BPDFamily.com

Hello all -

So it's been challenging to interact with my D over the phone lately. Most the phone calls are about 1-2 minutes, probably monitored by her mom, and then she hangs up quickly and firmly. It's really hard and I now have to call more often - when before they called at their convenience.

When she's here, (alternating weekends) she's relaxed and does pretty well all things considered. It's really good to see her and she behaves tenderheartedly. Going to bed is tough.

A relationship change is coming up for me (a great thing), but that is an underlying stressor for her too.

Oh man - my childhood was so picturesque in comparison. I can't imagine her trying to make sense of everything.

Hi forestfortrees,

I'm sorry the calls are so hard

It's kinda understandable. The stresses we felt as adults dealing with BPD are amplified for kids, maybe even more so for kids with the same gender as their BPD parent.

She cannot speak freely with you if her mom is listening, and she's probably worried she will say something that could trigger her mom. My son told me years later he never used "she" pronoun around his dad. Just that one word could set his dad off.

My son's T encouraged me to validate those feelings. Adapted to your situation, would be: "I get the feeling it's hard to talk to me on the phone when you're at mom's. It probably feels awkward, and maybe you feel like it's not safe to speak freely. I would feel that way, too. I know I'll get to see you every other weekend, so it's ok if the calls are short. I know you're doing what you feel is safe for you. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but I understand."

I did something similar with my son over school events. S15 tied himself in a pretzel during school performances, and he went so far as to say he didn't want to do theater anymore. Given how much he loved theater I figured it had to do with inflated feelings he had to take care of his dad and mom.

So I tried to lighten the load when it came to my part. "Hey, dad and I are going to be at the show, and we aren't going to be sitting together. If you want to go talk to him and say hi at the break, that's ok with me. Come find me when you want, or we can wait until we see each other next and have our time to talk then."

BPD parents have an above average need for validation and tend to not validate their kids, so it kinda falls to us to do the validation. It's a good antidote for parental alienation, and it helps our kids figure out what is their feelings and what belongs to the BPD parent.

Without validation, it gets hard for them to figure out how they really feel, especially if the BPD parent claims to know who they are and impose their own pathology on the child.

How old is your D?

She may just not want to talk on the phone much. My D11 has very brief chats with me when she's at her mother's, and often texts I send to her get no response or one word responses. She's easy to talk to, and we get along great when she's with me. I think she just doesn't find phone or text chats that interesting with her boring old dad.

My former step kids are afraid to talk to me in front of their mother. I'm sure it goes the same for children.

Thank you livednlearned, flourdust, Portent for your responses. I figured this was normal under the circumstances. It doesn't make it easy - sorry that it's not fair.

I know I bore her pretty quickly on the phone, and keep trying to find ways to at least say Hi.

I definitely agree that validation is key. I am happy how she's been expressive as we talk in person. It's been a really tough time for her - hard to focus more in school, and the like. I have to remember not to try and "extract information", especially when I try to understand reality from what I've been told from her and her Mom.

Have you read Divorce Poison by Richard Warshak? If you are presented with a highly distorted version of reality from your D, there are other important skills to use.

We don't put our kids in the middle, usually. But when our kids are put in the middle by a BPD parent, then we need some skills to manage the damage.

I believe DP has a good section about how to address lying and secrets and privacy. I would watch shows with my son and point that stuff out (Warshak has a list of good moves on his website, if I remember correctly).

In a normal family, we would not need to help them make sense of the distortions, but in a BPD family with seeds of alienation, teaching them ways to parse reality (without disparaging their BPD parent) is essential.