BPDFamily.com

 :help: My spouse and I recently had a conflict with his uBPD/Histrionic PD mother and are thinking we might have to go "no contact for a while. I would love to hear others' stories of how "no contact" went with parents. I have found so much solace reading others stories on the board and knowing we're not alone in this. If our story can help anyone else not feel alone too, that'd be great!

The second half of my question is, should we even ask for an apology if we know we will never get it? Going no-contact feels like punishment for their non compliance. But really, for it to work I know it just has to be for us. The thing is, we don't need them in our lives and have always felt much better during no-contact periods.

I also know baby will miss out on a relationship (the in-laws can be fun at times) and I know in-laws will never forgive us for that lost time. But we live on the other side of the country (think NY vs CA), so facilitating a relationship is already a lot of work for us. Spouse feels like "no contact" will be leading by example and not letting people push you around, especially if they are your relatives. He also respects that middle-brother wants to do "grey-rock" for his kids to facilitate a relationship with uPBD Grandma and Narcissist Grandpa. It's an equally valid option and is currently working for their family.

Anyone else have experience cutting off a BPD parent after children? I've read some forum posts and can see our future (when baby gets older) in some of your stories. It creeps me out that all they seem to care about is getting the newest pictures of baby and not any actual relationship. Baby is literally a "baby," but they seem to be more interested in being able to perform a good relationship with baby for other people (ie. posting the newest picture of baby on FB to friends).

I know we will likely never get that apology. Is it wrong to hold them accountable? Someone (@elphaba) posted a link to "The Man on the Bridge" story by Edwin Friedman, which was extremely helpful. (I can link to it if anyone wants it, just let me know). I guess accountability is a question that even philosophers still grapple with.
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The backstory:

I have been with my spouse for almost 20 years (since I was 18). We have tried no contact for 4 years and limited-contact/grey-rock for 8 years. Nothing has ever really worked well. They use guilt on us every few months, sending pathetic emails and mailing (with no return address) weird articles cut out of magazines. You know, like a serial killer does!  lol

The thing that ended our 4 years of no-contact the last time was my spouse getting sick and ending up in the hospital. I was afraid he was going to die, So I felt I had an obligation to tell his family what was going on. They were worried, kind and supportive. Of course, love is given only around medical issues. They were back in our lives after that. We tried grey rock/limited contact for 8 years with limited success. They do not respect boundaries.

Here's the most recent update:

Recently in-laws visited us + new baby for the first time in forever and surprisingly it went well.  red-flag Maybe we have "grey-rock" for 8 years to thank for that? By well, I mean they generally behaved even though we had to CONSTANTLY hear how horrible his "grey-rock" middle brother and wife were treating them. But because it went well, we feel like we almost have whiplash.

His "Dependent PD" little brother has flare ups of unexplained nerve pain and in-laws always rush to his aid when this happens. Finding the "best doctors" to run all the tests, only to (usually) find nothing of note. Their way of showing love and care was only expressed when someone had medical issues. So naturally that became a currency for the family. Well, something happened and they drove 8 hours to pick DPD little brother up, drive him to their house and get tests done.

Well, his DPD little brother calls spouse and starts immediately saying he is suicidal and wanting spouse to act as therapist. Mind you, spouse hasn't spoken to him in 6 months because of previous extremely selfish behavior (all hallmarks of his Dependent Personality Disorder). DPD little brother hints he is trying to get a diagnosis so he can do Physician Assisted Suicide because he can't do it himself. Spouse spends 3 hours on the phone talking him down, only to find out he is not serious about suicide, he just knows it gets family's attention/support.

Traumatized by the interaction, spouse goes to bed. In the morning, DPD little brother texts again, "I have IT, I'm suicidal." The cycle starts again. Spouse decides he is finally done with him forever (this is about the 200th time he has threatened suicide), and goes no-contact with him.

Spouse decides instead to call parents, because they have assumed responsibility for DPD little brother and this is really their problem. Spouse calls Narcissist Dad, who acts like a hostage on the phone. Spouse learns that DPD little brother is casually threatening suicide while being driven home from doctor's appointment by Narcissist Dad. Spouse then calls uBPD mom who is crying. Spouse asks, "what are you going to do about DPD little brother, he is suicidal?" She responds, saying he's justified because he has a "death sentence" diagnosis. Spouse gets upset, finally gets the actual diagnosis (which is decidedly not a death sentence) and finds out he has not actually been diagnosed, but that the doctor just said DPD little brother's symptoms could fit but they have to wait for test results. Spouse tells her she shouldn't say "death sentence" around a suicidal person. Says DPD little brother is just copying her language; language she always used to threaten suicide in front of them their whole lives. uBPD mother explodes, saying "I've apologized enough" and "why don't you just go b :cursing: to your f :cursing: therapist about it" and "I hope YOUR [baby] never hates you for things you've done." Spouse asks "do you really want to blow up the relationship over this?" uBPD mother ignores and keeps going with vitriol. Spouse yells at her, tells her to stop before she makes it worse and hangs up. Spouse starts dissociating.

1 week later I hear from Narcissist Dad (mind you, my existence has been barely acknowledged for 20 years). "Where are new pictures of baby? We had such a good time and now we hear nothing from you." I say, "Um, you know what's been going on right? No pictures will be exchanged until an apology happens." Narcissist Dad says "If only it were that easy." Narcissist Dad has been shielding uBPD Mom from any consequences of her behavior for their whole life (excessive spending, alcohol dependency, disordered eating, suicide attempts, stalkers, etc.).

1 week passes. We then hear Narcissist Dad has figured if he goes on apology tour for uBPD Mom, maybe he can get everyone what they want. Decides to fix everything by saying "uBPD mom is sorry" to spouse. Spouse says, "why doesn't she say it to me then?" Narcissist Dad runs him in circles, not really answering questions and ends by "wishing health and happiness" to him.

2 days pass. I hear from uBPD mom: "sad pathetic story... feel bad for me... you are holding baby hostage from me... give me new pictures of baby... blah blah blah." I spend 3 hours crafting a very vulnerable email and respectfully declining pictures until she apologizes. She "skimmed" my email, and blows up at me, comparing me to the Nazis.  lol

I write an angry email threatening "no-contact," but sit on it for 1 day before getting advice. Eventually I send it, and immediately hear back from Narcissist Dad. "What you said is awful, leave uBPD Mom alone." I say, "not mean, just the truth and probably hard to hear."  |iiii

Now you are caught up to the present day!  :wee:

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Spouse knows he could apologize, but he has been apologizing to keep the peace his whole life. uBPD Mom used to push him to the point of a blind rage when he was a kid, so he has been working on understanding and expressing ANY healthy anger. I was proud of him for actually yelling at her again for the first time in years. I am also proud of myself for standing up for my family even though I knew it wasn't going to go well. I'm tired of being careful around them.

It also takes us a really long time for us to get back to our baseline after a conflict because they really make you feel like you're in "danger." I really don't know what they are capable of if we push them far enough, so I don't want to keep getting angry at them. For our own safety, I think "no contact" might be best.

I may be an idiot, but I feel like this is such a solvable issue. It feels small and petty, but they seem intent on blowing it out of proportion. And no-contact doesn't have to be forever. I just don't want it to be at our expense anymore.  :heart:

My estrangement lasted 7 years (father), 10 years (uBPD sibling) and low contact with my mother (adult child) throughout. I am back in contact with my father, and have seen my brother twice in two very strained but short-lived public circumstances.

During much of the estrangement I was in therapy. I had decided to not appease or apologize so things went dark, making it kind of an accidental estrangement since that wasn't my intent although given my family dynamics it also wasn't a surprise.

It still astounds me how a small change in my behavior could lead to a full-blown estrangement in a narcissistic family system.

In retrospect, I was not clear about what my boundaries were. I knew I needed to change the way I responded but I grew up in that system and didn't have the emotional maturity to be clear and direct.

I had virtually no experience asserting boundaries and I'm not sure I even realized how my family worked in terms of boundaries. If I had the opportunity to do it again, I would be more clear about what I was doing although I don't anticipate the outcome would've been different.

During the estrangement I focused on what it meant for me to be healthy, to feel healthy, and to ensure my emotional safety.

To feel emotionally safe I needed to learn more about what it meant to be emotionally mature because that did not happen in my childhood. That deficit led me straight into an abusive marriage with a man who had BPD and addictions.  

The goal for me is to be fully myself and comfortably exercise my boundaries on behalf of knowing what I value and how I expect to be treated.

No contact can have a cost attached if it's a straight up punishment, I think. Because if you don't figure out a few things during the time-out, then when it's over everything just slides back to status quo.

My family knows things are different with me and about me but they aren't sure what to make of it. They try the same things that used to work, but I don't respond the same way anymore, yet I seem to neutralize conflict, and that's nonsensical to them since I'm the scapegoat (in their mind).

I saw my father look puzzled once when he thought we were on our way to a full wind up, but I had started to pay attention to my feelings and used that information to tip me off that we were headed for a bender. That's the kind of self awareness I learned during my estrangement, and ways to assert boundaries without making myself a target.


If I had asked my family for an apology knowing it would never come, that would tell me I was looking for a reason for the relationship to end.

Sometimes in an estrangement, the end of the relationship comes so ambiguously to an end and if it isn't clear whose fault it is, that can get in your head and make things very painful. Maybe you want a clear cut reason to end the relationship but if you focus too much on how it's their fault, then it's easy to get a bit stuck and miss an opportunity.


It's different for all of us, but for me, I don't want to stay stuck in a place of feeling hurt or mad, although I certainly have those feelings. It's more that I want to know how to get myself to a place where I can have compassion from a distance, as a form of self respect, if that makes sense.

At the same time, I try to not judge my feelings around triggers and beefs with family too much. They treated me like the family garbage can and I have every reason to be mad. It's just that I don't want to feel that way. I'd rather have killer boundaries and know how to skillfully neutralize them when I sense a wind up, which has taken years (and quite a bit of control and forethought).

If I have a plan for the repeating triggers and understand how things get set up (it's getting easier to foretell, though stuff does get through), I can have a relationship at arm's length.

One of the silver linings to the estrangement is that I learned a lot that helps me in other relationships. My family members are all difficult. None of them are easy. So figuring out things with them actually made relationships a bit easier with other difficult people when they happen to pop up in my life. 

NC is one type of boundary and for a boundary to work, it needs to be consistent. So choosing a boundary you can be consistent with is one consideration.

I have been LC with my BPD mother. LC can also be on an emotional level. Even though we still communicate, I don't get into emotional topics with her. This is also "grey rock".

How to choose? One aspect for me was that, if I were to be NC with my mother, it would have to include other people close to her, mainly my father. If I had any contact with other family members, they'd report information back to her. I don't post personal information on social media but anything I post, her extended family members would share with her. Then there were family occasions. Going NC with my mother would also mean NC with anyone associated with her. I didn't want to cut contact with other family members.

Neither LC or NC are easy choices. We just navigate the best we can.

I would also go with your H's lead on this. Since it's his family- he's the one who has the emotional ties to them. There could be a cost to his decision. For my mother, people are either on her side or not her side. While I understood the necessity of boundaries with her, and chose to do that, this comes with the reactions from her and other family members. You are important support to him.

Notwendy's comment that for a boundary to work it needs to be consistent is key in my experiences in navigating relationships with disordered family members. I am low contact with most of my large extended disordered family members. I am constantly having to remind them that these are my boundaries and not to disrespect them, yet they continue to do so, and I continue to reinforce the boundaries, having to create new ones as well.
It sounds like you are realizing that your disordered family members will never change. What kinds of boundaries do you need to have with them? It can be challenging to put into words what kinds of boundaries you need. Do be patient with establishing and maintaining boundaries as it is a learning process, in finding out what works and what kinds of behaviors you can tolerate.

Thank you so much for your insights @livednlearned! Your story sounds very familiar to us. Our initial estrangement started after the in-laws very poor behavior at our wedding (apparently a common occurrence with BPD people). Spouse just really didn't want to talk to them after that and kept ignoring their emails/texts/calls until 4 years went by. I'd like to say those 4 years were peaceful, but they were incessantly contacting us. To them, silence is worse than open conflict.


Neither of us even knew about boundaries either, we just knew needed some kind of a break from them. I know he said if he ever had to go no contact again, he would also like to be more clear about his intent. Like you, I don't know that it really would have gone better, (in fact it probably would have started more fights) but at least they would know where we stood in regards to putting up with their bad behavior.


For us, this introspection came later. At first it felt like we were running away from danger. Once we "got away" we started going to therapy together to try and untangle what went on. After a staying with friends for a wedding and describing what was going on with in-laws, the friend suggested we read Understanding the Borderline Mother. Her mother was borderline as well.

It wasn't until moving to a new city and spouse getting sick, that he started to take his own mental health very seriously. He started seeing his therapist, who he is still working with today. It has been transformative but has taken years for him to get to a point of understanding himself. As I'm sure you know, BPD people are excellent at gaslighting and being raised by one really messes with your internal emotional barometer.


Isn't that interesting! For us, setting boundaries with them and responding to their outbursts seems to make uBPD mom even more mad. Once she gets upset, she often acts like we aren't even in the room anymore (maybe dissociation?) and she is not even listening anymore. Our usual mode was to just ignore them or ignore the behavior so I think she gets upset now when we point out she can't do that anymore. Almost like, "Wait, you noticed? But you never noticed it before."



This just made me think of something. Because all our communication is usually done over the phone or text message/email, I think there is that element of body language and intonation missing which may just make everything worse. I noticed when they were here with us, I could say difficult things with them and set boudaries more easily because they could physically see I wasn't winding them up and could use tone of voice to convey that I was calm. There was less space for them to infer things.



That is a great insight, thank you! I think you are right. We are looking for ways to already justify our decision. But it is really helpful to hear how others are dealing with similar situations. In that sense, we can map it onto our experience and see how it fits.


What's so interesting about this most recent conflict for us is we FINALLY stopped and said, "no this specific behavior is bad." In the past we have just removed ourselves from 1 situation and let the bad behavior pile up until when barely know what/when/why happened anymore. uBPD mother would always said, "what did I ever do to you?" It's always been laughable, like "hmm, let me count the ways!" But the fact that she is trying to use that tactic now is interesting to see. It's great to be able to point and say "this specific thing you did a week, ago, that's why!" It makes everything so much less ambiguous. Even though it is a small and stupid conflict, it's part of a bigger picture and I think we are just starting to figure out how to build on that and enforce better boundaries.


That makes total sense! It's one of the reasons I'm conflicted about going NC. Because aren't we just holding on to the hurt, and that will only really hurt us? I think we will get to the compassion eventually. The self respect comes first.

In some ways, it will be easier for us (than for a lot of people) because we are already so far removed from them physically. They don't really gate-keep any important relatives. We're able to have a great relationship with middle brother. Little brother has Dependent Personality Disorder (It's hard to not believe that's the way his parents designed it) so he is basically just a "helpless" version of them now. We've gotten all the really important milestones out of the way with relatives, and they already got us un-invited us from some cousin's weddings. So there's really not much left but funerals. With any luck, we'll have a few years to build up "killer bounderies" (love that!) and be able to show up on our own terms.



It's interesting, our middle brother[in-law] said something really similar. Especially with his profession, he feels their upbringing has given him an advantage in dealing with difficult people.
After reflecting on our situation (spouse and I are both in artistic trades), his upbringing seems to have facilitated allowing more toxic clients into our lives and staying with them longer than we should have. After years of that, I think we finally realized the warning signs and know who to stay away from. Toxic people can be incredibly charismatic at first.

It's a bummer that baby won't really have a relationship with this set of grandparents, but I think that may have been wishful thinking to begin with. We will see about the future though. Maybe there is a time in the future when limited contact will make sense. It's hard because they absolutely hate middle brother who is doing limited contact/grey rock right now and entirely blame his behavior on his wife. So it's hard to want to do that either. Feels like a NC or LC makes this a lose/lose situation. I guess we will just have to focus on what makes us the most happy. And work on the killer boundaries of course!

Thank you again for all the amazing insights and advice!

Thank you @Notwendy and @zachira. That makes a lot of sense! Our therapist actually said something similar: If we were to actually get that apology (though very unlikely), would it really be enough? We are really just looking for an excuse to go NC because the behavior is part of a bigger issue.

It seems like NC will likely be the most sustainable for us, though not easy. They will likely attack that boundary over and over again, especially around holidays when they get the most lonely. But that will give us plenty of times to practice reasserting said boundaries.

The only reason LC has "worked" in the past is we let them step all over our previously stated boundaries (mostly around not wanting to hear them complain about how horribly middle brother was treating them). We were trained to be very conflict averse and not very good at constantly asserting and reasserting boundaries. So like like @zachira said, there was basically no consistency from us. Whenever we had done so, it would often end in periods of NC because they would get offended and start a fight for not being "supportive."

 
That totally makes sense. I think that would be the case with Dependent Personality Disorder little brother. But spouse has decided to go NC with him right now and doesn't see that changing in the future. Uncle has already been triangulated by them before. We are distant with cousins and other Aunt anyway. Middle brother knows exactly what we are going through because he had/has to do it himself also. After years of the 3 brothers constantly being triangulated by each-other, it's taken spouse a while to know he can trust his brother. Not the fault of either of them, BPD parents are trash. This all makes it a little bit easier to do NC for us.



This is exactly what my sister in law says too. I just need to follow his lead since it's his family and they barely treat me as a person anyway.

Thank you both!