Parents may say that they *loved* their BPD children but my theory is that this *love* might have been sympathy (feeling sorry for the child) or in more extreme instances - indifference to the child and her needs. So in fact, instead of building neurons that carried loving messages to the growing infant's brain, mixed signals were sent - love/hate, love/indifference, sympathy/indifference, sympathy/hate leading to a child who could never trust love (always waiting for the other shoe to drop - i.e. the pain) and an inability to form a loving relationship because all she was conditioned to know was sympathy and so it is sympathy, the closest thing to love that she knows is what she will illicit in hopes to fix the deficiency in her heart, mind and soul.

Sympathy is not love. Sympathy is not empathy. Sympathy comes from a stance of separation, where one looking down or at someone else sends the other the message - *I feel sorry for you, so I will feed you/clothe you/pick you up etc* This will always send the message of the child not being worthy of love and render that child incapable of feeling it as it was never experienced from birth or even prior during conception and gestation. Feelings of ambivalence or hostility toward the fetus are most likely to have occurred, this carrying over to the birth and throughout the child's life. Often you will here a mother say *But I gave her everything* *I loved her* - but this mother never experienced what love is so how could she give it to her child?

Does this resonate?