Life in a Bind – BPD and me

My therapy journey, recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I write for welldoing.org , for Planet Mindful magazine, and for Muse Magazine Australia, under the name Clara Bridges. Listed in Top Ten Resources for BPD in 2016 by goodtherapy.org.

Tag Archives: re-parenting in therapy


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I have a mother – when things shift in therapy

[This post talks about the uniqueness and importance of ‘mother’, and for me, that has a particular meaning. But for others it may be more appropriate to invest this word with a different meaning – it may relate to a father, grandparent, or adoptive parent, or any other primary caregiver. I don’t mean to exclude by my use of the word; but it is so intrinsic to my own experience and what I’m writing about here, that I cannot avoid it.]

“You can hear something over and over again, but until you hear it at the right time, in the right context, in the right frame of mind and with the right understanding, it makes no impact. You can hear words and you may comprehend their meaning, but it may still not be clear what the words are meant to change, and how . “

That’s a paragraph from a post I wrote two years ago called ‘A new experience of mother – Part 3’. It was one of five posts on the same theme. It continues to surprise me, the way that therapy returns over and over again to the same topics, to the same ground, but in subtly different ways. The return is an indication that there is more to think about, more to say; an indication that there is still something unresolved, and something hidden to unearth. It continues to surprise me that the merest fraction of a degree in the angle at which we look at an issue, can make an enormous difference to our perception, and can lead to a revelation. And that the ‘revelation’ can be both so close in content to what we already knew, and yet so far from it in terms of its impact, that it seems both ludicrous and impossible, not to have seen it any earlier.

Elsewhere in the same post, I wrote the following:

“My therapist often made the point that she was different to my mother, and she made it in numerous ways. She made it by actually being different; by responding in ways I didn’t expect and then drawing my attention to the fact that I’d been anticipating the reaction my mother would have had. She was understanding when I expected judgment; caring when I expected criticism; comforting when I expected shaming. She made the point quite explicitly by saying that therapy offered me  – she offered me – a different experience of mothering. I heard the words, and thought I understood them.”

And so I never expected to come back, two years later, and write what is effectively Part 6 of my series of posts on ‘A new experience of mother’. But I’m returning in order to add something absolutely vital to the things I realised then. Something that arose directly out of thinking about the distress I felt when my therapist did not answer my question about where she would be going on holiday this summer. I wrote about that incident in my post ‘Why therapists frustrate their clients’, but I wanted the realisation that came out of it, to be part of a separate post – this one.

***

When my therapist asked me to think about why it mattered so much to me that she had not answered my question, I said that it wasn’t so much the knowledge itself that was important, but what it would mean if she told me. I told my therapist that “it would mean a little less exclusion. It would mean feeling trusted. It would create a deeper feeling of relationship, and strengthen our bond. It would create another memory. All of those things seemed self-evident, natural, and in need of no further explanation. And yet she still seemed to think there was more to discover.”

Sometimes ideas occur to you in a way that is more like a voice speaking in your head, than your mind thinking a thought. That’s what it was like when all of a sudden, completely out of nowhere, I heard an answer to my therapist’s question about why it mattered and what it would mean. “It means I have a mother”, the voice said, “and that is the most important thing”.

***

I was at home at the time, and it was a couple of hours after session. I stopped, utterly taken aback. What was going on? On the one hand, it immediately felt as though there was a weighty truth in the statement the voice had made. And I already knew I had a therapy-mother – my therapist had been using that terminology (and also the phrase ‘therapy-daughter’) for some time. But on the other hand, there was something not quite right about the statement. The voice said “and that is the most important thing” -but how could that be true? That, right there, seemed to be the voice of my biological mother, who insisted that she was and always would be the most important, the only truly trustworthy person in my life, the person who would love me in a way no one else could ever love me. This seemed to be the voice of the person who elevated mothers, and specifically herself, above every other person and type of relationship I might ever encounter. And I already knew, in so many different ways, what a negative effect on me her narcissism had had. So how could the voice be right, if it seemed to agree with her?

***

The next morning I awoke having had three dreams that felt clearly linked to each other, to the question I had been thinking about, and to the ‘answer’ I’d received. In various ways, the dreams drew attention to three aspects of the mothering I’d received when growing up. They showed me that I had a mother who wanted intimacy with me but at the same time couldn’t cope with it because she could not deal with her own emotions, let alone my own. She left me, therefore, with the sense that she was afraid of me, and that I was a threat to her. They showed me that I had a mother who never wanted me to grow up and was full of nostalgia for the days of my childhood, not seeing or wanting to see who I really was and was growing into. They showed me that I had a mother who wanted to appoint herself as the most significant person in my life, and wanted to exclude others from my affections.

But very importantly, the dreams also showed me something that I could never consciously have accepted as a possibility. They showed me that at one time in my life, even if I couldn’t remember it, I had wanted that intimacy and that exclusivity too, even though I knew that the former would lead to rejection and invalidation, and the latter would be poison. I didn’t always reject my mother and everything she stands for, as forcefully as I have done for the last twenty years or so. I didn’t always reject completely out of hand, any idea that came from her, or any association with her. And I didn’t need to reject everything that sounded like her voice, now. It was possible that she could speak some truth about mothering, even if she herself had not been a good-enough mother.

***

I grudgingly realised that my mother was right – and I never thought I’d say that about her! Having a mother is the most important thing. Mothers are unique, and there is no other relationship like it. Wrong though she was in the way that she interpreted that relationship, its meaning, and its implications, I now believe that she was right about the importance and uniqueness of the relationship. And I’ve read enough articles over the years, about the impact on individuals of losing their mothers, to know that for many people, the importance and uniqueness of that relationship continues well into adulthood, and up to death and beyond.

Two years ago, I came to understand that my therapist was providing a new experience of mothering. I knew my therapist was very different to my mother and I was grateful and full of joy to have a type of mother-daughter relationship with her. But what I didn’t understand until a few weeks ago, was that for the last two years I’ve been holding two somewhat contradictory positions alongside each other. Because while accepting that I had a therapy-mother, I also believed that my mother was wrong about the importance of the mother-daughter relationship. I believed that I didn’t really need a mother, and had never needed one. I knew I had a therapy-mother, but I still thought of myself as being without a mother. On numerous occasions I had caught myself thinking ‘if I had a mother…..’, as if my biological mother were dead, rather than me being emotionally estranged from her.

In placing such an emphasis on my therapist’s difference to my mother, and in deriding so strongly the very concept of the uniqueness and importance of the mother-daughter bond, I was inadvertently preventing the experience I was having with my therapist from becoming a fully healing and transformative experience. She was providing something wonderful – but I couldn’t see it as being the very thing I had lacked for so long, while I still refused to acknowledge the importance and the necessity of what had been lacking. Inevitably, my therapist was providing what I had lacked in a rather different, and a more intensive and more concentrated way to that in which it would have been given through the longer period of childhood and growing up – but she was providing it nonetheless.

***

When I saw my therapist the morning after my ‘answer’ came, along with my dreams, I told her that it finally felt as if something had shifted, and that I had been missing a vital puzzle piece that had now fallen into place. More than that, I had been missing something vital, and things had shifted internally so that somehow I now felt more complete. She said she was very glad the ‘penny had dropped’! I kept repeating to myself, inside my head, ‘I have a mother, I have a mother’, and every repetition was full of joy. Whenever she or I made reference to it, I couldn’t help smiling; I still can’t.

As well as being accepting and validating, I have a mother who is not threatened by me and is not afraid of me; a mother who sees, values, and enjoys the ‘adult me’ as well as the ‘child me’; and I have a mother who does not want or need exclusivity and is confident of her position in my heart. Unconsciously, that was the type of mothering I associated with my therapist feeling comfortable enough to talk to me about her holiday plans, and that is why it was so distressing to feel that that experience was being withheld. But if it hadn’t been, I may not have realised the things I did.

I may not have realised, finally, that in my therapist I have not just a new experience of mothering, but a good-enough mother – and absolutely nothing can take that away from me. I have a mother. The relationship I thought I didn’t need, is in fact vital. The relationship I had been missing, I now have. The experience I thought I would always have to do without, is now a part of me. I know that I will lose her, as the majority of mothers are lost, at one time or another, to their children. And that will be devastating. But not even that can take away from me the fact that what I was missing I am no longer missing, and will never miss again. That is indescribable. I have a mother. It is the most important thing.


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A new experience of mother, Part 3

You can hear something over and over again, but until you hear it at the right time, in the right context, in the right frame of mind and with the right understanding, it makes no impact. You can hear words and you may comprehend their meaning, but it may still not be clear what the words are meant to change, and how . In ‘Deprivation and Delinquency’, Donald Winnicott wrote about an occasion with a client, which he called a ‘mistake which nearly ended everything’. He made an interpretation for which, he says, ‘I had plenty of evidence, and indeed I was right, but the interpretation was given ten years too soon’. He added, ‘In the long treatment which followed, the patient re-organised herself…eventually she became ready for this interpretation….’.

My therapist often made the point that she was different to my mother, and she made it in numerous ways. She made it by actually being different; by responding in ways I didn’t expect and then drawing my attention to the fact that I’d been anticipating the reaction my mother would have had. She was understanding when I expected judgment; caring when I expected criticism; comforting when I expected shaming. She made the point quite explicitly by saying that therapy offered me  – she offered me – a different experience of mothering. I heard the words, and thought I understood them. But just as it took me a long time to realise that the work of therapy is meant to change the way I feel about myself, and not just to give me a deeper understanding of why I feel that way; so it took me a long time to realise how her words about mothering were meant to change our relationship and ultimately, to change me. To change me into someone who can trust and be vulnerable; someone who can feel secure even during absence; someone who can feel confident of being cared for.

And so it was only after I re-organised myself, after I became aware of the different parts of myself and how they manifested in therapy, that I became ready both to be a ‘new mother’ to my inner parts (as described in ‘A new experience of mother, Part 1’), and to really take on board what it means to have a ‘new mother’ in my therapist. Only after that internal re-organisation could I accept the idea of my therapist as ‘new mother’, and allow it to have an impact on me, and to change me.*

***

And it happened in the smallest and seemingly most insignificant of ways. The concept really took hold of me not during an emotional revelation or a painful retelling of the past, but as the result of a very ordinary conversation about my health. I had been having a few doctors’ appointments and blood tests for reasons which were unlikely to be connected to anything serious, though I was nevertheless anxious and sometimes let my fears run away with me. I would sometimes open a session by updating my therapist to let her know I would be having an appointment the next day, or had just had one. I told her when my results came back clear, or slightly elevated (though not worryingly so).

And one day it struck me, after we had been talking about the idea of a new experience of mothering, that it now felt ‘natural’ for me to tell her about my health and my appointments –something I could never do with my own mother. My mother is incredibly anxious and any hint of ill health or unhappiness on my part, sends her into a spiral of worry and unhappiness of her own which she is unable to tolerate and therefore unloads onto me in an unconscious attempt to gain reassurance and to feel better. In addition, she has always been very intrusive, and would feel entitled to know more and to be kept updated; and as for mental health difficulties, as a teenager she simply told me I had no reason to be depressed. For all those reasons, I would never dream of sharing details of my life with her, and particularly details of my health; it is a simple matter of self-protection and survival. Her reactions would be overwhelming and it is hard enough to cope with my own.

There were countless occasions when my therapist reacted with acceptance and understanding when my mother would have been appalled, anxious and invalidating. The occasion when I showed my therapist some recent cuts from self-harming, is a memorable and precious example. But it took my therapist’s calm and comforting response to my fairly ‘routine’ health checks, and my desire to share these details with her, for the concept of ‘new mother’ to really click and for me to really see her that way. Perhaps it needed a ‘less charged’ environment to let the point sink in; or perhaps it’s just another example of my therapist being right. She often talks about appreciating the ordinary, and finding meaning in ‘the small’ things and the day to day. The fact that I was comfortably discussing the business of my day to day appointments was an obvious, tangible and forceful sign that I accepted just how different she was to my own mother. And so it was, that a concept that had been around for a while, became a living, breathing thing, making a real difference and having an impact on my thinking, feeling, and behaviour.

***

Since then, there have been some wonderful examples and reminders of that new mothering which have reinforced this game-changing (in more ways than one) realisation that has settled within me. At the end of ‘A new experience of mother, Part 2’, I described an occasion where, in the words of my therapist, I had ‘both the past mother and the new mother potentially in play at the same time and it is touch and go which one is stronger’. I managed to reach out for new mother rather than ‘act out’ based on my ‘old mother’ expectations that she would be disappointed in me (for not managing to make it through the weekend without emailing her). My therapist responded in a beautifully affirming and validating way, reassuring me that new mother was alive, and was not disappointed.

A few days later, we were talking about the upcoming therapy break and I uttered a Freudian slip. My therapist had said that breaks were important because without them, I would have a very tired therapist. My unconscious thinking, as betrayed by my Freudian slip, is described in my post ‘Freud was right about some things’. My conscious thought process, however, was completely focused on her use of the word ‘therapist’. When we had finished laughing (and inwardly groaning in my case) over my ‘slip’, I tried to explain what was really preoccupying me and upsetting me. I said ‘You used the word therapist……’. My voice trailed off but she immediately understood, and added ‘….rather than ‘mother’. But I’m both’.

Never one to accept my therapist’s words and interpretations without at least a tiny bit of resistance – and the tendency to focus on what I don’t have rather than on what I do – I tried to protest that that was all very well, but she wasn’t really my mother. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her words, and by the next session I saw things in a very different light. I felt guilty because I saw my response as rejecting; rejecting of a comforting and rather momentous truth. I really hoped it hadn’t come across as a rejection of her. What had struck me in the space between the two sessions, was the very obvious truth that being a mother (or a daughter) is about much more than biology. There are lots of different types of mothers: biological mothers, foster mothers, adoptive mothers, therapy mothers – and more. The definition is in the quality of the relationship – and the one that I share with my therapist can much more truthfully be called a mother-daughter relationship, than the empty one I have with my own mother.

Her statement that she is both therapist and mother is one that I have thought about almost daily since then. It has sustained me, it has comforted me, it has helped me feel secure and has enabled me to be vulnerable. It reminds me of who she really is, and of who I can be, with her – and that creates a new experience of being together**, for both of us.

 

*The similarities and the connection of the relationship between my ‘inner parts’ and me, and the relationship between me and my therapist, will be described in ‘A new experience of mother, Part 4’ and ‘A new experience of mother, Part 5’.

**And, indeed, of being apart, particularly during this summer therapy break….