BPDFamily.com

I'm so grateful to be here and to receive support and information.  My mom is the family member with BPD.  I am a mom of 2 and a caregiver to developmentally disabled people who live in my home.  My mom has lived with me and my family for the past 17 years.  We didn't know about BPD until a few years ago and the situation has blown up again to the point where we are needing to seek more professional treatment and therapy.  I would love to gain more tools and support in how to go about this as well as support for myself.  I have been a part of 12 step support group for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families for many years and have found it really helpful.  However, there seems to be specifics to the BPD dynamic that I feel this community might be better suited to address.  I am very grateful that you are all here and I look forward to growing and learning with you.

Welcome!

I have a mother with BPD and also attend 12 step ACA group. I have also worked on co-dependency in 12 step groups. I find them very helpful and suggest you continue the groups while posting here- for questions about BPD. I find the family patterns in the ACA group and having a BPD family member are quite similar, and so the 12 step programs can help, even if they don't specifically address BPD- and the information here helps with that. Let us know what your questions are.

Hi bluelollipop!  :hi:

So glad you are here and shared your post with us!

Wow! 17 years with your mom living with you! That's got to be challenging. I am really glad to hear you are in the 12 step group for support.  |iiii We will do our best to help you with the BPD questions you have. What is one of the current challenges you are facing?

 :hug:
Wools

Thank you so much for responding and welcoming me.  My mom is  73 and hasn't ever had an official diagnosis.  I didn't even really know about BPD until about 5 years ago and have been doing a lot of reading and research.  I finally found Understanding the Borderline Mother and Stop Walking on Eggshells and those 2 books have helped me immensely. 

Several years ago,  we had had a huge blow up and she moved out and turned a bunch of my family members against me and accused me and my husband of all kinds of madness.  We didn't see each other for 3 years.  That's when I found ACA.  This has been the cycle between us for my whole life, really.  I'm the only one who can manage her and then she gets triggered about something and goes off the rails in her thinking and comes up with all kinds of stories and reasons to betray me.  Then she gets over it and forgets and I'm suddenly the hero again.  After a few years of being in ACA, she found ACA as well and has been going for a few years now and we began talking again and she asked to move back in with us.  I thought since she had been doing ACA work that we might have the tools to manage our dynamic a bit better.  This last blow out was not nearly as bad as the previous one but I feel like we need more therapeutic tools if we are going to be able to continue in a long term relationship.  I think I understand now that she cannot live with me.  I've asked her to go stay with my aunt until I can find a therapist to help her with diagnosis and possibly medication and therapies.  She is very willing to do that most of the time but is a bit resistant to the BPD diagnosis.  She's more comfortable with CPTSD for some reason.  But that's for a professional to decide, I guess. I don't really care what the diagnosis is, as long as she is willing to get therapy.  When I tried to talk to her about possibly moving out, that's when things got really bad.  I wasn't suggesting she move away, just maybe in an apartment or condo near us where she can still have contact and be a part of our family but not living with us and getting so enmeshed in my personal life.  I wonder if there are resources for psychiatrists who deal with BPD and how I go about finding those that do.  Also, I am wanting to just get clearer about how to deal with my particular situation.  I hope to find resonance with other people's stories and just to find a place to talk about the insanity that comes from having to manage my own reality as well as hers for all these years.   I'm realizing how exhausted I am from this and I need to find a different way to be with myself and with her and with my siblings in it.  One of my older siblings does not believe she has any problems and is a really typical older son of a BPD parent in a high power corporate job with a possibly BPD wife.  My younger sibling has just come home from living on the other side of the world for 12 years.  This was part of the latest blow up with my mom.  She is beginning to see the dysfunction and just beginning to do her own work around it.  I have been mostly managing my mom since I was about 9 or 10 and I'm now 47.  Anyway, I look forward to looking around the resources on this sight and any tips you might have to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you so much.

I think that often we adult children of a pwBPD traits often end up seeking help or greater understanding of what we went through by the time we reach our 40's or 50's. We get so tired, and the reality of having to still emotionally care for the needs of our parent becomes an overwhelming mountain in front of us.

Have you found our library of resources? https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?board=36.0

There are a lot of topics to choose from. Don't go through too many at once because it can be too much to process. Come back to a topic as often as you like. Our site has a ton of information.

So glad you are here!

 :hug:
Wools