Holiday Craziness

Many of those with borderline personality disorder came from families with major dysfunction, addictions, violence, and abuse of all kinds. Holidays are stressful times even in relatively healthy families. There is often a message from the dominant culture: ie: Media that families ought to be like the Waltons or Leave It To Beaver. These messages set up unrealistic expectations about family life and holidays.

BPD is often a disorder that has patterns and cycles that recur over time, with the cycles getting shorter and shorter as time goes on and issues of abandonment or engulfment surface. Cycles in relationships are normal in all relationships. There are times when we are close and times when we have more space and distance. This is okay.

For the person with the disorder, it’s frightening and kicks in either feelings of being abandoned and alone or feeling of being overwhelmed and smothered. Since many of those with the disorder have a very weak sense of self, they feel lost taking their internal sense of self from others. This gives them an almost chameleon like ability to mirror our best qualities at times when they want closeness and the exact opposite when they need distance.

Add the usual cycles of BPD with stress and unrealistic expectations, along with often terrible memories, acknowledged or not, from their families of origin and it’s a recipe for disaster and horrible holidays of us Nons.

It is mostly a ’no-win’ for us. The best we can do is stay out of the line of fire as much as possible, establish reasonable boundaries and work on our own healing.

When holiday craziness gets overwhelming, you might try a geographical solution or you might simply enforce other boundaries that are appropriate to your situation.

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Disclaimer: The information on this site (http://www.bpd411.org) is based on personal experiences of the authors and members of our e-mail mailing list. It is NOT meant to replace professional advice or take the place of counseling, therapy or additional personal research.