ABSTRACT
Human communication between intimates is notoriously elliptical even in highly open and insightful families. Intimates share a common history that allows them to refer to events and relationship variables implicitly. From time to time, family members in those families with a son or daughter with borderline personality disorder (BPD) do try to talk about issues and resolve them. However, several problems inherent in their metacommunicative strategies routinely pop up that interfere with the achievement of mutual understanding and conflict resolution. A common characteristic of families with a member who exhibits BPD is that family members mutually invalidate one another. The structure of all human language is such that ambiguity is quite easy to generate. Any sentence in any language can refer to a multitude of unclear referents, or can be interpreted in antithetical ways. Negative evaluations can come out positive and vice versa through changes in body language, tone of voice, or even choice of synonym.
