BPDFamily.com

My 43 year old son has been recently diagnosed with BPD. He 14 years clean and sober, and has been treated for depression for more than a decade, and was put on large amounts of anti depressants that never really helped.
He has worked and lived independently since he was 18 and has had success as a musician, but there have been episodes of unusually dramatic pain over relationships, and intense emotional sensitivity, that now in retrospect, make more sense in the context of BPD.
In the last 2 years though, he has fallen apart, partially due to an obsessive relationship that he allowed to consume his entire world and he basically stopped working. He could no longer pay the rent for his apartment, and has moved in with me (his mother) and my husband, his step father who raised him with me from the time he was 8 with much love.  It seems that something about this relationship has triggered a more intense form of BPD in him. They continue to break up and get back together repeatedly, and and he becomes truly devastated every time at the thought of life without her. 

We are paying him to see a therapist who does DBT and he is supposed to start group therapy with a DBT skills group this week.
I am reading everything I can to understand borderline personality disorder, but reading isn't enough, there is so much I don't understand.
I am overwhelmed, I don't feel like I can tell him how he should be living his life, because he is an adult, but now that he is so dependent on us, it is confusing and frustrating. 
I am concerned that as long as he is in this relationship that he might not be able to focus on learning the skills.
But at the same time, I wonder if the only way he might ever be able to handle the relationship, or possibly say no to the relationship, is if he learns the skills, even while he is in the middle of it.

As much as I wish I could make him stop seeing her,  it doesn't seem possible to tell a 43 year old what to do---I am not sure putting those kind of boundaries on someone about a relationship ever works, but maybe when someone has BPD this is what you have to try, I don't know.

I feel like the DBT therapy is the most promising hope for him to get better. It is not easy for us to pay for this out of pocket, but we want him to have the opportunity to learn the skills.  He says that he really wants to do it, and he has already started using a DBT diary since he started to see the DBT therapist. But I really don't feel like we have any control over how it will go.

This is all very new to me and I am just spilling things out.
I hope that I am not being inconsiderate posting such a long and rambling first post!
thank you for listening... .
ps of course there is more to this history, but this is the most I could put down right now... .

Hi 2cubok,

I'm sorry to not see your post sooner  :)

It is good news that he is clean and sober for so long, and accepts his diagnosis and is willing to do DBT. Not only that, he is doing his DBT diary.

It sounds like he is in a high-conflict relationship. If he is open to DBT, he may appreciate The High-Conflict Couple by Alan Fruzetti, which is a book for BPD/NPD couples (or, at the very least, two people with high-conflict communication patterns) and is based on DBT. It may help him see he can be the emotional leader in a relationship where probably neither have the skills to do so, at least yet.

As hard as it may be to abide watching his relationship dismantle him, it may in fact be a very vivid backdrop to his DBT sessions. I think you are right in believing you cannot forbid or stop the relationship, and rejecting her may feel to him like you are rejecting both. Controlling someone with a mental illness doesn't work and only makes them mad and us exhausted.

A better way is to give him positive reinforcement when he takes care of himself. I found it helped me to learn about DBT and use the skills, too. My favorite to come out of what I've read is the concept of a dialectic, which (basically) means two seemingly opposite things that can both be true. Your son's relationship may be very bad for him AND it may be the key to his healing.

Does the GF come over to your house often? What kind of relationship do you have with your son? And with the GF?

Keep posting, it really does help.

LnL

i'm new here so excuse my lack of etiquette if i'm posting in the wrong place. I total relate to the post above. I have a 21 year old daughter diagnosed with BPD, Anxiety, etc, etc. After six months of harassing the ministry we got her into a treatment facility she said she wanted to attend. She left 2 weeks early from treatment then went missing for 3 days as she wanted to see her abusive boyfriend and didn't want to "hear our negative thought". This treatment was my last link to hope for something better. Now it appears to be a great failure. I haven't talked to my daughter since i found out she was okay. 3 days she let me think she was hurt or missing, or anything. I'm so angry and tired. I want to be the best parent i can be for her but i don't think I can take this anymore. overdoses, suicide attempts, police calls. How do i balance me and her?