Mother with BPD Is Showing Declining Physical Health and Refuses Treatment

[zsc884]

Hi, nice to meet all of you.

For all of my life, my father and my brother and I have struggled with my mother's extremely short temperament, deeply personal rages, fear and sensitivity of abandonment, and most of all, illogical reasoning and extremely painful defensiveness when we try to convince her otherwise. We all strongly believe she has BPD.

I have had many painful and traumatic incidences with her and through psychoeducation, I have finally learned that it is her disorder, and not me at fault. She has told me to go kill myself and that she wouldn't care when I told her that I was depressed and suicidal, has thrown water at me for trying to stop her from abusing my father, thrown textbooks at me for bad grades, lashed out multiple times in public during my childhood, consistently verbally abuses my father and my brother and I for forgetting to do things by blaming us for our actions  - once she reduced my father to tears when he forgot his wallet on a family trip on the claim that it was all his fault and he had intended to do it.
My father and my mother's relationship has suffered a lot, and when I was 8 years old, she would come to me crying, asking me if I wanted them to get a divorce and putting that burden on me. She has often broken down crying to me about their relationship, saying that my father will kill himself if she leaves and she feels trapped, but I never see that sentiment from my father's end, and my father is usually the one taking a ton of verbal abuse from her.

Being around her, I constantly feel anxious, extremely drained, and lonely - because even my great friends and boyfriend can't offer the constant support I need when I am in her presence. Just hearing her footsteps puts me in an anxious place. I hate being at the whim of her every emotion, and as I grow older, it grows more and more disturbing to me how childlike she acts. She has the emotions of a child - so excitable and giggly when happy, but so illogical and nasty when upset.

To my knowledge, she has never received full treatment. During my adolescence, I was in therapy for severe depression and suicidal ideation. My mother had thrown a book at me during the time I was seeing this therapist, and my father shoved me at this time as well. I had told my therapist about this, and my mother upon hearing this, immediately took the therapist away from me and refused to let me see her again. Also at that time, my mom had two sessions with the same therapist and left, saying the therapist was crazy and didn't know anything.

I am now a lot older now (24) and have received intensive therapy and have actually moved out of the country that my mother lives in. When I was trying to gain my independence, she constantly threatened to take my money away and bankrupt me if I didn't do what she wanted to do. Now, I am financially independent.

I am writing on this board because I have come to visit my family and it seems to me that it is getting worse. My mother is controlled by her anxiety. We live in California, and during the summer it is 80 degrees Farenheit outside. She has to keep the house constantly at 75 degrees Farenheit inside or else she thinks she will get sick. She refuses to open the windows. We recently took a trip where it was 75-78 degrees outside, and she wore a long sleeved shirt underneath, long pants, a short sleeved shirt on top and a scarf. She will only drink hot water, because she is afraid of drinking cold water and says it will get her sick. She has also gotten frequent cluster migraines and sleeps a lot and gets nosebleeds - my suspicion is all of the heat that she puts herself is dehydrating her. To top it off, she is of course, very irritable and highly prone to rages when she gets these migraines.

Every time I try to point out that she may be overheating herself, she refuses and becomes very rude and blunt to me. During our family trip, she cried because she was hungry and I told her that we didn't want to go to the first cafe she had selected for breakfast. My brother and my father are extremely quiet around her. She keeps trying to interact with my brother but he barely interacts with her. My relationship with my mother is the worst because I will tell her when she is acting childish. She had yelled at our hostess yesterday to accommodate our needs because she was stressed, and when I told her that she cannot treat people that way, she told me, well, it works. I think this is the crux of the problem, that she has been able to bully her way into keeping this coping mechanism.

However, she has just stopped working (I have heard her yell at her coworkers before when she was working), and I fear that the disorder is impeding her. My big concern is that my father and brother are too scared to say anything, so they will continue to suffer in her abuse and in their anxiety. I also am worried that her anxieties and her constant migraines may affect her health.

So my questions would be:
a) How can I get her to go into treatment without her raging at me?
b) What can I do to support myself in this time at home? I feel very anxious around her and it becomes a cycle, because I withdraw and then it makes her more prone to rages.

Thanks for reading. Sorry it is so long - this is the first time I have ever typed it out.

[Turkish]

Your check will come soon, but how long do you foresee living with her?

I'd suggest that you may be taking on burdens for which others are solely responsible.

Your mother's quirks about temperature are her responsibility.  As are her relationships with her co-workers, and also her/your family. 

The things that are hard to deal with are that you have likely stepped on to do these things for so long,  and the past abuse maybe reinforced your role,  on that you were,  and are,  put into the position of being responsible for not only her behaviors,  but also that of your brother and your father, despite them being independent entities,  responsible for themselves.  This is a burden no one should bear alone.