Human beings are primed for conflict. This is a good thing, as conflict is everywhere. To avoid a life of conflict is to avoid a life at all.
Benjamin Franklin once offered two guarantees on this human plane: death and taxes. If we could add another item, it would surely be conflict, which one might call the definitive prerequisite for death and taxes.
Human history, from both the nation state to the interpersonal relationship, can be framed (in part) by one struggle or another. Perhaps the best evidence of this in the stories we deem worthy enough to write down and send off to current and future generations. Every playwright, novelist, and author of fiction knows that no conflict means no story. And this is not a principle reserved only fiction. The writings that populate current events have always focused more on excitement and action, leading to the old journalist adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
As an 80’s baby and child of the 90’s, I had a front row seat to a series of television shows that worked by making advertisers rich and people worse; at the pinnacle of this parade was the late Jerry Springer, who understood that there was a sizable market that wanted conflict to take place in ostensible reality. There’s a reason why The Maury Show got huge ratings around years of nothing but the public revelation of paternity test results.
It’s what people often want, and the excitement over pain and strife is strangely magnetic.
Everyone is primed for conflict. Some of us are just primed differently than others. In my case, the BPD wires me to live on overdrive, putting me in a constant state of hyper-vigilance. I am perpetually on the lookout for the next “danger,” whatever that might be. By “danger” here, I do not simply refer to the risk of injury or death. As a term tossed around in the mental health community, to say something is “dangerous” is to say that it threatens a value or state of being.
And for someone with BPD (as well as other conditions, such as PTSD), there is danger danger everywhere, all the time.
Think, for a moment, about a time when someone you know (and for some of you, this could easily be myself) seemed to react quickly and disproportionately to the occasion. It is not fun to be on the receiving end of such an exchange. While I am an aficionado in the art of overreaction, that doesn’t stop me from being startled when the response doesn’t seem to fit the crime.
People generally expect the response to fit the event, whatever that means in a given situation. If you are stimulated by an event to the second power, then your response is expected to sum up to no more than the second power. If you live in a constant state of danger watching, where your senses filter everything through the lens of “this might cause harm,” you end up bringing the 10th power to the current situation, and the next one, and the next one, no matter the actual nature of the threat.
The only way to show hyper-vigilance is to continuously be excessive in the response. To act this way is to always act is if something is about to go deeply, terribly, seriously wrong at any moment. Live and think this way long enough, and the baseline of your behavior will stay locked in a state of red alert. Everyone around you will sense this but you, and you will be incredulous when it’s pointed out to you.
To illustrate: I do this thing when I wake up sometimes, where I’m not fully awake but not fully asleep either. I can hear what others are saying around me, but I cannot hear my own breathing and snoring. Occasionally, I am punched in the arm lightly, and that is the only reminder that I am making noises in my half-sleep again. Like clockwork I am always incredulous when I am being yelled at for something I can’t hear.
There have been many instances where I have been unable to see my own response baseline. I simply lived it out for others to see, and see it they did in all its excess.
Why do I behave excessively? Why do other borderlines tick this way? Why do people who have trauma responses stay on high alert?
To have BPD is to be so emotionally vulnerable that stimuli hurt far worse than they should. And to be clear, some degree of hurt is acceptable and necessary. That most people do not walk around all day with numerous life threatening cuts, bruises, and burns is a testament to the fact that feeling pain is a good idea, and often a life saving idea.
When the pain is ferocious all the time, this is the response for me, the borderline: I am so exhausted by the overactive emotions that I find myself killing the hint of a threat of a danger. Having known trauma in the past (as we all do, to some extent), I instantly dive into my storehouses of painful memories, take that energy, channel it into the closest blunt object, and stomp out the threat.
When your nerves don’t have any defenses, you don’t let anything get close to them. The key to survival is distance, isolation, and quick action. Dangers can hardly be dangerous if they are strangled in their cradles.
As a borderline, the lie that I tell myself is that I am not doing any harm by protecting myself this way. But here’s the thing: it’s impossible to exercise hyper-vigilance without some level of collateral damage.
This is basic physics in the end: the more force is concentrated in an event, the more that force is likely to harm things outside the intended target. There is something to be gained from caution, but much to lose from an excess of it.
For the record, I have never meant to hurt a soul, but my responses have no problem reaching the power of 10.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
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