My son is exactly like his BPD father... What can I do to help him?~

[How to communicate after a contentious divorce...]

My husband of 10 years is UPWBPD.  I am fairly certain that his mother also has BPD.  She has a difficult backstory me was then abusive to my husband while raising him.  My husband and I now have 4 children, and I spent the first 8 years of our marriage thinking I was just terrible at being an wife, mother, and anything else my husband observed me doing.  I finally found stop walking on eggshells, and everything suddenly made sense:). Over the past few years, I am beginning to see tendencies in my 4 year old son, and want to help in any way I can to steer him away from developing BPD.  Our other three seem to have no struggles at this point, but my 4 year old is very afraid of abandonment, cries when left with a babysitter or going to Sunday school without mom or dad, etc.  he is always asking about death and what if mom and dad die?  Cannot comprehend that he was ever a baby, and thinks when he grows up to be a dad he will have all of my husbands clothes and will change his name to my husbands name.  He always wants to "be" other people instead of himself.  Lately he is extremely explosive with anger, and is very black and white.  At age 4 he yells "I hate you" at least 10 times a day to a member of our family.  Tonight he told me he wanted me to die because I asked him to pick up his shirt from the floor.  I know personality disorders are diagnosed over pro-longed periods of time, and I'm hoping he is simply modeling his dad's behavior, but it appears to me that he really feels all of these things for himself and I am afraid he is just a peeps in tiny form.  What can I do to help from the start, to help him learn positive behaviors instead of get into negative patterns?  Especially when my husband really resonates with him and makes it a point to allow him to be himself, and tells me all the time how I should never punish him for just being who he is.  He tells me that I should know a 4 year old doesn't really mean that they want their mom to die, but that he just says things he doesn't mean (just like BPDH) and so I should just completely ignore it rather then telling him it's not ok to say those things in our home,  (also, he hears his dad say things that " aren't allowed in our home" so it has to be confusing for him.

[raggedy_ann]

My husband of 10 years is UPWBPD.  I am fairly certain that his mother also has BPD.  She has a difficult backstory me was then abusive to my husband while raising him.  My husband and I now have 4 children, and I spent the first 8 years of our marriage thinking I was just terrible at being an wife, mother, and anything else my husband observed me doing.  I finally found stop walking on eggshells, and everything suddenly made sense:). Over the past few years, I am beginning to see tendencies in my 4 year old son, and want to help in any way I can to steer him away from developing BPD.  Our other three seem to have no struggles at this point, but my 4 year old is very afraid of abandonment, cries when left with a babysitter or going to Sunday school without mom or dad, etc.  he is always asking about death and what if mom and dad die?  Cannot comprehend that he was ever a baby, and thinks when he grows up to be a dad he will have all of my husbands clothes and will change his name to my husbands name.  He always wants to "be" other people instead of himself.  Lately he is extremely explosive with anger, and is very black and white.  At age 4 he yells "I hate you" at least 10 times a day to a member of our family.  Tonight he told me he wanted me to die because I asked him to pick up his shirt from the floor.  I know personality disorders are diagnosed over pro-longed periods of time, and I'm hoping he is simply modeling his dad's behavior, but it appears to me that he really feels all of these things for himself and I am afraid he is just a peeps in tiny form.  What can I do to help from the start, to help him learn positive behaviors instead of get into negative patterns?  Especially when my husband really resonates with him and makes it a point to allow him to be himself, and tells me all the time how I should never punish him for just being who he is.  He tells me that I should know a 4 year old doesn't really mean that they want their mom to die, but that he just says things he doesn't mean (just like BPDH) and so I should just completely ignore it rather then telling him it's not ok to say those things in our home,  (also, he hears his dad say things that " aren't allowed in our home" so it has to be confusing for him.

[LilMe]

Raggedy_Ann-

I am sorry you are dealing with this in your son.  I know how frustrating it can be, as a mother of many children myself.  I have found that the tools on this site (on the right side of this page ----> work very well with children.  Dealing with our BPD is much like dealing with a toddler!  Validation really works well with children who are having extreme emotions.

I would also suggest finding a good counselor to help with these issues.  I have a daughter who is grown now who had many of the traits you mention with your son when she was young.  Being ignorant and overwhelmed, I was not able to properly deal with it and she is having a hard time as an adult (drug addiction, relationship problems, etc).  The one thing I would have done differently was get outside help!

Best wishes to you and your son!  Keep us posted on how things are going.  It would be helpful to us all.

[livednlearned]

Hi Raggedy_Ann,

It may also help to read up on the Highly Sensitive Child. Looking back, I realize my son has a sensitive genotype. Researchers refer to these kids as "orchids," different in temperament than "dandelions," who are more emotionally resilient. I had to drastically change my parenting strategies in order to support my son. Lesson 5 to the right has a lot of good material on Raising Emotionally Resilient Kids, and I agree with LilMe, read everything you can about validation. It turned things around for my son and I'm in the process of trying to teach him how to advocate for himself. He is so sensitive to stimuli, and I worried that being sensitive would make things worse for him, so tried (and failed) to get him to be tougher. Instead, I've had to learn to validate how he feels and it has been profound the change in him. He used to feel small scratches like they were major gashes of epic proportions, and I now validate that to him, he really does feel that way. He's also very triggered by sounds that other people don't even notice, like the sounds of people eating or crinkly wrappers. There are some theories that Highly Sensitive People can develop BPD because their intensely felt emotions are so invalidated by the other 80 percent of the population that aren't as sensitive to the same environment.

It takes a lot of patience. For example, when your 4 year old is yelling "I hate you," your response might be, "You must feel so angry right now. Did something happen to make you feel upset?"

I also encourage you to read Dr. Craig Childress's work on child rearing kids because it's much more attuned to sensitive kids. Many of us were raised according to behavioral development theories like time outs and punishing bad behavior, and Childress demonstrates how these parenting approaches can worsen the very behavior they're intended to correct. Perhaps behaviorism works with "dandelions," but they are toxic to an "orchid."

[Lou12]

I have a 5 year old boy that has very disordered thinking. I have traits of BPD myself but certainly no where near a diagnosis. I often wonder if he has picked up my traits. I have considered possible autism spectrum (if so he would be very low on spectrum). What worked for me was positive parenting. He has massively improved. His school have seen a huge improvement to. Hope that may help.

Positive parenting techniques can be found on the Internet