BPDFamily.com

Have you noticed the ubpd sibling getting better as they age.

Hello waitinghope and welcome.  :hi:

My dBPD has gotten worse. I have an NPD-acting sibling and they've gotten worse. It could any reason why this has happened. I hope your sibling is one of the lucky ones and improves.

*dBPD mother.

Sometimes i think i have noticed  improvement. But I also wonder if Im just projecting things, or if they are lying to me or keeping things from me. Or maybe its just wishfull thinking.

Nah, mine got worse with age. Constant negativity everyday. The slightest thing that doesn't go her way invites a tirade.

Nope.  uBPD mother

I thought my sister had gotten better.

After her son was born when she was in her early 30s, she seemed to gain some humility and perspective that something wasn't right about how she'd been living her life and the choices she'd made. But she took a turn for the worse gradually after our mother died in 2018, then started to regress after she rushed into a marriage with a narcissistic man that only lasted 9 months after a two-year relationship where they dated, then lived together. After that divorce, she started to wonder why she kept making the same mistakes over and over and sought the help of a therapist who, allegedly, told her it was how she was raised by our strict, overbearing at times parents (mom was controlling and smothering, dad was aloof and mostly a provider but not a nurturer). She took this and ran with it and decided her family was "toxic" and we caused her to be this way. She lost interest in taking any responsibility for her personal behavior, choices, or actions and just blamed everything on us, that she was the family scapegoat by our parents and that they'd ruined her life. Of course, it was a bit more complicated than that, but she had no interest granting our parents or older sister the same humanity she wanted people to grant her with for her behavior. She eventually stopped speaking to them, and later me, for reasons I assume are rooted in that she's decided we're terrible people.

What's fascinating is reading everyone else's stories on this site about how their families are/were and as I often tried to reason with her — our family has problems, but seem small compared to others. No one is sabotaging anyone's career or education. No one is stealing from anyone or lying. No one is beating, abusing, molesting, or being verbally awful to anyone. If anything our family is more marked by passivity where people wait too late to say anything or do anything and let little problems become big ones over time. Our family is passive-aggressive basically. And our parents' favorite method of control was gaslighting. But our family was also stable, our parents did not believe in corporal punishment, were loving, and every need was met. Our parents paid for and put us through school, bought us cars, and were respectful of our autonomy ... if we moved out of the house (if we lived there our mom couldn't help but treat us like babies). So it was complicated, but she reduced it all down to: "mommy and daddy hated me and were awful."

So I thought it got better, but I was wrong. It only got worse and our mom's death and her divorce were triggers. She only got older and more entrenched. Anything can make them backtrack and lose any progress that probably was never real in the first place. Nothing changes unless the person with BPD realizes they have a problem beyond "my parents screwed me up." Because my sister, even as a child, always had a problem with taking responsibility and accountability for her decisions and actions. Once that therapist told her this was our parents' fault that was all she needed to hear and she went down a path of isolation and misery.

My brother has become more self aware, but he was forced to have "anger management" classes in order to keep his job.

We held an intervention with our uBPD mom, including showing her tangible evidence of her manipulation - she denied it all as "false news", alternative facts etc...

So we've gone back to avoiding her and she's gone back to not understanding why everyone "ghosts" her. She's in her 80's, so the guilt of admitting to what she's done would probably send her over the edge. It is what it is. But I've met people in the 20's who openly admit to a stigmatised label like BPD - that's impressive. It's a spectrum and all about self awareness. The future is bright  :)

I have a brother with BPD, a sister with NPD, and many other disordered family members both in my family of origin and large extended families through both parents. My experiences are that disordered people have new overwhelming challenges with aging and do as they have throughout life by becoming extremely dysregulated by situations that overwhelm them. Younger disordered people are often more able to charm others into taking care of them whereas older people face more rejection as they age. Some disordered people welcome the attention they get by appearing to be elderly and disabled though with time will show their true colors which is very challenging to their caretakers and other people in their lives.