BPDFamily.com

Hello everyone. This is my first blog on this site. I’m hoping I will feel less alone by reaching out to all of you who have experience with BPs. I’m a 67-year-old divorced woman with a 36-year old child, who I suspect is borderline. To add a further layer of complication to the situation, they have come out as trans with the pronouns they/them. My child has always been socially maladapted. They never quite fit into a friend group. They are very bright and did very well in school, preferring the company of adults or older students to that of their peers. They had a bad relationship with my then husband, their dad, and I believe it was one of the reasons he left the family when my child was 15. My child has always been willful and difficult to reason with, but with age this has gotten more pronounced. They are a master at reading my mind and knowing my triggers and I have taken the bait pretty near every time. Of late, they are demanding that I join a trans advocate group, click like on their activist Facebook posts to show support, inform everyone in my circle of their new name and pronouns, stop having contact with them if they don’t use them when referring to my child and find myself “a lovely little counsellor”, as I obviously need help to stop being the way I am. In our last conversation, they hung up on me after telling me that they had done everything they possibly could to inform me of all the ways I need to change and it is now completely up to me to remedy myself. Unbeknownst to my child, I have mercifully been reading Stop Walking on Eggshells and I have had so many aha moments along the way. It has been far more helpful to me than the three counsellors I’ve been to see. Still, taking a stand and drawing that line in the sand, come what may, is terrifying. I find myself reading the UN declaration of human rights over and over to cement it in my brain that it’s the right thing to do. I have written whole scripts of what to say when/if we talk again. (They hung up on me, so I’m not that inclined to make the first move.) I already know, the hard thing will be for me to stay firm as they will try to rock me from my position by vying for my pity, playing on my guilty conscience, shaming me, etc. I love my child dearly as they also have many good sides. I grieve for them and the difficult life they are living and for us as a family. We have all suffered so much because of all the turmoil. Thank you for listening.

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I just posted for the first time today. I can relate to your post. I came seeking support and to learn skills to still to my boundaries. I’m going more and more crazy with each disownment. I know how to set a bayou day, I just don’t know how to stick to it. There’s always an emergent need that overrides the rules of the boundaries. My BPD daughter disowned me, kicked me out, told me she never wanted to see me again by 9:20 am today. At 2:30 pm I got text messages of a dire emergency and could I come back over and help with the granddaughter. I want to so badly but not because I want to help her, but because I think my granddaughter might be suffering. I know if I don’t come, she’ll marginally neglect her or give her the most minimal of care (she’s disabled and non verbal with a feeding tube). I declined and offered to try again tomorrow. The text I got was she is no longer my daughter and never contact her again. I saw my daughter’s posting on Facebook about her evil mother abandoning them in crisis this morning, trying to gain public sympathy, and how she has no time for herself. But she fails to mention that she flipped out on me this morning and told me to get the f out of her house and life. It’s asinine. She unfriends me on the regular, so the fact that I can see the post is not lost on me. It’s a message. And my poor family tries their best to empathize but unless they renounce me, she says they are traitors. I thank them for loving my daughter and being kind and gentle with her. I almost want one of them to renounce me so that I know my daughter still has an “in” with the family and feels like someone understands her. She tells them that she hates them all because they share blood with me. (That’s the polite version, what she actually says, I would never repeat. Let’s just say she has no problem hitting far below the belt) I’m embarrassed they get these bizarre hate filled texts from her. It’s me she hates. Leave them out of it.

I wish I knew how to be strong. I am typing this reply as I am fighting the will to drive over right now and fix her emergent situation. 

hugs to both of you, that sounds both so incredibly difficult

bigYellow, I just want to say, boundaries are for you to protect yourself, not to control yourself from doing what overall you decide you want to do.  If you want to decide for yourself to go and take care of your granddaughter because she may be suffering, and if this is more important to you than making a boundary with your bpd daughter, I think you can certainly decide that for yourself if you want to.  I think its all about just making decisions for ourselves, that is based on all our overall values and emotions and decisions, and sometimes the factors that go into the decisions can be very complicated!

Hugs to you and my heart really goes out to you in what must be a terribly hard situation to deal with, it sounds like you have been able to find a solid ground emotionally and are doing very well to try and balance things.  Hope you are able to take good care of yourself and sustain yourself as you keep navigating these waters

Also Gamma welcome to the site, really glad to have you here.  It sounds like you have already come a long way in understanding and learning skills and figuring out what to do.  emotional suffering can be so intense.  detaching with love is maybe one of the hardest skills to learn. 

I hope you can get what you need from this site, many people here can empathize with what you are going through.

Thebigyellow, I really feel for you. What a difficult situation to be in! I keep thinking how important it is for us, no matter how hard and selfish it seems, to always put our own oxygen masks on first or we will be of no help to anybody. We have to stay strong and trust that at some level our respective BP children will manage while we are struggling with the mask, so to speak. Take care and many hugs to you!