Maybe it’s a sibling. Maybe it’s a friend. Could be, it’s a romantic partner or spouse whose feelings you tiptoe around — for fear of offending, angering, or inadvertently setting off. So you’re walking on eggshells. Often.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if you didn’t have to worry about rousing the sleeping giant who shares your bed? Or tolerating the friend’s traffic tirades as you carpool to the office?
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you didn’t have to tiptoe around moods, subject matter, and emotional triggers that keep cropping up?
Are You Tiptoeing Through the Love Nest?
I’ve always thought of these challenging relationships as characterized by “tiptoeing” — maneuvering with care and trepidation around sudden anger, snarling sore spots, ill humour, and recurring battles of will I preferred not to engage in.
While I may view myself as the one who has tiptoed through the love nest too often in life, I’m certain there have been periods when the shoe was on the other foot, and I was the one perceived as touchy, temperamental or overly sensitive on specific topics.
Don’t most of us go through vulnerable periods, times when we feel fragile in some way? Aren’t we more volatile, and consequently, not connecting as well with a spouse, a partner, family or friends?
Perhaps the question we might ask is whether or not this is a persistent state or an exceptional period. And if it is a persistent state, or one that lasts so long you can’t recall what it was like before, what’s really going on?
Joe Navarro, FBI veteran and author of Spycatcher, refers to these challenging personality combos as eggshell relationships. He describes these as:
… relationships where you have to tread lightly — each day you wake up you are figuratively having to walk on eggshells because your partner or someone you know behaves or acts all too frequently with a constellation of traits that are just simply toxic… you have to be ever so careful around them lest they lash out at you. They do so because they are emotionally unstable.
Pass the DSM…
Emotionally unstable. Hmmm. That label gives me pause.
Curious as to what the gurus define as “emotionally unstable,” I searched. And all my searches led to Borderline Personality Disorder. Now, I can see where one who suffers from BPD could be described as emotionally unstable. However, a person who is emotionally unstable is not necessarily due the BPD designation, much less any other in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
After a death in the family, a messy divorce, a painful breakup, or a layoff at the worst possible time — aren’t we “emotionally unstable” — prone to tears or anger or bouts of the blues? If a manipulative hubby or wife is pushing our emotional hot buttons with increasing frequency, won’t our rollercoaster reactions seem unreasonable to others who have no idea what it’s like?
That tells me that the erratic responses or behaviors need to be persistent, untriggered by a game playing puppeteer, and not explicitly associated with a life event that sends us reeling.
The Unstable Personality
To be fair, Mr. Navarro describes the emotionally unstable personality, and he provides a quickie Litmus test for those who demand a degree of what I might call “eggshell avoidance in extremis.” He suggests that if we see eight, ten, twelve or more adjectives from a specific list, we could be dealing with a “toxic” individual.
And for anyone who has lived with a personality that consistently displays the behaviors Mr. Navarro identifies, you know the strain of tiptoeing around their unpredictable and unsettling actions.
Among the words in Mr. Navarro’s list:
… angry, bitter, clingy, controlling, cruel, demeaning, destructive, impulsive, inappropriate, masochistic, mean, mercurial, rage-filled, resentful, tormented, tormentor, unforgiving, unhappy, unhinged, violent, volatile…
Do visit the complete list; it’s extensive and makes its point, although, as Mr. Navarro clarifies, it is not in any way a diagnostic tool.
Loving Someone With BPD
I have loved a narcissist or two, not to mention a consummate albeit charming manipulator. I know what it is to love someone who is depressed, and as a result, I can imagine how hard it was for the man who once loved me in that same sad and distant state. But I have never loved someone who is borderline — at least, not that I’m aware of. That is a degree of delicate navigation around moods that I can’t imagine, except when I think back to my mother’s emotional volatility, which I suspect had some undiagnosed chemical component.
To clarify, the National Institute of Mental Health describes Borderline Personality Disorder as:
… marked by unstable moods, behavior, and relationships…
There’s a great deal more to BPD, which may include reckless or risky behavior, as well as
… high rates of co-occurring disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and eating disorders, along with self-harm, suicidal behaviors, and completed suicides.
Clearly, BPD is a very serious disorder that demands proper professional attention.
Toxic Relationships
So what about toxic relationships? Who popularized that label? Why does it now fall so trippingly off the tongue? Is it yet one more term to toss out so we can extricate ourselves from any situation where we’re uncomfortable?
Shouldn’t we reserve “toxic” for people and relationships that are truly poisonous? Can we be honest in deeming others what they are — too difficult or complicated for us to deal with, which may suggest that our resources, emotional and otherwise, are insufficient? That our desire or commitment is not adequate or appropriate to the task? That we’re simply not a good fit?
Mercurial, moody, tormented. These make Mr. Navarro’s master list, and often describe a dashing, brooding, and darkly romantic figure in our darkly romantic literary hearts.
It’s all very Heathcliff.
And when the hero finally gets the girl and they settle down? Is the heroine bored with her man if he ceases to be unpredictable? Or worse, if he doesn’t?
Of course, if the couple is content, good for them. The point in the description of tiptoeing around ye olde hearth is this: One person is putting the other through a miserable time, and a potentially destructive one at that. Tiptoeing around a person you love is like picking your way through a minefield. It’s a lousy way to live. And you may be the casualty.
Unstable Society?
Mr. Navarro’s range of potential personality attributes is startling, particularly as many of the traits he notes are the stuff of those tempestuous love affairs that some are drawn to — my Heathcliff example — which certainly doesn’t mean that ‘happily ever after’ ensues.
In fact, many of the terms offered as insight indicate narcissism and depression, both of which are running rampant in contemporary life.
Perhaps we should page through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to check the boxes for society as a whole. Isn’t there such a degree of instability in our so-called social infrastructure that we ought to shift the psychological spotlight to the root of the problem, or at least expand the scope of our attention? How can we ignore the metaphorical earth moving beneath our feet in fundamental facets of life — family, work, health?
What about our tendency to dispose of people? Do we (over)use labels like ‘toxic’ to excuse ourselves from responsibility? From sticking around long enough to sweep away the eggshells beneath our feet — as a team or a community?
Are we in a period of widespread societal cowardice, as beliefs in each other and our institutions have become so shaky that the Spycatcher’s list describes society as a whole?
My opinion is clear. I’m curious to know yours.
You May Also Enjoy
D.A. – As someone who lives with a person who I am certain would be diagnosed as BPD (were she to submit to diagnosis, which borderlines notoriously will not do), I think you have a pretty good handle on how things should be labeled. Certainly there is a certain amount of mental disorder in society at large. A quick search turned up a figure of about nine percent in the U.S. adult population. I thought it was higher, but that same search says that experts now agree the number is actually lower than they formerly estimated.
People who just occasionally touch our hot buttons are not toxic, and certainly not borderline. However, if they do it constantly to us, and especially if it is so with many people, then there may be reason for suspicion. I agree with the qualifier that it would have to be a persistent state, regularly routine across years of daily challenges, not just occasionally in life’s major disruptions.
Navarro’s definition of toxic people, which would include Borderlines, is much more descriptive than the NIMH’s description, which is almost laughably insufficient and clinical. The NIMH description is enough to give clues to someone who is close to a BPD and wondering “What the heck is this?”, but it is very incomplete and gives little insight into the experience. Some important things it does not list is that BPDs think in black and white terms, have a low self-image, have a high fear of abandonment, have a warped sense of reality, often have difficulty accurately reading facial expressions (think they are negative when they are neutral), hold their loved ones solely responsible for all of their unhappiness (a gift that keeps on giving!), alternate between adulation and hate with respect to the significant other(s), and may have arrested development and certain childlike personas unique to BPD. The NIMH list of frequently co-occurring disorders actually is of some help, especially if one can imagine what it is like when several of them occur at once.
Most, if not all, of the definitions of BPD I’ve read seem as if they’ve been written by a researcher who has not had much “up close and personal” with it. I started to say “clinician” instead of “researcher” but in actuality clinicians have had enough exposure that many of them will not take BPDs as clients because it is too taxing. I’ve even seen a very strong recommendation that those who treat BPDs have a therapist of their own for regular consultation.
Consider that seeing someone once a week for an hour (when the patient is doing their best behavior) is not the same as living with someone 24/7. In the Amazon reviews for the book Stop Walking on Eggshells, R.L. Hodges gives a perspective which probably seems over the top to an outsider, but is all too real to those near someone with the disorder.
“… topics covered in this book that had me practically weeping for joy after seeing it was actually in print: The spending sprees, drug addictions, rages/rampages, totally illogical reasoning, false accusations/retaliations, explosive rage from out of nowhere, jeckyl/hyde “behind closed doors” Godzilla that nobody believes you about, public lies and accusations against you (“distortion campaigns”), verbal, emotional, and physical abuse (“rage is abuse”), sexual recklessness/affairs/risk-taking/dysfunctions, and the illogical thought processes of the BP that have them driving away the people they want to be closest to the most because of a rage-driven fear of abandonment that often turns out to be self-fulfilling.
“… (the) BPD will continue to mow your life down like a monster truck and demand you lay in front of the tires again and again and again, making the situation worse until someone is locked up, homeless, divorced, or dead”.
I think most people would agree that this is clearly different from people who just push our buttons. Why would anyone put up with this? Good question! Damn good question, actually. More on that later…
D.A. – You suggest that a truly toxic (i.e. BPD, etc) individual would be identified by persistent, erratic behavior not triggered by a manipulative person or game-playing puppeteer. My take would be that a BPD would never be in a long term relationship with such a person. The BPD actually looks for highly sensitive people who can be manipulated, and therefore would on the giving side, not the receiving. As an aside – I can’t understand how any consistent/long term manipulator/puppeteer would be considered non-toxic. Rather, I consider that almost a de-facto definition of a problem, especially if the behavior is consistent and persistent. In the case of a true Borderline, the manipulation may be entirely unconscious – it is simply their particular coping mechanism, necessary to adjust reality to fit what they can handle emotionally, which is often at an arrested level of development. That arrested development, and internal modification of reality (plus blaming their chosen victim for all their internal torment) is the cause of the erratic personal relationships.
As to the question of how to relate to or support that 9% of society with true disorders and the friends with obvious troubles that may or may not fit that category?
As a society we need a broader recognition of what constitutes mental illness, more treatment funds, and less social stigma. As individuals, we need to urge our friends to get help, and not stigmatize them, but the mental health profession is pretty clear that we can’t do their work for them. It requires them to work on their own “stuff”, which very few people, particularly those with BPD, want to do. Evidence the T-shirt “I Love my Bad Attitude”.
The best we can do is set boundaries, do what is best for ourselves and hope that their deteriorating situation jolts them into saving themselves. I walked away from a friendship with someone who was almost certainly a narcissist. After several years of being a good, available friend, trying to help him talk through issues he was having (and suggesting professional help, which he refused to consider) I eventually had to say that I couldn’t sustain that relationship any longer. As a practical matter I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with my own issues, those of my BPD, and his.
The literature makes it clear that problems in a relationship with a BPD come from the BPD, not you. You didn’t cause them, you can’t fix them, no matter what. You may, however, be an accomplice, and have your own work to do. Batteredmen.com quotes Beverly Engel, author of The Emotionally Abused Woman: Overcoming Destructive Patterns and Reclaiming Yourself, talking about how people are co-dependent with respect to emotional abuse.
“If you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, you will need to learn how to take care of yourself. You will need to learn how to stop rescuing, to set your personal limits and boundaries, and how to be assertive.
“One of the reasons you may have been so attractive to an emotionally abusive person is that it has been clear from the start that you could be manipulated into taking care of her, and furthermore, that her needs were more important than yours. One of the most important things you can do is to begin to put your own needs first.
“If you learned as a child that your needs were unimportant, you may believe that taking care of yourself is a selfish act. But your highest responsibility is to yourself. When you take care of your own needs first, you will be able to be a genuinely caring, giving person, not a martyr…
“Some types of people are attracted to people who are emotionally abusive. They complain, blame, and try to control. Yet they continue to allow others to hurt them. In reality, they are more comfortable complaining and feeling resentful than acknowledging how very hurt and angry they are…
“The irony is that as much as a “codependent” feels responsibility for others and takes care of others, he believes deep down that other people are responsible for him. He blames others for his unhappiness and problems, and feels that it’s other people’s fault that he’s unhappy.”
Such a thoughtful and thought-provoking response, Robert. You give us a great deal to consider. Your thoughts (and citations) on codependency are particularly interesting to me (the way an emotional “abuser” will find the malleable / sensitive partner, and the dynamic that then takes place).
Protecting oneself in a relationship where such ongoing dysfunction exists must be exhausting. I imagine there is also at the very least a low-grade current of fear and anger in the partner as well, whether displayed or not.
And yes, the social stigma of seeking help for any mental health issues is appalling and counterproductive. It is also yet one more healthcare expense that so many cannot afford.
Much to chew on here, thank you.