Setting Limits with your emotions

The past two weeks for me have been quite difficult. My boss has really stirred up some drama and I suffered, but then I learned. My plan is to set limits with my emotions.

I have made no bones that I work for a person with Borderline Personality. Borderlines act in terms of "Drama." They start it and keep it going.

With drama there is a triangle of interactions between three people. There is a perpetrator, a victim and a rescuer. The roles are interchangeable between the three people.

Within a triangle of drama there is emotion, childish anger, and indirect expression of feeling and an absence of direct problem-solving. To stop it, you must clearly state your emotion and act like an adult.

I have decided that there is no integrity in drama. I have decided one of the problems with borderline personalities is that they have no integrity and that they have no insight that they have a character defect that includes no integrity.

I have been noticing my boss make comments that put her in a victim role.

• "I felt like I was jumped in there. You need to be on my side."
• "Now I am being made to look like the bad guy."
• "Why is he doing this to me?"

I have also been noticing comments that put her in a rescuer role.

• "I am working hard to save this department."
• "This is causing me a lot of work to fix things."
• "This is the cutting edge."

Now, she will be in total denial when she is in the perpetrator role. She is the perpetrator role quite a bit when she yells and makes abusive comments to groups of people. When I confronted her about making fun of me--she went into total denial and did not apologize. In fact she never apologizes.

I think in the recessionary times, we are more likely to let things slide. We are afraid to confront all the more as we are afraid of losing our jobs.

Without going into all of the detail of the past two weeks, I have been drug through the mud with my boss's drama.

I have to meet with her tomorrow. A major change is being made in one of my departments and the staff under me have a number of questions. She is acting like a victim when she really is the perpetrator.

My boss has made this repeated victim claim of being "jumped" in meetings when the staff ask good but tough questions. I made an effort to get the questions in writing first and I emailed them late Friday.

She wrote an e-mail response fairly quickly that indicated she was most bothered and that "We need to talk." She still feels jumped--borderlines do not like challenging questions--they can dish it but they cannot take it--again, they have no integrity, and as a result they create drama.

I will talk to her first thing Monday. She is likely going to make statements that make the staff look like perpetrators with all their questions, and that I am not rescuing her enough.

MY PLAN: I plan to put her emotion back on her.

I have decided to use an approach similar to Motivational Interviewing. In that I am going to repeat back to her what she says. If she says "I felt jumped in there, you should have backed me up in there." I am going to say something like "They jumped you" with a different inflection.
Then I will likely say "What is it about their questions that made you feel jumped?"


I have previously not said anything. The time has changed.

If she says, now I am made out to be the bad guy. I plan to say nothing, or at best, say "you feel you are the bad guy?"

I have decided that borderlines try to make others responsible for their emotions. I have learned lately through my time in the mud, that my borderline boss has been stating things only in feelings as to whether she is rescuing or she is a victim.

I expect this to be a very subtle approach and that this is the first line of defense. It is at best a Soft skill. It will be a lot of work, but I am going to have to start here. I do not think that she will have a clue what I am doing at first.

I think that it is tough enough coping with the economy as it is. I think that in this day and time we have to work on only owning our own feelings, and not those of someone else.

While we would like to empathize, many borderlines are willing to throw themselves out there as victims, depicting whether they are a victim of you or someone else. Things are not always safe out there.

For my boss, she needs to be responsible for her emotion. She probably never will be, she probably would die first. My plan is that I do not take responsibility for what she will not. Previously, I had gotten stirred by her emotion--it is time to start setting a limit--her emotion does not have to be my emotion.