Borderline Personality Traits In A Wilderness Therapy Program
Failure to recognize Borderline Personality Traits (BPT) in a wilderness program can lead to chronic problems and can have a destructive impact on a child’s life. Many students with the initial behavioral symptoms of this disorder will go undetected primarily because they hide these behaviors from parents and family members.
They are generally not evident until the child is under stress and they are observed continuously in a structured setting such as a therapeutic boarding school, psychiatric hospital, residential treatment or wilderness program.
In a wilderness program, a student may not demonstrate all of their symptoms until the third or fourth week. In severe cases they will be uncompensated within a week.
Behaviors That Will Be Encountered In The Field:
~ Intense emotional pain (shame, guilt, fear, loneliness, emptiness, longing)
~ Rapid mood swings (anger, sad, fearful to happy).
~ Failure by others to meet their needs are interpreted and reported to others as personal, intentional, neglectful or abusive.
~ Interpreting their experience as either “good” or “bad” instead of accepting that which is actually “grey”, “mixed” or “good enough”.~ Building and maintaining relationships with other students and staff by attempting to create a common enemy or sharing their criticism of program activities.
~ Progress or improved emotional well being will trigger thoughts about how bad they have felt in the past and that their positive emotional state will not last.
~ Reports to staff create the impression that the student is misunderstood, a victim, unloved, ignored or has been abused. Caregivers and peers will be drawn into and expected rescue, take sides or take actions to protect the student from “bad” people in their life.
~ Idealization of select staff and students in order to form and benefit from that relationship.
~ Recurrent inability to tolerate their emotional state followed by escape and avoidance behaviors such as medication seeking, inflicting pain through scratching or picking, self-mutilation, acting immature, becoming quasi-psychotic, or “acting out of control” to create a physical altercation and “emotional release”.
~ Decompensation in response to program structure, expectations and their inability to escape and avoid the “here and now” responsibility and emotional experience.
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