BPDFamily.com

I am wondering how others manage parental splitting by BPD child. Our 32 yo daughter (adult child) has significant needs but often she could take care of them herself. I have had to stop responding to texts while at work, turned off phone after certain time, not responded to late night texts till the next day. However, our daughter knows how to raise alarm even when there is logical reason to believe the situation is not urgent, and my husband has an impossible time saying "no" to her even when her requests disrupt our plans or life. As a result I have become the bad parent ("limit setter:) and he is the "good parent". It is creating tremendous marital tension (and we have been married 35 years). He says that he realizes what he does for her is not healthy for her or for our relationship but doesn't seem to be able to get a handle on it.
We had to cancel plans with friends last night because of her "urgent"(non-urgent) need; fortunately our friends were very understanding but told me that they know this has been going on "forever" and recalled instances from 15-20 years ago when our plans were interrupted by her behavior (which I had totally forgotten about). It is sort of embarrassing but when she was a child we did what we thought we needed to do.
Any thoughts from those of you in particular who are on the "bad" side. It is not a good feeling.

Woody59,
I can commiserate with your situation. My husband and I have been in a very similar situation with our 19yp BPDD and it was really, really isolating. In our situation, it made me feel like my husband and I weren't on the same team. He tends to step back from our daughter which (for whatever reason) made me feel even more so that I had to step forward and take the burden upon myself. Ultimately, it wasn't just one or the other of us that created the situation, it was both of us.
My husband and I sat down and had to have a conversation regarding our feelings about how we respond to our daughter's behaviors and how it made each of us feel. (It's pretty important to recognize that conversations like this aren't about who we are as human beings - it's about things we say and do...otherwise we end up taking it as a personal comment on who we are.) We both came to the conclusion that instead of finding a solution to help our daughter and ourselves, we had just been recycling the same failed solutions (which aren't solutions) and getting more and more frustrated when they continued not to work. That meant that we only had two choices - change what we want or change what we do. We could both agree that neither of us wanted to keep living the way we had been. We had to do something different - even if it was uncomfortable.
We decided to create some boundaries as a couple and then let our daughter know what we had decided. The first thing we decided was that we would treat our daughter's mental health crisis (real or imagined) as a serious issue and seek emergency services and care should she express to us that she is unstable or unsafe. We would no longer be dropping everything to run to her side or bring her into our home when she told us she felt she was mentally unstable and unsafe.
Second, we decided that the family life we had created in our home was important enough to protect. So, when our daughter decided she needed us to do something or be somewhere out of the blue, our family plans and obligations took presidence. Just like anyone else, if our daughter wanted to come visit for the weekend or have us do something for/with her, we would need 2 to 3 days notice. We would no longer be throwing our entire family off kilter and upsetting everything for the "benefit" of one person who no longer lives there.
Third, we decided that even though our children will always be our children, if we truly respected them, we would treat them like adults (when they were adults, of course). That means we no longer provide them with spending money, bail them out of adult consequences, or step in to take care of their lives when it was convenient for them. Now, that doesn't mean we won't help them or support them through good times and bad - it just means that we won't stand in the way of them succeeding or failing on their own merit. (It's hard to see someone I love fail or hurt...but it's harder for me to help create a life in which they are helpless.)

Over time, we came to develop additional limits for our daughter and for the world in general and it has been nothing but a relief! I actually get to live a life that's mine and isn't purely a reaction to the decisions made by someone else. I hope by sharing my experience it can help in some small way. Good luck and stay in touch!

Best,
AnotherMother