Gomer and borderline personality disorder
Gomer was a former prostitute and wife of the prophet Hosea. ““When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, ‘Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her” (Hos. 1:1). She demonstrates several symptoms of borderline personality disorder when she has great trouble leaving her former life to settle into marriage and motherhood.
Persons with borderline personality disorder (BPD) demonstrate a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships; have an unstable sense of self and engage in impulsive behavior that is damaging. Their life is characterized by instability and chronic feelings of emptiness. Often their feelings toward others sing from extreme closeness to extreme dislike. They are prone to self-sabotage when thing appear to be going well in order to avoid abandonment.
We can see all of this in Gomer.
A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships. When Hosea’s first married her, she was a prostitute who was sexually abused by many different men. After becoming a mother, she said “I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water” (2:5). But then after unsuccessfully returning to the streets, she decided, “‘I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now’” (2:7). This indicates other characteristics of BPD, namely having an unstable sense of self. Was she a wife and mother or a prostitute? Going back and forth between the two identities demonstrates an unstable sense of self or identity. Perhaps she felt unworthy to be loved or to be a mother? The Bible never says any of that, but we can draw some fair conclusions from her behavior.
This lead to impulsive and damaging behavior. Impulsively returning to prostituiton opened herself and her family up to a lot of pain and heartache. Her children were suddenly without a mother; Hosea found himself raising kids as a single-dad; and Gomer put herself in the dangerous and vulnerable position of being sexually abused by strange men. Hosea found her again at an auction, where he had to purchase her. “So, I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley” (3:2). What if some other man had found her first? She would have then been a sex slave. Gomer’s instability was fraught with incredible danger.
We can also draw from this perhaps chronic feelings of emptiness. Gomer is a tragically sad character. We know now that prostitution is strongly linked to chronic feelings of emptiness. The emotional toll of selling sex often involves deep dissociation, objectification, and the psychological impact of trauma.
One of the clearest indicators of Gomer’s personality disorder is that she walked away from a good thing (loving husband, motherhood, stable family) to return to the instability and emptiness of prostitution. The obvious question is why would she do that? The answer is that persons with borderline personality disorder often engage in self-sabotage when things appear to be going well. Things were going too well for her. We don’t know how long Gomer worked as a prostitute, but one day everything changed. As a prostitute, she had sex with any man who would pay for it, depended upon them to “give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my olive oil and my drink,” and walked to the market with a heavy social stigma of being a prostitute. Can you imagine the looks she received from the wives she encountered? But when Hosea entered her life, everything changed. She had love, compassion, stability, a house of her own, family, and security. At some point, it had too all seem to good to be true. So she left.
And finally, they engage in frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Gomer seemed to fear abandonment. She said “I will go after my lovers” and then later “I will go back to my husband.” What was she looking for? She probably just didn’t want to be alone; she didn’t want to be abandoned. That’s most likely why she left Hosea in the first place. Another person with BPD commented, “Even when they find a stable emotional relationship their fear of abandonment causes them to become paranoid about the stability of their relationship and the validity of the love coming from their partner…[they] actually try to self- sabotage their relationship in order to end the relationship before they are actually abandoned by their partner.”