re: 12 Year Old Girl with BPD

I have met many people who I saw as behaving irrationally. Not one of them saw themselves that way. They all had an internal logic system to rationalize their decisions. Learning their system is the only way to motivate someone whose system is vastly different from yours.

I was driven by fear as a child. I had an external motivation because I would be physically punished brutally for anything short of perfection. The constant (and very real and acted on) threat of physical violence kept me in line for a good while. It didn’t make me healthy, but it helped me hide my mistakes until I got to a point in life where that external fear was no longer looming over me and I couldn’t hide my deficiencies any longer. I couldn’t understand that most of my peers, as a kid, didn’t live with a figurative omnipresent sword of Damocles over their heads. Once I learned that they had something else entirely driving them, I started to understand other people better.

I have met people driven by revenge, guilt, shame, pleasure, challenge, attention, etc. You cannot understand how to motivate someone whose driving force is substantially different from yours until you truly learn their system. This is incredibly difficult to do.