Trigger warning - Borderline mothers

I had a very abusive, traumatic childhood. About a year or two before my DID diagnosis, I read into BPD because I was sure mom had it.. Fast Forward a few years to present day... Was diagnosed DID back in the summer and have been working with a wonderful therapist for the past 7 months.. She says that my mom is probably DID, she seems to have amnesic barrier... My dad may have also been DID as well (he died)...My therapist tells me constantly to ask my system certain questions regarding my parents...My system says that both parents were DID...I accept what they say and go with it, though it is hard at times for me to believe what they say... Sometimes this whole thing seems so surreal, yet at the same time I've come to accept DID as one of the most beautiful defense mechanisms there is. Helped me feel confirmation that I am here for a reason, have a purpose, and have been made into the person I am for a reason. I struggled with the diagnosis for a long time but am starting to truly have love for self and parts..and empathy for my parents... I feel they did the best they could with what they had...they were both very broken, hurting people...Does not justify anything that had been said and done over the years...but I can look at things from a perspective of understanding that they did not seek help and needed it...

I think it is worth mentioning that based on the structural dissociation theory of Ellert Nijenhuis and colleagues, BPD and DID are essentially the same thing and the only difference would be that pwBPD would have only one apparently normal personality while pwDID would have more than one. As most people who use this forum know, it is nearly impossible to count your alters because you just don’t know what you don’t know, so the distinction between BPD and DID is likewise far from clear cut.

I understand where the need for self-diagnosis and parent diagnosis comes from. I am not against it either. Sometimes, better that than misdiagnosis and/or stigma. Self-diagnosis can help gain a sense of control and it can thus improve anxiety. However, these diagnostic entities are really not as objective as the APA would like everyone to believe. I am not a fan of diagnostic criteria based on observable symptoms because they tend to disregard the total personality and individuality of the person and because they deny the subjectivity of all that goes on in a person’s mind. I would rather just say that a person has some dissociative disorder, which in my view BPD and NPD are both part of (rather than being personality disorders, but let’s not fall into the DSM trap here). I guess what I mean is that as soon as a so-called false self or alter or part is involved, one that is more independent than the normal adaptive shifts in personality everyone has, we are dealing with dissociation, whether there are two or a hundred selves, whether there is amnesia or not, whether we are aware of multiple selves or not, whether we act in or out, whether we have maltretment history or not, etc. I find diagnostic labels misleading.

Also, someone (posting this on a phone, very difficult to see from here who it was) among the first posts to this thread mentions that their mother’s host is sweet but passive and that an alter has BPD, but wouldn’t you think it is the other way around if no diagnostic label were used? If there were a sweet and passive alter and a haughty and attention-seeking alter, wouldn’t it be a little more likely that the haughty, attention-seeking one is the host? I mean, if the host is the most prominent personality, usually the one who has the most control over the system/body, why would they have to be the most socially acceptable one? Wouldn’t it make sense that the parts whose job it is to have the system “fit in” would also be the least socially problematic, so that the otherwise socially problematic host doesn’t sabotage the system?

I know that last paragraph is very open to debate, and my point is not to debate it. I am only using this as an example to illustrate how diagnostic labels can be very misleading and have us misinterpret a person’s personality structure. In a sense, we might be trying to fix something that ain‘t broke. The topic is very subjective and these labels attempt to objectify it when objectivity is simply not realistic when it comes to any maladaptive dissociative phenomenon. At least that is my understanding.

About the subtopic of whether it is a mother thing or not and whether it is an abuse thing or not...

I am a very science-oriented person because science has the beauty of staying neutral and doing away with emotion, which as we all know has multiple advantages. Thus, the vast majority of my readings on dissociative disorders and personality disorders is based on research papers. Here is what I have gathered from them.

DID is about trauma. There are many ways to be traumatized, but two things people with a DID diagnosis seem to have in common (statistically speaking) is that the trauma originates from the childhood family environment and that it is long-standing and/or repetitive. Basically, maladaptive dissociation would be a result of complex PTSD.

However, trauma does not equal abuse. Abuse, and not any least importantly neglect, are only the causes of trauma. Neglect in particular, and especially emotional neglect, are still systematically glossed over in psychiatric clinics, even though clinical research has been converging towards and increasingly pointing the finger at emotional neglect for the past two decades as being the form of abuse most likely to cause trauma disorders, chief among which is DID given its severity in comparison to other trauma disorders.

My personal theory is that given that other forms of abuse/neglect are far more dramatic and easier to detect, they don’t cause people to dissociate as much. People who have been traumatized in this way can fairly easily make the connection between their symptoms and their causes, and even though their experience is very hard for them to accept, they are less likely to feel the need to deny parts of themselves in order to forget those experiences and/or create alters to keep them from remembering or to feel less vulnerable to any subsequent exposure. These are people who are more likely to have PTSD without it degenerating into DID.

With emotional neglect, however, what tends to happen is that no one realizes that a child is suffering greatly (no physical symptoms or proof) and no one offers the child help or support. The child doesn’t even know that s/he is being neglected and thinks the treatment s/he gets is normal. They teach you about inappropriate touch but they don’t teach you about inappropriate ignorance of your needs, especially not emotional needs. It is much more insidious on the one hand and the child is much more left alone to fend for him/herself. It is this isolation that, in my opinion, pushes a child to not dare to be him/herself and invent invisible friends for protection because it is all s/he can do. I remember when I was sent back to my father by child protective services, the reason was I didn’t have bruises.

What all this means is that children are left alone with emotionally neglectful caregivers who, on the one hand, scare them but whom, on the other hand, they must rely upon for their survival. They don’t fight and they don’t flee—they freeze. Thus, these children get attached to the very people who frighten them. In other words, it is not the fact that they are abused/neglected that causes them to dissociate but disorganized attachment.

So, even if your father might be the one physically abusing you, it is your mother who traumatizes you by idly standing by and letting it happen, and then refusing to comfort you because, for example, she is scared that she is next in line for abuse if she does.

I know that in my case, most of the abuse came from my father, but it is my mother to this day who triggers me. I have long since forgiven my father’s abuse but it is only now, in my early forties, that I am starting to realize that most of the things that went wrong for me did because of the internal working model I integrated from my mother—who refused to intervene even when I begged her to.

Since the mother still tends to be the main caregiver and always will be for purely biological reasons, DID is mostly and overwhelmingly a mother thing, and it has nothing to do with gender. But it isn’t an abuse thing—it is a disorganized attachment thing. You CAN be traumatized and develop C-PTSD, BPD and DID without any actual abuse of any kind. Emotional abuse/neglect on their own can and will do that. Anyone who has a BPD or DID diagnosis or self-diagnosis must look into attachment disorder if they want to overcome their difficulties.

And remember, forgiveness is not about letting others off the hook. It is about not allowing mistreatment at the hands of others to take control over your own life.

Gomba13 wrote:Neglect in particular, and especially emotional neglect, are still systematically glossed over in psychiatric clinics, even though clinical research has been converging towards and increasingly pointing the finger at emotional neglect for the past two decades as being the form of abuse most likely to cause trauma disorders, chief among which is DID given its severity in comparison to other trauma disorders...

...With emotional neglect, however, what tends to happen is that no one realizes that a child is suffering greatly (no physical symptoms or proof) and no one offers the child help or support. The child doesn’t even know that s/he is being neglected and thinks the treatment s/he gets is normal.

Thank you for writing this. It has been so hard for me to believe that "only" emotional abuse/neglect, with minimal physical/sexual abuse, has caused me to have this much dissociation, when EVERY description of DID I've ever read puts forth "extreme, prolonged sexual and/or physical abuse" as the cause, and maybe mentions emotional abuse or neglect as an afterthought. It's never mentioned as a primary cause, and that has been so invalidating for me. That's actually a repetition of the emotional abuse/neglect that we've experienced, if you think about it. A way of saying, "your experiences don't qualify as bad enough to cause DID".

TheGangsAllHere wrote:Thank you for writing this.

Thank you so much for replying! I hear you on the “not abused enough to qualify for diagnosis” issue. I can’t get a PTSD diagnosis because I am apparently “not afraid of dying enough to qualify for diagnosis.” I am actually constantly afraid because ***TRIGGER WARNING*** I keep having suicidal ideation for not getting help and getting stigmatized with misdiagnosis. I am afraid I will get to the point where I don’t merely think about it, but I totally don’t want to die.***TRIGGER OFF***

What clinical research essentially says is that caregivers who emotionally neglect or emotionally abuse (name-calling, verbal threats, blackmail, etc.) are also much more likely to use other forms of abuse/neglect, so most, but certainly not all, children who were emotionally neglected also got physically or sexually abused, or at least physically neglected. The presence of these much more obvious forms of abuse then obscures the emotional neglect, and it is often believed there was no emotional neglect. However, when people physically and sexually abused as children are questioned using carefully designed study questionnaires, the majority report emotional neglect and/or emotional abuse.

What researchers have been looking at in recent years is what types of neglect/abuse are shared by the majority of people with dissociative disorders—emotional neglect came out on top. They also looked at the minority of people who were only subjected to a single form of abuse or neglect, and screened them per category of abuse to establish what proportion of each filled the criteria for a dissociative disorder (DID is what they are most interested in). It turns out that the category that has the highest proportion of dissociative disorders is emotinal neglect. In fact, much to their surprise, they found that sexual and physical abuse were the categories of single form of abuse that had the lowest proprtion of people with a dissociative disorder. Emotional abuse and physical neglect apparently cause more long-term harm than physical and sexual abuse. If memory serves, one study even sums up by saying that the common denominator is emotional neglect, and it is shared by dissociative individuals much more widely than it is in other psychiatric entities. This points, again, to an attachment issue rather than an abuse issue.

It is easy to see why society is mistaken about which forms of abuse do the most damage: since it is very rare that a child is only subjected to one form of abuse, we tend to assume that X child has DID because of physical abuse and Y child because of sexual abuse. But we don’t realize that both X and Y children were also subjected to emotional neglect, and that if we removed the emotional neglect, the damage would have been, in most but not all cases, much inferior to the damage that would have resulted if we kept emotional neglect and removed physical/sexual abuse instead.

I will try to find those papers again so that people in your shoes can cite them. Most of them are behind a paywall but abstracts are usually free and summarize the findings.

My mother has some borderline /nars characteristics. Shes also the martyr type... She has anxiety issues and I suspect some DID as well. She went threw a stressful period and she was never that person ever again
.only moments when the other part ofher pope up.

I lost a lot of security and truth when I saw her digress.


I believe she has deep concealed DID like I did before i started smoking all of the weed.

our mother seems to have some BPD symptomology; a childhood spent under her thumb of control (and we do mean control) would have us label her a 'queen' type if we understand the terms correctly. We have also wondered if she has narcissistic traits. Her behaviour is subtle and manipulative; which we have had to deal with for our whole lives. She seems, however, to have mellowed somewhat with age but one can never really tell.