Narrative developmental self-reports of those individuals who develop BPD overwhelmingly correlate to an anxious/ambivalent style of attachment, although disorganized styles have also been implicated. Baumrind identified parenting styles that run along an axis of involved and limit-setting (with the extreme being authoritarian) versus uninvolved and permissive (with the extreme being neglectful). Attachment theorist John Bowlby instead identified a parenting style that is a combination of two styles that force the child to continually shift between two extremes (Bowlby, 1988). Bowlby identifies this attachment style as absent/invasive.
Ideally, an environment of optimal frustration is present in which the all-good maternal introject can become sufficiently nuanced so that the child learns to carve out a space to develop autonomy that creates the self as a center of agency. Children reared in the absent/invasive context must contend with having no reasonable expectation of caregiver response whatsoever. Seemingly at random, and in response to a mysterious code only the caregiver seems to know, every need is anticipated before the child can even experience the need. It is a caregiving in which helplessness is not just fostered but is required in order for the child to have any chance of forging a connection to the primary caregiver. This also has the added implication of creating a sensibility in which the child must be hypervigilant in terms of the primary caregiver’s needs. The child must effectively understand the attention he or she receives from the caregiver as a way of protecting the caregiver. This creates not only a justification for the bond with the caregiver but also a way of holding out the possibility of the caregiver eventually meeting the needs of the child in an appropriate way.
Conversely and without warning, this invasive caregiving is withdrawn as preemptively and randomly as it is given. The child is then left to cope on his or her own with no responsiveness on the part of the parent. The child’s needs and the caregiver’s needs thus become inseparable and the infant/primary caregiver merger is extended indefinitely. When we work with BPD patients, this analysis can inform the way that we understand the continual crises that require limitless rescue missions on our part. The request for rescue come fast and furious. It is why it is so essential when working with such patients that we set clear rules regarding place, time, phone calls and texts, adherence to schedules, and payment.
Another enormously important area to discuss with BPD patients concerns gift giving. A child who is reared in such an unpredictable and unboundaried context will forever be mystified and hypervigilant—poised between extremes of abandonment and engulfment. Looking for signs and cues as to what he or she might expect from others or might be expected to provide to others. Identity diffusion, in which boundaries between self and other are constantly blurred, thus becomes the prevailing experience of self. With this diffusion comes an added challenge: the child’s identity becomes predicated upon external “mirrors,” so that identity becomes a response rather than something wholly owned and belonging to the individual.
The production of given aspects of identity as a reaction to external demands, whether overt or covert, creates a struggle between dependence and devaluation. Neediness becomes a way of maintaining the connection to this idealized and undifferentiated introjected image of the parent. Crises are a way of bringing the parent back into play when the primary caregiver is too distant. Yet no sooner is the primary attachment figure present, than the fear of engulfment forces the child to push the caregiver away. It is a relentless cycle that borderline individuals carry with them into their adult relationships. This simultaneous defense against engulfment and abandonment necessitates binary modes of relational experience. The BPD individual cannot integrate the good and the bad of the primary caregiver, so every relationship is characterized in quick succession by idealization followed by devaluation—the devaluation being the only way to disengage from the repeated failures of individuation that should have taken place at a developmentally-appropriate juncture.
