Relationship with your family.

I tend to write novels here, so I'll try to keep it short.

I'll never know exactly what was wrong with my mother, but she was some kind of a clingy drama queen during her first marriage, when my 4 half siblings were born. Her first husband had been an alcoholic and they divorced when the kids were very young. Then my mother met my father, and they had me. My father was a musician, and he hated my half siblings. According to them, he often beat them physically, molested them, or verbally abused them. They've been known to crank up the drama, though, so I don't really know how true any of that actually is, I was a baby then, so don't remember. So, my half siblings were thrown into the trash while I was put on a pedestal as the baby princess from the new marriage. I'm sure you can imagine how well that turned out.

My half siblings at first were very kind to me, and often helped me get away from my mother, who was, by the time I was probably 5 or so, on disability with a disease that was killing her slowly. She really did nothing but lie in bed and had severe depression. As a result, I was largely neglected during the critical years of elementary school. I ended up bullied a lot for not being dressed properly, not having my hair washed or brushed, etc. My mother wasn't bothered instilling good habits in me from an early age, and I was a space cadet during my earliest years of elementary school anyway, so I was not at all self aware. I actually think I might have been mildly autistic up until about 4th grade, when I think back on it, because of my strange behavior and inability to focus in class.

Anyway, anyway - eventually, after trying to play nice, the other shoe dropped, and my half siblings made sure I knew how much they hated me for being the little baby princess while they had been left to rot, back when I was too young to have even been aware of what was going on. I tried to have a good relationship with them through my 20s, but I could always feel the underlying resentment. They really hated me through my teenage years (I wasn't allowed to act like a teenager, and was criticized constantly for being "selfish" or other nitpicks they came up with just to take their resentment out on me), but kept it under control....sort of.

Eventually, my brother just stopped talking to me, and would no longer reply to any attempts by me to try to contact him (without ever telling me why). One of my sisters is now dead. The other two are a few of the most evil people I've ever met, to date. My sister, who was supposedly the sensible one, invited my son and me to live in her home after I had a nervous breakdown due to my career, and shortly after my mother finally died. I think that delivered the ultimate triggering of the feelings of abandonment in me, and I really thought I was going nuts (this was long before I ever knew I might have had BPD). She welcomed us with open arms, but it was short lived, as she made our lives a living hell within the first 4 months. I found a way to escape, trying to find work elsewhere (because she was constantly threatening to kick us out on the street), and met my husband - thankfully! It meant that I had to leave my son to try to get myself together again, and I left a huge amount of my savings for my sister to care for him while I was trying to find work and learn another language. She gladly took the money, and kicked my son out 4 months after I left, leaving him with only a fraction of the money to survive on. He was 15, and had nowhere to go but back across the country to where we had come from. I, by then, was living in another country, looking for work.

So all of that is a round about way of saying that I have no relationship with my family at all now. I don't know what would happen to me if something should happen to my husband, because I have nowhere to go. This is a serious problem as far as my abandonment fears go. I obsess over it, and there is nothing that can be done because we have very little money, and barely a savings. Things don't look good, though my husband loves me, and I love him and we support each other as best we can. Presently, my son is also here with us now, working and trying his best in this crappy economy. I'm just glad he's here. He is very secretive, so our relationship is close only on a very surface level. I'm ok with that for now, though it makes me sad.

I think always fearing that my mother was going to die from a very young age (I'd literally hear her choking and gagging in the next room because of her disease when I was like 6 years old and feeling powerless) contributed greatly to my BPD. My father was not in my life except very occasional visits on birthdays or Christmas.

I just want to make sure anyone reading my posts knows that I'm not dumping this all on any of you for pity. Now that I've found this forum, I'm finally just purging all over the place. Trying to get it out of my system. I'm really grateful to have a place like this in which to be able to do this, and hope that you'll all understand. I'm here to learn to control my BPD and finally heal so that I'll never feel the urge to overreact when triggered again. I guess I wasn't able to keep this reply short after all. Sorry about that.