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My mother seemed to present herself in three modes to me growing up.  The reasonable mother, the witch mother, and the hysterical mother. 

Were they multiple personalities?

I ask this because the reasonable mother NEVER referred to the abuse she as witch mommy had unloaded on me (like being beaten by a heavy weight fighter within an inch of your life).  And as I got older and tried to use tough love and broach her about what she had said it would trigger her once again to enter either the witch mother role or the hysterical role and they were terrifying and caused me to go into "freeze" mode once again (fight, flight or freeze). 

Lawson in the uBPD mother book writes about the "turn" -- the shark-like look in the eyes that shows the transition to the unleashing of "annihilating anger". 

So if I brought up the horrifying things said, I triggered the "turn" and was again tasered by the extreme malice or bombed and confused with the hysteria.  Reasonable mother was totally gone.

I hope I am making sense. 

When I grew up I rationalized because the truth was too scary that my dad's drinking made my mother crazed and she would be okay if he stopped. It brought some sense of hope. But the older I got I saw how sick they both were.  And when he was drunk he called her out on her insane need to over-control him and myself and others. 

When your reality was so surreal growing up, trying to grasp its reality at this point is frustrating.

I think I walk on egg shells more often than not from so much toxic conditioning -- tasering.

I think I fear getting close to people because I fear I will trigger a "turn" in them if we reach a certain closeness.  I know this is irrational but I think it has power still.

Hi bethanny,

My SO has an uBPDxw who is primarily queen and waif and can go hermit occasionally too.  I don't think it's a case of multiple personalities but multiple coping/communication styles.  My SO's ex will use all the tools available to her to get what she wants from people. She doesn't know how to simply ask for what she wants or admit she's made a mistake she simply uses what in her mind are the most effective tools to get what she wants.  Does the situation require charm to get what she wants or maybe if she appears fearful that will get her what she wants. 

The all powerful queen would try to dominate, charm, control, convince... .

In a different situation or if the queen couldn't get what she wanted the waif behaviors would appear.

The poor waif would try... .sympathy, guilt, illness, obligation, pity... .

In a different situation of if the waif behaviors didn't work then the hermit appears.

The scared hermit would try... .avoidance, hiding, ignoring, fearfulness... .

I sure can relate to this feeling like multiple personalities though particularly to a child.

Panda39, thanks for responding to this.

I appreciate your take on the resorting to anything and everything that works to manipulate rather than do authentic conflict resolution on the part of the uBPD person.

I've read about transactional analysis and the three basic ego states people operate from: parent, adult and child. There is a crazymaking one to others people drop into called the "pig parent" ego state, which is the child ego state masquerading as the parent, exploiting the authority deference a parent ego state commands but with an absolute narcissism and primitive controllingness of a child.

Both my parents often parented from this state. I was prepared for it more from my father and it didn't confound me.  But with my mother it traumatized me over and over and over again, since I wanted so much to trust her and wanted to deserve the moments of over-attribution with me as trophy daughter, but that meant she was right about the deserved to be exorcised demon daughter I suddenly became as she exploded at me with rage and merciless invalidation.

Instead of mirroring who I was actually and age-wise, I was wildly and unexpectedly infantilized then parentified then infantilized according to her needs and whims.

And my developing to an adult self was an enemy to be annihilated. Stepford daughterdom was the prison.

I want to believe there was sometimes a kind and decent person responding to me.  I don't think I would have been as psychologically damaged as I became without having such inconsistent parenting and without some taste of that. 

My father was consistently indifferent and damaging to me, no question, and there was also his drinking predictably exacerbating his cruelty, but that was not as profoundly crazymaking and confusing for me because of my ongoing understanding of him as emotionally arrested and unempathetic especially with age-appropriateness and children and the degrees of drunkenness. 

With my mother I was seduced into trust and admiration and then was terrorized by a Ms. Hyde personality shift over and over and over. There was a huge continuum of seeming benign and loyal maternal attention at one end to absolute monstrous cruelty.  And there was no normal "arc" in the transitioning.  It shifted like lightning.  Irrational malice or hysteria.

The hardest lesson I learned, too, with dealing with my mother's BPD was that "tough love" from me had absolutely no impact on her.  "Tough love" did not impact what seemed to me like PARANOIA that got triggered when she was challenged. And I wrongly assumed her rage would burn itself out. Not if she didn't get her absolute way. There was no compromise with her.

There seemed a sense of affinity based on convenience and sentimentality and short-lived gratitude, but no real capacity for respect and love, no tolerance for any emotional challenge and real honest feedback no matter what the cost or loss.