BPD and Co-dependency (patterns of enmeshment)

For me BPD and codependency went hand in hand. Growing up in a dysfunctional family largely affected by both BPD and codependency (which I think are often interrelated anyway) enmeshment was a very central reality for me.

With regard to BPD and having been abused, sexually, physically, emotionally and verbally the beginning point of my original enmeshment was with my father. He was an abuser, but he was also my father. I was not consciously aware that he was sexually abusing me because my dissociation was severe and long-lasting. For me, this man, my father, represented safety and security. I was so needy due not only to abuse but the fact that we moved often and lived a very isolated life anyway. He became my world. He became the center of my focus. The relationship I had with my father was dysfunctional, abusive, codependant and unhealthy. What I thought I had learned about "love" from him was really enmeshed neediness mascarading as love. At best it was an "illusion" of love. When he became my world I effectively ceased to exist unless validated by him.

As a child growing up to be so dissociated from what is happening is one thing. To be worshipping and needing and trusting an abuser is one thing as well. Children NEED to be taken care of and when a care-taker mixes roles and becomes an abuser the child's needs only increase they do no decrease and thus often the child fuses with the abusive adult. This was my experience.

The result of this fusion (enmeshment) with my father was, among many things, that I did not grow up emotionally. I did not mature and go through the "normal" stages of experience and development emotionally. This lead me to enter the age of adulthood as an emotionally very young child who was very needy and felt more helpless than anything else. It was the combination of feeling helpless and victimized and out of control, having no power that I knew of and the over-identification with my father that lead me to develop a relational style, a patterned way of relating to others that stayed with me and perpetuated a lot of damage in my life to the point that I could not sustain relationships up until the last few years of my life. Breaking established patterns of thought and behavior is very difficult because as I've discovered in my process it takes a different experience, a corrective experience, and a very profound and deep understanding of what is essentially wrong in the first place before lasting changes can be contemplated and made and adhered to.

As the pattern re-played out in my life I was co-dependant. This meant that I needed someone else to make me safe. I needed someone else to meet my needs. I was an "over-age" child for the first 19 years of my chronological adulthood. The pattern that played out over and over for me which was also so tied into being borderline was that of relating to everyone through such a maze of transference and projection that the only person I continually saw and felt and experienced was my father. I was not able to know people for who they were. They always became who I needed them to be. Most often that was my father, and definately always it meant they were a "parent-figure". There is a narcisstic reality in this that one's focus sees one believe or feel that they are the center of the universe and that in order to feel okay or to be filled up one must get from the "desired object" what one needs. If, like me, with my "desired object", my father, and the love and validation I desired from him one is thwarted and frustrated because what one needs is not forthcoming....this can set up not only a pattern of enmeshment but one of narccisstic needs as well in which nothing is ever enough.

This pattern saw me do things like constantly chase after any emotionally unavailable person I could find. My father was not emotionally available. This would then set up the entire scenario of distructive disaster for me. I would pursue in friendship or in "love" someone just like my father. (I didn't clearly know that then, like I know it now) Since this person (whomever it would be at any given point in my life) was emotionally unavailable it set me up to feel (and often to in fact be) rejected, abandoned, abused, disrespected and to approach the other person from the position of a needy child needing more of a parent than a friend or a lover. This then meant that in the here and now my BPD was showing again in terms of the demandingness and manipulative control that I would try to then exert over others.

Borderline Personality Disorder is likely a mix of environment and biology. Often we can change much about what we learned in our earliest environments. If you are enmeshed with someone, or the idea of someone you can't know who you are. When you don't know who you are you feel as though you cannot exists without the other person because they are defining who you are for you perhaps as a parent did intitially as was the case in my case.

In my family's dysfunctional system there was no healthy encouragement of my "growing up". I was not encouraged and supported in trying to be an individual or in trying to be who I was, believe what I believed in and be interested in what I was interested in. Therefore I lacked individuation due to the enmeshment of my first primary relationships.

Borderline Personality Disorder does not occur in a vaccuum. More often than not many of the ingredients that cause it to flourish include what I have mentioned here: sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse, and neglect. Over-controlling parents who do not allow you to test limits safely (who don't even give you limits and boundaries at all) and to grow and to experience what it is to be a spontaenous adventuresome child. Often we are raised in atmosphere's of severe distrust, disrespect where there is no healthy love present. We are told from an early age that what we feel/believe/experience isn't real, isn't valid and so we learn how to distrust ourselves which just further sets us up to NEED them. We learn from our experiences to interpret the world, essentially, in a Borderline way....which is cognitively distorted, black and white, all or nothing kind of thinking. Once you begin to experience enmeshment, a lack of individuation, an over- identification with and or need for one other or any other person that persists beyond adolescents all of your distorted thoughts and beliefs continue to be supported by both your environment and your experience.

In Borderline Personality Disorder, one lacks any developed, healthy sense of self. Lacking this makes enmeshment all the more likely. These patterns start early in your life and then are continually played out because it is all that you know how to do and it is all that feels safe, even if it is not safe at all. At this point in your life if you relate to what I am saying here you are likely too afraid of being alone to even begin to define what safe might feel like for you. I was there. The result was constant anxiety attacks. I was isolated and alone and too needy and often dissociative and I spent very little time in the here and now reality of an adult. There is a bridge from this place to the "real" world though the wind will blow strongly and painfully in your face the whole way....the key to change here is to find yourself and your own sense of safety, and to re-claim your feelings. Part of unfusing is not only re-claiming what you feel as valid but also learning to feel safe enough with your feelings to just feel them and to soothe yourself while you do.

Borderline Personality Disorder is very painful. It is life inside of a world of thoughts that only produce more pain and alienation because when you have BPD and you are caught up in those distorted thoughts reality can slip away, so sublty and so slowly and so easily and it is not that easy to get back. Due to all of your fears, fears based upon experience you will feel that you need to control too much to even acknowledge that perhaps your reality isn't "reality". If this is the case this is often where rage sets in. This is where you'll rage at someone who loves you to control them and to keep them away from the discovery that you yourself may not yet have made....that your sense of self and of "reality" are not reliable and therefore you feel a tremendous need to protect yourself, whoever that self may be.

Enmeshment as I have experienced it is the giving away of yourself to another. It is like trying to live outside of yourself. It fuels self-hatred. It is a very self-deceiving pattern to get locked into.

Along with the pain for the person with BPD, there is the pain for the ones that care and that end up having the reality of the Borderline thrust upon them in ways that often end up causing further enmeshment, and co-dependence for themselves and for others, unless and or until the other person is finally driven away by the borderline behavior.

If you are borderline and you suspect that you may be enmeshed with someone and or that you are a codependent if you take in nothing else here, take in that this means that the very first thing you need to do you for yourself is to find out who you are, what you need, and how you can take care of yourself and your own needs. Both BPD and co-dependence (enmeshment) are extremely painful because they inhibit you from being your own individuated self. When you can't be who you are, and you don't know who you are, life can be like on long roller-coaster ride that no one has the switch to shut off. Things get out of control, out of perspective and your sense of being lost, and isolated and or alienated is a good one. I learned that I could not know anyone else until I at least knew myself somewhat. When we do not know ourselves and we live that existance of enmeshed codependent self-denial/dissociation we will be trapped until action is taken to stop the entire cycle. But know this, no one is trapping you, it is you, and specifically your lack of self-awareness and understanding that is trapping you. It is the thoughts that you still choose to believe and it is the actions that you still choose to take.

These cycles are so often adhered to by borderlines and others because when you don't know who you are you have no capacity to be alone, to be on your own and to take care of yourself.

To begin to change enmeshed patterns and to free yourself enough so that you can begin to find and indentify yourself you must first make new choices. These new choices will mean not doing anything according to "old" patterns. In my opinion one cannot be borderline without having some high degree of enmeshed experience that then means that you are codependent. I also believe that enmeshment is born out of the dissociative nature of borderline "reality" and that from the center of that your feeling that you need help is an accurate one.

Of all that I have sought to heal from and work out, one of the most painful journeys has been the one to end my enmeshed codependent style of relating. I am getting there. And what has made it much more straight-forward recently is that after a time of looking at these issues I just began to recognize right away when I was about to take any enmeshed action.....that is to say that there really are thoughts that occur first and that the behavior takes place secondly.....I came to know this only by, unfortunately going through a corrective experience in a relationship in my life that was not able to survive at least in large part do to my Borderline regression which involved transference and projection. The relationship was not thought-out and was not something I'd ever undertake in the same way again. The tough lessons of life are really our best teachers. That experience was one of the most painful of my life. Finally, I had had enough of the pain. So much so that I made a decision to take responsibility for myself in yet still newer and deeper ways. This was born out of having once again been in an enmeshed relationship and once again having given myself up. I had abandoned myself. Now that I clearly see this and know this and know myself a lot better I will not ever choose to do that to myself "in the name of love" or for any other reason ever again. I had to end up lost enough, not even knowing why I had made major life choices that ended up with me being very hurt and with me playing a part in hurting others as well in order for me to be motivated enough to turn and face the pain that I had run from for a life time. That pain, was the pain of BPD, yes, but also the pain of enmeshment. In looking at this this time it has meant going all the way back and letting go further of my father, still, even now, at the age of 41. He isn't even alive anymore, yet if I am not careful to get my work done he'll live on in a most painful and destructive way inside of me. This can only be if I allow it. I am NOT going to allow it. I have changed my thoughts, my behavior and my feelings are just now catching up. When you change your thoughts your behavior will change over time. With both changed thoughts and behavior you will then feel differently as well. For me the way that I felt through much of this, has been a tremendous reduction to a practical elimination of my anger/rage and a gradual lessening of my grief. Grief and depressed moods that used to render me dysfunctional and last for days now if felt at all last for only mintues at a time.

I am not always comfortable with all these endless labels. I guess, they do, however, give us reference points from which to dialogue. I can report that I am not relating in a co-dependent way with anyone in my life today, at all. Sometimes it is difficult for minutes at at time. More often though, it is a relief. From my process through this enmeshed style of relating to a healthier style of relating I have been able to get to know myself better still and I have also gained new coping skills and enhanced my relationship to and with myself. I have also gained some much earned self-respect. Once we let go of expending so much energy on trying to get other people to meet our needs and get to the business of defining and meeting our own needs.....well, life then, gets sweet, so sweet. And personally I can attest to the fact that for me it has been a very new beginning to my getting some of my own life's dreams on the go and I am finding new discipline every day including setting goals and actually accomplishing them.

If you are enmeshed and you have felt that pain reading this, please know, that while it hurts you can choose to set yourself free. You can, by reading, through therapy and experience with people come to learn how to relate differently. You are potentially the best friend you can ever have....take some time, care enough, get to know yourself....if you're anything like me you'll discover that life on the other side on enmeshment is wonderful! So too is it simply wonderful to get to know people for who they are and to leave the past behind.

© March 29, 1999 A.J. Mahari

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