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The Causes of Gregor Samsa’s Borderline Personality Disorder

When people see Cockroaches, they feel scared and run away. When a therapist sees a

patient with Borderline Personality Disorder, they feel the same as seeing a cockroach and run

away because people with BPD are not only difficult to treat but also makes the therapist feeling

burn out with their unstable emotion. In addition, so far, there has no medicine for patients to

relieve their symptoms. However, because many researches on BPD are done in the recent years,

many effective behavioral treatments for BPD have emerged and the causes of BPD are clear.

For example, invalidating environment that the environment invalid patient’s emotion. In

addition, these causes of BPD are exactly the causes of Gregor Samsa’s BPD. The invalidating

environments that both his family and working environment are and the stress that he has for

years are the causes of his BPD.

BorderLine Personality Disorder is a mental illness that people with it have an emotion

regulation dysfunction problem. People with BPD can not regulate negative affect and possible

positive; thus, the effects around them easily affect them their thought. Because of this, their

emotion and thought often jump to another new stage very quick. For example, when people try

to be nice to them, they suddenly think people wanting to scam or harm them. That is why their

emotions are unstable with impulsive behaviors and they are difficult to treat for the therapist.

Gregor is the most important person in his family. He is the breadwinner of the family.

He works for his manager to pay the debt that his father owing to his manager. He had a plan for

saving money to help his sister for going to the music school she wants. Even though he had

been working so hard for his family, he is very loneliness because was a traveling salesman that

he often slept in the motel. Thus, He did not see his family very often or communicated with
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them. In addition, most of the communications he did during work is either with his manager or

customer, which most of his emotions that he expresses are not true.

Most important, Gregor’s family is an invalidating environment, in which his emotional

responses were consistently invalidated or punished. During the plot in the story that he can not

go to work, his whole family only concerned he will go to work for the family or not rather than

his feeling:

…it was his mother!—"it's quarter to seven. Don't you want to be on your way?"... what's

going on?" …with his fist...... he urged him on again i... however, his sister knocked

lightly. "Gregor? Are you all right? Do you need anything? (Kafka ch.1)

Thus, his family never concern his feeling. Similarly, when he refused to open the door for his

manager, his sister begged him to open the door and started to cry because she only cares he will

pay for his music school. When he started to feel upset about losing his job and went outside to

stop his manager, his father started to beat him up to punish his emotional expression and

resulted in injured on his leg. In addition, when his body was physically transformed to a bug, his

family did not see a human with emotions in his body, and they only see a dangerous monster

who should be kept in his bedroom. In addition. Professor Linehan, who is the professor in

Washington State University, explained how invalidating environment, like Gregor, has lived

with, is the etiological of BPD:

Linehan (1993) …She argues that a biological predisposition (perhaps limbic in origin)

interacts with an invalidating and interpersonally alienating family environment...chronic

invalidation of emotional experiences may result in a disruption of the emotion regulation

system. As a result, the borderline patient develops extreme emotional vulnerability and
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deficits in the ability to regulate emotions (Baird et al. "Developmental Precipitants of

Borderline Personality Disorder").

In other words, Gregor's family members consistently invalidated or punished Gregor’s

emotional responses. The brain, part of limbic, started to lose the ability of regulation of both

emotions and the effects from the environment in though; thus, his family developed Gregor’s

impulse and emotion regulation dysfunction issue, which is BPD itself.

In addition to his family is an invalidating environment, his working environment is also

another invalidating environment. Gregor is a traveling salesman, so he must train himself and

practice to show an emotion that never comes from his heart to sell a product to the customer.

Consequently, during five years of being a travel salesman, he chronically lost the ability to

understand his true emotion or even the action that caused by his own emotions; thus, when it

comes to his personal or family life, he often results in a failure to express his emotion and, most

importantly, impulsive behavior. For instance, when Gregor went outside of his room to kiss her

sister’s throat to express his emotion, it resulted that lodgers saw him, and the lodgers reject to

pay the rent.

In addition to an invalidating environment, the years of stress that he has experienced is

the second cause of his BPD. Gregor was his family's sole provider. If he lost his job, his family

will have no food to eat and no place to live. In addition, if he could not pay for his father’s debt,

his manager will lawsuit his family, and he must hire a lawyer. Moreover, he was the only hope

for his sister’s dream because he was the person paying for the music school that his sister

wanting to go. His career also brought him a huge amount of stress. His manager is very strict to

him than other employees in his work place. “For instance, when I come back to the inn during

the course of the morning to write up the necessary orders, these gentlemen are just sitting down
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to breakfast. If I were to try that with my boss, I'd be thrown out on the spot” (Kafka ch.1). In

addition, an experiment was done to measure the level of stress level in patient with PTSD and

patient with BPD:

Moreover, when BPD patients were divided according to the presence of high or low

number of PTSD symptoms, very high cortisol levels were found only in BPD patients

with a low number of PTSD symptoms. (Sauer and Ruth “Relationships Between

Thought Suppression and Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder”)

This concludes a people with BPD has abnormal levels of cortisol production to response their

daily life because of the prolonged period of extreme stress in their life, for example, the stress

that Gregor had from his family and workplace. As a result, because the cortisol production is

overwhelming, Gregor responses with stress emotion in any situation. He does not regulate his

emotions and often suddenly responses in anger or fear. Because he is stressed all the time, his

behaviors and his actions often end in a very extreme way.

In conclusion, because the emotionally invalidating environments that Gregor had and his

years of stress from his family and work are the causes of his BPD. His family never recognized

him as a human but a tool that his emotions were neglected or were the reason to punish him. If

he was no longer to be their tool, his family felt he is a barrier which should be thrown away. He

also worked for his manager who forced him working very hard. In addition, years of stress that

he had because he loved his family. As a result, because of this kind of environments and his

stress developed his emotion regulation dysfunction problem that he could not correctly express

his emotion or ccould know what he really wants to do, which his emotion was unstable and had

impulsive dangerous behaviors.

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Works Cited

Baird, Abigail A., Heather B. Veague, and C. E. Rabbitt. "Developmental Precipitants of

Borderline Personality Disorder." Development and Psychopathology, vol. 17, no. 4,

2005, pp. 1031-49. ProQuest,

https://login.ezp.pasadena.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/201694876

?accountid=28371.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. CDED, 2018. Kindle Book.

Sauer, Shannon E., M.S., and Ruth A. Baer PhD. "RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THOUGHT

SUPPRESSION AND SYMPTOMS OF BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER."

Journal of Personality Disorders, vol. 23, no. 1, 2009, pp. 48-61. ProQuest,

https://login.ezp.pasadena.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/195239819

?accountid=28371.