BPDFamily.com

Hello,  My daughter is 37. Nine months ago she ended our relationship. My husband and I were shocked. We thought we had a great relationship with her, her husband and their 2 children. Six weeks later she kicked her husband out. All of us are reeling. My son in law and her are seeing therapists, but she wants to divorce him. His therapist has told him that he believes my daughter is bpd. She claims that she is suffering from ptsd because of the suffering my husband and I and our son in law has put her through. That is not our opinion of her childhood. She was a wanted and loved child.  She was never spanked or abused. I was a stay at home mom, I never left her with a baby sitter. We all are confused as to what kind of abuse she could mean.  Her children have been a huge part of our life for 10 years, often spending the weekends with us. Now she says she is punishing us, and won’t let us see them. Does anyone else have experiences where a loved one could keep this virtually hidden for 37 years?

HI and Welcome,
She may well have BPD traits or even BPD, but please don't take it on yourself that it is your fault:
1.Here is some reading on " Is it my fault" from this website.
https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=49127.0
 In short  research suggests genetics plays a large role( scroll down to the NIH link that is within the message board above).  
2. Your daughter is 37.  Meaning it is up to her to work on her issues and not for you to turn over every stone in her childhood on every mistake you ever made in raising her.  We all have done this of course, but it does nothing for you or the adult child.  In addition, it is faulty data because everyone makes mistakes in childrearing and if that is the case, all of us would have BPD as a result of those mistakes.
3. It is good your son in law is in therapy.  Good for him and the grandkids.
4. I am sure other grandparents here can chime in.  In the meantime, take a look around the website, and please write to us again  as you are able.

 

Hi Violet,


I think it's more likely that she is rewriting history, rather than at last revealing something she has kept hidden for so long. This seems to be something which is very characteristic of people with BPD: they can suddenly change the way they remember something, and even though they were apparently very happy in the moment, later they will tell you that they weren't happy at all, it was all your imagination. Our initial reaction is to believe that since the person is telling us about her experience, she must be right and we are wrong. For a long time this was how I reacted to my own daughter's rewriting of events. I thought she must know how she feels now, and how she felt in the past. But over the past month, since I began to think that she might be suffering from BPD and I have been reading as much as I can on the subject, I realise that she is not a reliable witness of her own feelings.
In our case too, our daughter suddenly announced that she was getting divorced, just when it had seemed that her relationship with her husband was much better than it had been for a while, so we were completely unprepared for it. When I mentioned this to her, and said that on our most recent visit to them we had thought things were improving, she told me that I was wrong, I just hadn't seen how bad things were. This is only one example of how she has rewritten events: there have been many others. I'm not sure if she is even aware that she is lying: she can change her story without seeming to realise that she is contradicting something she has said earlier.
One of the characteristics of BPD is impulsiveness, leading to decisions made with no real rationale. Maybe this is why people with BPD then have to twist the past in order to justify those decisions in their own minds and to others. They can be very convincing for a long time, but sooner or later they lose the trust of those around them.
I'm sorry for what you are going through. You are not alone!

Hi Violet, I want to second what Lost4Words said. She is probably rewriting history. I read somewhere that while non BPD's usually change their feelings to fit the facts, BPD's often do the reverse, that is, change the facts to fit their feelings. It's very possible that up until now, her life was going well enough that she didn't have extreme negative feelings, and therefore didn't need to do so much changing of facts to fit them. She could be going through a tough time (and it doesn't take much for many BPD's for it to be tough) and so now she is rearranging all the facts and rewriting history. This probably has little to do with you or her actual past.

It's great that your SIL is in therapy. Since it's the therapist who suggested BPD, hopefully the therapist can help them get past this. 

2CC

Reading you’re replies has helped me understand. Thank you so much. I am in the process of trying to learn everything I can about BPD, so if ever given the opportunity I can communicate with my daughter in a more helpful manner.