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 :help: Please give me advice on how to be kind to my daughter when many things I say upset her, instead of reacting and even recoiling from her. She strikes s fast and so hard, and my going into defensive mode is only making things much worse. I love her and understand that she is I’ll.

Hi LilyGM,

First of all, welcome.  You have come to the right place and you are not alone.

There are others here that can answer you better than I can, however please read up on the tools on this site.

A couple of important things to mention (that work really well):

1.  Do not JADE.  When she says things that get you riled up, do not Justify, Argue, Defend or Explain.  It only makes things worse.

2.  It always helps to be validating and empathetic and an easy way to remember a response (not always easy to do if she gets under your skin) is to use the SET method.  Support, Empathy, Truth.  So, repeat back to her what she said so that she knows you heard her.  For example, if she says "You never believe me!", your validating and supportive first answer is " It sounds like you don't think that I ever believe you".  Then you move on to the empathy and you normalize her feelings by saying how you can relate:  " If I didn't think my mother ever believed me, it would certainly bother me too".   The T is for truth.  Maybe it is "I've always found you to be an honest person... or whatever the actual truth might be as long as you are not JADEing.

There is lots more but let's start with that.   What I did when I first was learning to communicate better I practiced in my head, because it can be hard to do on the spot!

Others will chime in, so stick around!  I thought I would try to answer quickly since I saw that you are still online.

All the best,

R

I sent you this really quickly as I was in the middle of something else and so afterwards I second-guessed myself as to whether or not my last statement was actually Explaining!   It goes to show how hard this can be and why it helps to practice. 

Maybe it would have been better if I had given an example that said something more like; "Help me make sense of ..."   

Like I said, others will chime in.   I'm a little rusty here, I've just returned after being away since 2021.

Let us know how you are doing!

R

Well I have two bits of good news for you. First is that you recognize how you go on the defensive, which probably makes you daughter’s outbursts worse. If you recognize that, you might try something different. First, don’t JADE, as the other poster advised. When she’s riled up, your daughter’s emotions take over. She can’t process any logic, which is why JADE doesn’t work. If you use logic, she’ll probably feel invalidated, and she might dredge up other grievances in response, which is even worse. If you engage with logic or your own negative emotional energy, she feeds off of that. So don’t JADE. Instead, you might try to gray rock—be still and boring as a gray rock. Her outburst doesn’t get a rise out of you, and she might calm down, get bored or walk away.

The second bit of good news is that your daughter is smart. She knows exactly what buttons to push to get a rise out of you. If she were dumb, her accusations would sound lame, maybe even ridiculous. She might say, you’re a lazy, racist, uncaring ugly hag that has no friends. Ridiculous, right?  You might stifle a laugh when she says such preposterous things, until you realize, she projecting her own insecurities onto you. She’s so preoccupied with her own shortcomings that her view of the world is distorted by that negative lens. But it sounds like your daughter is extra cunning, finding exactly the right words to get a rise out of you. I’d advise, don’t fall for it. Your daughter might go on a rollercoaster ride of intense feelings, but you don’t have to hop on board alongside her, right?  If she’s having an adult tantrum, she probably needs an adult time out, time and space to cool off. Give her that time out. Don’t interrupt it, either. Let her decide when she’s ready to reengage with you. Fair enough?

Hi,
I am just learning after many years of our family experiencing BPD hurtful outbursts that it is not beneficial to our daughter to listen to her nasty/hurtful accusationsThis approach seems to feed her behaviour.It is far better to calmly walk away or end the conversation or text.
In the past we felt we had to understand and  be sympathetic to her issues feeling it was our behaviour, her ex husband , her brother or any employer that was always at fault. That is the natural reaction of a parent.
I think this  approach has reinforced her own view that she is able to blame others and this attack and nasty approach gets the results wanted including hurting those close to her to bring us all into her spiral of misery
When our daughter demonstrates this behaviour she reverts to acting like a young child with tantrums I think that accepting she has a serious mental illness we have to try to retrain her approach to life by accepting this behaviour is not acceptable
It is really hard to restrain from trying to have a reasoned discussion believing she will understand she is wrong Sadly that simply never works
Any sensible discussion can only take place when she is calm and not in fight and nasty mode