Does Your Outer Child Ever Act Like a Borderline?

HUNTINGTON, N.Y. - Sept. 27, 2022 - PRLog -- Do people ever call you borderline? Did you ever ask yourself if you have borderline personality disorder?

We're all a little borderline from time to time, and sometimes we're a lot borderline, but does that mean we have Borderline Personality Disorder?

Not necessarily.

But it does mean we have an active Outer Child – the self saboteur of the personality – the part that wears its heart on its sleeve, clams up when we should be asserting ourselves, shoots off its mouth when we shouldn't, shuts down or storms off when we should be working through important feelings within a relationship.

Borderline: When we use the term colloquially, it just means we can become overwrought or over-reactive – that we let Outer Child get into the act and go overboard – that we let Outer Child get us to say or do things that put our relationship in jeopardy, or caused our loved one to feel undeserved duress, or caused a little destruction to self or others.

Going berserk once in a while or getting into arguments doesn't mean we have borderline personality disorder unless these behaviors represent a pattern that occurs with some regularity and that interferes in the quality of life, goal achievement and our ability to sustain healthy relationships.  Otherwise we can chalk up our isolated emotional outbursts to being human and in need of learning better ways to Tame our Outer Child.

Outer Child is especially prone to acting out in our intimate relationships because we all share primal abandonment fear – a fear that can be easily triggered.  Even during the best of times, seemingly small events can cause us to go into an emotional hijack. The raw abandonment can jangle in the course the day if we happen to feel rejected, criticized, excluded, misunderstood, overlooked, condescended to, unappreciated, taken for granted, ignored, dismissed, belittled, disrespected.  And we're not always prepared for it.

It is a universal dilemma.  We react automatically, not always in ways that are in our best interests.  We may overreact or under-react, express too much anger or not enough anger, become too demanding or feel too disentitled to ask for what we need.

When Outer Child gets in on the act, whether our reactions are aggressive or passive, we tend to regret them afterward.

Outer child can muddy the works even further by blaming the way we reacted on those who triggered us ...

Continue reading: https://www.abandonment.net/articles/do-you-sabotage-your-relationships-does-your-outer-child-ever-act-like-a-borderline-10-ways-to-curb-outer-child-from-sabotaging-your-life