My theory: CPSTD is nothing more than subjective "perceived trauma" by an individual that has a neurotic and/or inconsolable temperament. It is experienced in said individuals during the "individuation" stage of their psychological development as infants and very young children. At some point the infant either realizes he/she is a separate entity from the mother, and either 1. deals with it (he/she becomes their own identity with their own Freudian Ego able to discern reality from fiction) or, 2. never fully deals with it, never develops a true Freudian Ego (with the ability to have situational awareness of reality), and basically becomes an empty shell of a being with a pseudo-superego (that is, the inner critical voice in their head-which is either caused by an overly critical caregiver or by an emotionally absent caregiver) and pure Freudian ID. Imagine that. These "people" are merely beings that are pure ID and a pseudo-superego. This explains a lot.
These individuals have a complete failure in "object relations" and often become Cluster B's .
Most become narcissists. Borderlines are merely a stage in the narcissism spectrum (i.e somewhere on a continuum between full blown narcs and psychopaths). Hence a borderline today, could easily fluctuate between Grandiose/Vulnerable Narcissist and Psychopathy depending on their subjective, "perceived" trauma.
I think looking at this in a "Freudian" framework helps make it clear.
These people have no Freudian "EGO". They are essentially adults that are trapped within the emotional development of an 18 month old child.
Actually, that too is a sweeping statement. Some individuals (I am one such) grow up in extremely violent households, where physical, sexual (and of course emotional) abuse are ongoing from the youngest of ages.
It’s that individuals responsibility to get help if and when they are able to; however the symptoms of CPTSD are lifelong, varying in severity. I am pretty healthy, but still suffer night terrors, an embarrassing startle reflex, and I struggle on and off with depression.
You can’t beat, rape, starve, abandon, scream at, threaten little kids without lifelong emotional scarring. Surviving such circumstances rewires developing brains, and many of the neural pathways required to survive are etched in stone. Kids aren’t as “resilient” as people think.
I think the author is speaking of imagined or mild abuses that become identities, excuses, and permanent states of “victimization” for the purpose of status. That’s different, it pisses me off, but it doesn’t mean CPTSD isn’t “real.” ( It’s also not bpd, which is totally made up bullshit to excuse fucked up behavior.)
PTSD is "real". What you described above will cause PTSD.
"Complex" PTSD is, in my opinion, a subjective response most likely dependent upon the temperament of the child (which would NOT include traumatic events like beating, Ra** starvation, abandonment etc). Those terrible events are traumatic and will cause PTSD. There is a distinction in the literature between CPTSD and PTSD.
The distinction in the literature is about the co-morbidities that accompany ptsd but are not generally included in the ptsd diagnosis - for example, depression, mood disorders, disassociation. The difference between CPTSD and PTSD generally has to do with length of exposure to traumatic events. A single crime, accidental, limited military service can cause simple PTSD. More complex PTSD is a result of longer term exposure to traumatic events; growing up in a war zone or concentration camp, incarceration, long term child abuse etc.
Longer term exposure does psychological damage that shorter term trauma doesn’t - ESPECIALLY in children.
Again, this doesn’t mean I have a lot of patience with all the girlies out there who claim trauma and self diagnose BPD (and hosts of other ‘disorders’) to excuse shitty behavior and to avoid personal responsibility for bad character. One more person who excuses their own rudeness by claiming to be ‘on the spectrum’ is gonna make me scream.
At the same time, 40 years after escaping my abusers in a greyhound bus, I still get echos, tend towards disassociation if threatened, and have to control my impulse to punch people who accidentally touch or startle me. I occasionally struggle with depressive episodes, and am prone to self-blame and self-loathing. These are the parts of PTSD that are in the related but not diagnostic family of PTSD.
Wow I couldn’t agree more ! I’m sick of decades of the lies women have been fed . Women have been bombarded with fantasies of getting literally everything - sexy husband (or lover) ,
Ideal job, money , kids , house and dog. What the hell ? That’s an illusion.
You can get some of it some of the time , but never all without terrible cost .What a lopsided dream .
I am an elderly woman and I say “Men quit avoiding your rightful place in the family.” And ask God to help you . Really.
As a white man that was often abused and never asked or ever given a break throughout my working career while many meritless-hired socially and productivity damaging influencers that were always forgiven, supported and carried to damaging degrees I want everyone treated the same and if that means many 'professional' women are replaced with hard-working men then I would have been able to work better and been less abused.
This Hyper-Feminized society has crippled nearly everything important to good-ordered society. Our children are poorly educated because some special-needs kid screeching and holding the rest of class back. Men have been driven out of younger student education and sanity and safety driven away with them.
Generally, there something very sick about today's children educators and administrators and a significant sign of this is the active toxic anti-man environments that schools have become and it is reasonable to argue that since men protect and do not allow psychotic women to mind-rape or sexually abuse children they were driven away under threat of Witch-Whisper-Web false-accusations and reputational damage.
Devouring Mothers, Teachers, and society has significantly damaged our once sane, virtuous, caring trust society and generations of children. And it is long past time to actively stand against such Witch minions of Satan 5th column that poisons and destroys families, employment spaces, professions, gov, truth, justice, good-order, prudence, Charity, .. because it is clear that womanhood is unable to correct themselves and men that have tried have been crushed by the State and psyche-vicious mobs of screeching lying delusional femNazis and man-hating disHonorable insane baby-killing false-accusing women.
A 150+ years ago a student would get a decent education by 8th grade and so I used AI to report what a K-12 education should provide and condensed it down to K-8th and with men teachers and the few women able to focus and stop fingering their poo, it is doable and if any students have trouble they moved to a Trades School because unlike the psychotic Feminized insane professionals willing to harm every other student because one has trouble the rule will be that the troubled student is moved along and away.
.. What a sick society the hyper-empowered retarded feelie womanhood has made!
K-12 can and should be reduced to K-8th by using Men teachers that aren't mind-raping Witch minions. Trades or university and employed by 18 years old and married with start of family by 20, not castrated mind-raped infantile breast-feeding [adult] children at 30, like we have today.
You understand what 'Devouring Mother' is?
We have Feminized this level of hell, and so now we suffer 'Devouring Society'.
We need to Exorcise the devouring fatherhood childhood Satanic mind-soul crippling mothers and devouring retarding mind-raping societies demon-possessed from any power positions. If you can't work and think like a man then Get away from working men and our excellent systems, we have suffered your poison-vomit far too long.
Sorry to sound like such a hard-ass but I spent half my working-hours dodging testicle-kickers and I'd rather have WWIII with 3+ billion killed world-wide then allow another young hard working man to suffer the toxic hate that I and many others suffered.
Excellent comment. I have written much about this on my Substack and spoken out about the hyperfeminization of contemporary society on X. It's a national crisis.
Someone I know was supervising a PhD student that, after an episode of severe psychosis, was sectioned, given a Type 1 Bipolar diagnosis and eventually stabilised with Lithium. She is very bright and was an excellent student, she powered through and came within 6 months of submitting her PhD. During this period she also got married and became pregnant. Although very close to submitting she, for good reason, fell off the radar and eventually, after almost 12 months of virtually no contact (emails not answered etc) it was agreed that she would take a year break and then come back and submit.
She has now reappeared, having stopped her medication (pregnancy) and rejected her bipolar 1 diagnosis. She's now, apparently, autistic and ADHD and has found a psych advocate that is backing up her claim that she was misdiagnosed due to the fact the medical establishment are too quick to label women with negative diagnoses and that they "don't have a clue what autism looks like in women". Her demands for accomodations are quite literally insane. She wants to answer, or not answer emails as she sees fit, says that she is sometimes "non-verbal" so reserves the right to be silent through meetings, if she decides to show up to meetings (even online). She says that the masking she has to do to cope with normal life is so exhausting that she now spends much of the time asleep or just lying in bed. Her husband has had to quit his job to look after her and their small child. She is currently working with the university disabilities team to work on the massive list of accomodations she will require in order to return. She also wants to change her supervisor from a man that is appropriate and senior in her PhD subject field to a woman whose specialism is "Play Therapy" who publishes frequently on social media about undiagnosed autism in women, and masking.
The thing that is incredible is just how confident she is that she deserves all of these accomodations and how confident she is that she is someone who has been fundamentally disenfranchised by everyone, she is a nightmare. She is a wonderful example of how people are rejecting their accurate, severe, negative mental health diagnoses and embracing ADHD and Autism as positive identitarian labels that are "superpowers" rather than "life limiting". I feel absolutely awful for her husband but even more awful for her small child.
I have to add, there is no way that this woman is Autistic and absolutely no way she is ADHD. The only way she can possibly believe that she is is to conjur up "masking" to explain how she outwardly demonstrates zero autistic traits and, up until her psychotic episodes, was a dilligent, driven and VERY together student who sailed though her school career, degree and MA.
You give us so much to contemplate. It is good that your audience is on sound psychological footing, or we might experience post-traumatic stress symptoms from reading your dire findings.
"In the hands of an ideologically driven clinician, however, these stories are validated wholesale and even amplified, encouraging a self-concept centred on victimhood."
Is it fair to say then that the surge in Cluster B symptoms might - in part - be driven by poor quality (ideologically-driven) therapy? Could this loosely regulated field be "inadvertently" fueling its own growth by cultivating the very issues it claims to treat? Did they take a seed of dysfunction - sown by the trappings of modernity - and nurture it into a full-blown pathology, cultivated carefully to ensure their continued relevance and control?
If so, the parallels with the trans fad are impossible to ignore.
Absolutely. As Adam Smith stated in Wealth of Nations - "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
But it's harder to accept when it's not just the butcher, baker and brewer, but career professionals that were once-presumed to be - if not altruistic - then certainly above the fray.
The more I learn as an adult, the more I wish to be a child again.
Thanks Hannah, I must be out of the loop, I have heard nothing of this. It is laughable that they are trying to equate BPD with PTSD. I could go on and on about why that is a load of crap. Amazing how the accountability of females is yet again being softened.
In this article below I argue that generations of child psychological damage has caused world-wide insanity-accepting intellectual, judgement, prudence and other mental harms. I use both Catholic Theology teaching supported by modern psychological science.
If you could review at least the audio overview then I'm sure you will want to read the full article. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
I find it interesting (albeit disturbing) that it's become a radical position that constitutional temperament and sensitivity play a role in the development of personality disorders. Particularly the relational interplay between a developing being and the parental mirroring, guidance and holding they receive.
Admittedly I'm psychodynamically trained, and favour the PDM for diagnostic guidance which (as I understand your point) lists exactly what you describe: ("Contributing constitutional-maturational patterns: congenital difficulties with affect regulation, intensity, aggression, capacity to be soothed. Central tension: Self-cohesion vs fragmentation; engulfing attachment vs abandonment despair").
I work with clients who fit the clinical criteria for BPD, and who find this framing a useful way of understanding *what they do with their suffering*. If they have the capacity to gradually bear the affects involved in therapy, usually with the right tools to tolerate distress (DBT) and the ability to slowly bear unpacking the ways in which they contribute to their difficulties, they can do really well in therapy. Working with my BPD clients has been the most rewarding, meaningful work of my career so far. Also the scariest, but hey. It's absolutely terrifying for them underneath what you see on the surface, so there's that.
Unfortunately it also tends to be longer-term and more intensive therapeutic work than most people are able to access (because they essentially need reparenting, which takes account of the way they are in the world and in relating)... and also seems to fit your thesis.
I suspect that the wacko genes go back generations! Why the hell did you people stop looking at lineage? Everyone in the family knows Aunt Daphne is nuts! She even looks like Uncle Zephyr who lived in a hut with goats! Freud and Jung were careful to protect their heritage yet they insisted on sociology as causality! Time to look again at genetics! I weary of hearing, trauma did it! I hear not a squeak of how to deal with hereditary aberrations of behavior from therapists! It seems the professors have one eye closed and want you to close one of yours!
While I don't disagree with anything you're saying here, I think you're leaving out the other side of the story -- expanding what counts as trauma until it encompasses pretty much anything. Including normal and bad parenting, as well as unavoidable life events. If both happen concurrently, then arguably saying that trauma leads to borderline personality disorder is basically the same thing as saying bad parenting or a rough childhood leads to borderline personality disorder.
I find the "traumatized kid" model useful in understanding and dealing with my son, although the only trauma in his life were some very severe GI issues as an infant and toddler. We are working very hard to keep him from growing into the twisted mindset he often displays, using CBT and, yes, the polyvagal theory stuff.
One polyvagal theorist that I read describes it as the parent being "absent or unresponsive". If the child doesn't feel supported through hardship, they develop twisted ideas to cope. The way to treat that is to provide support through difficult episodes. This does not mean 100% validating their ideas of what is going on. But in the moment you provide refuge rather than correction. Revisiting the episode after and "CBTing" it is part of the treatment. Any practitioner who fails to do this step is failing their client.
Sorbie in her substack seems to be concluding that her bpd was an attachment disorder created by poor parenting... Could the attachment disorder be created by everyday imperfect parenting? Did her privileged parents really have to do something terribly wrong for the attachment disorder to be created? My assumption is that plenty of parents are less than perfect, but don't result in disordered kids... That it's a mismatch between the kid's needs and the parents' capacity...
There's a theory that most kids are dandelions and do well no matter what, but some kids are orchids and if things aren't just-so they fare poorly. I think this could explain why so many kids weather normal, imperfect parenting, but we get a number of (very loud) failures of normal parenting.
My theory: CPSTD is nothing more than subjective "perceived trauma" by an individual that has a neurotic and/or inconsolable temperament. It is experienced in said individuals during the "individuation" stage of their psychological development as infants and very young children. At some point the infant either realizes he/she is a separate entity from the mother, and either 1. deals with it (he/she becomes their own identity with their own Freudian Ego able to discern reality from fiction) or, 2. never fully deals with it, never develops a true Freudian Ego (with the ability to have situational awareness of reality), and basically becomes an empty shell of a being with a pseudo-superego (that is, the inner critical voice in their head-which is either caused by an overly critical caregiver or by an emotionally absent caregiver) and pure Freudian ID. Imagine that. These "people" are merely beings that are pure ID and a pseudo-superego. This explains a lot.
These individuals have a complete failure in "object relations" and often become Cluster B's .
Most become narcissists. Borderlines are merely a stage in the narcissism spectrum (i.e somewhere on a continuum between full blown narcs and psychopaths). Hence a borderline today, could easily fluctuate between Grandiose/Vulnerable Narcissist and Psychopathy depending on their subjective, "perceived" trauma.
I think looking at this in a "Freudian" framework helps make it clear.
These people have no Freudian "EGO". They are essentially adults that are trapped within the emotional development of an 18 month old child.
They are incurable.
Actually, that too is a sweeping statement. Some individuals (I am one such) grow up in extremely violent households, where physical, sexual (and of course emotional) abuse are ongoing from the youngest of ages.
It’s that individuals responsibility to get help if and when they are able to; however the symptoms of CPTSD are lifelong, varying in severity. I am pretty healthy, but still suffer night terrors, an embarrassing startle reflex, and I struggle on and off with depression.
You can’t beat, rape, starve, abandon, scream at, threaten little kids without lifelong emotional scarring. Surviving such circumstances rewires developing brains, and many of the neural pathways required to survive are etched in stone. Kids aren’t as “resilient” as people think.
I think the author is speaking of imagined or mild abuses that become identities, excuses, and permanent states of “victimization” for the purpose of status. That’s different, it pisses me off, but it doesn’t mean CPTSD isn’t “real.” ( It’s also not bpd, which is totally made up bullshit to excuse fucked up behavior.)
PTSD is "real". What you described above will cause PTSD.
"Complex" PTSD is, in my opinion, a subjective response most likely dependent upon the temperament of the child (which would NOT include traumatic events like beating, Ra** starvation, abandonment etc). Those terrible events are traumatic and will cause PTSD. There is a distinction in the literature between CPTSD and PTSD.
The distinction in the literature is about the co-morbidities that accompany ptsd but are not generally included in the ptsd diagnosis - for example, depression, mood disorders, disassociation. The difference between CPTSD and PTSD generally has to do with length of exposure to traumatic events. A single crime, accidental, limited military service can cause simple PTSD. More complex PTSD is a result of longer term exposure to traumatic events; growing up in a war zone or concentration camp, incarceration, long term child abuse etc.
Longer term exposure does psychological damage that shorter term trauma doesn’t - ESPECIALLY in children.
Again, this doesn’t mean I have a lot of patience with all the girlies out there who claim trauma and self diagnose BPD (and hosts of other ‘disorders’) to excuse shitty behavior and to avoid personal responsibility for bad character. One more person who excuses their own rudeness by claiming to be ‘on the spectrum’ is gonna make me scream.
At the same time, 40 years after escaping my abusers in a greyhound bus, I still get echos, tend towards disassociation if threatened, and have to control my impulse to punch people who accidentally touch or startle me. I occasionally struggle with depressive episodes, and am prone to self-blame and self-loathing. These are the parts of PTSD that are in the related but not diagnostic family of PTSD.
Wow I couldn’t agree more ! I’m sick of decades of the lies women have been fed . Women have been bombarded with fantasies of getting literally everything - sexy husband (or lover) ,
Ideal job, money , kids , house and dog. What the hell ? That’s an illusion.
You can get some of it some of the time , but never all without terrible cost .What a lopsided dream .
I am an elderly woman and I say “Men quit avoiding your rightful place in the family.” And ask God to help you . Really.
As a white man that was often abused and never asked or ever given a break throughout my working career while many meritless-hired socially and productivity damaging influencers that were always forgiven, supported and carried to damaging degrees I want everyone treated the same and if that means many 'professional' women are replaced with hard-working men then I would have been able to work better and been less abused.
This Hyper-Feminized society has crippled nearly everything important to good-ordered society. Our children are poorly educated because some special-needs kid screeching and holding the rest of class back. Men have been driven out of younger student education and sanity and safety driven away with them.
Generally, there something very sick about today's children educators and administrators and a significant sign of this is the active toxic anti-man environments that schools have become and it is reasonable to argue that since men protect and do not allow psychotic women to mind-rape or sexually abuse children they were driven away under threat of Witch-Whisper-Web false-accusations and reputational damage.
Devouring Mothers, Teachers, and society has significantly damaged our once sane, virtuous, caring trust society and generations of children. And it is long past time to actively stand against such Witch minions of Satan 5th column that poisons and destroys families, employment spaces, professions, gov, truth, justice, good-order, prudence, Charity, .. because it is clear that womanhood is unable to correct themselves and men that have tried have been crushed by the State and psyche-vicious mobs of screeching lying delusional femNazis and man-hating disHonorable insane baby-killing false-accusing women.
A 150+ years ago a student would get a decent education by 8th grade and so I used AI to report what a K-12 education should provide and condensed it down to K-8th and with men teachers and the few women able to focus and stop fingering their poo, it is doable and if any students have trouble they moved to a Trades School because unlike the psychotic Feminized insane professionals willing to harm every other student because one has trouble the rule will be that the troubled student is moved along and away.
.. What a sick society the hyper-empowered retarded feelie womanhood has made!
K-12 can and should be reduced to K-8th by using Men teachers that aren't mind-raping Witch minions. Trades or university and employed by 18 years old and married with start of family by 20, not castrated mind-raped infantile breast-feeding [adult] children at 30, like we have today.
You understand what 'Devouring Mother' is?
We have Feminized this level of hell, and so now we suffer 'Devouring Society'.
We need to Exorcise the devouring fatherhood childhood Satanic mind-soul crippling mothers and devouring retarding mind-raping societies demon-possessed from any power positions. If you can't work and think like a man then Get away from working men and our excellent systems, we have suffered your poison-vomit far too long.
Sorry to sound like such a hard-ass but I spent half my working-hours dodging testicle-kickers and I'd rather have WWIII with 3+ billion killed world-wide then allow another young hard working man to suffer the toxic hate that I and many others suffered.
Excellent comment. I have written much about this on my Substack and spoken out about the hyperfeminization of contemporary society on X. It's a national crisis.
Fantastic material and inspirational, and eye opening as your stuff always is, thank you Hannah !!!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Someone I know was supervising a PhD student that, after an episode of severe psychosis, was sectioned, given a Type 1 Bipolar diagnosis and eventually stabilised with Lithium. She is very bright and was an excellent student, she powered through and came within 6 months of submitting her PhD. During this period she also got married and became pregnant. Although very close to submitting she, for good reason, fell off the radar and eventually, after almost 12 months of virtually no contact (emails not answered etc) it was agreed that she would take a year break and then come back and submit.
She has now reappeared, having stopped her medication (pregnancy) and rejected her bipolar 1 diagnosis. She's now, apparently, autistic and ADHD and has found a psych advocate that is backing up her claim that she was misdiagnosed due to the fact the medical establishment are too quick to label women with negative diagnoses and that they "don't have a clue what autism looks like in women". Her demands for accomodations are quite literally insane. She wants to answer, or not answer emails as she sees fit, says that she is sometimes "non-verbal" so reserves the right to be silent through meetings, if she decides to show up to meetings (even online). She says that the masking she has to do to cope with normal life is so exhausting that she now spends much of the time asleep or just lying in bed. Her husband has had to quit his job to look after her and their small child. She is currently working with the university disabilities team to work on the massive list of accomodations she will require in order to return. She also wants to change her supervisor from a man that is appropriate and senior in her PhD subject field to a woman whose specialism is "Play Therapy" who publishes frequently on social media about undiagnosed autism in women, and masking.
The thing that is incredible is just how confident she is that she deserves all of these accomodations and how confident she is that she is someone who has been fundamentally disenfranchised by everyone, she is a nightmare. She is a wonderful example of how people are rejecting their accurate, severe, negative mental health diagnoses and embracing ADHD and Autism as positive identitarian labels that are "superpowers" rather than "life limiting". I feel absolutely awful for her husband but even more awful for her small child.
I have to add, there is no way that this woman is Autistic and absolutely no way she is ADHD. The only way she can possibly believe that she is is to conjur up "masking" to explain how she outwardly demonstrates zero autistic traits and, up until her psychotic episodes, was a dilligent, driven and VERY together student who sailed though her school career, degree and MA.
You give us so much to contemplate. It is good that your audience is on sound psychological footing, or we might experience post-traumatic stress symptoms from reading your dire findings.
"In the hands of an ideologically driven clinician, however, these stories are validated wholesale and even amplified, encouraging a self-concept centred on victimhood."
Is it fair to say then that the surge in Cluster B symptoms might - in part - be driven by poor quality (ideologically-driven) therapy? Could this loosely regulated field be "inadvertently" fueling its own growth by cultivating the very issues it claims to treat? Did they take a seed of dysfunction - sown by the trappings of modernity - and nurture it into a full-blown pathology, cultivated carefully to ensure their continued relevance and control?
If so, the parallels with the trans fad are impossible to ignore.
But they wouldn't do that, would they?
I think a lot of things are driven by the self interest of the providers of services and products.
Indeed, if you start with that assumption, the world starts making sense.
How to adjust perceptions to accurately discern self-serving vs reality is a harder nut to crack.
Absolutely. As Adam Smith stated in Wealth of Nations - "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
But it's harder to accept when it's not just the butcher, baker and brewer, but career professionals that were once-presumed to be - if not altruistic - then certainly above the fray.
The more I learn as an adult, the more I wish to be a child again.
Thanks Hannah, I must be out of the loop, I have heard nothing of this. It is laughable that they are trying to equate BPD with PTSD. I could go on and on about why that is a load of crap. Amazing how the accountability of females is yet again being softened.
Dear Dr. Spier,
In this article below I argue that generations of child psychological damage has caused world-wide insanity-accepting intellectual, judgement, prudence and other mental harms. I use both Catholic Theology teaching supported by modern psychological science.
If you could review at least the audio overview then I'm sure you will want to read the full article. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
AI generated audio overview of article;
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/dcc1110c-6fdc-4966-a0a6-10948155a59c/audio
Full article;
"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2220:, 9th July 2025, A Letter to Traditional Catholic Bishops, Calling for Champions."
https://stevenwork.substack.com/p/multiverse-journal-index-number-2220
God Bless., Steve
What about all the cases of borderline commonly rediagnosed later to female autism?
I find it interesting (albeit disturbing) that it's become a radical position that constitutional temperament and sensitivity play a role in the development of personality disorders. Particularly the relational interplay between a developing being and the parental mirroring, guidance and holding they receive.
Admittedly I'm psychodynamically trained, and favour the PDM for diagnostic guidance which (as I understand your point) lists exactly what you describe: ("Contributing constitutional-maturational patterns: congenital difficulties with affect regulation, intensity, aggression, capacity to be soothed. Central tension: Self-cohesion vs fragmentation; engulfing attachment vs abandonment despair").
I work with clients who fit the clinical criteria for BPD, and who find this framing a useful way of understanding *what they do with their suffering*. If they have the capacity to gradually bear the affects involved in therapy, usually with the right tools to tolerate distress (DBT) and the ability to slowly bear unpacking the ways in which they contribute to their difficulties, they can do really well in therapy. Working with my BPD clients has been the most rewarding, meaningful work of my career so far. Also the scariest, but hey. It's absolutely terrifying for them underneath what you see on the surface, so there's that.
Unfortunately it also tends to be longer-term and more intensive therapeutic work than most people are able to access (because they essentially need reparenting, which takes account of the way they are in the world and in relating)... and also seems to fit your thesis.
I’m more like a cluster f.
I suspect that the wacko genes go back generations! Why the hell did you people stop looking at lineage? Everyone in the family knows Aunt Daphne is nuts! She even looks like Uncle Zephyr who lived in a hut with goats! Freud and Jung were careful to protect their heritage yet they insisted on sociology as causality! Time to look again at genetics! I weary of hearing, trauma did it! I hear not a squeak of how to deal with hereditary aberrations of behavior from therapists! It seems the professors have one eye closed and want you to close one of yours!
While I don't disagree with anything you're saying here, I think you're leaving out the other side of the story -- expanding what counts as trauma until it encompasses pretty much anything. Including normal and bad parenting, as well as unavoidable life events. If both happen concurrently, then arguably saying that trauma leads to borderline personality disorder is basically the same thing as saying bad parenting or a rough childhood leads to borderline personality disorder.
I find the "traumatized kid" model useful in understanding and dealing with my son, although the only trauma in his life were some very severe GI issues as an infant and toddler. We are working very hard to keep him from growing into the twisted mindset he often displays, using CBT and, yes, the polyvagal theory stuff.
One polyvagal theorist that I read describes it as the parent being "absent or unresponsive". If the child doesn't feel supported through hardship, they develop twisted ideas to cope. The way to treat that is to provide support through difficult episodes. This does not mean 100% validating their ideas of what is going on. But in the moment you provide refuge rather than correction. Revisiting the episode after and "CBTing" it is part of the treatment. Any practitioner who fails to do this step is failing their client.
Sorbie in her substack seems to be concluding that her bpd was an attachment disorder created by poor parenting... Could the attachment disorder be created by everyday imperfect parenting? Did her privileged parents really have to do something terribly wrong for the attachment disorder to be created? My assumption is that plenty of parents are less than perfect, but don't result in disordered kids... That it's a mismatch between the kid's needs and the parents' capacity...
There's a theory that most kids are dandelions and do well no matter what, but some kids are orchids and if things aren't just-so they fare poorly. I think this could explain why so many kids weather normal, imperfect parenting, but we get a number of (very loud) failures of normal parenting.