When you first get involved with a Borderline, they idealize you. When the initial, inevitable, minor disappointment occurs, they devalue and vilify you.
Due to a Borderline’s fears concerning closeness and attachment, they HAVE TO find reasons to emotionally distance and push away from you. It’s automatic and reflexive!
They’ll cite the most benign, irrational, ludicrous reasons for finding fault with you, and picking a fight. Your job, is to realize their fury has nothing whatsoever to do with YOU.
I was at a friend’s house one night a couple of years ago, and her husband offered to heat up a snack for her while she watched TV. You’d have thought he suggested he wanted to POISON her, for the nasty, sarcastic reaction he received. THIS is BPD in action.
The kinder you are to these broken souls, the more they distrust and despise you. Your kindness to them feels undeserved and unwarranted, so they disrespect and revile you for it: “You must be an IDIOT for loving me, ’cause nothing in my previous life experiences thus far, has left me believing I’m worthy of all this attention and adoration!”
This is what you’ve been up against, when your care and affection is squandered on someone with BPD traits. They cannot give NOR receive love. Many BPD women physically stiffen when their child tries to hug them. I had a gal pal like this, long ago. So, it’s not just that women with borderline traits cannot GIVE love to their kids, they can’t RECEIVE it from them, either. How sad is this?!
I’ve spoken to many individuals who think of BPD as the cause of volatile, violent behavior, yet the MAJORITY of Borderlines do not display these extremely destructive behaviors. Most are generous, kind, even over-giving people, who are simply unable to fully attach to another, including their own child.
Attachment spawns anxious feelings in Borderlines, because it threatens a loss of SELF (what little they’ve manage to cull for themselves). When your own well is empty, is it even possible to imagine giving your scarce inner resources to another?? Of course not!
Borderlines have told me, “I feel so close to my kid, it scares the shit out of me, for how could I survive if something happened to him/her and they died?” This is an acute example of attachment fear in the borderline disordered individual: “If someone I let myself fully love departs, I won’t be able to survive. I will cease existing.”
The rubbish you read and hear on the internet about Borderlines fearing abandonment, is merely a surface oversimplification of what REALLY goes on inside these people, but is rarely consciously held. Even BORDERLINES have bought into the faulty notion, they are afraid of you leaving them!!!
I’m putting this to you, so that if you’re one of the thousands of folks who asked me the same goddamned question over the decades I worked to help partners of Borderlines HEAL, you might finally understand the answer to your query, “If they’re so afraid of abandonment, WHY does he/she constantly push me out the door?!”
Now, you KNOW. Hopefully, you won’t keep believing the inane crap you read on the Web (OR in your DSM-V) about Borderline Personality Disorder, because it merely perpetuates your confusion, and keeps you ignorant and susceptible to the dangers of getting involved with one of these lovely, but deeply damaged beings.