% of people with borderline personality disorder lose the diagnosis after age 35. They're no longer borderline.
>> What, what happens? This is completely, to me, because
>> Yeah, we don't know. We think it has something to do with the brain. We believe that borderline is hereditary. There's a genetic component and involves specific brain abnormalities that are more common in one's teens and 20s and then the brain being neuroplastic. The brain is neuroplastic. The brain rewires itself, adapts somehow, and after age 35, well over 80% of people with borderline no longer have borderline. That's a fact. And, um
>> What are the studies that point to this, Sam?
>> Numerous, actually. The ICD itself is mentioning this. So
>> Really?
>> Yeah. And then
>> I feel like it, sorry, go ahead.
>> And then there's another thing. Borderline personality disorder is among the very few mental health conditions that are actually amenable to treatment. Um, there is a treatment modality called DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy.
>> And DBT is successful in 50% of the cases. In other words, if you spend one year doing DBT as a borderline,
>> you have a 50% chance of losing your diagnosis, regardless of your age. And this percentage goes sky-high as you as you grow older. Now, yeah, please go ahead.
>> Can you speak to, could you speak to the cohort of of women and mothers who do not shed the diagnosis and whose behavior only intensifies as they age, which I find to be the case with adult children of my cohort, my generation and older? And, and I think a lot of this predates the the constant conversation in the culture of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy. What are the coping mechanisms for adult children of borderline mothers when the mother's behavior only solidifies and intensifies?
>> When the mother's behavior solidifies or intensifies, she is very likely not a borderline, or at least not a pure borderline. As you have indicated, she's likely to suffer from other comorbidities which do worsen with age. Um, so, for example, she's very likely to be a narcissist as well. Narcissism does not ameliorate or mitigate with age, with the exception of antisocial behaviors. All other features of narcissism become worse.
>> So
>> Fascinating.
>> So it's a, it's very extremely likely, actually, that this kind of person has actually shed the borderline part but has remained with the narcissistic part. And now the narcissism is glaringly ostentatious and obvious. And that makes the situation a lot worse. We have an identical situation with dementia. You've mentioned dementia. Dementia.
>> Yeah.
>> In dementia, certain cluster B personality disorders become much worse. For example, if you are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and then develop dementia, your narcissism would be accentuated and become much, much more deleterious and egregious. So this is exactly what happens with borderline. The borderline is reduced somehow, ameliorated, mitigated, softens, soft edges.
>> While the narcissism, the psychopathy, because psychopathy is also very common with borderline. Um, other histrionic, histrionic personality disorder, which is also very common with borderline, all these, all these survive the borderline. And then
>> Fascinating.
>> Yeah. The borderline is considered, think of the borderline as an invisibility cloak. So there's this invisibility cloak, and when it's tossed away, what's left is the wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Then you see the true face of the individual.
>> You know,
>> the narcissism, the histrionic personality disorder, the
>> psychopath.
>> Definitely. I see those in my own mom. Um, and psychopathy. Can you just speak to a little bit of that as a comorbidity? Because I think when people hear psychopathy, they think one thing, and that is the extreme end of psychopathy, which is you are a hardened criminal, if not a serial killer. But does psychopathy exist on a spectrum?
>> Well, yes. The overwhelming vast majority of psychopaths have nothing to do with serial killing, not even as a hobby. And they actually, um, cope well. Um, they, they're pillars of the community. They are chief executive officers. For example, there are studies by Babyak and Hare, uh, which have demonstrated that the prevalence of psychopaths among chief executive officers, surgeons in operating rooms, is much higher than in the general population. So most psychopaths are functional, pro-social, socially adaptive, and so on, so forth. The only difference between a psychopath and a healthy person is a psychopath would tend to be goal-oriented. They would lack empathy, and therefore they would be callous, reckless, unscrupulous, and immoral. That's one reason why there's a debate whether psychopathy is a mental illness at all.
>> Oh, that's fascinating.
>> Yeah, that's fascinating. In in in the case of borderline personality disorder, coming back to the topic, the comorbidity with antisocial personality disorder, which is a clinical name for psychopathy, the comorbidity is pretty high. Actually, there are some learned guesses that about one in three borderlines would also be a psychopath. And
>> I would love to talk to you about this a little bit just because, you know, again, in the case of, you know, my mom is the template for the idea of the difficult mother, the borderline mother. She could be in public at events, at family gatherings, even dealing with strangers. The charm would just come on like that. Extremely charismatic. Has a gravitational pull. People just wanted to be around her, be near her. Even if she could be outright clearly mean, say something mean, people would laugh it off like, "Oh, that's just Mary, you know, she's that's how she is." And then the child becomes, I think, even more confused because they see the mother interfacing with the rest of the world as this lovely, charismatic, just magnetic personality. And behind closed doors, the child is acted to the opposite. And what, what happens is the child becomes very confused. I'm speaking about myself. Who would believe me when I say that behind closed doors my mother can be a monster?
>> Well, first of all, I hate to break it to you, but you're describing a psychopath, not a borderline. Uh, one of the key diagnostic features and clinical features of psychopathy is superficial charm and glibness. It's a key feature, which
>> It's also a key feature of narcissism, right? Uh, to a much lesser extent.
>> Really?
>> It's actually the antisocial dimension in narcissism. It's definitely psychopathic.
>> Uh, but coming back to to your question, I tend to digress and I apologize, but coming back to your question,
>> um, the main message that such a mother conveys to her child is something's wrong with you. Something is wrong with you. Other people love me, you don't. You don't. Or other people behave one way, you behave another way. You are incapable of making me feel good. You're incapable of making me happy. You're So there's always a message, an underlying message of your failure. You're constantly failing me, you're a disappointment, you're
>> Mhm.
>> And so if you happen to be the scapegoat and not the golden child, and these are transitory roles, by the way, but if you happen
>> Exactly. I was often a scapegoat. I was often a golden child. I will say my mom did a lot of things right with me and encouraged me in so many ways, but there were other times where there was nothing I could do to satiate her need for love and attention.
>> That is what I've mentioned earlier, the approach avoidance repetition compulsion. That's
>> the inability to actually reach a plateau of intimacy and so on.
>> When you gratify, when the child gratifies such a mother, when the child meets the mother's expectations and needs, needs, she feels suffocated. She feels threatened because in her mind, she's expected to reciprocate, and she is unable to reciprocate.
>> And so she feels that she's being set up for failure or that she's being framed somehow, or she, and at that very moment, she flips and she becomes, she renders the child a pariah object. She renders the child an enemy in her mind, someone who is challenging her actually to be a good mother. And so
>> Wow.
>> the child can never win. And consequently, the child develops what we call in psychology, or in some schools in psychology, an internalized bad object, a voice or a set of constellation of voices in the child's mind that inform the child that he is or she is unworthy, inadequate, a failure, perhaps also ugly and stupid, definitely disappointing, and so on, so forth. And this constellation of voices, they're known as introjects. You carry them with you for the rest of your life. You may kid yourself. You may kid yourself that now you have you have recovered somehow, that you have a lot of self-esteem and self-confidence. You're an accomplished person, and so on. But these voices are inside you, and they're undermining you, and they're corroding you, and they're not letting you be.
>> Would you say those are fixed traits, or would you say that if you are an adult child who is cognizant to a degree of what went on in your childhood with a borderline mother, and you do go and seek therapy, as I did, that those can either be mitigated or eventually purged from your system?
>> Eradicated. Yes, absolutely. The prognosis is very good. The problem is the vast majority of people do never reach this level of self-awareness.
>> They,
>> you know, I think a lot of people don't realize they even had a borderline mother. We were just talking on The Nerve the other day. There's a big B.D. documentary about the artist Billy Joel that's airing now on HBO, and he and his sister refer to his mother who had rage explosions like this, and they they describe their childhood as quote, walking on eggshells, as bipolar. And I think there's a lot of confusion, uh, between what a a bipolar mother presents as and a borderline mother presents as. Is there much of a difference, Sam?
>> Of course, there's a huge difference.
>> Would you explain?
>> Bipolar disorder is, um, cycling between moods.
>> Mhm.
>> And the cycles take, uh, very long time. Typical bipolar cycle is weeks to months. Months is very common. Whereas in
>> Manic versus depressive?
>> Manic versus what used to be called manic depressive. Yes, hypomanic and manic.
>> While in borderline personality disorder, the cycling is very, very fast. It's accelerated. Like the borderline can switch between moods within within the hour or within hours. It's extremely rare to document a case where a mood lasts for four days. That's considered to be an outlier, you know, something amazing. So that's the first, uh, difference. The second difference is everything that is happening to the to the bipolar is an outcome, a direct outcome, and the a result of the underlying mood disorder. Whereas in borderline personality disorder, the mood disorder is ancillary, is not a main clinical feature. There are other clinical features which are much more relevant in borderline and which are completely absent in bipolar disorder. Anyone who confuses the two is a bad clinician, to use a British understatement.
>> But if you're a child or an adult child, what is absent in the bipolar mother that is present in the borderline, or vice versa? What?
>> The bipolar, the bipolar is predictable.
>> Ah, okay. You know, you know that father right now is can't sleep, is into herb schemes of getting rich quick, is so that's a manic phase, and you know for sure as a child that the next phase is father goes to bed and never leaves bed for a few months. That
>> So it's utterly predictable. The cycling is predictable. Whereas with a borderline mother, there's no way, there's no model, there's no theory you can construct which will predict the mother's future behavior. And we say that when you are with a borderline mother, there is a failure of what we call theory of mind. There's a failure of mentalization. You cannot create a theory about your mother's mind which would allow you to feel safe, to feel that you are in a secure base, and that is terrifying for a child. It's a horror movie. There are two other, there are two other issues I think with a with a borderline mother. The first I've mentioned, which is the the the bad object, the messaging that you are not good enough, you're unworthy, you're a failure, you're disappointing, you're this, you're that. And the second, I think, uh, problem is that the mother sets you up for failure. You see, when you're as a child, you're confronted with a bad mother, a dysfunctional mother.
>> Dysfunctional, yeah.
>> Yes. When you're confronted with such a mother as a child, you have two options. You can say, my mother is dysfunctional. But that's terrifying because if your mother is dysfunctional, she won't feed you. She won't shelter you. You may die. So no child adopts this position. No child says, yeah, my mother is a problem.
>> The other option is to say, I am the problem.
>> It's all happening because of me.
>> I'm doing something wrong, or I am wrong. So you adopt this stance that you are the reification of wrongness. You are wrongness embodied and personified, and you spend the rest of your life believing that you are wrong. Now, because of that, it is very difficult for people to reach a level of self-awareness because it requires them to admit finally that nothing's wrong with them, that it's mother. And
>> They still have the inner child that is terrifying of admitting this because you see, if you're six months old and you reach a conclusion that mother sucks and you know is not unlikely to feed you or shelter you or protect you, that's life-threatening. No child would do this. And we only kid ourselves when we when we distinguish these phases in life. Now, we are adults. We are not children. That's not true. We're always children, especially especially when it comes to mother.
>> Absolutely. You know, it's fascinating in my mother's case, she had had a true gift of relating to, she was so good with babies and children, you know, once the, once they hit, especially kids who weren't hers, but, you know, I, I found, I would always say, you know, the problem is once you become of an age where you develop your own thoughts and personality and you're going to defy the mother, and that's where the conflict would come in with her. But I always felt her gift was so pronounced with babies and children because she was a child herself. I believe her her borderline personality developed as a result of, from all of my reading, the trauma of losing her mother very young, of feeling abandoned, of going through several more traumas before she even hit the age of 20. And instead of getting help, again, it was a different time. It was always just the the, I've spoken to relatives about this, the constant refrain in the house was, that's just how she is. She's otherwise a wonderful person. Just go along to get along, and we'll just move. It's the easiest way to keep this train going.
>> Um, now to that, I want to, I just want to show a couple of clips. We'll, I'll show one, I'll get your reaction. We'll go to the next one. I think the the biggest depiction, the most, I'm going to say influential on the culture and, um, most profound was Livia Soprano, Tony Soprano's mother, of The Sopranos. And David Chase, the genius creator, has said more than once, Livia is based on my mother, who I did realize at a certain point was a borderline, and I have never seen a better depiction of how a borderline will box you out of any possible solution you could answer to bring them a bit of happiness. So, we're going to look at this clip of Carmela visiting Livia and trying to get Livia to back off her own son, who's just doing his best vis-à-vis what his mother needs. Let's take a look.
>> But I want you to cut the drama. It's killing Tony.
>> What are you talking about?
>> I'm talking about this, this poor mother, nobody loves me victim crap. It is textbook manipulation. And I hate seeing Tony so upset over it.
>> I know how to talk to people.
>> Well, I am a mother, too. Don't forget. And you know the power that you have, and you use it like a pro.
>> Power? What power? I don't have power. I'm a shut-in.
>> You are bigger than life. You are his mother. And I don't think for one second that you don't know what you're doing to him.
>> Oh, me? Me? What do I, what did I do?
>> Look, I didn't come by to argue. I came by to check on you and to bring you the rig. If you don't want it, you can give it to Junior because I know he stops by a lot.
>> He's my husband's brother. If you can't check up on me once in a while, that's none of anybody's business.
>> Oh my God. I am not saying that. All I am saying is if you don't want it, give it to Junior.
>> I know what you're hinting at.
>> Ma. There is nothing wrong with companionship. What is wrong?
>> Wait until you're abandoned.
[Music]
>> To me, that is textbook dialogue. I've heard versions of that millions of times. Sam, what do you say to that?
>> I agree. This is 100% borderline. Uh, I would emphasize just two points because we've discussed the others, actually. The first point is the the drama thing. Borderlines use drama as a regulatory mechanism. I mentioned that they,
>> I mentioned that they outsource their internal psychological processes to a single individual. Usually it's a single individual. And at the same time, they create environments, specific environments that are that force the other party to comply with expectations and needs as verbalized or non-verbalized. This environment is dramatic. It's always dramatic. They use drama to force, to coerce other people to behave in highly specific ways. This has a name in psychology. It's called projective identification. So this is one element. They're drama queens and kings. The second element is the mother here appears to be acting. And many, many people will tell you, yeah, they're acting. I don't think she's acting. The problem with borderlines, narcissists, and even to some extent psychopaths, they are what we call ego-syntonic. In other words, they don't feel that they have done anything wrong. They feel that people are wronging them. That's why they have this victimhood complex and and so on. They don't, they don't see what it is that people keep complaining about. Why people keep criticizing them and disagreeing with them. And in their mind's eye, they are perfection. Borderlines are as grandiose as narcissists, by the way, even without the comorbidity. Grandiosity is a key feature of borderline. So
>> Interesting. So a borderline would say, I'm perfect by definition. I'm a perfect entity. Therefore, I can make no mistakes. And it's not, she doesn't say this. She wouldn't say this as a kind of bragging or bragadocio or something. It's just a fact of life. She's perfect and she's infallible. She never makes mistakes. And then people around her are either too envious or too stupid or malevolent, or something's wrong with them. Something's wrong with them. This is called alloplastic defense. The borderline has, like the narcissist, she has alloplastic defenses. She blames other people, the environment, institutions, the period in history, her own personal history, her mother, her father, the neighbors, the dogs, you name it. Someone is to blame. Never her, never she.
>> I can attest to this. I can attest to this firsthand. My mother was never to blame. There was never an apology to come. It was, in fact, if you called her out on inappropriate behavior or an explosive rage, uh, it would the response would often be, you made me do that.
>> Yes, alloplastic defense. You, you're to blame.
>> But it's, it's even more than this. If you dare confront the borderline, criticize her, expose her, um, force her to face the mirror, present evidence to the contrary, because she has a narrative that is often counterfactual. Narrative has nothing to do with reality. If you do any of these things, probably you are a sadist. Probably you're malevolent and hateful and vengeful, and it says something about you. It says nothing about the borderline, but it says everything about you. Or maybe you're just stupid, unable to appreciate the the borderline's endowments and gifts. Or maybe you're envious, even as a daughter. You may be envious of her. Borderline mothers compete with their daughters.
>> When it, when it comes to external appearance, looks. They, they compete with their daughters. When it comes to the social circle of the daughters. Even the daughter's lovers. I mean, there's constant competition. And so if there's competition, there's envy. And if there's envy, there's aggression. And you're being aggressive.
>> You're being aggressive.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think there, there was definitely levels of that. And, and I think what is becomes very difficult for the child as they mature and then become an adult is really trying to come to terms with marrying the the bad mommy with the good mommy, right? Because I think part of the reason there's so much resistance for an adult child to say, "Wait a second. What's been going on here is not my fault at all. Something is deeply wrong." Is because it is your mother. As Carmela says in that clip to Livia, you are larger than life. You are his mother. You gave him life. You kept him alive. And I want to just play this very brief clip of Tony Soprano in session with Dr. Melfi. And Dr. Melfi coming to a realization that she's she she doesn't have the time to let Tony realize that his mother wants him dead. Now, this is an extreme dramatic version. And she's she's going to tell him, "Listen, your mother's a borderline." And I'm going to explain what that is to you. And Tony's inability to process this at all. Let's take a look at this clip.
>> I say what your mother has at the very least is what we call borderline personality disorder. A borderline personality disorder.
>> Let me read to you from the DSM-4. Okay. Definition of the condition.
>> A pattern of unstable relationships, affective instability. It means intense anxiety, a joylessness. These people's internal phobias are the only things that exist to them. The real world, real people are peripheral. These people have no love or compassion. Borderline personalities are very good at splitting behavior, creating bitterness and conflict between others in their circle.
>> So Sam, that's a lot. Uh, but could you speak to that? And also for, for what stuck out for me when Dr. Melfi says, these people have no love or compassion for others. I do have to say, I would never describe my mother like that. I don't think the love that she showed me or my brother or any of the children she helped raise, uh, would apply. So if, if you could please.
>> I, uh, tend to disagree with about 50% of what this doctor said.
>> Interesting.
>> I think she was describing a narcissist.
>> Interesting. Um, yeah, of course, narcissism, pathological narcissism and borderline, borderline state are very, very similar. There's been a scholar by the name of Otto Kernberg, who is the father of the field, and he suggested that borderline and narcissism are in so intimately linked that they're one and the same.
>> Wow.
>> So it's easy to make this mistake. But I would like to focus on, rather than criticizing the imaginary clinician, I would like to focus on splitting. First of all, everyone goes through a phase of splitting people. Splitting is an infantile defense in early childhood. Children split. Someone is all good, another person is all bad. That's precisely the reason that when the child says mother is all good, because it's too threatening to consider the alternative, the child is forced to say, then I'm all bad. It's the outcome of splitting. If she is all good, I'm all bad.
>> That's the first thing. Healthy mothers, functional mothers, mothers who Winnicott, the famous pediatrician and psychoanalyst, called good enough mothers.
>> They signal to the child. They constantly inform the child, subtly, non-verbally, I am both good and bad. I'm not only good, I'm also bad sometimes. For example, you cry and I don't pay attention to you, or you want to eat and I'm out of the room. So, you see, Mommy can be frustrating. Mommy can be not nice. So, the mother broadcasts to the child, the healthy mother, the functional, the good enough mother, constantly broadcasts to the child, I am both good and bad. You need to integrate these parts of me. You need to create a composite which is not black or white, but gray. It is the mother that helps the child to graduate, graduate from the splitting defense, to leave it behind, to go to move on from the splitting defense. But what if the mother actually broadcasts, yes, you're right, I am all good. I am blemishless. I am perfect. And that means, of course, that you are the exact opposite. This kind of person would not be able to move on and would be stuck in the splitting phase. So
>> borderline mothers induce primitive defenses, induce splitting in their own children,
>> which is
>> I would also submit, just based on my own experience, that to have a, as you just described, not the good enough mother, but the all good mother who is behaving badly or in ways that scare you as a small child, and then turns around and says, "No, I'm all good and you're the problem." can inculcate a fundamental miswiring of one's own intuition and in one's own ability to self-identify what is what I am seeing and hearing versus what I am being told I am seeing and hearing.
>> Yes, this is gaslighting. So
>> Gaslighting.
>> Yes. So gaslighting induces in the child what we call impaired reality testing. I think what I'm trying to tell you, a bit politically incorrectly, is that
>> Please go.
>> is that children of of uh borderline parents, mothers mostly, the mother is the critical figure in the first 36 months of life, not the father.
>> It's politically incorrect to say this, but it's the mother's fault, if you wish. The mother molds the child and shapes the child in the first 36 months. The father plays a very marginal role.
>> Mhm.
>> In these first three years. So
>> Uh, what I'm trying to say, I think, is that the borderline mother, the legacy of the borderline mother in the child is some borderline features. It's not, it wouldn't be true to say that the borderline child is all good,
>> all pure, and it is the borderline mother that is all bad. That's a splitting.
>> Right. Of course.
>> So, the borderline, the the child of the borderline mother is likely to engage in splitting, likely to have a bad internal object, likely to fall for the wrong type of people in romantic intimate relationships, likely to be terrified of intimacy and love, however unconsciously. Likely to develop repetition compulsion, approach avoidance. Likely to do all these things. Likely to be a bit dramatic, likely to be a bit histrionic and seek attention all the time, and so on.
>> Mhm.
>> This is
>> And again, just to absolutely, and just to put a point on that, before we go, as said earlier, this does not mean the child of a borderline is doomed to that kind of a life. That once they recognize it, if they are involved in getting some sort of treatment, self-help, what have you, that they can overcome said.
>> I want to emphasize, I want I would, with your permission, I want to take another to emphasize this not in order to end on an optimistic or hopeful note, but because it's a fact.
>> If borderline personality disorder has an excellent prognosis. If people with borderline personality disorder, even people with borderline,
>> they get well in the overwhelming vast majority of cases. They lose the diagnosis. They're perfectly healthy. So even more so when it comes to children of people with borderline, the the prognosis is excellent. If you become aware that your mother may have been a borderline and so on, so forth, your best bet is therapy. We have numerous treatment modalities. If you have the bad objects, for example, these sentences in your mind that keep saying you're inadequate, you're nothing, you're a failure, you're a loser, you're unworthy. This can be eliminated with cognitive behavior therapy. Literally eliminated for life. Um, splitting can be tackled with psychodynamic therapies. We have the tools, and you will be as good as new. Everything can be reversed and erased. Absolutely. Money back guarantee.
>> Well, thank you, Sam. We'll hold you to that.
>> All right. Um, I hope that you will come back on The Nerve as we continue our discussion of difficult mothers in all of their forms. Um, so thank you again.
>> Thank you for having me. Kind of you.
>> Wonderful. Thank you so much. And, um, to you out there who are watching and thinking, "Oh my God, like, yeah, my mom might be a borderline. I might have grown up in a home like that." I would love to suggest to you