Borderline parents?

Hi, I am new to this forum. I wonder if any of you have BPD parents and how do you deal with them? How have they affected you? Do you think you have BPD because of them?

I am dealing with a BPD mother and I have a lot of anger towards her. She is very selfish and doesn't care about others' feelings, seeing us as her extension. At the same time I feel very sorry for her. She is always very depressed. But she is old and quite dependent on me and my siblings. I don't know if you have any advice. Thanks.

My parents are both nons, but my husband and I are both borderlines so our daughter will be growing up with two borderline parents. We're both in therapy, part of the reason for that is we aim to give our child a safe childhood that she gets through without being mentally ill.

My mom was borderline with munchausen syndrome (which lead to me being the victim of munchausen's by proxy) and anxiety. She damn near killed me a couple of times. We barely talk because I don't feel safe around her. I felt completely terrorized by her as a child and she's too enshrined in her sense of entitlement and ego to listen well enough for me to try and get closure.

I realize my mom isn't the picture of a typical borderline and had some deeper issues, though.

I'm pretty sure my mom has BPD and she also is totally dependent on me (we used to also be completely enmeshed until I finally got therapy in my late teens).

I know what you mean about hating her on the one hand and feeling sorry for her on the other… I'm totally ambivalent about my own and go from completely whitewashing her to completely blacklisting her.
Any attempt to talk to her, confront her, open up with her is completely useless and often anything I try to be honest with her about will somehow end up being used as a weapon against me in some way or another… so my policy now is just to never tell her anything about anything (which has lead to many terrible fights and much drama in the past but has paid off in the long run).

The main piece of advice I can think of giving you is that while she may not have a choice about having BPD, she does have a choice about making an effort to improve herself for your and your sibling's sake or her own.
Once she chooses to not make any effort on her part in the relationship, then you have no obligation to make any effort for it either.

You didn't mention if you have BPD yourself or not but if you do just think about all the work you've done on yourself so far and compare it to hers. It's not easy but it's not impossible either and as adults the responsibility for our own lives lies solely in our own hands.

pheonixrise wrote:My parents are both nons, but my husband and I are both borderlines so our daughter will be growing up with two borderline parents. We're both in therapy, part of the reason for that is we aim to give our child a safe childhood that she gets through without being mentally ill.

How did you find out that you and your husband are borderlines? How do you raise your daughter so that she is not affected by it?

ladyswan wrote:My mom was borderline with munchausen syndrome (which lead to me being the victim of munchausen's by proxy) and anxiety. She damn near killed me a couple of times. We barely talk because I don't feel safe around her. I felt completely terrorized by her as a child and she's too enshrined in her sense of entitlement and ego to listen well enough for me to try and get closure.

I realize my mom isn't the picture of a typical borderline and had some deeper issues, though.

I had to look up munchausen syndrome. Oh, yeah, I think my mom has that as well. I think I had that when I was a kid. I sometimes pretended that I was injured to get attention from my teacher and classmates. I grew out of that, though.

ShakyCore wrote:Any attempt to talk to her, confront her, open up with her is completely useless and often anything I try to be honest with her about will somehow end up being used as a weapon against me in some way or another… so my policy now is just to never tell her anything about anything (which has lead to many terrible fights and much drama in the past but has paid off in the long run).

The main piece of advice I can think of giving you is that while she may not have a choice about having BPD, she does have a choice about making an effort to improve herself for your and your sibling's sake or her own.
Once she chooses to not make any effort on her part in the relationship, then you have no obligation to make any effort for it either.

Do you sometimes feel you are losing yourself by telling lies or having to lie all the time? I am quite sick of having to do that all the time, because I don't want to confront her or deal with more trouble. But sometimes it gives me a lot of anxiety.

I think she would have to be aware of her problem in order to improve herself, no? If it's a psychological disorder, I would be quite hard (if not impossible) to make a "choice," otherwise she would be just acting irresponsibly and not mentally sick, no?

Fairytale wrote:How did you find out that you and your husband are borderlines? How do you raise your daughter so that she is not affected by it?

My husband has been diagnosed with it for years, I had been diagnosed with a "Cluster B Personality Disorder" for years and finally had a psych tell me that it was BPD last year. We both originally met each other through a forum like this one, so we both already knew about each other's mental illnesses.

Right now, my daughter is 10 weeks away from being born (: But I've been teaching myself for years now how to be relatively normal, and how not to let my ill thoughts dictate what I do and say. I have several people and organisations who will be able to give me a hand when I call, and I am doing all the reading and practice I can on dealing with the BPD so that it doesn't control me.

I know this will be something I'll need to learn 'on the job', so to speak. But I'm not someone who is unstable generally - I may have days of that at times, but generally speaking I and my husband are both stable. I've also helped care for many children already (including my cousins when I lived with my Aunty) and all the people who's children I've cared for trust me and have no problem with me being around their kids.

I can thank my Mum for a lot of this - when I was around 10 years old she started dealing with her own past and also started learning about raising children healthily. Since then she's been a teacher to me, by talking to me about what she's learned, and by being an example.

Fairytale wrote:Do you sometimes feel you are losing yourself by telling lies or having to lie all the time? I am quite sick of having to do that all the time, because I don't want to confront her or deal with more trouble. But sometimes it gives me a lot of anxiety.

I don't lie to her all that much, for the most part I just refuse to tell her anything. When she asks me direct questions about my friends and my life I simply refuse to tell her (a couple of weeks ago she even threatened suicide if I don't open up to her about my life but I still refused).
This is something that took many years to build up. Back when I used to tell her everything, everything was used against me. After I started realizing it wasn’t safe to tell her everything, I started hiding some of it but opening up to her about others – and she still used what little I gave her to get to me and pull out the rest.
About a million times over I told myself that "maybe I'm just being paranoid, maybe it's not as bad as I think it is, maybe this little piece of information is innocent enough that she won't be able to use it against me, maybe I'm just being a paranoid horrible daughter, she's my mother after all!" and a million times over she betrayed my trust and made me pay dearly for trusting her. Whatever anxiety or guilt I ever felt about hiding stuff from her or lying to her has long been eroded.

As for losing myself in lies (or concealment as it were), that is not a problem because I'm honest (and generally real, or as much as I can bring myself to be) with everybody else I know. If you don't have a network of friends (behind her back, of course) whom you can be mostly real with, I strongly suggest you get one and that should help a lot, both with the anxiety and with feeling lost and with a million other things.

Fairytale wrote:I think she would have to be aware of her problem in order to improve herself, no? If it's a psychological disorder, I would be quite hard (if not impossible) to make a "choice," otherwise she would be just acting irresponsibly and not mentally sick, no?

I'm sure many here will disagree with me on this point but I don't think having a label (or knowing what your label is) is all that necessary for recovery. I've spent years working on my BPD issues, my codependency issues and my Schizotypal issues without even knowing that I had them. I knew I had the issues but I wasn't told much about them or how they classified and I never gave much thought to what their official names were. Labels are very useful for the clarification of many, many things and knowing how to put things in perspective, but I don't think they're the be all and end all of recovery.

My mom is vaguely aware that she needs therapy and I've tried to get her to go many times but she always has her bag full of excuses ("I'm too smart for therapy", "I'm too old for therapy", "what good would it do at this point?" etc'). In the past I've also tried confronting her many times about her issues and about the things that bother me in the relationship and even when she'd pretend to understand and be open about it at first – after a few hours it became another thing to fight about and attack me about as she'd ease into denial/defensive mode.

But regardless of how hard/easy it is to "get through to her" or get her to see her own issues and work on her own issues and work on the relationship etc… the main thing here is – she's not my freaking spouse, she's my freaking mother!!!!!! At age 27 I'm not supposed to have a relationship with her anymore (other than an annual mother's day greeting card and maybe a once a month phone call to see how she's doing) – a phone call made from my new home with my new family (i.e. husband + children). I'm not supposed to still be living with her and what she did with her life and with her own issues and recovery shouldn't have any affect on my life anymore.

She's not my fking child either so her problems aren't supposed to be my problem or my responsibility. Remember that when it comes to your mother, even if it hurts to even think about it.

ShakyCore,

I can relate. My mom sounds almost like a carbon copy of yours! Last year I was avoiding her because she was being completely dramatic and reactive while trying to extract information about my personal life. At the time she was claiming to have cancer (she doesn't). When I wouldn't cave in to her demands she got her husband to call and lecture me! I hung up on him and then she sent me emails and wrote status updates on her facebook about how rude my behaviour was, completely forgetting she was the one causing it all in the first place. Totally freaking insane.