Why Does My Daughter Suffer From BPD With No Trauma In Her Life?

By Dr. Betsy Usher

I’m going to write the first part of this article like a research article to see facts and then I will discuss the possibility of what could be going on. This is a sensitive and difficult question to answer as I do not know your daughter or you or who diagnosed her. I’m going to assume that she does have BPD but with a slight hesitation since it’s commonly misdiagnosed.

Many individuals that have BPD or C-PTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder) find that their families do not see their role in their diagnosis. They feel scapegoated, rejected, misunderstood, and disbelieved in their experience causing further trauma.

It can be extremely difficult and painful for a parent to see their role in their child’s mental health disorders. However, research has shown that their needs to be some risk factors in order to create BPD and childhood trauma (abuse/neglect/invalidating environment) plays a major role in BPD. I am asking you to be open minded about what your daughter may have experienced as a child that you are not yet in tuned with inside yourself. Ways in which we connect, attach, validate or not, touch, regulate, how you view the child, and how you treat the child all play a major role in BPD.

I come from the new camp of research that believes BPD comes from C-PTSD as trauma and is an attachment and emotional regulation disorder.

Let’s go through some facts…………..

BPD is extremely complex, misunderstood, stigmatized, and a controversial diagnosis that some say needs to be changed and recategorized from a personality disorder to a trauma disorder.

Women make up 75%of individuals carrying the BPD diagnosis (Widiger &Weissmen, 1991) while genetic factors, family dynamics, childhood abuse, and brain structure have all been explored in order to explain how BPD possibly develops it takes a perfect concoction of innate personality traits, emotional sensitivity, biological/genetic factors and childhood environmental factors to inevitably make up an individual with BPD.

Perhaps the most widely studied facet of a BPD client’s life is their childhood environment, which includes childhood abuse history and parental attachment styles. Because of this research, BPD is known to be caused by a combination of stressful life experiences and an individual’s innate personality traits. The type of “stressful life experiences” can range from severe physical or sexual abuse to a childhood who many not have fit perfectly into their family; this makes it hard to know which child may develop BPD.

The famous Author, Bessel Van Der Kolk study found that, in individuals with BPD, 81% of them in childhood had physical (71%) or sexual (67%) abuse. Although studies vary, it is estimated that around 50%of borderline clients have had childhood sexual abuse. Some research shows that repeated or cumulative trauma appears to be an important factor in the development of BPD

Some of the greats on BPD say this about how BPD comes about.

Marsha Linehan believes BPD is created by a dysfunction of emotional regulation in conjunction with dysfunctional and invalidating environments.

Dr. Manning believes in order to create BPD, their needs to be an, “innate, biological vulnerability to emotions and an invalidating environment during childhood.” Individuals with BPD have high levels of vulnerability to emotional stimuli and are easily aroused compared to non-borderline clients.

For numerous reasons, different childhood environments can negatively affect a child when their needs are not being met.

This is called an invalidating environment, which is defined as an environment where the responses of the child are pervasively treated as inaccurate, unrealistic, trivial, or pathological, independent of the actual validity of the behavior.

Dr. Levy states that Individuals with BPD have been correlated with the formation of ambivalent attachment or a disorganized attachment. This means that BPD has much to do with the attachment between the caregiver and the child. The mind of the borderline’s parent with ambivalent attachment is full of his or her own childhood preoccupations and experiences they went through while they were children. The parent struggles to not make the children’s experiences their own but may end up having enmeshment.

This style of attachment is called “come here, go away,” by Dr. Dan Siegel.

So now that we’ve seen some research let’s explore……….

Being a mother or father is no easy task. If you’ve ever been a parent to the rest reading you can testify to that. We try our best, most of us anyhow. We truly do the best we can and according to the famous Winnicott (object relations) you just need to be good enough. However, every child is different in their needs and every parent is different in how they see those needs and meet those needs; as the child tries to meet the caregivers needs as well.

Let’s get off the blame train and onto what really can happen without a parent realizing they are causing trauma or an insecure (unhealthy) attachment with their child. Generation after generation parenting styles have been passed down that have been unhealthy. This comes from times of war, famine, heterosexism, sexist attitudes, stereotypes, social economic status, times of war, poverty, culture, abuse being passed down, and racism in our culture. All this mixed together creates individuals’ views, their thoughts, behaviors, and attachment styles. It is passed down. Period. The only way to break it is to know it, work on it, and change it so it’s not passed down.

This means the parenting style that says, “Stop crying, get up, your fine,” or “you’re too sensitive,” or “you’re being a baby,” “what’s wrong with you?” “Why can’t you be more like your brother,” “God you’re impossible,” “You need to grow up, have a plan, you can’t be a loser forever,” “You need to be more_____”and so on and so on.

Invalidation.

It’s everywhere it’s passed down and it’s a destroyer of self-worth and brings up a sense of not being seen, heard, valued, respected, and understood. This all leads to an experience of a traumatic childhood. It may seem over the top to use the word traumatic, but this is because our culture is so full of abuse that people don’t’ even know they are gaslighting (abuse) when they say, “you’re being too sensitive.” There is also Trauma with a big T, experiencing war, being rapped, almost died from an illness or accident and then there is trauma w a little t, car accident, witnessing a crime, losing a loved one, ect. Trauma is still misunderstood so most people are completely unaware they’ve experienced it. In the book Childhood Disrupted they say that 2/3 of all Americans have experienced trauma. 1/3 of all women in America are in abusive relationships. It’s rampant. So childhood trauma is everywhere just misunderstood so it’s missed.

In regard to attachment. Children with behavior issues, emotional problems, acting out, and using drugs all is a sign of trauma and an attachment issue. The parent usually unknowingly is misunderstanding what the child needs and the child is misunderstanding the parent limitations due to their age and lack of maturity.

The expectations then of what that child needs and believes they should get are missed by the parent as the parent does what they think is best and misses the child in what is best for them. The parent will have one or two of the four different styles of attachment (secure, avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized). Each (besides secure) coming to the end of the child feeling unattached and struggling with self-image, self-worth, not feeling lovable, struggles in relationships, and struggles with identity ect.

The child and parent didn’t meet each other and attach in a way that was meaningful, safe, and with respect.

As you read before BPD individuals usually have ambivalent or disorganized. Ambivalent being in a parent that is sometimes there and loving and helpful and then sometimes the opposite. The child never knows what to expect as a parent’s job is to be consistent. Disorganized comes from abuse; any type. The child is fearful of the parent and never feels good enough. Now parents can be covertly abusive and not even know. I have other articles on this if you’re interested.

In conclusion, you may not see the trauma your child went through, but she did. It’s always there with BPD. Old research found it 80% of the time, now we have found it always including in the form of an invalidating environment. Emotional abuse and verbal abuse will be found in there.

Also, most if not majority if not all young women experience some type of sexual injury. As in assault, harassment, shaming, rape, ect. There may be some things you don’t know as a parent; in fact I would assume most parents don’t know their children all that well as they become teenagers and young adults. Especially if there is an attachment issue. The child may even try and share but the parent usually has a narrative of the child that they don’t realize they have, and they struggle to see around it. Assuming this means that and that means this when in fact they are missing what their child is telling them or showing them.

This is not about shaming parents. I am a parent, it is hard, we don’t know so much still about children, but we do know a lot more now. Mental health in our society is in the hands of parents and the child’s environment. 100%. It is our job our duty if we choose to be parents to know research on parenting, to read about it, to be conscious when parenting especially if we are caught in a negative hostile and unsafe environment.

I would say the first two years of my child’s life I had to stop myself from reacting, then I’d say to myself do the opposite of what you want to do because that is what my parents had taught me and so that’s what I felt to do. However, it was abusive, hurtful, disrespectful, and would not have helped attachment. I was conscious every step of the way guiding her into the person she will become. I don’t know if most parents do that. I think they just react and pass down what they were taught which is most likely abusive in some way.

BPD does not come from nothing. It comes from many risk factors, but attachment and an invalidating childhood is there. So, it may be helpful for some people to do their own therapy, to look at their own childhood. Maybe they find out they were abused, mistreated, had an insecure attachment and find a deeper understanding of what their child went through. BPD is so stigmatized it would be very helpful for a parent to do this, so they don’t fall into the trap of scapegoating their child with BPD.