1.88.3.A. Borderline Personality Disorder
Praise.
It’s a word which carries so much weight with it. A concept that bestows worthiness with its presence and insignificance in its absence. A small, simple word that feels to almost understate its presence, yet works deep into us, cutting and healing in ways that only concepts with smaller words can.
It underpins our very self image from the moment we can hear and see, shaping us and our beliefs about ourselves and others.
Given enough praise, we develop into healthy, happy and well adjusted people, struck by occasional lows and lifted to occasional highs, keeping to a band of emotional responses that may not always be liked but build us as people.
Given too much, we see the overconfident and arrogant, the egocentric plumped with their own self worth.
And yet, given not enough...
While the arrogant are intolerable company, it is those cast aside, denied simple praise and invaluable worth that are both the saddest and most horrific. In the most vulnerable victims we often find the most heinous monsters.
Strong in their convictions of others’ low opinions of them, paranoid of acts against them, they struggle to see anything good for what it is. Their paranoia eats at their relationships, their loathing and resentment and belief that even those closest are sabotaging them drives even the most loving from their arms. Their unreasoning anger at the smallest slight clashes violently with their fear of driving others away, hated and fear of being alone provoking abuse against those who would leave them.
They cannot stop themselves anymore. They act without thought of others or often themselves and sometimes find they blaming an other self for the anger they cannot stop.
And for all that, there is no relief. No end to the hollow feeling, the impending, consuming knowledge that no matter what you did, it was not enough.
No anger, no hate, not control can ever give that feeling, fill the empty spaces that have never known what it is to be enough.
My life is filled with those who dance the edges of madness or throw themselves, laughing and crying, into its lap. Maybe I myself have stepped too close, and in trying to look into the heart of the insanity, I have found it looking back.
But I know this monstrous emptiness that gnashes teeth of rage to try and feed its hunger for worthiness. I grew with it as my companion, watching it over my dining room table from the safety of my mother’s knee.
I wonder, what difference would it have made for just one person to tell my father ‘It was not your fault, you did everything you could, you did more,’ and have meant it.
Word Count: 450
It’s a word which carries so much weight with it. A concept that bestows worthiness with its presence and insignificance in its absence. A small, simple word that feels to almost understate its presence, yet works deep into us, cutting and healing in ways that only concepts with smaller words can.
It underpins our very self image from the moment we can hear and see, shaping us and our beliefs about ourselves and others.
Given enough praise, we develop into healthy, happy and well adjusted people, struck by occasional lows and lifted to occasional highs, keeping to a band of emotional responses that may not always be liked but build us as people.
Given too much, we see the overconfident and arrogant, the egocentric plumped with their own self worth.
And yet, given not enough...
While the arrogant are intolerable company, it is those cast aside, denied simple praise and invaluable worth that are both the saddest and most horrific. In the most vulnerable victims we often find the most heinous monsters.
Strong in their convictions of others’ low opinions of them, paranoid of acts against them, they struggle to see anything good for what it is. Their paranoia eats at their relationships, their loathing and resentment and belief that even those closest are sabotaging them drives even the most loving from their arms. Their unreasoning anger at the smallest slight clashes violently with their fear of driving others away, hated and fear of being alone provoking abuse against those who would leave them.
They cannot stop themselves anymore. They act without thought of others or often themselves and sometimes find they blaming an other self for the anger they cannot stop.
And for all that, there is no relief. No end to the hollow feeling, the impending, consuming knowledge that no matter what you did, it was not enough.
No anger, no hate, not control can ever give that feeling, fill the empty spaces that have never known what it is to be enough.
My life is filled with those who dance the edges of madness or throw themselves, laughing and crying, into its lap. Maybe I myself have stepped too close, and in trying to look into the heart of the insanity, I have found it looking back.
But I know this monstrous emptiness that gnashes teeth of rage to try and feed its hunger for worthiness. I grew with it as my companion, watching it over my dining room table from the safety of my mother’s knee.
I wonder, what difference would it have made for just one person to tell my father ‘It was not your fault, you did everything you could, you did more,’ and have meant it.
Word Count: 450