Help!

I have a 31 year old daughter. She is bulemic and abusing prescription drugs.

At 17 she ran away from home with some guy which created a big bruhaha in our family. Since that time her life has been hectic. We had to bail her out of financial trouble twice.

She has a shopping problem, buying things she has no need for. She is obsessed with her appearance, spending thousands of dollars she does no have on clothes and boxes and boxes of shoes.

She moves all over the country at the drop of a hat. Most of the time chasing some man. Her relationships don't last more than a year. Her jobs don't last more than a year. She ends each job in a turmoil over some misconduct on the part of her employer.

She is unhappy, depressed. Everytime someone in the family has an important event, she creates a big todo about something - anything to gain attention and divert attention from the other person. She must be the center of attention. She blames our reaction to her running away at age 17 as the cause of her problems.

She describes herself as "very sensitive" and therefore won't take criticism. She manipulates everyone. She seems to be in a desperate search to find someone to take care of her.

She argues, fights, blames others, and when confronted with trying to solve her problems, she attacks and belittles others and their problems. The list goes on. I suspect that she has both a Narcissitic Personality Disorder and a Histrionic Personality Disorder.

This all breaks our hearts as we love her so.

We finally had to throw her out of the house because her behavior got so bad, she wouldn't stop using Rx drugs, and I wouldn't let her stay at home without taking urine tests to verify she was not using drugs. She left on the eve that the drug kits were to arrive. She has stolen Rx drugs from us, her grandparents, other family members, her employer and even a dying relative who was on hospice.

She is now living with her grandparents and taking advantage of them. She has gone through thousands of dollars they had saved for her over the years.

As I write this I am in tears. Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Is there somewhere we can get her some help?

I would strongly suggest getting her to see a shrink. however, telling her she needs one will only push her away "again" I suggest possibly making the suggestion to her that You, your Husband etc, family would like to see a therapist so that you can all better your relationship with eachother..this way she thinks its not about her, even though it is.... Take the shrink aside and explain the situation to her/him. Its a form of manipulation on behalf of you for your daughters sake. Maybe it will work though. Then again, she might just manipulate the therapist.

From my clinical experience, I see these behaviors more frequently in Bipolars and/or Borderlines (although they are not unheard of in NPD).

She needs a psychological evaluation desperately.

Instead of family members "bailing her out," someone needs too take a stand. "NO MORE HELP unless you agree to therapy" (or at least an evaluation). Otherwise, what motivation does she have to seek help when the whole family is enabling her to a certain degree?

Other than contacting Dr Phil..... , like Serendipity says, stop bailing her out. Everyone in the family needs to make a pact and stand together on this. Set boundaries and stick with them.

In the meantime, prepare yourself for the possibility that your daughter may actually destroy herself....sorry to be so blunt, don't mean to be. But perhaps seeing it from that point of view could help.

For instance,you may just have to evalute that if her ship goes down, is she going to go down alone, or is she going to take the rest or some of the family members with her.

Dealing with people that make happy and ceremonious events a drama centred around them is an awful thing to be involved in. But it does actually take the family to be involved for it to work. It sounds like there's a lot of emotional enmeshment going on with the extended family that this woman is causing.

If you can separate her behaviour it could be helpful too. If you keep in mind that she actually 'feeds' off the reactions of your family, she was successful with it at 17 (referring to her having caused that bruhaha 14 years ago) and she's been doing it ever since.

She's manipulating all you guys to get involved. If she is HPD/NPD then the prognosis may not be good.

Good luck with it all....

We have tried to get her into see a MD - Psychiatrist to help with the drug addiction and bulemia and their underlying cause. She won't go. Instead she selected a talk therapist who advertises that she uses yoga to solve problems. She has done this several times in the past. When she does, she tells the therapist what the problem is without input from her family and friends. As a result, the therapist has no clue what is really going on. Through this manipulation, she is able to center the therapy on what horrible parents we are and what effects her childhood traumas have had on her life. This will go on for a couple of months and then she quits, citing the expense. We tried to talk directly to the therapist, but she declined to meet with us, citing doctor patient confidentiality. This last time around, much to the therapist's credit, she recommended that my daughter go see a MD- Psychiatrist. So far, that hasn't happened. She has a myriad of excuses.

This is a terrible vicious cycle she repeats over and over again. Appearing to want to get help, making all the outward gestures to appear to get professional help, and then after a short period of time she stops seeing the therapist. In the end nothing changes because she is just doing it to manipulate us and has no real desire to get help.

This last time around, we had originally secured a promise from her grandparents, who are in their seventies, that they would not provide a sanctuary for her when things got rough. We dug our heels in and prepared for the worst, hoping that the end result would be worth the effort and turmoil. But, they gave in after my daughter complained of "not being part of our family." She again was able to manipulate us all. She is using them against us.

We have been living this for fourteen years. By the way, there is no abuse in our family. No physical abuse, sexual abuse or any of that. Reading about the various disorders on this web site, our responsibility for this is limited to spoiling her as a child and possibly loving her too much.

We have all decided that there will be no more financial help. Even the grandparents have agreed to that. We all just don't have any more to give her. She announced yesterday that she is quitting her $60K a year job, which she has had for a little over a year. She will soon be out of work, with tons of bills, and no money except unemployment. This is going to put more stress on her which will deepen the addictive behaviors and make matters worse. If her past behavior is any indication, once signed up for unemployment she will decide that she needs a vacation and will disappear on a trip somewhere. She won't look for work until her unemployment runs out and she will return avowing that she has had some sort of epiphany in her absence, loves us all terribly, wants to make amends and re-establish our relationship and will then ask for financial help while she gets back on her feet. Her grandparents will refuse. She will then probably turn on them accusing them of not caring not wanting to help, just as she did with us then we finally refused to give her money.

It is an inescapable pattern of behavior for her.

And on and on and on. None of us, including her brothers, know what to do to help but watch.