Hi,

One sign that your daughter is telling the truth is that her mom swore her to secrecy!

One thing your daughter might do is approach a school counselor and express her concerns about her mother and stepdad driving drunk, because it puts her in harm's way.  That might impel the counselor to report, which might trigger a CPS investigation.

I don't know to what extent gathering evidence yourself would be admissable in court, but my recommendation would be to try to photograph your ex's car for damage (discreetly of course), and possibly the mailbox.  You know the mantra here--document, document, document.  Even if the "evidence" doesn't reach the courtroom, I think it might help substantiate a case, such as with CPS.  My sister did that sort of thing with her ex, who was an unsafe driver and got into accidents, some like the one you describe.  Ultimately, her kids' concerns about smaller accidents, near-misses and getting lost on familiar routes were enough for courts to remove their dad's ability to drive the kids anywhere.  I'm pretty sure it all started when one of the kids approached a school counselor about this.

If your ex is anything like my disordered uNPD family member, she will have a spotty driving record.  The police might have a file on her.  In other words, one report of a small accident with no police intervention or evidence might be disregarded.  But if you can establish a pattern and reason for ongoing concern, then you might get something done about it.  One standard approach would be to require a breathalyzer test whenever your daughter is driven by her mom, to ensure your daughter's safety.

Hi JsMom.  I'm glad you had a great time on your trip and that you're finding the Fjelstad book helpful.  I really found it so as well.  Thinking of starting it all over again!

Do you feel like something that's the "right" thing to say one day is the "wrong" thing to say another?  I have experienced that and, in reflecting on it, I find it helpful to know, because it means that it's not about what you say.  It's about what they're feeling at the moment interacting with what you say (and sometimes anything you said would elicit the same response).  You can't expect yourself to be a mind-reader!

Hi again,

I've been where you are, getting to the point of saying, my husband and I aren't continuing to work (into retirement) so an adult child doesn't have to.  That's what it boils down to, right?

If I put on my CFO hat, I'd say, no way should you pay for a wedding out of a RETIREMENT fund.  If you want some justification for this, here goes.  You don't have any money to spare right now.  Though you might have paid for your son's wedding, and your mom might have paid for yours, those situations were different.  My guess is that you've already spent orders of magnitude more money on supporting your BPD daughter well into adulthood, when she refused to work consistently.  Moreover, your husband is ill right now.  There's no telling what sort of medical and related expenses await you.  Maybe some medical treatments or ancilliary support services won't be covered by your insurance.  So you really have no extra funds available.  In addition, you yourself know that if you become a widow, your income will probably be halved, but your living expenses will remain largely unchanged.  You still have to pay for your housing, utilities, homeowners insurance, groceries, your own health insurance, etc.  Maybe you spend a little less on food, and maybe you can sell your husband's car and get rid of the associated insurance, but otherwise your living expenses are mostly fixed, barring downsizing.  Do you want to be forced to downsize?  Because of a wedding (which might not even happen by the sound of it)?

Here's another way to look at things.  You have two other adult sons.  My guess is that they are thriving, right?  Would they not resent all the extra money, mental effort and bending over backwards you're doing, in a vain attempt to "save" your disordered daughter, when she's not working on herself?  They might think that you're rewarding dysfunction, instead of rewarding all the good things your sons are doing.  And how about this:  if you continue to enable your daughter's dysfunction to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars over the coming years, and you run out of money to support your own retirement, will you ultimately be relying on your sons to help support YOU?  My CFO perspective says, honor your sons by not becoming financially reliant on them in retirement.  You can give them that gift.  In my opinion, that is the right thing to do.  If you don't save yourself for yourself, then save yourself for THEM.

If you absolutely must pay for the wedding, I'd say, you do it by not touching your RETIREMENT fund, which exists for your retirement only.  You finance the wedding with the $800 a month which you're currently spending to support your daughter.  You redirect those funds to her wedding, and by November, you'll have $3,200.  I'd say that's your budget right there.  Once she's married, you discontinue ALL monthly financial support, as your daughter and her husband become responsible for themselves.

Look, the reason your daughter isn't working is because she has a boyfriend for housing and your $800 a month for a phone, car insurance and co-pays.  If you stop paying, she'll either be forced to work again, or she'll stay at home phoneless and carless.  Her choice, but she gets a wedding that you can afford, if she goes through with it.  If not, that's also her choice.

Just my two cents.

What is the type of relationship? 

Sibling, she's my younger sister.

What is the status of the relationship? 

We're in full contact as I live with our enabling mother.

How is the current status working for you?

It's awful. I am dreaming of cutting contact, but I'm nowhere close to be ready and my family will not allow it.

What is the top challenge you face with your loved one?

The mood swings, the verbal abuse, the trauma after years of both that and physical abuse.

How would you categorize your loved one?

She's diagnosed with BPD, but refuses treatment.

What do you struggle with yourself?

I see myself as someone that's too used to the abuse that I cannot disengage with her and the situation. I'm sure that I need to stay away, but I physically can't and I'm not prepared for that in any way.

What are your goals at bpdfamily?

My main goal is to learn how to disengage, understand that I can't change her, and finally get myself prepared for when I'm ready to quit this dynamic.

Yup.  This isn’t working.  This never works for me.  I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do and it still doesn’t work.  I did it correctly and it doesn’t work. 

If I don’t help, I’m evil.   And when I do help, my help is second guessed.  And on those many occasions when I am patient and simply do what they thought they WERE doing, and it works, it’s never a fault of their losing patience or doing something too quickly. 

And God forbid you ask them to write down or keep track of what you did to avoid it in the future.   

Your divorce lawyer ought to be able to provide some ideas?

If your daughter is in counseling, she might share that with the counselor.  No idea if another's child is put at risk makes an enforceable difference.

My SUV is a few years old and if I'm using cruise control it will do some limited level of lane assist but if my hands leave the steering wheel for more than about 10 seconds it alerts and stops the lane assist.

We're all getting up in years, so we feel for you.  My retirement income doesn't even pay for all my home expenses, so my son helps out.  The reality is that inflation and bills are going up faster than the COLA adjustments.

Hopefully you're aware that Social Security allows widows who reach retirement age to choose whether to file under their own work history or their spouse's work history, or - in the past - even a combination of starting with one and then continuing with the other.  That last option may not be offered any more.

Hi Pook,

I agree, that the overwhelming majority of conversations with my pwBPD are to ask for help or money.

I suspect I can translate the Smurfs conversation for you.  My guess is your daughter is expressing some unresolved grievances and maybe feelings of rejection and self-doubt, possibly because she feels ongoing "rejection" by a society which used to have one-dimensional expectations for women, and she feels she doesn't fulfill those expectations, so she never really "fit in."  I can say that I felt angered by the Smurfs when I was growing up, because the fact there was only one female in the village, who was portrayed as pretty and in need of rescue, was a message that girls are mostly unimportant and valued mainly for their looks.  It wasn't just the Smurfs, but also the muppets (Miss Piggy was the only female puppet that I can recall, and surely the only one who primped in front of a mirror), the original Sesame Street--with ZERO female puppets that I can recall--plus Bugs Bunny and even the Superfriends, where Wonder Woman was the sole heroine.  This trend continued into high school, when we read tons of classic books, but the only interesting female character who wasn't a passing date, prostitite or barely-mentioned mother was Lady Macbeth, and she plotted murder!  Many classics have zero female characters:  Lord of the Flies, Old Man and the Sea, The Red Badge of Courage, The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Moby Dick.  I personally found it frustrating to write umpteen essays about "coming of age" books with no meaningful female characters I could remotely identify with.  The unspoken message was that my gender (and by extension, I myself) was uninteresting and unimportant, especially if we did not fulfill conventional expectations of being pretty, meek and/or motherly.  I recognize that things have changed massively in this millennium, and that scholastic reading lists have evolved, but there's still that lingering sting of growing up in a sexist environment.  It might mean that your daughter thinks that she's not conventionally pretty, and couldn't fulfill society's expectations for women that were subliminally messaged to her when she was growing up through media and education.  She might feel she has work extra hard to get attention and/or feel accepted.  Maybe she still feels invisible, rejected or alienated--by society, by her friends, maybe by her family.

Maybe I can translate it like this:  Traditional kids' media reinforce the notion that if you're not a pretty girl, then you're invisible in society.  Girls and women in classic cartoons and books generally weren't featured for their character, their abilities, their good deeds, their clevernes, their humor, their friendships, whatever.  They were the token, pretty love interests and one-dimensional.  Thus it felt to me like I was expected to be a cookie-cutter girl.  One response to that was to break the mold entirely.  I feel like I did that, to some extent in my life, and it was liberating.  But not "conforming" can come at a cost, because parents and some others close to me generally don't accept it, as my existence didn't meet their 1950s-style expectations.

Just my two cents.

Hi everyone,

I recently got some news of an incident that occurred while my D was with her mom.  My D told me about it, although she was worried about telling me because she said her mom angrily demanded she promise NOT to tell me, and didn't want to suffer any blowback if she learned she told me (I said I would be discreet). 

The incident involved a drunk driving accident BPDxw caused.  Basically, they were returned from an event, and her mom had been drinking (daughter said the adults in the group had "a bunch of bottles of champaign").  In one car was BPDxw, her friend, and her friend's kids, and D was in the car behind watching this happen.

I guess, BPDxw tried putting her car in some kind of auto-pilot mode (this was not a Tesla, but an SUV with lane following assist), so she could stand in the sunroof while the car was driving. 

YES, with kids in the car, WHILE she was driving, she wanted to stand up in the sunroof, and feel the wind in her hair or whatever.  The car swerved dangerously the first time she tried it, and then she incredibly tried it again, and on the second attempt, the car veered off the road and hit a mailbox before coming to a stop in someone's yard.  A child in the car was apparently injured in the accident. 

I guess the car was still driveable, and they were able to get it home without getting caught, or anyone filing a police report, as far as I know. 

So my question:  How can I obtain evidence of this incident that would hold up in court? 

I'm thinking of calling the local PD, and asking if anyone reported any property damage like this, or the incident itself.  I think all the adults involved in the incident would deny it - even the parents of the child injured (they're that kind of people). 

According to my daughter, her step dad also drinks while driving... I don't know if her mom does, but I do know when her mom drinks, any self control goes out the window completely. 

Don't want to start an incident if it leads to nothing, but I also don't want to do nothing if it leads to my daughter being harmed if/when they do something like this again.  Also don't know if this is enough to go to court over...   Daughter mentioned living with me again, but said she was afraid of them being angry and abusive toward her during the time she would be at her mom's home if we flipped custody.

Thank you for responding. We are definitely among those parents who are just trying to walk the line between being supportive and enabling her. After we refused to let her come back home, she finally agreed to go to job corp, so we paid for her to camp at state parks and took her food until  there was an opening. She finally got a CNA license through job corp which also housed and fed her for 9 months. She had a job and apartment, with us unwisely subsidizing her. Then she moved to Colorado with a friend, and refused to work.  It came to head about five years ago when we first cut her off completely financially, because I finally said I was not working so she didn't have to.  She ended up on the streets, and even then, I was making calls trying find homeless shelters and mental health resources. She had a complete downward spiral which of course she blames me for because I wouldn't let her come home.
She ultimately did go back to work and find housing of sorts, and we started occasionally help8ng her out again. Of course, give her an inch and she takes a mile, and gradually we found ourselves enabling her again. Once again, she lost a job, only this time she had a boyfriend to support her. After realizing she was not putting in any effort to find a job, we cut her off again financially, except phone plan, car insurance, and copays for medical so she would start getting therapy for her bpd. We have refused to give her money for food or living expenses. The condition with the copays is she sends us photos of the receipts, so there is some accountability.
Then with the engagement, I did offer to pay for a wedding (my mom paid for mine, so it seemed the right thing to do.) It's ample, but not ridiculous, $10,000 from a very small retirement fund. I won't just give her the money, because she would spend it with nothing to show for it, and to be fair, she doesn't have many friends, and it will mostly be her sibings and my large extended family who would come, a total of about 50 people.
We ended up spending about that much for her brother's wedding, and will probably pay for her other brother, too, so I don't really think of it as enabling her, but with the wedding in November, and a couple of deposits made, not sure how to proceed.
It just seems like we're walking a tight rope. We are not sure yet what the prognosis for her dad is. They may decide surgery is too risky, or he may have the surgery (scheduled for mid September) and not make it. At this point, I don't have a lot of energy to deal with her. What she may not realize is that when her dad dies (whether this year or 10 years from now), my income will be be almost half what it is now, and I may not be able to continue paying out the $600-800 a month in copays, or pay for a phone or car stuff.
Thanks for listening. It is helpful to know there are others who have gone through this, and understand.