Attempting to Visit Family

[quixote888]

So like most BPD Spouses, she attempts in every way possible to destroy my relationship with my family.

The primary way of doing this is to fly into psychotic rages whenever I say I am visiting my family, even if for a couple of days.

It is mostly an abandonment trigger.

Next month my brother is coming to the US from Australia and I'd like to see him.  In order to do so I have to fly to another city.

When I brought it up, she immediately started crying and said "How can you do this in light of everything I've said about your going out to visit them?  You visit them _all_ the time.  (It's once per year, if that)."  She's being treated currently for alcoholism.  My concern is that if I go, she will drink and go into one of her suicidal rages.

Wondering if anyone had thoughts on how to handle this.  On the one hand, I would like to visit my family, and I can't let her destroy my family.  On the other hand, if I go, it will cause her enormous pain and there will be the consequences of raging and abuse.  I've been having coping issues with her illness, and it's been affecting my ability to work.

My other problem of course is my family who don't understand BPD.  They are deeply alienated by the entire situation.  Their response is of course "Why do you deal with this?"

Any advice would be appreciated.  It's so hard not to hate her and instead to hate the illness.

Q

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[waverider]

Unfortunately you are being held to emotional ransom. This happens because it works.

Does a variation of this occur on smaller issues, or is this a stand alone issue?

To be yourself, and value yourself, it is a pattern you will have to break, or it will keep getting worse and resentment will build.

You do not need to justify this, only to accept that it upsets her but ultimately she has to find her own ways of soothing herself.

If she goes on a drunken and destructive binge, that his her choice and she will have to live with the consequences. If she takes it out on you its time for boundaries and time out. if the consequence of that behavior is you are taking time out then that triggers her abandonment issue further and it becomes a case of does she want to experience abandonment or take it out on you. Again that is her choice.

After a while of sticking to your rights to not be dictated to like this it will subside. If not you will have to question whether you want to live like this. But you will have to live through brinkmanship behavior to break through that boundary.

If you allow yourself to be brow beaten ironically she will loose respect for you for allowing it to happen. pwBPD struggle to respect those they can control. They need someone stronger than themselves to bounce off and provide the boundaries they lack.

I have been through the same over far less issues. It is a hard hard road

[quixote888]

Why do you say it will subside?  It never ends.  She did the same thing with my friends, and now I see all my friends in secret, and say I'm "working".  Any time I show any independence or engage in any "abandoning" activity, she either severely denigrates it or flies into a psychotic state.

My problem is really with coping.  Her last psychotic episode practically crippled me psychologically and I was unable to do any work for a month.  I thought about asking for a three month leave of absence.

Anyway, if I do this, she will take revenge, usually by abusing the children by engaging in her horrific behavior in front of them.  I'm supposed to go on a trip with one of my kids and she is threatening to sabotage that trip if I go.

It's so insanely f-ed up - and of course explaining it to my family is useless.  Why can't you take a couple of days and see your brother and his family, they might not be back in a few years.

The worst is her screaming at me that my family is horrible and that I _shouldn't_ see them because they are so bad.  She barely even knows them, sees them for a few hours maybe once a year.  And then I get these long lectures about my problems with my mother are totally surreal.  She hasn't seen her own family in three years now.

Anyway, I decided to "stay" to protect the kids, I have to give them some kind of normal life, especially since one of them shows BPD traits and I think childhood environment is important to prevent it from becoming the full-blown disease in adulthood.  It's just so incredibly depressing that I can't see my parents in their 80s, and my brother and his children.  I may just fly out for the day, say there's a conference in town or something.  But my mother has no filter, and I would be terrified that the next time they were together she would spill the beans and then the rage would be pretty spectacular.

Also, she's made a lot of progress with the alcohol lately, going into rehab and now getting therapy, drugs, and going 4x/week to group therapy.  If she falls back into alcoholism because of this the negatives would outweigh the benefits.

I think what angers me more than anything is everyone saying that BPD "goes away" or "goes away when she turns 50", I can't tell any difference between now and when she first started to rage nine years ago.  It feels like a false hope, and I feel like the rest of my life will be horrible like this - although it seems more and more like I will have to leave her once the kids are gone.  It would be so much easier to say "sorry I'm going" if there were no kids involved.  But then that's not for another four years and my parents may be dead by then.  My father can barely take care of himself.

Sorry for the long rant, but I needed to unload.

Q