Working with Borderline Personality Disorder
What experience has taught me about borderline personality disorder — in my work with clients from my practice as well as managing the volatile and difficult man who lives inside me.
Defense Mechanisms V: Idealization
Idealization reflects a drive to escape from an internal experience felt to be unbearable and to connect with something perfect. This defense mechanism may take aim at another person, an actual experience or one’s own self.
Defense Mechanisms IV: “Thinking”
The precocious development of verbal thought can function as a defense against unbearable emotional chaos; in later life, this kind of “thinking” often takes on a life of its own, can feel persecutory and underlies problems with insomnia.
Defense Mechanisms III: Further Uses for Projection
In addition to ridding the self of painful experience, projection may also defuse internal conflict between opposing impulses or ideas. People who use projection in this way often provoke behavior in others than appears to “validate” the projection.
The Hatred of Authority
While rebellion against established authority often leads to progress and positive change, legitimate authority exerted with concern has its value. Some people can’t tolerate the expression of authority in any form, however, and live in constant rebellion against it.
Defense Mechanisms II: Denial
Like all defense mechanisms, denial has its normal and constructive uses: by denying the awareness of unavoidable death, for instance, we’re able to continue with our daily lives.