The Childish BPD Adult
Written by Kathi Stringer
Talk to me as an adult and I will pretend to be exactly that. I pretend to be an adult to win as any child will do. When I pretend to be an adult, I am not in touch with my feelings or my core sense of self. It is like putting on a costume that is not mine but I can play the role. Because like a child, it is only play. It amazes me sometimes how well I can play the roles and fool others. If you try to reach me as an adult, you will have only air in your hands, a façade, a pretend element of what I am not. But if you can see, truly see beyond the adult toy masque, and see the child who operates all the adult mechanisms, then you see that which can be reached. If you talk to the pretend adult, then you will get pretend answers and behavior. But if you talk to the child, that which is I, then I can respond. This is my secret and for a long time even I didn’t know this secret. It’s hard to be a child in a grown up world. It’s a feeling of being lost. It’s sad sometimes because when I see other children they don’t look lost. They have parents, structure and guidelines. This helped them grow and form into an adult. They went through the maze and arrived at the other end. It was a maze I have never had the opportunity to enter. What is structure? I remember at 6 being on the other side of town in the blackness of the night. No one cared where I was. What are parents? I can’t ever remember being loved, rocked, cuddled or held. I have no memory traces of this. What are guidelines? I had none and made them up as I went along in life. I’m afraid my guidelines are not very stable since I didn’t have a measuring stick that was constant in my life. Is it any wonder that I am still a lost child that is pretending to be an adult?
Engulfment of the Void
This is an example of how the child was reached. When Peggy and Dr. Witkowski highly recommended that I take medications but the choice was mine, I felt lost without structure. They were talking to what they thought was the adult part of me and since that part doesn’t exist, I was not responding. It was too much of an adult choice and since I hated being anything like an adult I would not take part in that function, which involved making a choice. But when Dr. Witkowski talked to the child, and made the choice for the child – take the medication – the message went through all the vault doors and reached me. It’s hard to explain the warmth and security when I am truly recognized for who I really am. For a moment I felt like I existed, that I was protected and had value. For a moment the abyss inside of me was gone. I felt contained and within some sort of nurturing structure. To those who grew up with parenting, this must seem like a puzzle to them because they yearned for the day they could break free from this binding parental structure. Yet, to never have it left me with undefined boundaries and a sense of being scattered and a loss of identity (Engulfment of the Void). So while making a choice represents freedom for some, for me it represents painful neglect of a child that had too many choices because nobody cared.