Borderline Resistance To Help & "Truth"

A Non-borderline asks: Why are borderlines so resistant to help?

A large portion of the resistance of many borderlines stems firstly and foremostly from all of the pain and damage they have suffered. Broken trust and betrayal after broken trust and betrayal and more often than not, someone failing to meet his/her initial basic needs. (primarily soothing- nurture needs)

The lost self does not know what it needs or wants. The lost self -- the borderline self in a frantic search for a way to meet needs and avoid pain creates layers and layers of defense mechanisms - which are experienced as "behaviours". Within the lostness of an unstable identity -- a lack of identity, often, a borderline is not aware that they need help. To them, life is just as it has always been and the hurts, the problems, the torments are everyone else's fault and or responsibility. Many borderlines do not have any understanding or self-awareness from which to "know" that they do indeed need help. And when in that kind of emotional pain and upheavel often nothing feels like help. For the borderline nothing offered as help is "good enough" until the borderline begins to know him/herself and meet some of his/her own needs.

Borderlines are not aware of how they feel (often) because they are lost and trapped in the walls and layers that have been built up to protect them. What was put in place through (often unconscious choices) to help ends up being more as hurtful as the original wounds. As the borderline gets older their mal adaptive defense mechanisms, especially in relation to others, continue to compound the damage that the borderline was originally trying to cope with and or escape in the first place.

This leaves the borderline lost in a maze of cognitively distorted thoughts, illogical beliefs (often unquestioned) and in the throes of assumption after asumption.

Often, for many borderlines, anyone that tries to tell them anything different from what they "think" they know is seen as "lying to them".

When someone is in the active throes of BPD -- remember-- they DO NOT KNOW WHO THEY ARE -- WHAT THEY WANT-- WHAT THEY NEED -- WHAT THEY VALUE -- WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN'T WORK. And borderlines do not know how to relate to others because they do not know how to relate to themselves. They are lost. It is a most profound and desolately-barren place to be. It is full of emptiness and uncertainty. It drives borderlines to demand a rigid sense of order -- it may be disordered- order, or ordered-chaos, but borderlines cling to maladaptive and unproductive (unhealthy patterns) because in the absence of knowing self the patterns -- or expectations