BPDFamily.com

It seems like almost everything I ever find to read about BPD is focused on women... BPD girlfriends, BPD mothers, etc. I have found it rather difficult to find information and resources about having a BPD father, or about BPD in men in general. When I do find something about BPD men, it has always been from the angle of dating a BPD man. I feel like growing up as a girl with a BPD father had certain aspects to it that may be a little different from other situations and gender combinations, but I'm not really sure since there is so little information on it. I have even wondered if my childhood experiences may have given me some PD traits, myself, but again there seems to be very little information on how it would affect you if you grew up with a BPD father, as opposed to a BPD mother. My mother seems much more NPD, she is very high-functioning and very skilled at manipulation.

Well my father was the opposite. He was always very low-functioning and could hardly handle life if he was by himself. He had intense angry outbursts that seemed to come from nowhere and could become very violent, but then just as quickly as it came on, it would dissipate, and then he would act worried that we (his children) didn't like him anymore. But his apologies were always along the lines of... "You shouldn't have made me mad, now I feel bad about what happened." No real personal responsibility. He could become very easily paranoid and always seemed to think others were out to get him, it could be anyone or everyone. This would send him into rages or lead to him doing/saying some pretty crazy things. It also seemed like he was in a perpetual mid-life crisis 24/7. He would go from different hobbies very fast, getting very excited but then quickly losing interest, nothing could ever make him feel right. He was extremely controlling and could not handle being challenged in any way without losing his mind. He once even threatened to kill himself just because my mother wanted to try a separation, and this was even though he had acted like he hated her guts. It made no sense.

Now what I feel like may have been unique due to our genders, is that my father also had extremely warped ideas about love. He didn't seem to even understand that there were different types of love, some not appropriate with certain people. Often times he made it clear that he felt "in love" with me, and this lead to abuse. Just as easily, though, he would respond to me like he would a lover and him having BPD, in that he would suddenly hate me and rage about how I was "just like" my mother. Sometimes it honestly seemed like he could not tell me apart from my mother, too much projection and delusion going on, or something.

Eventually his drinking got so out of control and my mother did divorce him. His entire life spiraled out of control, he became totally unstable. He hooked up with the first woman who would take him. In fact legally, he got divorced and remarried on the same day. It was just insane. He lost his job due to his paranoid rage issues and they put restraining orders against him. His new wife left him. He quit taking care of himself. He lost his house. His drinking was so bad he developed some mild dementia problems. Any efforts to help him by relatives never worked, he would always blame everyone else and self-sabotage.

Now I am almost 30 years old, and I don't even know where he is. All I know is that he is homeless, still drinks, gets arrested now and then, lives out of car, and he may even be dead. Once every several months there will be a "sighting" of him by someone, and the grapevine eventually gets back to me, and that's the only way I even know he is alive.

Therapists I've talked to always seem eager to speculate that he was AsPD or NPD, and I feel like this is just sexist, like BPD is considered a "women's problem" and therefore that couldn't be it. But I really think he had it.

I suspect my dad has BPD, but he would never go to therapy because he does not think anything is wrong with him. Even after I have gone  no contact he still thinks that I am the problem. I think my dad was low functioning... .we were always on the brink of losing the house, and my parents were always in debt to Family.

I think the biggest thing is that the dsm always feminizes BPD traits,  so the way they present in males is often confused with other disorders but the root cause is the same. Unfortunately, my mom is still blind to the fact that my dad has issues. I don't know how, because he gaslighting everyone, threatens suicide to win arguments, and she has stated that he lacks empathy when things require him to put others before himself.

I am surprised that your father apologized for anything, my dad would either completely forget that anything happened (leaving me angry), or only remember what I said (leaving it up to me to apologize for anything). The last time he apologized was when he verbally attacked my uncle at a family funeral, and he only did it because my sister nagged him into doing it.

My therapist and I discussed npd and BPD, but we leaned to BPD because my dad will rage in public, npd would make sure not to damage their image in a group setting.

Starting_Over,

You have an interesting point about BPD information being geared toward women with BPD. I think this is probably because there is a 3:1 ratio of women (75%) diagnosed with BPD vs men (25%).

I just went on to Amazon and was able to find one book specifically geared towards Men with BPD.  I have not read it personally but it did have 4.5 Stars.  Might be something to check out.

Hard to Love: Understanding and Overcoming Male Borderline Personality Disorder by Joseph Nowinski

Panda39

I used to think my brother was NPD, but now I think he is BPD. He will often look odd or disheveled in public, and has been blacklisted in his field of work due to workplace temper tantrums. Also, he is not very manipulative. Or at least he's not good at it, and it works only with our parents (enDad and uBPDmom) in the long-run.

He also burns through circles of friends due to his low functioning, and then complains of being lonely.

I contrast my brother with a "friend" I had in University who, looking back at it, was obviously NPD. He ended up backstabbing me and running a hate campaign against me over a woman we both liked. She ended up suffering for it too, and a bunch of other people suffered collateral damage. As much my brother upsets me, he has never done anything horribly manipulative like that.

BTW my uBPDmom did the "just like" thing to me for years. In this case, she was saying I was just like her older sister, which confused the heck out of me.

I don't see it that way, honestly. I see it as more like there is a 3:1 ration because there is heavy bias, not that there is heavy bias because of the ratio. Or in other words it seems like men exhibiting certain behaviors are much more likely to be diagnosed with something else (AsPD, Bipolar, Autism, etc), and women with the exact same behaviors are way more likely to be diagnosed with BPD. I swear if my father had been a woman, professionals would agree "she" probably had BPD in a heartbeat. But because he's a man, his behaviors (idealize/devalue, splitting, paranoia, abandonment fears, emotionally unstable, rage outbursts, addiction, self-sabotage, impulsiveness, etc) just must be something else.

I really think this is a shame, too, because I bet a lot of men with BPD are not getting diagnosed and treated properly, and I bet I am far from the only one who grew up with a BPD father and can't find any resources on it.

Also there is at least this:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201503/the-borderline-father

This had to be so hard, teak. I imagine that going through this, and then finding very little information to explain male BPD in general and BPD fathers in particular made it doubly hard.

I found one study that might shed some light:

Johnson, D. M., Shea, M. T., Yen, S., Battle, C. L., Zlotnick, C., Sanislow, C. A., ... .& Gunderson, J. G. (2003). Gender differences in borderline personality disorder: Findings from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 44(4), 284-292.


Elsewhere in the article it also says that they find that more men have PDs than women, and more men than women seem to also meet the criteria for comorbid PDs like narcissism, ASPD, and some other ones. They also say that there is not a lot of research on men and BPD.

teak, your description of your dad's warped view of love is really heartbreaking, especially for you as a child. It almost sounds like he had an identity disturbance.

I remember Dr. Gundersen, a leading researcher of BPD, said that he thought it made more sense to distinguish the severity of BPD in someone because that more accurately summarizes what is needed in terms of treatment. Your dad sounds very low-functioning, and perhaps therapists are getting swept up in the types of criteria and not enough in the severity?

If I find any other resources I will pass them along. When we are dealing from extreme abuse, it can feel very validating to hear our own experience described by those who went through the same thing, gender and all. I feel that way about having a BPD sibling, wishing there was more out there to describe what it was like to have a BPD brother. I am 3000 miles away and can do very little for his daughters, who I know are suffering.  :'(

LnL

Teak, welcome to the forum.

It's difficult enough when coming to terms with the idea of a mother's possible BPD - trying to find support and solidarity from those who understand what it is like to have a dad with it must be rather more difficult. You have my sympathy.

In my FOO, it was my mother who was uBPD. But in her family, it's her father - my grandfather - with some kind of definite BPD/NPDlike disorderedness going on. When I was a kid, he was rage-y, gaslight-y, self-righteously affectionate, and volatile enough that I hated to be around him even though he reserved the worst of his behaviors for adults. His treatment of people actually was what kept me from realizing, for a long time, how abusive my mom was to me; I excused her behaviors because I could see how much better a parent she was than her dad had been.

My mom was killed two months ago at age 60 and I did everything I could to stay away from her dad - in his late 80s - at the funeral. When he did manage to snag me, he scolded me for not contacting him recently and made several demands of me. I just excused myself and walked away at that point. It's not even worth trying to be polite anymore. He recently tried to physically assault a cousin's pregnant wife when he was angry about a minor boundary she was enforcing, even though he couldn't do much to hurt her as he's shrunken with age and weak from Parkinson's disease. There is just no stopping the depth of that man's disorder.

Anyway, from what I saw and continue to see as his granddaughter, I feel very strongly for you in having to deal with a BPD father. What you describe saddens me but does not surprise me. I hope you are able to make connections with others who can commiserate with you and offer hope through their experiences.