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What still goads me is the way BPD and Narks expertly hide their abuse. My BPDm would pick holes in my friends poor grammar, spelling or swearing. Being dyslexic my BPDm convinced me I would fail at everything until I learnt to spell.  I now realise, it’s a very effective way of undermining people. At work I remeber a boardroom meeting, where a fellow Direct undermined my arguemnt because there were spelling mistakes. My CEO at the time, said "You let him get you rattled. That's when you lose the argument." In fact a hatred of company polotics is what led me to set up my own business.

I still to this day, equate snobs or people that get uppity about swearing as hypocritical. I mean Shakespeare and Chaucer had a liberal use of the swear word. It’s the language of the people. Sometimes there is no better word, especially when discussing some of the abuse we had.  I realised as a child that even thought my friends had tattoos, swore, sniffed glue (she didn’t know that bit) they were gooder people (ignore the grammar)  . They were human, she wasn’t. They were loyal and full of love, she was neither.

I have to say in the UK forums they are strict on abuse, but relaxed about expletives. But my BPD could abuse you all day long without ever using an expletive or splitting an infinitive. To me this constant subtle abuse, that leaves no marks, that can never be pinned down as abuse is the omnipresent pressure they excerpt. How do you combat that ? If you ever take exception you get “that’s not what I meant” “don’t be so sensitive”. So you have to rise above these comment, yet the comment work. I guess that's why lawyers and Poloticians learn these techinques.

There’s something honest about swearing. I counted 5 black eyes prior to someone commenting, then visible bruises stopped. But to be honest, I preferred visible bruises over untouchable abuse.  Invisable abuse robs you of the truth, of any hope of justice. I know the solution is walk away from it or rise above it. But doesn't that just push the problem onto someone else ?  It would be great to nail the odd BPD in court. I think my problen is I've always been saving someone, protecting someone and I find it difficult to let injustice go. Anyone got any tips ? And don't say become a lawyer  .

Hi HappyChappy,

Thanks for this post, I think you raise some very good points. This silent sneaky abuse can be just as bad or even worse than the 'big' abuse because all these little jibes add up to one constant massive blow to our self-esteem and self-worth. Your BPD mom was probably well aware of that and among other things this behavior probably helped her control and manipulate you and keep you down.


Exactly! My uBPD sister did/does something similar. Before I came along she was the highest educated one and acted like a snob and was always pointing out the supposed spelling and grammar mistakes of the other family members. In reality however, her own spelling and grammar really isn't that great and some of the mistakes she pointed out weren't mistakes at all. She found it a lot harder to do this with me though because I got a higher education but she still to this day makes remarks about the spelling and grammar of my other sister in particular.


I unfortunately experienced this too. My mother subjected me to emotional and psychological abuse without using expletives. When I would get angry with her and try to resist she immediately would assume an extreme victim role (because I was supposedly hurting her), pretend like she didn't know what I was talking about or justify her behavior. Difficult to combat indeed but now that I'm an adult and have learned about BPD I'm getting better able to deal with this behavior. When you ask how do yo combat that, do you mean how do you combat the negativity internally in your own mind or how do you verbally combat your mother? I keep reminding myself that I should drastically lower my expectations of my mother and shouldn't take anything she says or does seriously because it's only a reflection of all the chaos and negativity inside of her and says nothing about who I really am. No matter if she acknowledges her bad behavior or not, I change my behavior towards her whenever she misbehaves so she's aware that there are consequences.


In court she would probably put on another mask and have everybody thinking you were to blame for everything  Letting go of injustice is difficult, especially when it concerns our parents who 'should' have loved and protected us. But even if you would get your day in court with her, would it really change anything or get you your childhood back? Odds are that she probably still wouldn't fully or genuinely acknowledge how she has hurt you. It's very frustrating, I find that too, but maybe it's better for your own sake to try and let certain things go and instead work on the things you can change. It's definitely unfair, but that unfortunately is the way it is for us children of BPD parents.