Surrounded by BPD- only recently learned about BPD Dad

[ballerina82]

Hi all,

I posted in here long ago about a close friend with BPD and my struggles with her. A different friend lost her battle with BPD, anxiety, and depression and took her own life last year (I didn't know she had BPD until after her death). I started to realize a pattern.

After being in therapy for losing my friend and just life stress in general. I finally brought up my father more, whom I rarely spoke about. He has many BPD characteristics and I only recently came to realize (at age 26) that my dad likely has BPD and my childhood was not only irregular, but traumatic.

Have any of you with a parent or guardian with BPD found yourself drawn to those with BPD or BPD characteristics unknowingly?

I feel it is a need to help and parent others because I've always done that for him.

Thanks! 

[HappyChappy]

Have any of you with a parent or guardian with BPD found yourself drawn to those with BPD or BPD characteristics unknowingly?

I feel it is a need to help and parent others because I've always done that for him.

Thanks!  

Loads of people on this site have. Read around the posts and you'll see. Just as a dog can sence feer, a BPD knows who's best to target. They often go for people with high integraty and honesty. As they know we're more likely to try and help them. More likely to stay, and do the right thing. They can also predict what we will say (i.e. the truth) and hence we're easier to manipulate. Also as children of BPD they often train us to become parents way to young. Off loading their parental responsibility asap.

Now that you've had this realisation, what bothers you the most ? What do you need to know ?

[claudiaduffy]

First off, I am really sorry for your friend's death.   

Second, I have a severe emotionally-allergic reaction to anyone who feels even slightly like they might be BPD, so I run away from them the instant I pick up on it, but I do seem to be drawn to close friendships with people that (I only find out later) have a relative with BPD. Most of my close friends have a significant person in their life with full-blown BPD or NPD characteristics. Heck, I married a guy whose mom is one of the worse cases I've personally interacted with. 

It's really good that you're doing some soul-searching on the need you feel to help and parent others. At one level, it's a kind impulse; but on another level, it so easily leads to enabling abuse, and might be, at its root, a problem with how you see your value in the world and/or a way that you feel the need to control the world. I struggle with these impulses and tendencies, myself.

When I realized that my then-boyfriend's mom was deeply disordered, and that he was mostly unaware of the problem, I had a gigantic difficulty in knowing how to tell him what I saw without being another woman trying to tell him what he should or should not do. I was NOT going to be another parent to him. I was NOT going to be another manipulator in his life. I was NOT going to do his hard work for him, even if he showed that he wanted out of his family's unhealth and wanted help to do so. I WAS going to be a cheerleader for him, but not a crutch for him. Keeping myself from blazing in like a savior was really hard, but it did pay off. My boyfriend did what he needed to do on his own, and we grew in respect for each other in the process. And I grew in my freedom; it was touch and go there for a bit, but refusing to parent my boyfriend helped me to remain steady in my refusal to parent my mom, who is also uBPD.

Now, we're very happily married, and have awesome boundaries in place that keep us from parenting anyone (we don't have kids yet.)

[P.F.Change]

Have any of you with a parent or guardian with BPD found yourself drawn to those with BPD or BPD characteristics unknowingly?

I feel it is a need to help and parent others because I've always done that for him.

Most people gravitate toward relationships where they can continue playing familiar roles. Many members here on this board have found themselves with BPD friends and romantic partners for that very reason. It sounds like you are aware that your learned need to rescue may be attracting people similar to your parent. Understanding that is an important step; the next is to work on learning healthy boundaries and taking care of yourself first.

I learned a lot about boundaries from this workshop: BOUNDARIES: Upholding our values and independence. I also found a lot of things to think about and work on when I read these two:   SELF-AWARE: Are we co-dependent? and TOOLS: Dealing with Enmeshment and Codependence. I hope they are helpful for you, too.

Wishing you peace,

PF

[ballerina82]

Thank you so much everyone! It definitely is surreal coming back to these boards for a whole different person I never really expected or realized had a similar disorder to 2 friends. The two friends (one that died in 2013) and one that is safe from self harm and more stable now both have BPD but they are all very different in how they show/showed it.

My friend that took her own life at 23 had a ton of self-harming behaviors and was never needy, but I felt drawn to her. I am still surprised and confused in some ways that she had BPD but it was a thinking pattern for her that she did not openly share and she isolated herself and kept a distance from us (friends & family), hiding the behaviors until leaving a blog for us to see what she had been doing the past year. I had tried desperately to reach out but she changed her number, emails, everything.

I guess the difference with my dad and my friend that is alive and well is that they trusted me enough to "let me in" aka pull me in and then they kind of clung to me like a life raft. And yeah I was a parent to my dad basically; his emotional support and when we did spend time alone together starting at age 7 he completely checked out except if I was leaving the house. Then he would get sad and guilt me to stay, as well as putting me in the middle of the divorce and screaming at me often about my mom. I blocked most of it out until seeing a psychologist about my friend that committed suicide. The hardest thing now is knowing these behaviors that he still tries to play out and creating boundaries, trying not to feel guilty, and letting him know he's not the victim. I have the most supportive mom that kind of undid any of his damage and she was basically my mom and dad because he was gone for his job mostly. I never understood why she kept a very removed tone and attitude towards him, because everyone loved him and he could be the best and sweetest person, but now I understand she had to because if she let him in at all as a friend he started raging on her out of nowhere. The whole world did and still does think that my dad is the sweetest, kindest, and most helpful man. In anything that goes wrong people feel bad for him. He would bring his resentment and anger towards others to me and my mom and take it out on us, blaming us for not having money or for letting a friend stay with him. It was a weird life, but felt normal until now in many ways. If I told anyone he was mean or screaming at me in the neighborhood they would say "What? NO WAY! he would never do that." The divorce was blamed by everyone on my mom, and her own family took pity on him and kind of pushed her out for a) divorcing and b) leaving my "poor" dad alone. My dad's mother runs his whole life and is a very rigid and intimidating woman. She runs it to the point of looking at his bank statements daily and questioning him about a more expensive meal than usual at a restaurant etc. She would constantly harass him about how expensive I was as a child and she started telling me at about age 10 that my dad did not have money and to look elsewhere for clothes, support, etc. He had a full time job and my mom left everything to him because she only wanted primary custody of me. My psychologist thinks his mom may have BPD characteristics. Anyway, thanks for letting me vent and good to have you all here! 

[HappyChappy]

My psychologist thinks his mom may have BPD characteristics.

There is a genetic link, and the behavior you descibe does back up your psychologist's view.

Sounds like you've had alot to contend with. So how far down the journey are you ? Are you struggleing with anything or do you feel you've delt with the past ?

[Turkish]

My mom recently revealed to me that about 20 years ago, one of her many therapists at the time (she went through seven before she found one with whom she clicked) gave her a book on BPD. She thought at first it was to understand her dad, but my mom said that her T probably was doing this as a gentle way of suggesting my mom had BPD as well. No wonder my mom was so quick to exclaim, "of course she's BPD!" when I shared with her my armchair diagnosis of my Ex. I remember thinking at the time that it was odd. It used to frustrate me that two people who were alike in a lot of ways had little tolerance or empathy for each other. Both were aware of their diagnosed depression issues.

My belief is that my mom was not officially diagnosed because she copes (though if only they knew how horribly on the edge she lives); being low income, DBT therapy was probably not an option.

My mom is a BPD Waif-Hermit. I came to this site due to the breakdown of the r/s with my uBPD partner and mother of my two children. Looking back, I was always attracted to emotionally waifish women. At least I now have clarity to give my son tools to not end up with a version of his mother as I did (though my uBPDx has more intrinsic meanness than my mom). She's been gone 5 months, and finally had a "BPD incident" (inappropriate rage) with our four year old son last week that frightened her enough to reach out to me for feedback. It goes with making children emotionally responsible for their parents' emotions and reactions, something most or all of us here struggled with. I defined Parentification, and she opened up a little about how she was always responsible for her mom's feelings and issues, resulting in what she calls her "lost childhood." I don't look at my childhood as "lost" though it certainly was unconventional. But my Ex had uBPD dad to deal with: abandoning and emotionally distant or unavailable.

[ballerina82]

Turkish- I'm sorry to hear about that struggle with your partner and mom. I'm glad your kids have you and that she's reached out for help. 

My biggest issue now is probably just distancing and creating boundaries in friendships that I had before I did some self-discovery and realized why I was involved in so much "drama." I am married and in an intense doctorate program (psychology ironically) and have some old friends that I now just want to avoid due to their personalities. I'm not saying they are BPD, but there is definitely some dependency and inability to be rejected there. They met through me and are both intense extroverts with a lot of energy. Both of which I'm not. One has been a friend since I was 5 and despite 20 years of me trying to let go she has hung on. The other was married into the family and we were close in undergrad, she could not contain her emotions very well and was dependent to the point of intense anger if I was unable to spend time together. They've both grown up a bit, but when I explain that I am not available because I am busy, they will say how busy they are too (which I pick up on them saying I should make time too). I'm just at a different point in my life and after discovering this about my dad, an alarm tends to go off when any emotionally labile or dependent people come around. Both of them have relationships that move like waves and tend to come around in urgent times of need saying they have no one else, only to be perfectly fine or find a new partner the next week. I've  met some great new friends in my program with more similar interests and less expectations of me and with less interpersonal issues.

Setting boundaries with my dad is a weekly work in progress, sometimes he takes it ok, and other times he gets intense anger at me, or he guilts me with a sad face text. So right now that is what I am dealing with the most. My most intense friendship with someone with BPD has died down significantly to the point of talking daily to only once every couple of weeks, so I feel I have made it over the difficult part of the mountain. It was hard to ease off from that friendship.