An angst-filled mix-tape of a story

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!

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

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)

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

Whose Eggshells?

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

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

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?