BPDFamily.com

My child has been through every therapy available, even DBT.  Her drug use and lying were putting her in danger.  I finally put her in rehab and she lived in a sober living for 3 months.  I really believed she was just an addict. She has been begging to go back to DBT. So, today I read "The Essential Family Guide to Borderline.  I feel so helpless and guilty. The words and the anger that have spewed out of my mouth because I did not understand have been horrible.  How do I mend our relationship?

PRF you are not alone with that feeling. I too have known dispair because of my mistaken/unwise actions and words with my dd23.  The good news is that using the tools bpdfamily have on the site make a difference. I have learned SO much and turned a real corner (and it happened quite swiftly once I got my head around it). Take heart and know that changes you make now are first steps to a more positive future.

I am in a similar position right now. My 22 year old BPD son has not communicated with me for 2 months now. I got so much wrong before through not understanding. I feel I have learned a lot through reading the tools on this board. I want to send an SMS text but don't know how to word it to show a more sympathetic and validating attitude?

Hi prf,

We are glad you are here looking for a way back to a better relationship with your daughter.  Properly parenting a child with traits of this disorder is not intuitive.  The skills and tools that are most affective/needed are "normal" parenting styles and they are affective/needed at the highest degree and frequency which is not "normal".  Also, some of the "normal" parenting styles are noticeably absent from what works with children who suffer with BPD.

Now that you have knowledge of what she is struggling with you are empowered to make things better.  Studying the clinical info to get a better understanding of what drives her behaviors can help us not personalize our kids behaviors and that puts us in a better position to help them and ourselves.  Learning the skills like validation, asking validating questions, SET, and limits and boundaries and putting these into practice can help rebuild the relationships we have with our kids.

We have all made mistakes in parenting our kids. Once you have a better understanding of the disorder and have the skills to communicate with her in a healthy way it would be beneficial to your relationship with your daughter to admit where you made mistakes and apologize to her.  In effect, cleaning the slate to start from a new place with new skills for a different outcome. 

It is so very positive that your daughter wants to go back into DBT.  I hope that there is a way to make this happen.  Would you be open to learning DBT as well?  Modeling the skills you want her to use and speaking the same therapeutic language is very powerful for her healing, your feelings of empowerment to help her, and having a healthy relationship with her.

Is your daughter maintaining her sobriety?  How old is she?

I look forward to your thoughts about these things and learning how I can support you on this journey of healing.   

lbj

Daisy67 - I found texting to be an effective tool to make validating communication because they all you time to be thoughtful as you are messaging (I wrote it, edited it,deleted, tried again). I think they gave me time to get my validations right.

It could be useful to go over your last communication with him and try to identify his emotion at the heart of the issue you were discussing and formulate a validating text (using toolkit) around this. Send it and give it time.

Since I began this technique, my daughter's texts back became noticeably less angry with each reply. Eventually, the anger was gone and we could meet face to face.

This was my experience. Although I know there will be differences in our situations,  I hope my experience will encourage you that texting can work.