BPDFamily.com

I think my mom has BPD, a friend just mentioned to me that she might have it just based on how she treats me. Growing up when something bad happened in the house, my mother would always blame it on me and ingrained in my mind that "it was my fault" for her anger, depression, emotional moodswings. I finally got a job (just graduated undergrad) and I am trying to move out. Only thing is my mother is making this extremely tough, telling me i should just work at starbucks, degrading my job, telling me I am making an awful decision... .all cause she wants to continue to have control over me, to limit who I can talk to and where I can go in life. A mother should be so excited for their daughter to finally get a job offer after intense research and applying. I purchased the ticket yesterday to move to this other state for my job, and now today my mother is crying even though yesterday she was yelling at me making jokes about how maybe i should look in California after all of this work. Its completely degrading. I am 22, and yet she is so emotionally abusive to me and then the next day is like so amazing. It is so hard to deal with, like I am walking on eggshells. I am terrified of what she will do the next week before I leave. I haven't even told her when I will leave, cause I don't want to deal with the extreme happiness or the blaming/guilt/shame she will play. Help? Also I didnt really know how to describe everything well enough to understand her BPD, but I need to figure out an escape plan and how to handle communication with her when I leave in a healthy way.

Hi kollarit   

it certainly sounds like your mom has BPD traits. What kind of job did you get? yes, the flipping back and forth behavior makes you feel like you're going nuts sometimes.  But it's not you and it's NOT your fault. Congratulations on all the hard work you've done to earn your degree! My guess is you're really looking forward to moving.  Good for you for taking care of yourself. I'm sorry you have to deal with this kind of treatment from your mother. It's such a shame and so hard for kids being raised by parents with mental disorders. When will you be leaving? Will she be living alone when you leave?

So glad you found this group of wonderful supporters!

I went through something similar. When it was coming time for my mom's little wa if child to leave the nest,.my mom started having a breakdown. This was late in my senior year of high school. Though I graduated at 18, she convinced me that I couldn't move out because I wasn't a legal adult (I was working, and rarely home that summer anyway). That was the last summer she ever smacked me, too.

A person with BPD has lousy personal boundaries, and can see a loved one as an extension of themselves. In a parent-child relationship a certain amount of this may be normal, but healthy detachment and development of children into independent entities should start in the toddler years. A pwBPD will often resist this, and it can be very damaging to a developing little person. A pwBPD will fight differentiation. A child should not have to fight it, though parent-child conflicts are normal, especially in the teen years.

The good news is that you are aware of things, and taking steps to break out of an unhealthy dynamic. She splitting you good/bad is certainly confusing. My mom did that, and I unfortunately carried that over well into adulthood.

When I moved out, I went very low contact. I relished the freedom. The summer after I left, she had a major breakdown. I went back to help (I was living 60 miles away at the time), but I went back to my life and left her to sort it out on her own in therapy.

I'm really sorry that she is belittling your degree like that. 25 years after having left her home, my mom was still belittling my life choices, encouraging me to abandon my career and go back to school. She was visiting me. I opened up a spreadsheet and showed her my retirement account balance and her jaw dropped. Then she shut her mouth. I didn't say anything other than, "I think I'm on the right track, mom."

I had previously shown her a paper on which I was the less author, published in a reference book. I might as weall have shown my baby at the time for all of the reaction I got. Ditto for a few other significant accomolishments. So I stopped trying. Looking for validation from an invalidating person is casting us in the Sisyphian role.

You're about to break free. Distance, and the hang up button on the phone are natural boundaries. Distance, after the initial breakdown from my mom, actually helped our relationship, though it took some time.