BPDFamily.com

New member here but a year-long stalker. This forum has made me a different, stronger kind of parent. Thanks to all of you, I’ve learned to (and continue to learn and practice) to stay “light as a fairy”, validate the valid, and not enable.

Our dBPD 21-year-old daughter is a quiet BPD. We adopted her at birth. Something was evident at age two, but she was a happy kid. Emails back and forth to her teachers about lack of motivation started in first grade and continued through high school.  Middle school through high school years were a living hell for her and for us. Cutting, constant suicide attempts, drugs, sneaking out, police visits, psych hospital, IOP, etc.  Therapy started in middle school.  She liked it, but it wasn’t DBT.  In between times of clarity and acting like a typical person, she was horrid, horrid, horrid.  Not in a raging kind of way, but in a way that made us (pretty darn normal, level-headed parents) seriously consider if she had been possessed.  She was evil in a disturbing, under-handed kind of way.  But then, she could turn around and be so much fun that.

We developed a phase-out move out plan for her once she graduated high school that would have set her on solid financial footing.  She chose repeatedly not to follow the rules set forth in that plan, so by the time she graduated, we told her she had to move out within the week.  We know we enabled so many times because we were 100% convinced she would kill herself. However, we had absolutely no wavering when we told her she had to move out.  We were done. 

Caveat: she had a bf of one month who she moved in with.  Had she not had that, maybe we couldn’t have been so unwavering.  We couldn’t believe we were thankful for that bf.  As with a lot of you, we couldn’t believe that this was our lives and the tiny bits we scraped the bottom of the barrel to be happy about. 

We treated her moving out like it was a happy, exciting time for her. Helped her move, bought her some  basic things, visited her, etc. Since then, she has been through evictions, bf’s, can’t keep a job, continued suicide attempts and ideations, crippling anxiety, etc. Fortunately(?) for us, she’s always had a bf to share expenses.  We’ve lent some money, but she is determined to pay us back.  I doubt that will ever happen, and we’ve written it off in our minds as a learning experience for us. She never changed her ways regarding financial management no matter how much we lent her, so we quit doing it. 

Guess what happened when the parent bank closed?  Just like another member recently posted, our DD took it upon herself to hunt down resources to get by.  She will likely always just get by by the skin of her teeth and suffer a hundred repeated mistakes to learn a lesson, , but she is SO much more mature and in charge of her life since we let go and let her be an adult.  Out of fear, we were involved in the details of her life way, way too long. 

This is just us, but what’s (mostly) worked for us is to not ask her any questions or make comments about jobs, bf, money, housing, etc. I only talk/text about things that are funny and/or neutral.  I’m even careful about making overly enthusiastic congratulatory comments, thanks again to learning from those members who have posted on here about it possibly being too much pressure for them to succeed. 

Thank you again to everybody who posts on here even once or thousands of times.  It’s made a world of difference in my family’s life. 

Wow-please keep posting. My DD19 is adopted too and yes, demon possessed has entered our minds. I’ve not mentioned it here in my posts bc it sounds nuts.
I so agree with the things we are happy about-talk about lowering our standards for our kids!

My DD is Asian and was continually the brunt of school jokes for being a dingy dumb blonde under the black hair down to her waist. Even teachers expected her to excel in Math and Science. Talk about a reverse stigma.

I must comment again about “Loving someone with BPD”, Dr. Manning gives the perfect scenario of how communication goes awry and nothing is accomplished. This was a lightbulb for me in that for 10 years I’ve wondered if DD didn’t struggle with an Auditory Processing disorder. Now I see that when emotions are running that high, the brain has very little cognitive ability. I’m absorbing every page of this amazing book.

Thank you for taking the time to present your story here. Maybe others will too!

Thanks to you too for sharing with us what you have done and are doing and learning. Looking forward to peace and to clarity and to having a house free of stress and fights.