Abandonment

Children may view their role in things that happen as central and children tend to blame themselves. If mum and dad are fighting, the child often thinks it’s their fault. If parents separate the child concludes that it’s about them. The child often believes they were abandoned when parental separation happens. A mother (and her child) leaving a difficult marriage situation can be misinterpreted by the child as the father abandoning. This can leave a child with a self view that they are disposable and likely to be abandoned again by another loved one. That can set up the central fear of abandonment in BPD.

When trauma befalls a child, sometimes they erroneously conclude that they deserved it. How could they possibly deserve it: they figure they must be bad. There’s a notion that being bad deserves punishment. The trauma is like a punishment. Being punished means they must have been bad. That’s the child’s conclusion. That’s the child’s way of making sense of it. They can’t comprehend the real causes of trauma: neglect, negligence, randomness and malevolence.

Children understand “bad” and they’re biased to believe they play causal roles. Children can carry that feeling of being bad into their future. It may become part of their identity. It has a childlike texture because one was a child when one embodied it.