elderly mum has BPD, I want to support her without sacrificing my mental health

[GinTea]

Hi, I’m hoping I can get some reflections from people who might have been through or are going through a similar situation to me. My mother is 83. Although she is quite active she is getting to the age where she is a starting to become physically vulnerable, she is also a lot more mentally vulnerable than she used to be. I have a very strong instinct to be available to her and support her and this is what I have done - for my whole life. I am 42 and in the last three weeks for the first time I have taken a break from contact with my mother. I took this break because a dear friend passed away and she had no capacity to empathise or be sensitive in any way to my grief. My raw vulnerability gave me clarity. I accept her ongoing abuse, I say yes to it in order to be there for her. I put her first all the time. Our relationship has been flipped ever since I was a child - I was her parent. But in that moment I saw very clearly that no one should be treated in the way she was treating me.  So I drew a boundary and said I couldn’t be in contact for a while. I felt incredibly guilty and worried that she might do herself harm, but thankfully the guilt did ease off and I know that she is ok. In this last few weeks I have felt better than I have felt in years. And now I can see how abusive and confusing her behaviour still is even now, on top of the trauma of growing up with her as an abusive care giver. I actually don’t feel like I want to be in contact with her again, which surprises me and makes me a little afraid. I know I can’t go back to the relationship as it was and allow myself to be pulled back into a dynamic where my boundaries are not respected and I am not respected and where all of my attention energy and preocuparon is centred around her. So my question is, is anyone else here having to navigate the elderly, end of life years supporting  a parent who has been and still is abusive? 

[Methuen]

Hi GinTea,
Welcome.  There are quite a number of members here who like you, have to navigate an elderly parent with BPD.  Some of us still support our parent, some are LC, and some are NC.  Everybody has to find their own best path through this.  I had to step back from the level of care and time I was spending on my mom because it "too much" for me, and it made me unwell and miserable.  I came out of retirement and went back to work, and my H took over taking her to appointments and buying her groceries.  He's a gem to do this, but doesn't take any   from her.  He's also a star at playing "stupid" when she expects him to read her mind, and he holds pretty solid boundaries.  I see her for an hour about once or twice a week at most.  He does the heavy lifting.  There is no other family.

And now I can see how abusive and confusing her behaviour still is even now, on top of the trauma of growing up with her as an abusive care giver. I actually don’t feel like I want to be in contact with her again, which surprises me and makes me a little afraid. I know I can’t go back to the relationship as it was and allow myself to be pulled back into a dynamic where my boundaries are not respected and I am not respected and where all of my attention energy and preocuparon is centred around her.

Right.  I get it.  You are the one that has to change to keep yourself "well". When it comes to my mom, I try to be a very small target.  What I mean by this is I don't talk about anything of importance with her.  I don't declare my thoughts or feelings or frustrations about her behaviors with her. It's just pointless to communicate that stuff because they don't have the emotional intelligence to hear it, process it, and change. Declaring my frustrations would be pointless and would result in her twisting and flipping what I was saying so that I would become the target.  I have a ton of boundaries now, but I enforce them with actions, not words.  For example, when I get a flurry of texts, I just ignore them.  But I've never told her I'm going to ignore such texts.  I simply don't answer them.  I've never declared anything to her.  For me, that's the safe way to approach my changes.  I am conflict avoidant.  I've changed, but I haven't told her what I'm doing or why.  I just do it, and give her plenty of time to adjust and figure it out.  It hasn't been easy, but incredibly, she has made some adjustments, even as she continues to worsen with her aging.  One reason it has met with a degree of success is because my H stepped in to help me out.  She has also found and manipulated other "friends" into being a caretaker for her.  I'm pretty sure it wears on them.  But they have to set their own boundaries.  She is 87.

I'm sure others will chime in here.  If you have specific questions or examples, we may be able to be more helpful.  Let us know how we can best help.

[Notwendy]

Hello and welcome. I also have an elderly BPD mother and the more contact I have with her, the more I realize how impaired she is. It's also a balancing act between helping and also having boundaries. Her emotional needs are huge. It takes village - a team of medical providers and caregivers- and a constant turn over of them because she will paint them black and dismiss them, or they decide to not tolerate her emotionally and verbally abusive behavior. The paradox is that as much as she needs people for assistance- she also is abusive to them.

Her relationship with me is need based. She isn't "motherly" or affectionate. Similar to you, our relationship has been flipped since my early adolescence. She's been verbally and emotionally abusive to close family members- and to her children. We grew up being afraid of her.

I naively stepped in to try to assist my parents when my father became ill in his elder years. They were so abusive, I had to have boundaries. After my father passed, my BPD mother was the one to distance herself from me, but she also wanted a relationship with my children and realized she had to at least appear to be interested in me as well. One of her most damaging behaviors is that she lies- so much that I am not able to trust in anything she tells me and she's manipulative. A relationship isn't possible with this situation. I have spent more time helping her recently, as she has age related needs but I have no expectations of her part in a relationship.

My mother is very emotionally unstable and while "legally competent"- she's not able to manage even daily tasks. We had household help, and my father and us kids,  when we were old enough did these for her. After we kids grew and left home, my father took on most of the tasks. He was her caregiver. We didn't understand the extent of this as the main goal was to have her appear "normal" so he didn't let on and they both maintained the illusion of her competence. Although he left my mother a solid financial cushion, she has mismanaged it after he passed.

She took out a home equity loan on the house that was paid for and got herself into a situation where she was not able to pay it back. We (her family) moved her to assisted living, sold the house and the car she kept ( but didn't drive). All proceeds from these sales went into her bank account. We had hoped she would manage with the level of care in assisted living. She has not managed this well.

I don't have a good answer to how to help other than to do what you are willing to do, but that it may not be perceived, and accept the feeling that whatever you do, it doesn't feel like "enough".

[GinTea]

Hi Methuen, thanks for responding and for welcoming me. It helps to hear how you’ve been managing the situation with your elderly mother. Also how you’ve managed the boundaries. I have instinctively been doing something similar. Putting up boundaries in terms of my actions but not addressing her behaviour or my frustrations as this has proved pointless, as you highlight. I think there probably are specific questions which I may want to ask, but at the moment I am still coming to terms with the extent of the abusive behaviour I have tolerated. I have been so wrapped up in the idea of my mother as a vulnerable person, constantly putting her needs and wants above mine, excusing everything she does because she’s not doing it on purpose.. that I have denied a large part of the actual impact her behaviour has had on me historically and continues to have on me today. So hearing other people’s reflections of their own experiences in a similar situation is helpful to affirm my position. After moments of clarity in the past I have  reverted to a position of buying into her gaslighting that I am a terrible person if I don’t do what she wants. This time I truly am ready to see the situation for what it is, but I am also finding it very hard at times to come to terms with things as they are, because of the pain and grief Involved and because I have to make peace with the time I have already spent putting her at the centre of my life. It feels like a I have to plant my feet very firmly on the ground not to get drawn back into a fictional world where she is fine, our relationship is good and everything is wrong with me.

[GinTea]

Hi Notwendy, thanks for your reply to my post. I really appreciate you sharing your experiences with me. At the moment even justifying my right to have my feelings in response to her and my right to assert my boundaries in response to her is like starting to climb a huge mountain. I am realising how much I have subjugated my need to live my own life in favour of trying to meet her needs. Which has been a thankless task, as you say, no matter what I do, it’s never enough. Reading about your mother’s treatment of those who tried to assist her was also very helpful as there is a strong mirror to my mother’s behaviour there. Others reflections which affirm my reality are very very helpful to me at the moment. Because I feel so easily pulled back to a place where I believe I am wrong and there is nothing wrong with her. The fiction which she created in which I am the cause of all her problems and the only one responsible for fixing them. I know I have to come to terms with this first before I make practical decisions about assisting her in old age.

[TelHill]

Hello GinTea,

I was a pt live-in care giver to my elderly bpd mom (85 at that time) and enabler dad for a few years. They had major illness/extended hospitalizations almost at the same time.  They were healthy and independent though a little slow prior to that.  It was shocking to see their quick decline.   I kept my home and went back and forth as I could. My brother said he would help as he could.

My parents started a campaign to have me abandon my home. My father wanted me to sign over my home to my niece so she could take care of me in my old age. (I was recently divorced and had no children.)  I refused so my mom started a campaign to have me sell my home because it was a lot of work and to move in with them full-time. I also refused.

My mother was enraged the entire time I was with them. She emotionally abused me, stole some of my belongings, would command me to stay when I told her I was going out, ridiculed me. She wanted to be joined to hip to me!  She was frightening when I was living with them as a minor. She was off the rails now. I assume she was angry about her sudden loss of independence and hospitalizations. She took them out on me. I suspect she had observed my behavior as an adult for the first time (I had left home to attend college at 18 and never returned) and figured out how to manipulate and dominate me to get free help.

My brother reneged on his promise. My father and brother didn't see that mom had mental health issues when I pressed for help from them. This meant to me they wanted me to accept the brunt of her rage.   I started to develop a deep depression. On top of that, I had developed a foot infection. I cut my foot when I was cleaning my own deck and never took care of cleaning the wound properly. A toenail was removed. I had to stay off my feet and on antibiotics for three weeks.  My podiatrist warned me to take care of my own health first. I left my parents home entirely, went very low contact with them and no contact with my brother.  

I had had boundaries when I began to live part-time with them. I abandoned them as she slowly manipulated and terrified me.  

I was a little naive and upset when I decided to divorce my long-term npd husband. That's why I didn't think out the consequences of this new arrangement. I am usually a logical person who can think of most possible paths and their outcomes. I'm a software engineer. That's a big part of the job.

Many elderly live longer than in the past though the quality of life tends to degrade as people age into their late 80s and beyond. It's very likely that your mother would be totally dependent on you due to poor physical health and cognitive issues.   She may depend on you to use the restroom, take a shower, cook for her. It could be unsafe for her to be alone ever.  That means you do not leave the home unless you can get someone to watch her for a few hours. Being bpd, she will take out her anger at this on you.

I don't know if this helps -- you may have decided to have outside assistance for her or move her to a nursing home.  Be thoroughly prepared if mom's plan for aging in place is you and you say yes.

[So Stressed]

I was the only family member near to my BPD mom for almost 20 years.  Her BPD escalated as she aged, and I wasn't even really aware that it was BPD.  I just thought she was a difficult person and a bully. For a lifetime, if I didn't do exactly what she wanted, she made my life difficult.

As she aged, she became more abusive and she would have these episodes or spells when her anger was right out of control and then she wouldn't seem to remember it afterward, or else she was gaslighting and denied what happened. It was really crazy making, and when this started to happen, I sought help from a therapist to deal with her. What I regret is that I didn't call an ambulance the first time she had one of those psychotic spells because I learned through my own therapy that she probably has bpd and did all her life, and it just got more prominent as she aged. I also became more aware because I was living closer and seeing more of her.

I kept trying to get her assessed so that we could get some care for her, but she wasn't interested in any care unless it came from me, so she wouldn't get assessed.

Now, my sibling has moved her across 2 states and put her in an assisted living facility that is not somewhere that I think she will thrive.  While she needed more care than I could give and she was abusive to me, this doesn't seem to have solved much. My Mom was lying to my sibling about me and others around her, and so my sibling does not have any idea about BPD. My sibling and Mom moved her as a punishment to me for not doing exactly as I was told, which was hurtful, and I do not think that Mom will be happy where she is.  I guess that is not my problem, as it was their decision and my sibling will probably learn about the BPD over time although sibling is golden, so maybe not?

I am now left looking back at the craziness that was my life for the last almost 20 years and wondering, "What just happened?"

[TelHill]

Hello again GinTea,

Sorry if I came across as overly dramatic in my post. I had a terrible experience care giving my bpd mom. It was one of the worst decisions I made. I hope you make the best decision for yourself!

So Stressed, Sorry that happened to you. I am 60 and had first heard of BPD 25 years ago from a therapist. I had been in therapy off and on starting in college and it was centered on my mother's horrible treatment of me.  Not one of my therapists before this had guessed what was wrong with her.  

I know we all want the best for our mother's despite the lopsided relationship we've had with them. Unless this asl has quality of care issues, it may be just the place for her.   Many adult children simply make placements and never visit. Maybe your sibling is the same.