I once had a terrific boss who would frequently announce, "Success begets success," as a way of encouraging us to be our very best when it came to setting goals at work. For whatever reason, it made a huge impression on my life and I think about it often. I believe that it's true for myself, my clients, and for their families.
And maybe the opposite is also true.
Many years ago, I spoke with a dad who was interested in getting his 17 year-old daughter connected with a residential treatment program for borderline personality disorder. I'm always interested in hearing more about why families believe that treatment is a choice they want to explore so I asked the dad to tell me more.
It wasn’t surprising for me to hear that the daughter's inability to regulate her behaviors was often connected to her mother's emotional dysregulation. Over the past year, mom and daughter jointly instigated arguments that had recently become physical resulting in mutual pushing and some slapping. No one had been physically hurt nor bruised—yet. The dad was hopeful that his daughter would be more open to learning about different ways to cope with her emotions than his wife.
This was a family in crisis.
The daughter's emotional dysregulation caused her mom's emotional dysregulation and the mom's emotional dysregulation caused the daughter's emotional dysregulation.
In other words, chaos was begetting chaos. Both the daughter and the mother needed help.
Marsha Linehan—the creator of dialectical behavior therapy observes that, “Change is transactional.” Chaos and drama make sense in families when parents don’t have the skills and strategies they need to help each other when things are most challenging.
Something had to change in order to break this destructive family cycle.
It's rare that any of us set out to cause each other pain. I certainly don’t believe that this was the mother’s intention. Sometimes our anger (or fear, guilt, or shame) gets in the way and we aren't as helpful as we'd like to be with the people we care about the most.
Because understanding how emotions and behaviors work is often the first step to change, the families I see in my office will certainly benefit from having an understanding of how events (such as yelling) create unwanted thoughts and emotions that keep arguments and misunderstandings from being resolved.
This is a quick look at how that might work for many people:
If we have an understanding of why we yell (or whatever it is that we're doing to make a bad situation worse) and how we ever got to that point to begin with, we're in a much better position to figure out how we can prevent those unwanted behaviors in the future.
Thankfully, we aren't slaves to our thoughts and emotions. Emotional awareness and some honest self-reflection can lead to all sorts of healthy strategies we can use to help us behave in a way that is more in line with our relational goals and our values.
Life isn’t perfect and we don’t need perfection in our families. The truth is that we're all a work in progress and have a lot of room for improvement.
Are you stuck in a pattern of destruction with your BPD family member? If so, there are reasons to hope for a better future. You can be an important part of your family’s success story.
Maybe learning DBT is something that could help make a difference in your family.