BPDFamily.com

My SO has a middle aged adult daughter with BPD. She can be very sweet and nice for months, then suddenly distorts a comment and goes to the dark side, lashing out her dad and me (as well as others). She then goes incommunicado and cuts us out of her life. She has a teenage son who may also be borderline and she uses him as a pawn by not allowing his grandfather to talk with him. So it’s been six months and she deems now she will talk with him. He has done nothing but try to be kind and it doesn’t matter. So she acts as if nothing is wrong even though she has ignored him for half a year. One of her parting gifts was to gang up with her borderline sister (his other daughter) and compose a text about how I shouldn’t be allowed to look at her social media. Yes. It was filled with expletives and insults. I have decided that there will be no more fifth , sixth chances and that I will have nothing to do with them. But I want an apology because I feel that if he wants to reconnect with her, that’s the least that I can expect from him. I am tired of being their punching bag and I realize they are his daughters and that they are ill but I would never tolerate this garbage from my own kids, especially if they were abusive to him.

Hi Myheadisspinning
There are so many different aspects to the complex situation that you have to deal with. I have just been trying to look at each one and think about each.

You ‘realize they are his daughters and that they are ill’. All the behaviours you describe are at the core of BPD. None of us would tolerate this type of behaviour from people who are not ill. This is quite a dilemma because for decades people see this behaviour and even when they know there is illness as the basis of it, it is still measured against how we would act if someone without an illness acted this way.

You seem to be saying that if SO wants to reconnect with his dd, he will need to apologize to you – is that right? If that is right, you want him to apologize for her behaviour. I’m not sure I have understood you here.

The key point you make is that they are SO’s daughters – and as is so often the case with BPD, the partner of the parent becomes the target of blame. Someone with BPD needs total attention or they experience intense abandonment – so when the parent’s attention is taken by an SO the intense abuse etc flows.

It seems you have been this target of blame and of course you have had enough. I think disengaging from their media accounts and moving on with your life is well warranted.

However I think it’s important to do it in such a way that SO doesn’t become the new ‘piggy in the middle’. It seems you want him to apologize for his dd’s behaviour if he wants to reconnect with her.

I am not sure this is a good way forward – it might in fact create a different set of problems.

Is it possible for you and your SO to work towards separating your relationship from his relationship with his children? Does your SO understand BPD and you being the target of blame? I think it might be complex to start with but I think firm boundaries around your relationship and your SO’s relationship with his dds is the way forward in the long term. I think I have read a post here some time back where someone put this in place. It was difficult – I think Christmas was a time when keeping things separate was problematic – but I think this sort of thing is the best way forward.

There is never going to be ‘happy families’ – it’s how to create and maintain separateness in the face of intense emotional turmoil that is BPD.