Quotes from Christine Ann Lawson

Children who live with a predatory mother become unconsciously preoccupied with reading their mother's moods. A fleeting glance, a furtive gesture, deceleration, and a shift of direction are signals of an approaching Turn. Bracing, hiding, or merely holding on gives children a much-needed sense of control. Shutting down, avoiding eye contact, and getting away are other means of establishing control.

Because she lives in a state of alarm, she notices things that others miss.

The relationship between a borderline mother and her child may change dramatically when the child is approximately 2 years old, begins to speak, and expresses a separate will. The mother's anxiety intensifies because the child is no longer totally dependent and cannot be completely controlled.

Upon entering therapy, adult children of borderlines are initially reluctant to discuss their childhood experiences. Several patients developed psychosomatic symptoms such as feeling a lump in their throat or experienced panic attacks following sessions during which they discussed their mother.

Ernest Wolf (1988) explains that "merger-hungry" personalities need to control others completely. The borderline Witch's merger-hungry personality leaves her children feeling devoured, suffocated, oppressed, and imprisoned. Even as adults, her children may dream about prison camps, holocausts, invasions, wars, and natural disasters. They fear for their survival.

The effects of parental abandonment, abuse, and neglect can be mitigated if children have access to a relationship with a loving adult such as a teacher, a minister, a neighbor, or a relative who is empathically attuned to the child's feelings.

Therapists sometimes warn family members not to depend on the person with BPD to validate their self-worth, yet young children have no choice. They can and will do anything to hold onto the good mother (the loving, caring person) who unpredictably turns into the Witch mother (the terrifying, raging beast).

Emotionally stable parents share their children's joy and quiet their fear. But caretaking roles are reversed for children of borderlines whose mothers are chronically upset. Children repress their fear in order to calm their mother. Situations that should frighten children may not because they have learned not to feel.

Borderline mothers who threaten or attempt suicide keep their children emotionally trapped, and their children may suffer from extreme anxiety even as adults.