borderlinePhD

Faludi's Feminist Backlash

2011-04-10T09:17:00.012-04:00

So, I finally looked at the article.

The one where Susan Faludi misrepresents my argument from Jane Sexes It Up (which she clearly did not read, but depended instead on Astrid Henry's misrepresentation of same), which appeared in Harper's magazine last October. The cover story.

I responded to it with one of my main go-to solutions. I ignored it. I avoided it. I left the magazine on the coffee table and averted my eyes from it each time I walked through the living room. But finally I looked at it this morning.

Here's what Faludi says:

Sex is the movement’s Mason-Dixon Line, now as it was in the Eighties, when battles over pornography were known as 'the sex wars.' Those old skirmishes have now been reimagined by third wavers too young to have been part of them as a generational showdown—even though second-wave feminists were on both sides of the Eighties fight. Sex isn’t the source of the divide between feminist generations so much as its controlling metaphor, used, Astrid Henry noted, to conflate power and prudishness, as when third-waver Merri Lisa Johnson casts feminism as 'a strict teacher who just needs to get laid.'

The irony of this misrepresentation is almost too much to bear. Here is what my original source says:

When I first imagined this project I thought that in writing it I would force feminism's legs apart, liberating her from the beige suit of political correctness. I wanted feminism to be bad like me. A young feminism, a sexy feminism. I found myself saying things like, 'I'm not that kind of feminist, all sly innuendo and bedroom eyes.' Early in my research, however, I discovered that that kind of feminist is mostly a media construct -- oversimplification spiced with staged cat fights. . . .

[R]evolutionary ideas about sexual politics are consistently misrepresented or simply 'disappeared' in most narratives of U.S. history. This face of feminism [referencing Carole Vance's anthology, Pleasure and Danger] -- the smart-ass take-no-shit anarcha-orgasmic-feminist persona Gen Xers thought we invented -- is suppressed in the mainstream media. . . .

Whatever conflicts exist within feminism, the first lesson for each generation must be about the politics of representation (which histories are handed over, which are not, and why); for it is frequently against representations of feminism as puritanical or anti-male or just plain crazy--not against feminism itself--that many young women posit our sexy "new" brand of feminism.

Rather than forcing ourselves on feminism, then, the Jane generation means to reconnect with our movement. The women who confess their desires in the following pages diverge purposefully from the path of 'patriarchy's prodigal daughters' (young women trading on chic renunciations of feminism) to form a feminist sexual identity informed (not imprisoned) by the women whose writing came before us. Feminism -- addressed by many young women as a strict teacher who just needs to get laid -- is a name we [third wave feminists] want to reclaim for the intersection of smart and sexy within each of us. A theme emerges as several writers arrive via various routes at the same negotiation between feminism's most trenchant critiques of sexual politics on one hand and it's devil-may-care libertinism on the other, finding fragments of desire and indignation in each direction, and piecing together the usable past.

From there, I go on to say that third wave feminist sexual politics are positively informed by the sex radical politics of second wave feminism, and that Jane Sexes It Up aims to theorize sex positivity to work in a more nuanced way with ideas most vocally advocated in the late 1990s by women outside academia (e.g., Susie Bright, Carol Queen), and, in the legacy of feminist scholars like Jane Gallop who provided the Prologue to Jane Sexes It Up, I hoped to encourage third wave feminist academics to generate more theoretically sophisticated yet still thoroughly embodied and situated articulations of sexual agency, ambivalence, and lived experience because sex positive women outside the academy articulated these positions as if they were antithetical to feminism.

I wanted to fix that problem.

Regarding a round-table of these lusty vernacular theorists, I positioned my own perspective and anthology apart from this rejection of feminism, and I speculated that the idea of a politically correct sexuality sanctioned by feminist thought was a red herring distracting young women from the life-saving, world-changing intellectual history of feminist sexual politics. My hope for that collection and for much of my publication record since then was to intervene in the pleasure/danger binary that organizes this intellectual history, and to reconfigure the conversation as one that can attend to pleasure and danger without polarizing discussions of sexuality (a position that characterizes some of the most important works of third wave feminism, including Heywood and Drake's Third Wave Agenda and Lynn Chancer's Reconcilable Differences).

I have not written to Susan Faludi, or to Harper's, but I'm still wondering if I should (or if the moment has passed and it is simply too late for anyone to care, if I should have already) set the record straight.

My will to do so has been weak in part because when Astrid Henry announced the publication of her book, Not My Mother's Sister (a title that still makes very little sense to me), I wrote a note of congratulations to her in third wave feminist solidarity. She wrote back to thank me, and to give me a heads up that one of her chapters focuses heavily on my work. When I read the book itself, I was really surprised and hurt. I wrote to her and pointed out the misrepresentation and the issue of ethical feminist citation that would suggest she should in some way correct the record.

She never wrote back.

Something similar happened a year or so before that experience. Another third wave feminist anthology came out in which Katha Pollitt makes a weird aside about my work (actually, about me) based on a second-hand verbal paraphrase of my position that it is sometimes hard to make yourself change your sexual and romantic practices even when you perceive them as out of step with your feminist politics. I mention bell hooks' criticism of what she calls "lifestyle feminism," by which she means convenient feminism, or feminist politics you can ascribe to without having to change anything about your practices in the world, and I say, simply, that this is a difficult challenge to face. I stand by the honesty of that statement. Without reading it in context, in fact without reading it at all but rather just hearing about it, Katha Pollitt says something like, Just wait till Merri Lisa Johnson marries some asshole and is mistreated by him. She'll change her tune then. (I'm definitely paraphrasing from memory, here, so, in the transparency of ethical feminist citation, I am stating explicitly that you will have to check the original source, Catching a Wave, for a more accurate representation of her words.)

I guess what I'm left wondering this morning is whether Jane Sexes It Up might actually be unclear. There is a certain pleasure in getting up on my high horse and feeling indignant about these unjust representations of my argument, but maybe there was something about the language, the phrasing, or, and this is the one I think is most likely true, something unclear about my use of the common trick in literary nonfiction of using stories of one's former naive self as a device to set up a story about one's coming to consciousness, one's feminist education, using oneself, in other words, as a kind of foil and a double for the uninitiated reader to demonstrate the commonplace misconceptions held about a particular subject, in this case feminist sexual politics. Astrid, Susan, and Katha all seem to take this device as my 'real' self and overlook the many places where I explain how my ideas shifted, evolved, grew, and became more well-informed. I probably shouldn't put the three of them in a single category because their errors are different in type.

Astrid misread.

Susan neglected to check her sources.

Katha took hearsay as the real-for-real truth.

All three errors are surely simple human foibles and not deliberately malicious attacks. But they are sloppy. And they contribute to the very social forces that undermine feminist thought by caricaturing a self-identified feminist sister. Given the stature of Susan and Katha as internationally renowned and widely trusted voices of feminism in the popular press, they ought to be more diligent in their research and representation of other feminist thinkers.

Shame on y'all.

I'm not the first to say this, as Courtney Martin made a more timely response to the Harper's cover story on Feministing in September 2010, as did Jennifer Baumgardner, and Jack Halberstam joined the conversation in October 2010 on Bully Bloggers, but I would like to belatedly echo their frustrations over Susan Faludi's feminist backlash with my own, even though I have typically elected not to participate in such conflicts.

In fact, when the Oprah show called me to explore the possibility of having me on their show addressing tensions between second- and third-wave feminists, I said I was very interested (who doesn't want to go on Oprah?! especially in the wake of a new publication), but that I didn't want to participate in what I call IN THE BOOK staged catfights. They decided against having me on the show.

But I guess the time has come to differentiate in my own mind between staged catfights and genuine conflict worthy of rebuttal. This one, I believe, is the latter.

Jane Sutures It Up; or, Can You Have a Personality Disorder and Be a Feminist Too?

2011-04-03T21:03:00.002-04:00

A reader recently wrote to me in a mixture of admiration and distress over her experience of relating strongly to my first book, Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, and again to my most recent one, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet. She loved the bold feminist protest of Jane and the raw psychological wounds of Girl. In a voice not unlike my own as I sorted through the conflicting and confusing evidence of my relationship history in the memoir, she wrote to ask, What does this mean? Which one is true? Who was good? Because I found her inquiry so challenging, I wrote back to ask if I could take some time to think it over and answer her on the blog.

She said yes, so here goes.

Merri Lisa,
Congratulations on your great new book! I finished it a few days ago, and I wanted to write and say how much it moved me. The huge life changes that you’ve gone through were obviously shattering, yet they gave you such amazing insights. The suffering you describe was tough to experience vicariously, but your strength and bravery that were ultimately conveyed were inspiring.

You have no idea how many people I convinced to read JSIU after I discovered it in 2003. It sparked many intense and fruitful dialogues with my feminist- and non-feminist-identifying girlfriends, and even my boyfriend.

As I just said, I absolutely loved Girl, but it seemed like it was written by a totally different person. My friends and I responded deeply to Jane (all the essays, but especially the ones you wrote) because its ambivalence about men, gender roles, and feminism reflected our inner tensions and doubts. We identified completely with your searching for a different kind of heterosexuality. Your book embraced both the dangerous, unruly rawness of desire and the essential truths of feminism.

So I guess I’m left with the question of what you see when you look back at your earlier work. Is there something other than pathology to be salvaged in Jane? When you think back on how you captured contemporary girls’ dissatisfaction so poignantly, do you see anything more than just symptoms of borderline personality disorder and/or repressed lesbianism?

[Then I wrote to ask for more details on the comparison . . . ]

The differences I see in the two books have everything to do (I assume) with the changes that have happened in your life in the past five or so years. Three big ones: the BPD diagnosis, coming to terms with lesbianism/coming out, and getting married. Girl is about these circumstances, the revelations they brought, and how you still struggle with those revelations. To me, it reads like a chronicle of your 30s, while JSIU was a chronicle of your 20s.

I'm wondering about how you connect these two chronicles. Is the sole connection a therapeutic narrative that finds in Jane a repository of symptoms of BPD? Should young women who see themselves in your Jane essays get therapy, stat? :)

Again, thank you for ALL of your beautiful books. Thank you for struggling through the trauma to reach healing expression.

Love,

Amanda

Amanda's questions zero in on precisely the most complex philosophical work in front of me these days as a self-identified queer crip academic feminist person-with-borderline-personality-disorder.

How to write about female psychosocial disorders without reinforcing sexist stereotypes of women as inherently crazy, irrational, excessive, and generally off our rockers.
How to make nuanced distinctions between the feminist protest of asymmetrical and otherwise unsatisfying hetero-relationships and borderline styles of reaction to distress, which are markedly disproportionate and self-defeating.

One might say of the borderline personality what Melanie Klein (via Joan Lachkar) says of the patient in a paranoid-schizoid position:

She stands up for herself in bizarre and inappropriate ways.

Such concerns will be at the center of the scholarly monograph I have begun to imagine, where I will theorize in more detail the movement between shoring up identity categories while simultaneously calling them into question, staging an encounter with stigma in order to loosen its hold on the category of borderline personality, and negotiating between the perspectives of feminist critique and those of 'crip' critique to expose a gap between them that resembles the gap Cheshire Calhoun reveals between 'feminist' and 'lesbian' viewpoints on matters of sexuality.

The decision to write Girl in Need of a Tourniquet was prompted, in a way, by my realization that the bad feelings described in "Fuck You and Your Untouchable Face: Third Wave Feminism and the Problem of Romance" (chapter 1 in Jane Sexes It Up) were coming up in similar ways in my lesbian affair, a realization that definitely made me question my insights in JSIU for a while. (Maybe the problem wasn't the guy. Maybe it was me. Why did I always take the faucet end of the tub after all? My capacity for self-subordination outstretched the influence of male-dominant couplehood dynamics.) Gender roles were no longer the obvious culprit, so I dove into the wreck of my personal psychology, family history, and ungrieved losses, leaving feminism behind for the time being.

Yet I always conceived of this memoir as a form of feminist social commentary.

In preparation for writing the book, I took a course taught by Deborah Siegel and sponsored by the National Women's Studies Association on how to write book proposals for trade publishers called Making It Pop, a course with the explicit aim of educating academic feminists on the practical skills of reaching a wider audience rather than restricting our conversations to the smallish world of academic journals. In short, the feminist cultural work of the book as I imagined it had to do with countering misogynistic and mentally ableist portrayals of the borderline personality woman as 'psycho girlfriend,' a la Fatal Attraction, Play Misty for Me, and, for a more lighthearted demonization, My Super Ex-Girlfriend. I even shopped the book to agents and publishers under the title Psycho Girlfriend Apologia for a few months. I hoped to contribute a humanizing portrait of borderline personality disorder as a mishmash of trauma reenactment, attachment disorder, and emotional dysregulation, and to suggest that what appears irrational in her behavior has a persuasive logic to it, the flawless logic of the neurotic to borrow a phrase from Karen Horney, which is perfectly pieced together but rooted in paranoid delusions and ego fragmentation.

After spending the requisite period of time worrying that the new book reveals the old book as precisely such a delusion, the fog of self-doubt lifted, and I saw a very different relationship between the two.

Far from undermining the feminist analysis of hetero-patriarchal romantic narratives, power dynamics, and gender roles that appears in Jane Sexes It Up, I believe Girl in Need of a Tourniquet excavates the psychological dynamics that produced in me a hypersensitivity to the insults and injuries that come with the work of feeding egos and tending wounds, the emotional labor, that is, of hetero-romance.

(Whenever I write or teach about hetero-romance, I find it necessary to pause and explain that I don't mean to suggest that same-sex relationships are blissful or free of conflict. The point I'm making by identifying the subject of hetero-romance is not about drawing a contrast between straight and gay relationships, but rather it is a way to emphasize the social constructions of heterosexuality as a form of desire structured by the eroticization of gender inequalities. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.)

It is my borderline personality that made me feel the discomfort so acutely that I was moved to produce a critical anthology on sexual politics and third wave feminism.

It is my borderline personality that works like a forked branch vibrating over buried springs of fresh mountain water, leading me to wells of emotional intensity and, at times, emotional inequalities running beneath the surface of a relationship.

This view of borderline personality as emotional giftedness works in important ways to balance the usual understanding of borderline personality as emotional dyslexia. My therapist said many times that borderline personality comes with gifts as well as challenges, but the public sphere has rarely made space to address borderline gifts of creativity, perceptiveness, empathy, and expressiveness.

So, should fans of Jane Sexes It Up seek help immediately for borderline personality disorder? Is there something besides pathology and closeted lesbian desire to be salvaged from Jane?

To the first question, I guess it depends on what parts resonated with you. If it was the longing for a more equitable sex life, then no. If it was breaking your favorite wine glass in the sink during a fight, then maybe therapy would be worth a try. (What needs fixing is not the anger but the management of anger.)

To the second question, I have to admit that when I reread my chapters in JSIU now with almost a decade since its publication, I draw little smiley faces in the margins next to the previously unrecognized traces of lesbian sexuality and borderline psychology in that narrative. Those things are definitely there. But I consider them the queercrip excess of Jane Sexes It Up, a bit of subject matter spilling over the top of its main ideas about queer feminist heterosexualities, not the 'true' or 'real' story beneath the false consciousness of feminist critique.

Towards the end of chapter 1 in JSIU, I asked the question on so many undergraduate Women's Studies students' minds: Can I have a boyfriend and be a feminist too? And I offered a tentative 'yes' to acknowledge the difficulty of reconciling feminist politics with hetero-desire while encouraging women to try to do so anyway.

Now a parallel concern is unfolding in reader and audience responses to Girl in Need of a Tourniquet:
Can I have a personality disorder and be a feminist too?
Can I admit to psychosocial disability and interrogate misogyny, able-ism, and medical authority at the same time?
Can I claim the label of borderline without signing away my rights to a feminist perspective on relationships that drive a girl crazy?

Again, I'm gonna say yes.

Tentatively. Critically. Self-reflexively.

The path is unclear, but I think I can get there from here.

Thanks for the great questions, Amanda!

March Madness

2011-03-01T14:51:00.004-05:00

A lot of questions have been coming my way about the problem of gender bias in borderline personality disorder diagnoses, and in honor of today's kick-off to Women's History Month, I offer this blog post not as a response but as an invitation to begin a collaborative inquiry. Let's figure it out together. Two components of gender bias stand out immediately: (1) the disproportionate diagnosis of women as borderlines, and (2) the overlap between borderline personality traits and traditionally 'feminine' traits. A number of important feminists have worked on the question of how psychiatric labels have been used to subjugate women (Phyllis Chesler, Jane Ussher, Jean Baker Miller, to name three out of a throng of feminist scholars). A smaller group of feminist disability theorists have pushed back against this feminist renunciation of psychiatric labels, advocating for the labels as 'enabling fictions' that provide us with a useful way of understanding and describing psychological distress, not to mention an avenue of access to social and medical support (mainly I'm thinking here of Andrea Nicki's article, "The Abused Mind," but there are others working along similar lines).

In the specific context of borderline personality disorder, Dana Becker has advanced a strong feminist critique of BPD, a condition she says is "arguably the most pejorative diagnosis of our time," so I'm pasting a segment of her work below (pulled from the website for the Association for Women in Psychology).

Let the conversation begin!

Is borderline personality disorder a big ol' sexist ruse? Does it have any liberatory dimensions worth celebrating?

Borderline Personality Disorder: The Disparagement of Women through Diagnosis

Dana Becker, Ph.D. Professor, Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is currently defined in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a persistent pattern of instability (both personal and interpersonal) and impulsivity. Its symptoms range from self-damaging and suicidal behavior to intense mood reactivity, feelings of emptiness, and problems controlling anger. It entered the DSM in the 1980 edition and is currently the most frequently diagnosed personality disorder.

The primary characteristic of any personality disorder is said to be its stability over time, but as described in the current DSM-IV-TR, BPD is characterized by instability—of identity, of mood, of behavior — and there are well over 100 ways to combine its symptoms that qualify a person for the BPD diagnosis. Given the diversity of its symptomatic picture, many, even in the psychiatric profession, have had difficulty conceiving of BPD as a single disorder. According to the DSM-IV-TR, about 75% of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are women. This was not always the case. BPD criteria have been altered appreciably over the past fifty years to include more and more symptoms related to emotion, accounting at least in part for the sex bias inherent in the diagnosis. Many researchers have challenged the validity of BPD, some concluding that BPD has become a catch-all label given to people, especially women, who experience acute sadness, emptiness, and emotional reactivity (particularly in the form of rage). The BPD diagnosis overlaps with other diagnoses such as Histrionic and Dependent Personality Disorders, which have been assailed for pathologizing behavior (e.g., dependency, seductiveness) that many women have been socialized to exhibit.

Some women who have been diagnosed with BPD have histories of psychological maltreatment, neglect, and/or childhood sexual or physical abuse, and they may have difficulty expressing anger “appropriately.” The ways in which “borderline” women express their pain has occasioned a vast clinical literature on how to treat “borderlines” and how to manage the strong emotions they may arouse in their therapists. So-called borderline women are often described as angry and manipulative, when in fact they often act out because they do not trust that others will meet their needs if they express them straightforwardly.

The BPD diagnosis has been used in court to institutionalize and/or medicate women involuntarily, deny them custody of their children, and have their parental rights terminated. Women diagnosed as having BPD have also frequently been discredited as witnesses in court cases involving rape or sexual abuse.

Categorizing a particular set of disparate symptoms we now call “borderline” as a personality disorder encourages clinicians to focus on a particular style of coping learned under adverse circumstances rather than on the forms of abuse and emotional invalidation that originally made that style of coping necessary. The association between women and what is arguably the most pejorative diagnosis of our time can create fear and avoidance, if not frank hostility, on the part of students of psychotherapy and practicing professionals toward a population of extremely vulnerable women.

SOURCES

Becker, D. (1997). Through the looking glass: Women and borderline personality
disorder. Boulder: Westview Press.

________. (2000). When she was bad: Borderline personality disorder in a
posttraumatic age. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70 (4), 422-432.

________. (2001). Diagnosis of psychological disorders: DSM and gender.
In J. Worrell (Ed.), The encyclopedia of gender, Vol. 1 (pp. 333-343). San Diego:
Academic Press.

Becker, D., & Lamb, S. (1994). Sex bias in the diagnosis of borderline personality
disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. Professional Psychology: Research and
Practice, 25, 55-61.

Brown, L. S. & Ballou, M. (1994). Personality and psychopathology. New York: Guilford.

Herman, J. L., Perry, J. C., van der Kolk, B. A. (1989). Childhood trauma in borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 146 (4), 460-465.

Nurnberg, H. G., Raskin, M., Levine, P. E., Pollack, S., Siegel, O., & Prince, R. (1991). The comorbidity of borderline personality disorder and other DSM-III-R Axis II personality disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 148 (10), 1371-1377.

Ogata, S. N., Silk, K. R., Goodrich, S., Lohr, N. E., Westen, D., & Hill, E. M. (1990). Childhood sexual and physical abuse in adult patients with borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 147 (8), 1008-1013.

Shaw, C., & Proctor, G. (2005). Women at the margins: A critique of the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Feminism & Psychology, 15 (4), 483-490.

5 Things Not to Do When Someone Is Angry With You

2011-02-19T21:53:00.004-05:00

Anger is scary. I react to it like I'm a little kid and the world is ending. It says 'grrr' and I turn to run away. I want to learn to react like a grown up, with some grace and stability.

Some segments below have been tailored from the original source to directly address PWBs (people with borderline personalities).

FIVE THINGS NOT TO DO WHEN SOMEONE IS ANGRY WITH YOU

Do not keep pushing and prodding for explanations or for conversation in general.
Do not overcompensate. Going to desperate lengths to fix the problem comes across as phony and makes the person more angry.
Do not beat yourself up. Tearing yourself apart will not improve the situation. Resolve to yourself to make a change.
Do not turn the situation around and get angry at them. Resist the urge to make them the problem.
Do not try to get revenge. [I find this one confusing, like, what on earth kind of revenge would one take on someone for being angry, but 4 out of 5 helpful tips is not bad.]

SO, WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

make a sincere apology
give them space
assure them you will be there when they are ready to work things out
maintain emotional balance because falling apart is a flawed and unfair defense (see previous post)

Specifically, this last one means you still have to eat, sleep, exercise, hydrate, go to work, and take care of any children or pets in your care, and, if possible, do extra little things to nurture yourself like bake cookies or go for a long walk and smell the warm spring air and accept a world where someone being mad at you can coincide with an unseasonably sunny Saturday in the impossible month of February.

The world hasn't ended.

Watch Grey's. Go to sleep. Wake up tomorrow.

Try again.

Pretty Little Defense Machine

2011-02-19T14:48:00.002-05:00

One question that comes up repeatedly at public readings from Girl in Need of a Tourniquet goes something along the lines of 'how did you gain perspective on your own symptoms?' They want to know how I am able to see through the haze of borderline cognition to see and accept my own complicity in the painful experiences I describe. Most of the time the question makes me feel special, like I am a borderline savant who is gifted with insight into her own flawed perceptions, but the truth is that the insight comes from other people. I see the emotions I'm experiencing as authentic reflected in their faces as false and strategic. It has often been the case that I ran the other way when I saw this distorted reflection because I believed the person was seeing me the wrong way, and I wanted to hide to protect myself from the unfair picture.

Occasionally I can admit that what they are seeing is accurate.

Sadistic verbal attacks? Yes, I've made a number of them.

Wild swings from idealization to devaluation? Definitely, over and over again.

Paranoid misinterpretations of other people as hostile and out to get me? Again, yes.

Sudden frightening bursts of anger? In the words of Natalie Portman, 'Don't test me when I'm crazy.'

The one saving grace in this awful picture is that once I see the behavior for what it is, I am generally able to change it. I am holding on to this glimmer of hope today because I just saw a whole new set of personality disorder symptoms in myself, and they are not attractive and, more importantly, not functional. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I made this whole being borderline thing up. Like maybe there's nothing wrong and I just went all Lauren Slater metaphorical on borderline personality disorder and used it as a narrative device to capture the feeling of being in extreme emotional pain, or worse, maybe I made it up as an excuse for bad behavior like one of my Feminist Disability Studies students said on Thursday about how people abuse diagnoses by using them to get away with things. I said her comment was ableist. I said those defenses are symptoms, too. She looked frustrated. I think maybe she wished I would hear what she was saying about the importance of accountability despite the diagnosis.

Just as I begin to wonder about whether my diagnosis is real (and just as I block a student from addressing crip accountability), the psychoanalytic karma fairy drops a whole new load of 'behaviors' in front of me, and I realize something. You can call it being borderline or having a personality disorder or just being a bad person - who cares what anyone calls it, who cares where the line being normal bad person and abnormal bad person is when you hurt someone you love and then watch yourself like a character in a bad movie trying to get off scot-free instead of sticking around to deal with the pain and anger directed legitimately at you (at me) - it is not okay to hide out inside a false reality where you are always seen as right and good, or, at worst, wrong but impaired.

So anyway, long story short, I'm a defense machine, and I am pretty grossed out by my defenses right now, so in the interest of seeing them for what they are, and towards the end goal of us PWBs (people with borderline personalities) and people in general, really, being honest and accountable for our hurtful behaviors, here is the list I made today of my tactics for avoiding responsibility when I do something wrong:

crying when someone is mad at me so that they switch from anger to compassion
positioning myself as a martyr, encouraging them to take their best shot, like I am jesus savior good when I am really judas traitor bad, like I am somehow generously giving something up by facing my responsibility for their pain
describing myself as all bad (see above) so that others will rush in to say I'm not all bad
depriving myself of basic self-care (the long goodbye of the hunger strike, in Aimee Mann's words) as a kind of emotional threat so that my partner becomes afraid for my well-being and doesn't feel free to express anger
making it all about me, apologizing so that I can be forgiven, offering to do whatever they say so that I will be seen as compliant easy docile when I am really stubborn difficult recalcitrant, treating guilt like a hot potato I don't want to hold
lying (I won't pretty this one up with imagery)
writing a book or a blog post because I don't know how to be sorry in person
referencing a cool band or song in the title to cover up my emotional deficits with a veneer of hipness

I kept my one-year-old niece last weekend, and I noticed she cried really intensely every time I told her no (like, no don't pull that drawer out, or no don't grab the dog's tail), and I sort of identified with her, thinking hey I don't like to be criticized either. Crying is not simply the expression of pain and sadness. Crying is a defense. The thing is, she's one and I'm thirty-eight and acting like a baby. Self-pity does not wear well at this age. I'm still groping around for a model of what mature regret looks like, though.

I'm hoping the people who follow this blog will explain it to me like I'm five.

Draw me a picture. I want to do better.

Does DBT Work?

2010-11-02T11:13:00.000-04:00

In the previous post, the question came up of whether DBT works. I have not undergone this therapy, so I invite responses from anyone who has.

In the meantime, here is a bit of unexpected skepticism towards DBT from an article in a British journal on psychiatric treatment:

Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT; Linehan, 1993) is based on the principle that BPD is essentially the result of deficits in interpersonal and self-regulatory skills and that these skills can be taught in therapy. Defective affect regulation is seen as particularly important. Treatment consists of weekly individual and group therapy sessions based on a skills-training model, together with out-of-hours telephone contact with the therapist.

Dialectical behaviour therapy has been shown, in a single study, to be superior to 'treatment as usual' in reducing self-harm and time spent in hospital, but not subjective experiences such as depression and hopelessness (Linehan et al, 1991). There were also significant improvements in social and global functioning and anger (Linehan et al, 1994). However by one year after the end of treatment, rates of self-harm were no different in the DBT group and treatment-as-usual groups, although both had improved (Linehan et al, 1993).

Despite this essentially negative finding, DBT has attracted considerable interest; however, Linehan's study is open to a number of methodological criticisms. Only 39 patients were studied, all of them female, and of these only 20 were fully assessed. The level of self-harm required for entry into the study (two episodes in the last five years and one in the last eight weeks) may have led to the inclusion of patients who were less severely disturbed than those commonly seen in clinical practice. Furthermore, DBT involves a high level of input from professionals and it is not yet clear whether it is the skills training itself or simply the high level of support which leads to the reduction in self-harm.

-Anthony P. Winston, "Recent Developments in Borderline Personality Disorder" (2000)

This assessment of DBT surprised me. I had never heard negative remarks about this therapeutic approach before. Reading Linehan's dense tome on CBT for borderlines helped me a lot in reconfiguring my attitudes. The idea of radical acceptance was at first a big frustrating puzzle to me - another opaque window - but gradually it settled inside me as something useful that I can draw on, especially regarding family relationships.

Anybody else have thoughts on DBT, CBT, Linehan, or this methodological critique from Winston?

Ask a Borderline

2010-11-01T21:02:00.005-04:00

A reader of Girl in Need of a Tourniquet emailed me this week with some follow up questions, and with her permission I am sharing our correspondence with readers of this blog. Thanks, Joanna, for collaborating with me on this post!

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 9:32 PM, joanna george wrote:
Hi Lisa,

I realise you're probably extremely busy with all your responsibilities as an author and professor but I just wondered if you'd have time to answer a few quick questions regarding your book/BPD. If not, I completely understand.

I thought your book was amazing, by the way, very real and unique to other autobiographies I've read by people with Borderline. It certainly helped me in my obstacled journey as a Borderline, although I'm now reflecting more on my own thoughts, feelings and behaviours, especially of the past. Hopefully, this will be some form of self-therapy for me. It is certainly comforting to know I'm not the only one who has offbeat thoughts and emotions.

So my questions - I was wondering if you have done DBT which is thought to be groundbreaking therapy for Borderlines, and if so, was it helpful? I have done two modules of DBT and to be honest, while it has helped with some of my behaviour where interpersonal relationships are concerned, it hasn't helped greatly with making me 'feel' better. As you mentioned in your book, (from another author) when one is pathologically anxious or in distress, methods such as meditation and physical exercise don't work too well. I find when I am in what I call 'one of my rages' or need for self-harm, there is nothing stopping me, and meditation and mindfulness are the last things on my mind.

My other question - I believe you were diagnosed quite late, in your early thirties, as I was too (just a year ago actually). Did you experience similar emotions, feelings, thoughts and behaviours when you were much younger and just went undiagnosed, or do you believe it is something that appeared later for you? I always knew I was different (different in the sexuality as well as mental sense) and went through my twenties just thinking it was depression/dysthymia. I didn't even start self-harming until I was in my early thirties, although I always went for some very fast and out of control drives when the tension and anger rose.

And one last very tiny question - even though you're now married, do you still feel like there is perhaps a 'hole' or something missing (I am actually not sure if you spoke of this in your book anyway)? I have a wonderful girlfriend but still feel as though something is missing in my core, my soul. It is something now that I'm older I realise will always be there.

Anyway, thank you for reading my email, and thank you so much for writing your book. I just wish it went on for longer!

Take care,
Joanna

Hi Joanna,

Thanks for writing. I am happy to answer your questions. Would you be comfortable with me using your email and my responses on my blog?

I have not gone through DBT, but I have listened to Pema Chodron for many years now, and I read a book called Feeling Good which is a CBT-based book, and both of these sources provided the kind of cognitive reconditioning I needed in order to improve my overall mental well-being. I have been lucky to find that I could implement ideas from books and audiobooks in my life with minimal therapeutic supervision. From what I understand, most people need more structured guidance, but if the choice is between books/audiobooks and nothing, then I say try the books :-) The best tactic for me is to read and listen during periods of low-grade anxiety as a way to manage my emotions and keep them from getting too big and uncomfortable. I also reduced my alcohol intake significantly because I finally understood and accepted that alcohol amplifies my negative feelings to a level where I cannot manage them, so it is like a "gateway drug" into emotional chaos. I was diagnosed around age 31, about six years ago, but I did always know something was off for me. Like you, I thought it was depression, and I thought it was basically what I learned in my undergraduate literature courses to call the "human condition."

It is not the human condition, I now know.

And in fact I was fascinated to read that some of the authors and artists of the so-called human condition (e.g., Sartre, Munch) were suffering from severe abandonment depression related to childhood loss of attachment figures. I am married now, but as I say in the book, marriage is no cure for an attachment disorder (I prefer "attachment disorder" to "personality disorder," because of the way the term shifts focus to the dynamic of pain rather than the person herself). I still experience loneliness, frustration, abandonment feelings, engulfment feelings, and a basic restlessness, but I don't look to my partner to correct those feelings. It is my responsibility to explore, manage, ventilate, and refuse to be at the mercy of these emotions. I have made enormous progress towards what psychologists call "integration" as a result of writing the book and doing the cognitive reconditioning that accompanied my writing process. Old painful memories have taken on a less frightening dimension. My working models of self, other, and world have all shifted in a positive direction.

I am working to shed the "goat girl" narrative of myself as monstrous and unwanted, and to replace it with a more friendly view of myself as valuable, interesting, pleasant, and so on. My view of others is shifting from the other as disapproving judge to the other as simply someone living their own life with their own hangups and gifts just like me. And the world looks less hostile now, more neutral and interesting. Those changes (as opposed to my marital status) are helping me feel full instead of empty and to feel whole instead of like a "hole." The work really has to do with what's going on inside us, but I am lucky to have a partner who will engage in ongoing conversations about such things, who pushes me to keep reconditioning myself to be less easily thrown off my mood, and who listens earnestly when I say I feel unheard or invalidated and who is open to making changes in our interpersonal dynamics to improve the space of our marriage for both of us.

I hope these responses are helpful to you. Again, thanks for writing me and for supporting the book.

All best, Lisa Johnson

An angst-filled mix-tape of a story

2010-10-15T22:57:00.001-04:00

This is the best review of the book so far. Thank you Kathy Wise! You are so right - the book IS a mix tape, a prose poem, and a big open question about the line between sane and insane. I am honored to be a staff pick at Shelf Unbound.

The cited soundtrack to Girl in Need of a Tourniquet is the soundtrack to my own coming out in the early '90s, minus the borderline personality disorder. It is the shaved-headed power of Sinead O'Connor, the burning passion of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, the bi-ambiguity of Ani DiFranco, and the Juliette-Lewis-in-a-mental-hospital video drama of Melissa Etheridge. An angst-filled mix-tape of a story, Johnson's memoir serves as a beautifully crafted prose poem about an absent mother, unrequited love, sexual identity before the L Word, and mental illness, begging the question of where sane (or youth and a lack of consequential thinking) ends and crazy begins.

-Kathy Wise

Girl in Need of a Tourniquet - Video Short - thanks to AJ Mahari for providing an audiofile of this reading!

2010-08-29T19:09:00.001-04:00

Interview w/Merri Lisa Johnson by Amanda Smith, Exec. Dir., Florida Borderline Personality DIsorder Association

2010-08-25T15:23:00.005-04:00

This was my first interview about Girl in Need of a Tourniquet. It took place the very week of the book's release. Go to: Florida Borderline Personality Disorder Association and scroll down to the link to an mp3 of the interview.

(Hopefully it's working now . . .)

Interview w/Merri Lisa Johnson by AJ Mahari, Psyche Whisperer (June 29, 2010)

2010-08-25T14:58:00.000-04:00

Listen to internet radio with Psyche Whisperer AJ on Blog Talk Radio

Whose Eggshells?

2010-08-23T19:21:00.004-04:00

I've written so many different descriptions of Girl in Need of a Tourniquet as I prepared the manuscript and worked on publicity for the book. I just ran across one that might be useful in sparking conversation about the dynamics between borderlines and our partners or familial attachment figures:

My mission in this memoir is to convey the strangeness and intensity of borderline personality while at the same time retracing the flawless - if dysfunctional - logic of borderline cognition. The borderline doesn't like walking on eggshells any more than her partner or family members do. She would never have intentionally strewn them on the floor. She often thinks you (her partner, her mother) put them there! You may both be putting sharp broken things in the path of your relationship without meaning to, without knowing you're doing it.

This description isn't meant to shift blame from the borderline to the partner, but rather to foreground the fact that the touchiness captured so well by the image of walking on eggshells is produced by an interpersonal dynamic, not from the borderline in a vacuum, and, most importantly, that this interpersonal dynamic can be reconfigured through the acquisition of improved skills in communication and emotion regulation. This is a commonplace view in imago therapy and family systems therapy, but it rarely comes up in conversations about borderlines.

Within two months of weekly therapy sessions with a couples counselor who uses imago therapy strategies, my partner and I saw dramatic improvement in our relationship, and we still use the concepts, language, and tactics we learned there on a daily basis.

Plus we listen to a lot of Pema Chodron.

Just sayin' . . .

Strengths and Resilience, Not Flaws and Damage

2010-08-05T15:28:00.005-04:00

The label "borderline personality," like all personality disorder diagnoses, can be powerfully disheartening when you are on the receiving end. It seems like an all-encompassing marker for a deeply flawed person. I felt embarrassed by the term at first and was so relieved when a colleague of mine at another school suggested I research the "strengths and resilience" school of thought in Psychology (in place of the focus on assessing damage) and urged me to reframe borderline personality in terms of the gifts of empathy and other emotional strengths that come along with this personality organization.

In Jenne' Andrews' recent blog post on Loquaciously Yours - "Don't Call Me Borderline" - she writes about the destructive power of the term borderline personality disorder in her mother's life and in her own, and about the ways she and her mother both experienced a kind of eclipse of their creative strengths in the face of heavy pressure from the world of psychiatry to accept a view of themselves as terribly sick.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’ve never worked with people whose inner systems fit the criteria for the DSM categories of Borderline, Narcissism, and others. The difference is that I don’t use the categorical and shaming word “Personality Disorder” to describe a person’s experience and I don’t view people as fundamentally flawed. Deeply wounded, yes, powerfully protected, yes, but fundamentally and irreparably flawed, no.

I am especially drawn to the implication in her statement above that the "ugly" or "difficult" parts of borderline personality disorder are indicators of a very powerful and, I would add, often self-defeating system of defense mechanisms. I think of borderline personality disorder (or its less intense form, borderline personality organization) as a set of defense mechanisms gone haywire. Little bombs and tripwires and short fiery fuses set up in a circle around us and inside us. I definitely agree with the move to foreground trauma survival, trauma reenactment, and post-traumatic stress syndrome as the emotional musculoskeletal structure of borderline personality disorder. The idea of borderline personality as, also, a set of emotional strengths, resilience, and gifts is the very important other half of the new-and-improved story so many of us are now trying to tell about life with borderline personality organization.

The Accidental Sociopath

2010-07-30T10:19:00.001-04:00

My partner and I often discuss the film, Girl, Interrupted, as a blurred portrait of the borderline/sociopath. In the film, the borderline personality is the main character, Susannah, played by Winona Ryder, but the character we both think most people see as borderline in the film is Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie. Lisa, however, is a sociopath. (For Angelina's critique of the film, click here.) Part of the reason we imagine this blurred portrait happens is that the general public misconceives of borderline personality as a standard sociopath. Someone who will, as a therapist once described to me, cut your throat and laugh while you bleed out on the floor. This is partly a problem of misinformation, partly a problem of cultural and professional bias against borderline personalities as difficult, scary, or overwhelming, and partly a problem of there being something a little bit true in the blurring of these two types. There are moments when borderlines skid sideways into sociopathy:

Clearly there are fundamental differences between borderline personalities and sociopaths, differences which I appreciate. At the same time, when the borderline personality’s rage or desperation is evoked, one sees (and not rarely) responses that can closely correspond to the sociopath’s calculating, destructive mentality.

Once inside this mentality, I’m suggesting that borderline personality-disordered individuals can lapse into a kind of transient sociopathy. Commonly, victims of the “borderline’s” aberrant, vicious behaviors will sometimes react along the lines of, “What is wrong with you? Are you some freaking psychopath?” They will say this from the experience of someone who really has just been exploited as if by a psychopath.

Because this isn’t the borderline personality’s default mentality (it is the sociopath’s), several psychological phenomena must occur, I think, to enable his temporary descent into sociopathy. He or she must regress in some way; dissociate in some fashion; and experience a form of self-fragmentation, for instance in response to a perceived threat—say, of abandonment.

These preconditions, I suggest, seed the borderline personality’s collapse into the primitive, altered states of self that can explain, among other phenomena, his or her chilling (and necessary) suspension of empathy. This gross suspension of empathy supports his or her “evening the score” against the “victimizer” with the sociopath’s remorseless sense of entitlement.

-Steve Becker,
"The Borderline Personality as Transient Sociopath"

For the most part, this article by Steve Becker trips my internal Borderline Bias Alarm System. Lights flash. Sirens set my teeth on edge. For one thing, it's posted on a blog called LoveFraud. Ick. The article is part of the dense cyberforest of anti-borderline treatises, rants, warnings, and notes of regret posted to the web by non-borderlines about borderlines. So I take what Steve Becker says with a grain of salt.

However.

I'm intrigued by the idea of the transient sociopath. It rolls off the tongue like the accidental tourist or armchair psychologist or incidental charges.

If you read the chapters, "Rocket Girl" and "Tantrum Artist," in Girl in Need of a Tourniquet, you will see that I descended into near-psychosis as a result of remaining suspended for too long in an affair with an unavailable lover. I didn't have thoughts of "evening the score," as Becker says, but I definitely regressed, dissociated, and experienced temporary self-fragmentation. I lingered on the psychotic end of the neurotic-psychotic borderline spectrum. I collapsed, on occasion, into primitive, altered states of consciousness.

So. What do you think of Becker's ideas about borderline personality and transient sociopathy?

Do admissions (like my own) of a borderline breakdown that blurs lines between crazy-borderline and crazy-sociopathic risk further misidentifications of and biases towards the borderline personality?

Has your borderline personality ever threatened to trade hats with its sociopathic best friend?

What are we to make of this intersection of diagnoses?

Beyond Remission, Beyond Stigma

2010-07-25T14:53:00.002-04:00

Check out Kiera Van Gelder's intelligent discourse on the challenges facing individuals with borderline personality disorder as they reduce symptoms but continue to experience baseline affective dysphoria, longings for intimacy and community, and the stigma attached to the diagnosis. Kiera is the author of the newly released memoir, The Buddha and the Borderline, and her work as an advocate for BPD individuals and as an educator of the general public and the professional psychoanalytic community is pathbreaking, passionate, and highly admirable. I count her among my friends, colleagues, and best writerly compadres.

Beyond Remission: Mapping BPD Recovery by Kiera Van Gelder from Kiera Van Gelder on Vimeo.

I plan to write a series of articles in the upcoming academic year about the question of calling someone A BORDERLINE or self-identifying as A BORDERLINE. In this lecture at Yale University's annual BPD conference (in 2008), Kiera states a strong dislike for the rhetorical pattern of calling someone A BORDERLINE because it holds a person in the stigmatized and static space of a diagnosis and identity that is widely maligned. She is totally right, but I want to complicate the picture a bit by using this idea as a point of respectful departure in order to begin thinking about what a queer feminist crip theory of borderline personality disorder would look or sound like. I'm interested in borrowing Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's description of feminist disability theory -- embracing the supposedly flawed body of disability -- to make a similar proposal for mental illness in general and personality disorders in particular.

By embracing the term BORDERLINE as an identity, I am working to destigmatize the label and to throw light on the biased norms that shape the stigma, to demystify the illusions of normalcy that make us believe most people are mentally balanced and physically whole and symmetrical, while a few of us freaks or gimps or borderlines are tearing our hair out and muttering to ourselves about paperclips and conspiracies on the subway.

I'd like to begin thinking about ways of reclaiming and revalancing BORDERLINE like others before me have reclaimed and revalanced QUEER and CRIP, drawing on the work of Nancy Mairs, who wrote the oft-cited essay, "On Being a Cripple," and the more recent follow-up piece, "Sex and the Gimpy Girl," as well as on Robert McRuer's powerful philosophical treatise, Crip Theory, and on the examples being set by figures like Bethany Stevens on Crip Confessions and another up and comer blogging under the name CripChick.

"We're here, we're borderline, we're fabulous!"

It has a certain ring to it.

This approach would be less about educating the public on neurodiversity and more about taking an anti-bias approach to borderline personality advocacy. (For more information about anti-bias education, look here and here and here.) What I like about the anti-bias approach to education is the way it replaces the so-called politeness of ignoring difference with attention to the social production and maintenance of difference through the internalization of bias, the reproduction of stigma, the manufacturing of consent to norms that are unhealthy and unjust, and the inequitable distribution of resources.

I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts on this preliminary sketch of an idea to use crip theory (a kind of in-your-face self-naming that refuses the usual hierarchies of normal/abnormal, able/disabled, sane/insane) in order to get past the mistaken notion that personality disorders, attachment disorders, and mood or affective disorders are unusual or rare,or signs of weakness or marks of moral failure. They are actually, as I say in Girl in Need of a Tourniquet, as common as dirt, and it would be nice if the world around us stopped pretending otherwise :-)

Of course, just like the word queer, it's one thing to self-identify as queer and quite another for someone else to call you a queer, so perhaps a queer feminist crip stance towards reclaiming borderline personality may need to remain a first-person kind of thing, something you call yourself in specific contexts to make specific interventions in cultural narratives of mental illness or misogynist bias, not something other people (your doctor, your ex, your boss, your lover) should ever call you.

What do you think?

Can BORDERLINE be reclaimed and revalanced in an analogous way to QUEER and CRIP?

And what do you think about using crip theory to talk about mental illness and personality disorders in addition to the usual topic of physical impairments?

Should CRIP be reserved for radical disability activism devoted to physical/visible impairments?

Is "borderline pride" a useful strategy for acknowledging borderline personality as a "type" rather than a terrible illness or untreatable condition? Or does it undermine potentially life-saving changes in behavior among borderline personalities? Can one have borderline pride and a deep commitment to improving quality of life (a.k.a., recovery) for borderlines?

Let me hear from you.

Borderline Personality at Work

2010-07-22T14:21:00.001-04:00

This blog post is a follow-up to comments made on my previous post, "Waiting to Exhale: A Question of Borderline Personality Stigma." I tried to post it as a comment, but it was too long, so here it is as a blog post of its very own :-)

I am touched and reinvigorated by these stories of coming out or staying in the BPD closet. I really appreciate everyone sharing your own evolving experience of being borderline and your decisions on how to navigate this condition in specific contexts (e.g., education, the work place).

I especially connected with Cheri's post above:

"Before I came out at work, people didn't understand why I sometimes reacted strangely - in one meeting they thought that I was angry and glaring at everyone, when in reality I was trapped in my own head flogging myself, riddled with anxiety and unable to speak.

I much prefer putting myself out there a bit and explaining why I sometimes have difficulties than people thinking that I'm being a bitch."

Being out as a borderline personality at work is something I am just now experiencing -- barely -- because of course my book came out and my colleagues are congratulating me on the publication. No one has addressed the subject matter of BPD specifically, which is kind of nice for now, since it remains such a controversial and stigmatizing diagnosis.

I am fascinated by the idea of having colleagues who know enough about BPD to recognize silence as a sign of anxiety instead of disengagement, anger, contempt, or a disgruntled attitude. I've been thinking a lot in the past few months about how I come across in meetings with other faculty, and about how I come across in the university classroom. Students have remarked in the past that I looked angry, or that I seemed angry when they didn't understand something, when of course my memory of such days are of feeling overwhelming anxiety at the prospect of being unclear or unsuccessful in my attempt to teach them something. When I'm upset with myself, when I feel my veneer of apparent competence is cracking - the look of anger visible to other people is really a look of anger directed toward myself.

I hate the idea of being misunderstood, of having my good intentions and collaborative energy lost in the whirl of my uneasiness when my ideas are questioned. I want to be seen as industrious and insightful, but my Rosie the Riveter impersonation tends at times towards the abrupt.

Or I suddenly feel like the little girl out of place, dressed up in a business suit that swallows her whole, and I want to run from the room and cry. I have cried over work with the same tormented hurricane tears usually associated with the borderline personality in love. I have sat in my car and screamed into my hands while my face streaked red and wet.

I don't know that I would expect students or colleagues to translate my facial expressions differently based on knowledge of my diagnosis, but the process of thinking through how I am perceived could maybe help me adjust my demeanor so I don't broadcast anxiety/frustration/disappointment/self-loathing to my audience in the skewed images of rigidity/standoffishness/arrogance/my-way-or-the-highway-ness.

Not that I have full control over my emotional demeanor. Sadly, I still experience a kind of "frozen" affect that feels like insecurity but looks like impatience.

Amanda Smith also made a great comment on the question of stigma and being out as borderline at work: "And don't forget self-stigma. Even with lots of current information about the disorder, I sometimes think, 'Gosh, I should have a handle on this behavior or that behavior by now. Why can't I be more like him or her?'"

Why can't I be more secure. Why can't I be more patient. Why can't I be more confident. Why can't I respond in a lighthearted way, without my voice quavering or my mouth going dry.

The questions irritate like saddle sores beneath the yoke of the workplace.

Ben writes, "Too often, sensitive people take their disenfranchisement and run with it, advancing into the margins instead of facing their society squarely, bravely."

This is definitely the challenge facing all of us. Some days I get it right. Some days I still want to close the blinds and hide :-)

I am looking forward to starting a new academic year -- new classes, new meetings, new colleagues -- and knowing that my at times strangely intense feelings of rejection at work are just as disproportionate and internally generated as the feelings of rejection I experience in romantic love. I may not be able to change the feelings just yet, but I am eager to find out the difference it will make to say to myself, "These feelings are too big to be about this meeting, or this colleague, or this student," and to take a step back while the intensity storms through my body and leaves and, in the big picture, means much less than I once thought.

The feelings, in fact, may not mean anything.

They may simply be there. And then not be there.

I picture myself returning to my office after a difficult meeting or class period and smiling upon my discovery that the world has not gone up in a ball of fire, that the sky is not falling, that my job is secure, and that I am just fine.

Waiting to Exhale: A Question about Borderline Personality Stigma

2010-07-15T00:27:00.000-04:00

In the lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer community, people often remark on the fact that "coming out" is a strange and misleading image of what it means and what it feels like to reveal one's sexual orientation. The usual image of coming out looks like this: a person walking through a door, stepping out of a closet, standing up in a gesture of pride once and for all to say I am gay and I am glad for everyone to know about it! But of course coming out doesn't work that way. As a lesbian, and now as spouse to a transguy, I come out, stay in, walk through the grocery store in an oblivious haze, take the microphone at a rally, correct (or do not correct) pronouns over dinner or in a hallway conversation at work every single day to some degree or another. It is a constant flow of outness and in-ness and in-betweenness.

There is no single coming out moment.

The same is true of coming out as a borderline personality.

I can come out or not as borderline personality depending on my comfort level, my audience, my mood, the stakes, and so on. As with my late-blooming lesbian-ness, I rarely expect people around me to react in a positive way to my coming out as borderline personality. Mainly, this is because I am paranoid as shit. Turns out, the people around me are pretty cool about the borderline thing (and about the lesbian thing and the transguy spouse thing).

My campus publicity office has put my new book on blast as a top headline on the university's website. I feel all melty and in love with my campus for doing this. Usually I feel like they hate me. Obviously, my borderline personality patterns extend beyond my loved ones to work acquaintances I rarely even see in person who probably do not hate me or love me or think about me very much at all.

I came out again on The Frisky. I held my breath and waited for the mean comments. But the comments weren't mean. They were engaged, enthusiastic, uplifting, personal, earnest, vulnerable, and real. Authentic. My absolute favorite emotional demeanor.

My new friend Kiera wrote a book called The Buddha and the Borderline. It's coming out on August 1, 2010. As part of the pre-release publicity, Kiera came out of the psycho closet. I like her bold language. She sounds fearless.

We are in the age of coming out. We may actually be in a post-coming-out era. Coming out is so nineties, you know? I kissed a girl and I like it. I have borderline personality and I'm kind of okay with that, too. Or, I want to be okay with it but I'm still kind of nervous. The general public is playing it cool, though, standing with one hip cocked to the side and singing along with Perry Farrell that nothing's shocking.

Has borderline personality rocketed from psycho closet to cause celebre? I'm relieved but also really surprised.

Tell me what you think. Is the stigma not as bad as I thought?

BPD, NPD, Glee, & the Lock-and-Key of Romance on TV

2010-06-02T07:53:00.003-04:00

Here's my Glist of BP/NP appearances on on Glee:

Borderlines

Narcissists

Click on the linked names for media critiques, fan-fiction, interviews, and other material about each character. So far, these analyses have not ventured into the characters' psychology, but I am seeing BPD/NPD couplings everywhere on Glee.

Post a comment if you disagree or want to make additions, revisions, or web-links to this list. For more information on this relationship structure, see Joan Lachkar's book on the subject.

Personality Disorder Test - Still Scoring High in Several Areas

2010-06-02T07:22:00.000-04:00

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	High
Schizoid:	High
Schizotypal:	High
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Very High
Histrionic:	High
Narcissistic:	Very High
Avoidant:	High
Dependent:	Moderate
Obsessive-Compulsive:	High
-- Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Information --

I have become fascinated by the way borderline and narcissist traits fluctuate and intermingle not only between two partners but within a single personality.

Sick Enough

2010-05-27T21:31:00.009-04:00

Reposted in newly edited and hypertexted form from my Facebook note (original date: Jan. 21, 2010)

The recent NYTimes article by Abby Ellin on women with eating disorders "not otherwise specified" interests me in particular because of the theme of not thinking they are "sick enough" to get help.

That theme has come up for me in several areas of life: am I depressed enough for anti-depressants? am I food-depriving enough to be anorexic? am I dependent enough on alcohol or substances to enter AA or NA and claim the ominous titles of alcoholic or addict. am I self-injurious enough to be considered a cutter? am I psychotic enough to need hospitalization?

Am I crazy enough? Am I lesbian enough?

The labels work as obstacles. The barrier for me of pursuing therapeutic support for my chaotic romantic relationships, and my painful or confusing family relationships, and my neurotic or conflict-riddled work relationships was precisely this question of labels, categories, or what constitutes “enough pain,” “enough dysfunction,” “enough self-defeating behaviors” to need therapy, or to see myself as in any way mentally ill. Am I sick enough to be borderline? Am I borderline enough to write a memoir about it?

Clarity comes and goes, but it seems to boil down to two things: the degree to which the pattern affects your everyday life, and the degree to which professional support or support groups or medication or whatever would lead to positive improvements in basic feelings of security, self-love, and comfortable being-in-the-world.

Ultimately the decision is a matter of assessing the benefits and disadvantages of claiming the label, the diagnosis, or the medical intervention.

What felt like a question of entitlement (not wanting to wrongly assume a painful identity that belongs more rightfully to others who suffer more than me) has fallen away and in its place I grapple instead with questions of use-value, borrowing an idea of “strategic essentialism” from the academic fields of feminist postcolonial studies and critical autobiography studies of life-writing by women with disabilities as postcolonial texts about medically colonized bodies.

I title one of my memoir chapters “Becoming Borderline” as a reference to the idea of "borderline" as a complex identity that simultaneously provides ground on which to stand (there is something liberating about finally understanding oneself in terms of a given narrative or category or diagnosis) and at the same time colonizes the body standing on that ground (in adopting the label I become subject to the stigma, media misrepresentations, psychiatric counter-transference, and catastrophizing attitudes among the general population about what a borderline is - my story gets overwritten, in a sense, by the pre-existing story of borderline-ness.

So, as I inhabit this amorphous terrain of identity, subjectivity, imperialist medical and patriarchal narratives, and psycho-social geography, I begin to see that there is no definite answer to the question am I borderline enough to be entitled to the word, label, diagnosis, treatment, or memoir. I would not want to consider myself at the mercy of the label so that my every thought, word, action, or feeling are necessarily determined by my essential borderline-ness.

However, I claim the term to the degree that “becoming borderline” enables me to reflect on, get perspective on, undergo treatment for, talk about, and redirect my psycho-socio-neuro-physiological patterns of reaction and the attachment style (disorder, malfunction) that result from these reactions. In this way, I am writing borderline in an autotheoretical tone in order to consider the intersecting line within the self between the personal and cultural texts of this diagnosis.

At this point, I advocate moving away from the question of entitlement – of being sick enough – and thinking instead about the gains or losses involved in claiming any particular identity. I am crafting a concept that borrows “strategic essentialism” from debates about identity politics and applies it to borderline personality to adopt “strategic borderline-ness” as a way of moving through or around the problem of being borderline and refocusing on borderline personality as a cognitive and affective structure, a spectrum of behaviors and cognitive patterns that deplete me and drain my capacity for joy or intimacy.

Maybe the intervention I want to make in the "sick enough" or "not sick enough" structure of thought could be seen as a parallel to bell hooks' intervention in debates over the label of "feminist." So many scholars and students get hung up in the back and forth questions of what constitutes a feminist. Can I be a feminist and have a boyfriend? Can I be a feminist and wear lipstick? Can I be a feminist and shop at Abercrombie and Fitch? The Feminist Majority Foundation has a t-shirt campaign that says "This is what a feminist looks like," a smart effort to make the wide range of kinds of people who claim the identity of "feminist" visible to the world.

I can imagine wearing a "This is what a Borderline Personality looks like" t-shirt for the same reason.

Or, more simply, "This IS crazy."

But ultimately I prefer to follow bell hooks in refraining from thoughts about what a feminist is or who is entitled to the label to the more pressing and thrilling concern with advocating feminist movement. I do not want to be borderline at this point so much as I want to understand borderline as something I do (and something I can stop doing), not a predetermined essential innate quality but a learned set of behaviors, a psychological predisposition, a cognitive and affective structure available for deliberate redesign in my personal life, and, ideally, a platform for borderline advocacy.

Bluebird Theory: Borderlines and the Quest for Happiness

2010-05-27T11:38:00.001-04:00

I want to return to the idea of borderline personality in the key of blue from a different angle that still has to do with moods but also has to do with the cultural politics and diagnostic pathologization of emotions.

I am a diehard Six Feet Under fan.

The cold blue tones of its opening sequence and the music with its weird minor chords and music like bottles clinking together hypnotized me. Even its Christmas episodes were ironic and angry and rude. Think Billy, post-mental-hospital-inpatient-stay on "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" (2002): "Happy's a concept I try not to buy into. It gets me into trouble." Billy's bipolar expeditions took place years before my diagnosis as borderline, but the pain he felt and the anti-social behaviors felt and sounded familiar. If I were Claire, I would have dated him too. Several years later, with my diagnosis and three therapists behind me, I would know better and walk away from Billy. He is the siren song of the abyss. Plus, I'm gay.

Anyhoo, his words about not chasing happiness still strike me as right on. Pursuing happiness has translated in my life into a series of addictions of the opiate and amphetamine variety, as well as the headlong dive into various illicit affairs, a structure of desire I think of as the crack cocaine of romance. That's not happiness's fault, but it was borderline personality hedonism which I mistook for happiness for a long time, even though it hurt and made me miserable and sick.

Fact: My grandma gave me a glass bluebird when I was a teenager to remind me to look for happiness.

Fact: When I moved away to graduate school, after an early marriage, divorce, and major episode of depression, I put the glass bluebird in a drawer as a gesture of protest. There is no bluebird, I wanted to say. There is no happiness.

Fact: After I ended an affair with a woman who dated me for about 18 months while choosing not to leave her long-term partner, I got a big fat bluebird inked into my shoulder and told people it was the bluebird of happiness which eludes me.

Now we have entered a moment of bluebird of happiness critique both in the mainstream publishing industry and in the world of academic theory. Ariel Gore's book, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness, has garnered many positive reviews for "filleting the bluebird" (pardon the gruesome meat-eater imagery):

“Everybody, it seems, wants to know why women aren’t happy. But Bluebird suggests that maybe that’s the wrong question to ask. In reframing the age-old, exasperated query of what women really want—from themselves, their partners, their jobs, and their families—Gore’s exploration of happiness offers a probing, inspiring, and deeply humane alternative to the powerful positive-thinking industry. Bluebird is radical in the truest sense—and as a recovering pessimist, I'll be keeping it handy.” —Andi Zeisler, cofounder and editorial director, Bitch magazine

“Ariel Gore expertly fillets the plastic bluebird of happiness to reveal its faintly beating heart. Eloquent and sensitive, Gore is one of the best feminist writers of our times.” —Susie Bright

In an interview on Feminist Review, Gore responds to a question about whether smart and happy can go together in women's lives:

In American culture there has been a massive campaign to sell us all on cheerfulness. It has been an important part of capitalism and has been part of the oppression of women. Women have been endlessly told by others what we need in order to be happy. Maybe they say we need a husband or children or a fantastic career or a spotless kitchen or multiple orgasms. In any case, we are being told what is good for us. Of course we rebel against false cheerfulness and being told what to do when it's wrapped in the nonsense of it being “for our own good.”

I picked up my campus mail yesterday and to my delight, my copy of Sara Ahmed's new book, The Promise of Happiness (2010), had arrived. I am cuckoo for cultural theory, so this is the bluebird critique I am frothing to read. She completely thrilled me with her last book, Queer Phenomenology, so I am already on Team Sara Ahmed before cracking this new book. Feminist theorist Rita Felski sings its praises in an endorsement of Ahmed's "bold critique of the consensus that happiness is an unconditional good" and celebrates the intervention not only into "happiness studies" but also into the wrongheaded assumption that feminism "destroy[s] women's happiness." So, yay. These are great lines of inquiry and I can't wait to read more.

Still.

Billy Chenowith lingers.

And this is not really a book review.

The queer, feminist, and queer feminist critiques of happiness overlap with borderline personality concerns, but they are not exactly the same, so I am moving towards something like a queer feminist cripistemology of borderline personality and the bluebird of happiness phenomenon. (Note to self: finish reading Robert McRuer's Crip Theory.)

I don't want to suggest that I am anti-happiness, or that my next book will be the borderline personality version of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, or that I will write a memoir that reads like the long groan of the toothache, to borrow an image from the Underground Man himself. Yet the story of borderline personality is, for me, very much the story of pursuing the bluebird of happiness and then shouting angrily when it flies away instead of sitting companionably in one's lap like my true spirit animal and dog of my heart, the shih tzu.

When I got the bluebird tattoo, I meant for the ink to function as a sort of totem, a commitment to searching out happiness and refusing the lures and pleasures of despair. I went out to a bar (no place for bluebirds or recently broken up borderlines) and kissed a strange girl who did not celebrate my bluebird tattoo but offered me this rejoinder: "But you must also wrestle with the raven." Of course I immediately thought I loved her, or could love her, and I longed for a more thorough conversation about bluebirds and ravens and the meaning of life, punctuated by more kissing. Alas, she was straight and did not take my calls, so I had to figure out the answers for myself. Four years later I still don't really know what she meant, but I think it had to do with balance, and maybe with the dangers of fearing the loss of happiness.

Here is my contribution to the field of Bluebird Theory.

For the borderline personality, the problem is not happiness or sorrow (or dating married lesbians or kissing straight girls, although neither of these activities helps). The problem has to do with peripheral or secondary emotions.

Fear of happiness, fear of sorrow, fear of heartbreak, fear of loss.

Borderlines are emotion-phobic.

Scared of feeling something good and then losing that feeling. Scared of expecting a particular feeling and ending up with another. Scared bad feelings will never end. The glass bluebird and the one inked into my shoulder are not celebrations of happiness for me, they are totems against ever feeling bad, and that's crazy. Or, in more professional terms, that's schizotypal, avoidant, and emotionally self-injurious.

Picture me scuttling away from the light like a spider, scuttling away from the human hand like a hermit crab, or walking sideways towards my attachment figure with the odd gait of a woman with disorganized attachment disorder. I don't want to wrestle with the raven anymore than I want to worship the bluebird, actually, but I don't want to fear the flight of dark and light in and out of my life anymore. Maybe my first stop on the summer pleasure reading train should be Miriam Greenspan's Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair. Not exactly a beach-lite title, but if it lightens the load of emotion phobia I carry inside my hermit crab shell, I will gladly make room for it in my straw tote underneath a brightly striped towel and take my mood/identity/attachment disorder on a mental vacation.

Precocious Succubi: The Psycho Ex-Wife Problem

2010-05-26T21:52:00.003-04:00

I will be developing my thoughts at more length soon on the subject of gender bias and borderline personality disorder for a guest post on Randi Kreger's Stop Walking on Eggshells blog on Psychology Today Online, so let me just note for the moment that the blog I discovered this afternoon on a (maybe) borderline ex-wife is sort of sickening. As the daughter of divorce (three marriages for both my parents), I know ex-wives can seem, be, act, and/or go crazy. However, the vitriol being directed at this person or the population she supposedly represents makes me somewhere between uneasy and queasy. There is something truly crude about comments like the following:

"All Psycho Ex-Wives Are Precocious Succubi Sent From The Depths Of Hell To Gnaw On The Souls Of Men!"

Or this:

"My godson just divorced the 'tart without a heart' last week."

Tart? Succubus? Grr. Frustration makes sense. Packaging it in age-old anti-female chestnuts, well, that could surely be avoided. People can be scary and invasive when they are losing a relationship or attachment figure. I get that. I just don't think being mean (or perpetuating stigma/stereotype/misogyny) is the best response to the problem.

There are 173 responses to the post on the main page of The Psycho Ex-Wife Blog.

So much ranting. So little insight.

If you are curious for more details, or are just generally drawn to blogospheric trainwrecks, click on the title of this post to be redirected to the artless undignified spectacular display of sexist psychobabble passing for a blog.

Or you could just go watch Fatal Attraction again, followed by its lesser known predecessor, Play Misty for Me.

Splatter flicks with a vengeance against my so-called personality disorder.

And yes, ranting is contagious :-)

And no, I don't always sound this psycho ;-)

Grief Impacted; or, Borderline in the Key of Blue

2010-05-26T16:43:00.003-04:00

"Unacknowledged grief will keep you stuck in the active throes of Borderline Personality Disorder." -A.J. Mahari

I started a new thread on the discussion board of my Facebook fan page for my new book, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, to share thoughts on impacted grief as a root cause and persistent symptom of borderline personality disorder. In hoping to hear thoughts from lots of people, I decided to revisit my initial efforts in January towards blogging on the lived experience and diagnostic politics of borderline personality.

Here, reposted, is my discussion prompt (apologies for profspeak):

What I figured out for myself during the long process of writing the book was that my series of borderline personality symptoms (affairs, substance abuse, chronic depression and feelings of emptiness, a general nonbelongingness, deep-rooted bad-person feelings) come from what I've learned to call "impacted grief," long ungrieved losses from childhood. Even though I knew writing the book would help me grieve but would not represent The End of Grieving for me, I'm still disappointed to be sitting under such a heavy load of grief this week over how things unfolded in my family of origin.

I saw a book once called Bereft by a woman who lost a sister to a violent death, and I never read it, but it has been in my head for days now. The word captures my sister-grief feelings so well, and sometimes I wonder if I will ever stop feeling these sister-grief feelings.

When on earth does grieving end?

The loss cannot be recuperated, events of history cannot be reversed, and I want to be over it, but my sister-grief feelings persist like lost limb trauma. The neural pathways keep snapping inside me and I feel like I forgot something or missed a step or overlooked a clue or left someone behind or arrived as the bus was pulling out of the station.

My sisters are alive. I know them.

But I am haunted by memories of them as little girls and can't stop working at the unsolvable puzzle of what might have been, how things might have gone differently, what would have happened if we had grown up together instead of apart.

The neurotic loop is exhausting.

I wonder if anyone has stories of grief, grieving, moving past grief, or if it is more about living with grief without being capsized by it.

Fill me in . . .

Oh, and because I am a compulsive researcher, here's a smidge more from the secondary resources:

"In his classic article, Engel (1961) posed the question, 'Is grief a disease?' Grief is not generally considered a disorder but rather is viewed as an adaptation to a loss. In this respect, the process of grieving is similar to the process of healing. It involves working through the stages of grief. The tasks of grieving include experiencing the pain of grief, accepting the reality of the loss, adjusting to an environment in which the loved one is missing, and withdrawing one’s emotional energy and reinvesting it in another relationship. Failure to complete these tasks can result in impacted grief, which is a prolonged type of grief associated with depression. Impacted grief can block further growth and development." -William F. Doverspike, "Grief: The Journey From Suffering to Resilience"