Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder

 

What’s left when we must consistently walk on eggshells with someone is superficial small talk, strained silences, and lots of tension. When safety and intimacy are gone from a relationship, we get used to acting. We pretend that we’re happy when we’re not. We say that everything is fine when it isn’t. What used to be a graceful dance of caring and closeness becomes a masked ball in which the people involved are hiding more and more of their true selves.

I read Stop Walking on Eggshells because I know someone with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and their psychiatric nurse recommended this book as a resource for friends and family of those with BPD. I confess to not knowing much about BPD before picking this up, and the person I know doesn’t suffer from the violent/manipulative/self-harming outbursts that are described in this book (which makes me question the diagnosis?), but for those who find themselves constantly “walking on eggshells” around loved ones with the disorder, I can see how this would be valuable. It should be stressed that this is a self help book for those who know someone with BPD, not a resource for those with the diagnosis, but if you need help “taking your life back” (as per the subtitle), the authors outline many helpful tips: from setting boundaries and active listening to calling 911 and documenting spousal abuse before a divorce or custody hearing. The writing is informal and accessible, includes countless stories from people with BPD and those around them, and certainly seems to fill a need. (Note: I read an ARC of the upcoming Third Edition of this book and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It may be obvious to you that the person in your life with BPD needs help. But it may not be obvious to him or her. For people with BPD, admitting that anything about them is less than perfect, let alone acknowledging that they may have a personality disorder, can send them into a spiral of shame and self-doubt. Imagine feeling empty, virtually without a self. Now think about admitting that what little self you can recognize has something wrong with it. To many people with BPD, this is like ceasing to exist — a terrifying feeling for anyone.

In several places, the authors stress that clinicians often fail to identify BPD, or mistake it for bipolar disorder (confusingly, 10-20% of those with BPD also have bipolar disorder), or refuse to believe that adolescents can have a personality disorder, or mistakenly believe that BPD always stems from an abusive childhood...this seems a slippery diagnosis and I now feel only marginally better informed about the disorder’s manifestations. A baseline presentation might be:

People show wild mood swings; see other people in black and white; act impulsively; are highly (and easily) triggered by real or imagined abandonment; and seem to either hate people or love them. These kinds of behaviors lead to intense and unmanageable relationships.

By way of explanation, the authors write:

The brain of someone with borderline personality disorder is biochemically different from most people’s. In a person with BPD, both their brain structure and their brain chemistry regularly turn on their emotional centres to full strength. Imagine a big, muscled bully pounding the logical centres of your brain into submission. That’s what it’s like for people with BPD. And, long after most people would have cooled down, the bully is still throwing punches — and your loved one is still upset.

Yet, in another place:

BPD is a personality disorder that is diagnosed by a person’s behavior, not through any biochemical measurement. BPD moods are typically more intense than bipolar moods; they also tend to change more quickly and more frequently.

Despite this biochemical element, they write that medication isn’t helpful for the disorder itself (although those with BPD might be prescribed something for depression, moodiness, or impulsivity), but encouragingly, the disorder can be cured through tools such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy or Cognitive Behavior Therapy — the only wrinkle being that those with the disorder tend to resist therapy until they hit rock bottom (a story is told of a woman who didn't accept that she had BPD until she saw the look of fear and horror on the face of her four year old as she beat him — she immediately began behavioural therapy and was eventually cured.)  Understanding all of this doesn’t really alleviate the pain of an abusive relationship, and ultimately, Stop Walking on Eggshells is a resource for a person on the receiving end of this abuse. The book includes such helpful advice as:

Understanding the difference between causes and triggers of borderline behavior is crucial to taking the behavior less personally. You can trigger borderline behavior quite easily as you go about your day. That doesn’t mean, however, that you caused the behavior.

And:

Feelings don’t have IQs. They just are. Sadness, anger, guilt, confusion, annoyance, frustration — all are normal, and to be expected by people faced with borderline behavior. This is true no matter what your relationship is to the person with BPD. This doesn’t mean that you should respond to your loved one with anger. But it does mean that you need a safe place to vent your emotions and feel accepted, not judged.

The authors describe in detail: how to be a “mirror” (and reflect back the other person’s emotions) instead of a “sponge” when interacting with a person with BPD; they give the reader permission to finally break off relationships with abusive and manipulative parents, adult children, and partners; they even lay out some general legal advice and provide resources for male victims of domestic violence. This book is filled with plenty of such valuable information, and for those looking for a way to “take their lives back”, I do hope they find it here.

The Thirteenth Tale

It was while I was reading “The Mermaid’s Tale” — the twelfth tale — that I began to feel stirrings of an anxiety that was unconnected to the story itself. I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me a message: Not many pages left. The knowledge nagged more insistently until I tilted the book to check. It was true. The thirteenth tale must be a very short one. I continued my reading, finished tale twelve and turned the page.
Blank.
I flicked back, forward again. Nothing.
There was no thirteenth tale.

Much like with Diane Setterfield’s recent Once Upon a River, I read this (her earlier novel, The Thirteenth Tale) with a flickering smile of anticipation on my lips, waiting for a moment of ignition that felt guaranteed, but which then failed to arrive. An antiquarian bookseller interviewing a reclusive author in her mansion on the moors? A slow unspooling of ghosts and mysteries with a Gothic vibe? Modern(ish) events that sound straight out of a Brontë novel? A book about books and their readers and their authors, all circling around themes classic and contemporary, just should have worked for me — and it almost did, and I’m not quite disappointed — the writing is strong — but once again, Setterfield and I ultimately failed to click as anticipated. Three and a half stars, rounded down.

“Once upon a time there was a haunted house —”
I reached the door. My fingers closed on the handle.
“Once upon a time there was a library —”
I opened the door and was about to step into its emptiness when, in a voice hoarse with something like fear, she launched the words that stopped me in my tracks.
“Once upon a time there were twins—”

Margaret Lea — a serious young woman who lives above her family’s bookstore, amusing herself with the reading of old manuscripts and the writing of obscure essays on the little known lives she uncovers — is shocked to receive a summons from Britain’s greatest living author; the reclusive Vida Winter. Disdaining contemporary fiction, Margaret has never read any of Winter’s bestselling novels, but when she reads a collection of Winter’s classic fairytale retellings that completely engage her mind and soul, Margaret decides to accept the writer’s invitation. Margaret learns that the imperious Miss Winter intends for her to act as her biographer, and although she isn’t really interested in the task, Margaret is completely hooked by the author’s story as it begins, and the mysteriousness and spookiness of the tale keep Margaret — and the reader — engaged until the twisty end.

I liked that (for the most part) Vida Winter’s story could be shelved alongside Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or The Lady in White — books that various characters throughout The Thirteenth Tale keep reading and referencing — and that made this read feel like both pastiche and homage. I don’t know if I found Winter’s story to be completely believable, but in the tradition of these Gothic classics, I was willing to suspend my disbelief (which made the eventual “twist” ending feel pretty ho-hum; I was prepped for a much bigger reveal than that). On the other hand, Margaret’s own story seemed needlessly melodramatic (and especially her relationship with her mother), and while I understand why it’s better, as a would-be biographer, for Margaret to bring experiences that help her to relate to her subject, I just never believed in the things that “haunted” her. It was all too much and not enough.

I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels.

And so, in a way, Setterfield has written an old novel and I do like the way she tied things up with a “proper ending” (even adding a postscript in order to reveal the eventual fates of secondary characters), and while I was always interested to keep reading, to learn the whole story of Vida Winter, this wasn’t a particularly meaningful bit of literature; nothing deeply revelatory about the human condition (there are really no relatable characters); no grand statements on society; no mind-engaging playfulness with language or form. This is, however, an interesting story, well told.

The Butterfly Garden

 

“What is this place?”
“Welcome to the Butterfly Garden.”
I turned to ask her what that meant, but then I saw it.

The Butterfly Garden was a book club pick and it was presented as a mindless — but mind-blowingly twisted — read, and that sounded just fine for a lazy summer afternoon. But ultimately, it wasn’t even fine; this is bad. The writing — from the sentences to the overall plot — is amateurish and illogical, no character acts like a recognisable human being, and if this is meant to be a thriller, the “twist” that comes at the end is so not worth the journey. I see that author Dot Hutchison has turned this book into the first of a series, and I can also see that others on Goodreads have rated this highly, so I’ll just say: not for me. (Spoilery ahead.)

The techs tell him the girl on the other side of the glass hasn’t said a word since they brought her in. It doesn’t surprise him at first, not with the traumas she’s been through, but watching her now from behind the one-way mirror, he starts to question that assessment. She sits slumped in the hard metal chair, chin resting on one bandaged hand as the other traces nonsense symbols onto the surface of the stainless steel table. Her eyes are half-closed, deep shadows bruising the skin beneath, and her black hair is dull and unwashed, scraped back into a messy knot. She’s exhausted, clearly. But he wouldn’t call her traumatized.

The Butterfly Garden opens in an FBI interrogation room: a young woman — cuts and burns covered in bandages — has been whisked away from the hospital, and the two agents in charge of her will draw out her entire life story before arriving at the part, one day earlier, when she and a dozen other captive young women somehow made their way to freedom. The agents do know that these women were kidnapped, raped, and mutilated during their confinement, but they don’t like the way that this particular young woman “doesn’t look like a victim”: could she have been working in cahoots with the psychopath known as “the Gardener”? To get this “Maya” to open up, Special Agent Brandon Eddison will repeatedly pound his fist on the table and remind her that they’re the good guys working for justice here, and Special Agent in Charge Victor Hanoverian, the father of teenaged girls himself, will repeatedly send his partner out of the room to cool off and use his Dad intuition to read between the lines of Maya’s testimony.

In addition to information about Maya’s particularly horrific childhood and the relatively happy months living in New York City right before her kidnapping, we learn pretty early on that the Gardener is a rich and powerful man who captures girls (target age around sixteen), tattoos butterflies on their backs, forces them to live in a secret greenhouse on his mansion’s grounds, and expects them to be available for sex with himself and his sadistic adult son. Since we know that the captive girls eventually get free, the only thing that adds tension to the plot (beyond the discomfort of reading about rape and torture) is trying to figure out why these FBI agents are suspicious of Maya (and the eventual explanation is too stupid for me to even bother putting behind a spoiler tag).

As for the format: Perspective shifts back and forth between a third person limited focussed on Special Agent in Charge Victor Hanoverian’s POV during the interview, to Maya’s first person POV as she tells her story. And while this should be a good format for the material (with the reader learning what Victor is thinking about Maya as she talks, and then letting Maya have a more personal voice when describing difficult events), her sections often didn’t sound like someone giving testimony in an interrogation room:

At night the Garden was a place of shadows and moonlight, where you could more clearly hear all the illusions that went into making it what it was. During the day there was conversation and movement, sometimes games or songs, and it masked the sound of the pipes feeding water and nutrients through the beds, of the fans that circulated the air. At night, the creature that was the Garden peeled back its synthetic skin to show the skeleton beneath. I liked the Garden at night for the same reason I loved the original fairy tales. It was what it was, nothing more and nothing less. Unless the Gardener was visiting you, darkness in the Garden was the closest we got to truth.

I’ve read some good reviews that get into the implausibility of the Butterfly Garden itself but I have no energy for dissecting this book more than I already have — I wasn’t against the idea of a mindless read, but this wasn’t a fun escape (the rape of a twelve year old isn’t “twisted”, it’s gratuitous trauma porn), and ultimately, this was an affront to my taste and intelligence.

Jack

 

I’m a gifted thief. I lie fluently, often for no reason. I’m a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of. I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. This has been true of me my whole life. I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do. And here I am with a wife! Of whom I know more good than you have any hint of, to whom I could do a thousand kinds of harm, never meaning to, or meaning to.

I first encountered the titular character of Jack in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead: In that earlier work, John “Jack” Ames Boughton returns to the town of Gilead as the prodigal son of its upstanding and long-suffering Presbyterian Minister; eventually revealing that he had been joined in a challenging (and illegal) marriage with a Black woman. In Jack, Robinson goes back to the beginning of Jack and Della’s relationship (which started shortly after WWII), and superficially, everything about this story sparked with me; heart and mind. Marilynne Robinson is a deep thinker and masterful writer; no words are wasted in her use of this fictional storyline to explore complex theological concepts. But while I completely engaged with Jack’s struggles, and often read with my heart in my throat as he made bad decision after bad decision, I couldn’t shake being slightly offended on behalf of dear Della — she seems to be a too-good-to-be-true archetype (instead of an actual human being), meant to test Jack’s commitments to atheism and nihilism, and the fact that she is Black (and considered a traitor to her race by her family) seems an unnecessary complication that doesn’t do justice to her as a person. Ultimately, Jack is a complex and fully human character (who fulfills a protagonist’s requirements of challenge and change) and I couldn’t help but connect with him. On the other hand, Della is a catalyzing agent for Jack and little more, and as the main character of colour in this book, I think that Robinson misstepped by not making her more knowable or believable. Otherwise, a stunning addition to the Gilead series. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in the final forms.)

Dear Jesus, what was he doing? This was not what he had promised himself. This was not harmlessness. He was sure he had no right to involve her in so much potential misery. How often had he thought this? But she had the right to involve herself, or had claimed the right, holding his hand the way she had. She was young, the daughter of a protective family. She might have no idea yet that embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness. God in the silence. In the deep darkness. The highest privilege, his father said. He was usually speaking of death, of course. The congregant’s soul had entered the Holy of Holies. Jack sometimes called this life he had lived prevenient death. He had learned that for all its comforts and discomforts, its stark silence first of all, there was clearly no reprieve from doing harm.

It’s easy to see what any man would find attractive about Miss Della Miles: young and lovely, poised and thoughtful, this daughter of a Memphis-based Methodist Bishop received a college education and fulfilled her dream of moving to St. Louis in order to teach English at Sumner High (the first high school for African-American students west of the Mississippi River). As for Jack Boughton: he’s an ex-con, a drunk, and by his own description, an old, white bum whose only stated goal in life is an aspiration to harmlessness (rarely achieved). So, despite being raised “to develop self-sufficiency in the Negro race by the practice of separatism”, and despite anti-miscegenation laws that could see Della jailed for their relationship, a bit of shared poetry and exaggerated gallantry are somehow enough for this young woman to risk losing her family, job, and freedom in order to be with the strange white man who has taken to roaming her neighbourhood at night, causing a stir in the community that reaches her family back in Memphis. As an actual human woman living with these stakes, I don’t see why Della would look twice at the scarecrow with the frayed cuffs and the whisky breath, but to Marilynne Robinson’s purpose, Della is more a symbol of God’s grace towards the fallen Jack than an actual person (and again, I feel slightly offended on Della’s behalf, only partly related to race).

According to the most relevant definition I could find, grace is "the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not necessarily because of anything we have done to earn it”; and boy, does Jack work hard at rejecting love and mercy. As in the other books that I’ve read in this series, this volume has several scenes with ministers (and the children of ministers) discussing Christian doctrine, all while the doctrine-in-action plays out in the background (and in case I’m making this sound like it belongs in the Christian Fiction section of a bookstore, these discussions are more philosophical than missionary). I was struck by Jack’s use of the word “prevenient” in that last passage (a word I had never heard before) and discovered that it is often used by Calvinists — as in “prevenient grace” — to explain free will (or, if one prefers, “free won’t”), and that knowledge furthered my understanding of what Robinson was trying to achieve here. (And as I am nothing like a Calvinist, it's all fascinating to the parts of my brain that are interested in anthropology and culture; people don't need to live on the other side of the world from me for me to be interested in how they live and what they believe.)

He let her look, not even lowering his eyes. He was waiting to see what she would make of him. And then he would be what she made of him.

Taken as a straight story, the plot-points of Jack’s life and actions are compelling and affecting; this is a well-written tale that completely captures postwar America and its ongoing struggles with racial and social equality. But of course Marilynne Robinson’s focus here isn’t solely on the historical details of her plot: over the course of the Gilead series, she has been exploring and demonstrating the tenets of Christian faith, and this elevated intention does serve to elevate the whole project — you know you’re reading something with heft and purpose. I was made to care for Jack and I was rooting for him to find salvation (in the secular sense); I just wish that Della felt more like Jack’s partner than God’s instrument.