I was apalled the other day when when I read several posts by young women “memoirizing” about ex-lovers with the full-blown speculation in each case that said partner was and is “a borderline.”
Wait just a minute. A person, a human being, is not “a borderline.” Moreover, before writers go off opining and diagnosing and publishing what they view as “personal truth”, they need to be sure they have the facts– all of them. Despite the fact that the DSM IV lists this as a personality disorder, many, many experienced and qualified people absolutely hate the terminology; the forward- looking clinical community is searching for something far less stigmatizing to characterize the ups and downs of the trauma survivor. Eventually this faux disorder will be redacted from the DSM.
There is no more disempowering, stigmatizing diagnosis in all of psychiatry. Moreover, labels– especially this one– maim and kill. I watched my mother, who fit the profile and wore the label, go from being a vibrant young artist, wife and mother to a blob of protoplasm incapacitated by over fifty shock treatments across 15 years. No one ever taught her to grab hold of her inner resources,her creativity and her strengths, which were plentiful.
So it was that on the last day of her life, after decades of being passed out in a chair in our study living from a self-perception as a defective, washed-up human being, when she was angry at me, she walked out of the nursing home to get her hair done. It was too much for her after years of inactivity and smoking; she had a massive heart attack in the chair in the beauty shop and died.
I try to find comfort in the fact that this happened at the precise moment in which she started to take responsibility for herself and that thus she died trying. But this, of course, left me terrified for myself. Terror perpetuated the mythologies of incapacitation that some people said applied to me. Losing touch with my strength, I capsized and floundered, having to rescue myself from fears morphing into beliefs leading to the deadly idea that I didn’t deserve to suck air.
Minus any validation of my strengths, I came dangerously close to checking out myself. But the important thing is that I didn’t and that I got in touch with the real me who is strong and brave, who has endured the unendurable and lived to tell about it– like so many of us with deep-running childhood wounds and patterns of interaction that put us back “there”– in hell.
Some therapists really get off on putting people in a box and shunting them on through the system. In the past decade, especially in the court system in every state, more and more women have been assigned this label and told that they must undergo years of therapy– notably, Dialectical Behavior Therapy or DBT– to even be able to function.
Last year, in a dehumanizing and unethical ambush attempt by a pair of therapists who should be stripped of all licensure, I was force-fed the diagnosis of BPD. We fought it out in Court and I won. I won the right of self-determination– to call myself a writer and a human being with a history of trauma. But don’t think that I don’t fight that tape within that says, “You’re a mess. You’re a sicko. You belong in a mental hospital” night and day.
As a civil rights activist, I have advocated and claimed and perpetuated the idea wherever I can that those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are in fact trauma survivors whose pain must be validated and whose ability to heal must be reinforced. Thank God I am not alone in this fight:
Here is an excellent excerpt by the webmistress/therapist at GoodTherapy.org:
“Recently, someone asked GoodTherapy.org to include Personality Disorders within our list of Concerns Addressed (this is the list of concerns that people can select when searching for therapists and the list that all members select from when creating their listing). Our decision was a unanimous “no” and we thought it would be fair to explain why and to give our members the chance to make an argument for the use of the “Personality Disorder” diagnosis. I should say that we do support the inclusion of “personality disorder” symptoms in our list of concerns and we are currently working on translating these to fit into our list…. Please feel free to add your comments to this discussion below by clicking on the comments link directly below this post.
The following is our reasoning: We believe that by labeling a person as personality disordered or, in its more gentle form, stating that a person has a personality disorder, we are essentially claiming one’s personality, their person-hood, their essence, is fundamentally flawed. What else are we, other than our personality? Such a diagnosis is very likely, if not absolutely, to produce more shame, worthlessness, and rejection in a person who probably has enough of it already. I don’t care how it is framed, normalized, or expressed: having a diagnosis called “Personality Disorder” says one thing: you are fundamentally flawed.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’ve never worked with people whose inner systems fit the criteria for the DSM categories of Borderline, Narcissism, and others. The difference is that I don’t use the categorical and shaming word “Personality Disorder” to describe a person’s experience and I don’t view people as fundamentally flawed. Deeply wounded, yes, powerfully protected, yes, but fundamentally and irreparably flawed, no.”
Thank God for those who break with “mainstream” clinical thinking to challenge these horrific labels, which rank right up there with the mind-numbing doctrine of “original sin” in the shame and guilt we humans have brought to bear on one another.
The young writers were upset with me when I weighed in, commenting that I was “off-topic”, blowing off what I had to say.
The only way to deal with the stigma that sets in in which one is viewed through uninformed and fear-filled eyes is to live against it. To claim one’s personal power, thereby breaking out of the box– to be in the world as who one truly is– a writer, a carpenter, an activist, a whole person. To do this requires, daily, action both physical and mental against the tapes.
This, as I understand it, is how Jews maintained their dignity during the Holocaust. Viewed as vermin by the Nazis, they supported each other, sustaining their cultural and individual identities, refusing to surrender to shame.
Sorry, memoirists who think nothing of exposing family and ex-loves to write a sensational tale: you do not have the right to take another person’s clothes off. Vent your “victimologies”– that you were somehow drawn into a relationship with a person in pain– privately. Own your choices and tell a story that offers hope to the world.
Divided We Remain.
One lesson to take away from the amazing ongoing story of the Chilean miners is that under the worst possible conditions, they unified and continue to present a unified front to the world. They have forged deep bonds and looking out for each other, agreed among themselves that their stories are not free, to split all proceeds from what they regard as a collective story. We should hold that phenomenon of unity up to ourselves as the golden fleece to which we aspire.
Who knew that there was even a writer in the mine who kept a journal from the beginning, taping it shut at the end until someone pays him enough for it? Writers have always been opportunists, even in the worst moments.
Meanwhile, The Episcopal Archbishop of New Hampshire yesterday put up on the Huffington Post a cogent piece on the suicide, stigmatzing and bullying of our gay children as he views these things it to be perpetuated by mainstream religion and the view that homosexuality is a sin.
I had mixed reactions to Robinson’s piece. He states that “the theology of sexuality must be changed,” making an elaborate point that this will save gay kids. I believe that it will be a cold day in hell when that happens. I am a cradle Episcopalian and I have seen my church fall apart around this issue. I have also watched those to the right on the issue senselessly and chronically attempt to use the Bible to shore up their arguments and those on the left cave to their own emotionalism. When I was teaching argument at the University of Colorado, we called the appeal to scripture a logical fallacy– a faulty appeal to authority. Why not make the argument on the basis of reasonable personal conviction and a few credible studies, et al?
Meanwhile, the inability to agree to disagree permeates all discourse, the Left dropping words like Islamophobe, racist, fascist on those shouting Idealogue (in reference to President Obama), socialist–and let’s not forget that last year Republicans went so far as to call Obama a “liar” when he was speaking to Congress.
No one is going to change my or your mind about certain things, and Bishop Robinson is not going to reform the Episcopal Church by guilt-tripping people into the posture of inclusiveness. It is unlikely that conservative heterosexuals will ever sanction homosexuality and that liberal heterosexuals will not continue to privately struggle with the issue while paying lip service to reform. It is unlikely that Republicans will get behind Obama and it is unlikely that Obama will further appease Republicans after his overtures were rebuffed last winter and spring.
In short, we are not going to get each other to agree that there should or should not be a mosque near Ground Zero, that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell should be repealed, et cetera.
We are and will remain, a house divided, wistfully looking at the isolate moments of unity around things like the Deep Water Horizon disaster, the plight of the trapped miners and their heartening rescue, and perhaps– perhaps, setting aside our profound differences with each other to agree that it is wrong to harass, shame, intimidate and wound anyone– particularly children.
With others therefore, I find myself seeing and now believing that at this time there are at least two Americas. I believe that there is no purchase in party affiliation and that what is required is independence of thought and coming to terms with one’s conscience, one’s morality, one’s personal politics.
Why the Political Becomes Personal:
Above all, it appears to me, we have to stop the blame game. I’ll share a skill I have been trying to learn and have not yet mastered: when someone close to me upsets me or does something I vehemently disagree with, I am trying to withhold any reaction whatsoever as opposed to raising my voice and ratcheting it all up. I need to do this until I can present my case without calling names.
As a moody Irish poet and daughter of a mother who was up in arms morning noon and night, this is nice work if I can get it. But consider how powerful that is. What if Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, who walked off the View last week to protest Bill O’Reilley’s comments on the WTC attacks, had simply looked at him, and not dignified his statements with any response at all? What if one of them had said, “That’s your opinion; I have mine,” refusing to be baited into an argument? The dialogue might have been sustained and not degenerated into yet another impasse on the subject at hand.
Doesn’t it all start with the individual, this business of tolerance, acceptance? I have miles to go before I personally think well of how I handle disagreement and conflict. I am despserately alone in my community because, when my civil rights to inclusion, to be emotionally and physicaly safe have been violated, I breathe fire and invoke the Americans with Disabilities Act, among other things. To my credit, I stand up for myself– but it is a lonely promontory on which I stand, and there is nothing like mentioning the ADA to set people back on their heels.
There are no bridges back at this time in my own life to the Church, to certain support groups, to certain longstanding friendships gone awry, to the local university and the writer/mentors I thought so well off for so many years. I have not built these bridges and I have lost interest in building them because when I have tried, I do not get any apologies or overtures coming back from the other direction. Not one person has said to me, “We are sorry for our behavior,” when the same has been demanded of me. So be it.
But we all owe each other many apologies, publically and interpersonally. We must extrapolate from ourselves to see what’s happening to our ability to communicate with one another. There were certainly things in Robinson’s piece, hell-bent on conversion– that pulled my chain. The comments posted by gay rights advocates clearly came from feeling under personal attack and were as filled with blame and vitriol as those defending the sanctity of Christian doctrine. Sadly, while Christianity appears to advocate love, forgiveness, tolerance and inclusion and is in a position to advocate for listening and responding strategies in all venues in this country, to mediate argument, hostility and misunderstanding, in practice the Church cannot live up to its own idealism; it eats its own and drives people who most need community and redemption away.
Never has it been clearer that we will not become a united country until we collectively agree that we cannot change one another’s hearts and minds except, perhaps, by example and that we need to engage in a discourse of compromise. We have not accepted each other’s differences when we beat the drum of I’m right, you’re wrong, asserting that one of us is a homophobe and the other an abomination, as Robinson notes. Thus far, few of us appear to understand that we cannot force one another to do anything, and can only, with our own lives and conduct, exemplify that which we would like to see transform human affairs.
1 comment | tags: ADA, Bishop Gene Robinson, Civil Rights, Disability Rights, Episcopal Church, Gay Rights, homophobia | posted in About Islam, Civil Rights ADA, Politics and Commentary, Tour d'Force Posts, Trauma Survival