BPDFamily.com

Hey Rev (and anyone else who's interested, probably Flossy cuz this involves our interest in anthropology/sociology),

In the "Does it end" thread, you wrote:

"One thing is for sure, that without sustained treatment, it will likely get worse. I am astounded at how fast my daughter has spiraled down"

***With apologies to anyone who has ever had a person they love in a war because I certainly don't want to diminish their experience or in any way trivialize what's happening in Afghanistan,*** as soon as I read that sentence I immediately compared what you were saying about your daughter to Afghanistan and realized that the two circumstances are not dissimilar. Unfortunately I have to run a kid to a doctor appointment right now so I'll get back to this thought later, but I wanted to put if out there.

(Sorry that I made a mistake in the subject line, but thanks to whoever edited it. Also, I didn't want to hijack the other person's thread by posting on it, which is why I started this one)

So here's my thinking  behind what I wrote above, about the current situation in Afghanistan being an analogy for many of our situations with our BPD children:

We can go in and take over and spend trillions of dollars and countless hours trying to train them on how to make their own lives better, on how to make better decisions, about how to live independently, but in the end, the scaffolding we're providing (and possibly not even something that's wanted in the first place) will need to be removed, and the people will have to stand on their own. So if people won't avail themselves of the help being offered in order to make their own lives better, there's literally nothing we can do, unless we think a valid choice is to continue to spend trillions propping them up forever. And if we remove the scaffolding and they go right back to what they had before we started trying to help them, then we must acknowledge that they are choosing that for themselves. Neither the Afghanis nor our children are helpless. And just as Rev said he was astounded by the speed at which his daughter regressed to a former state, so was the world astounded by the speed at which the Afghanis allowed the Taliban to retake the country.