To me, abuse is someone repetitively saying or doing something that harms you- and that could be physically or mentally.

For instance, someone lying about something.  That's not abuse.  But if they continue lying about different things and our relationship is completely built on a stack of lies, then yeah, it's abusive.  My BPD daughter comes to mind where she'd ask for $10-50 daily for gas and food, yet she was buying drugs and alcohol.  If I said no, she'd scream and rage about what a terrible father I was.  That was abuse...and not just the yelling part.  The being nice to me part to manipulate me to give her money was just as abusive because it was being done with bad intentions.

There's also one-off abuse as well- which I think we don't have to define.  Hitting, insulting, belittling, manipulating...all that is certain abuse.  But I think we'd differ on when it reaches that level to call it abusive.  For instance, someone pushes me because they're rushing to the bathroom and I'm blocking their way...is that abusive?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  You'd have to see a little bit more of the relationship to really have an understanding.

I'll add one more thing- friends and family usually know better than we do if our relationships are abusive.  We tend to brush off so much as regular daily cohabitating that it all begins to feel normal.  Oh, my partner is moody in the mornings, that's just how they are.  Or, he only hits me when he's drinking heavily, it's my fault for saying something that upset him.  When we're so close to it, we can see something completely different from the actual truth.

Bottom line, if someone is acting in a way that harms you over a period of time, that's abuse.  Everyone has bad days so again, I'm not talking about a one-off incident where someone loses their cool and shouts for a few minutes.  If it happens once, probably not abuse.  It it happens weekly, then yeah...it's probably an abusive relationship.

I think we assume abuse is done with intent by an evil person. Actually, abusive relationships are not all bad and neither is the abusive person necessarily evil or doing so with intent to harm. Rather, they are cyclic, with the person being caring and loving and sometimes even remorseful in between. This is why they can be confusing. It also involves two people. People wonder why the abused person doesn't just leave, but it's actually difficult for people to leave an abusive relationship due to the cyclic nature of them.

What's the point of naming abuse abuse? It's not to vilify someone or to blame or not blame. It's to not sugar coat it. It is what it is. So call it that.

I think an aspect of the partner in these relationships is sometimes a sense of denial or minimizing the behavior due to the other qualities of the person or the experience. But abuse has an impact and it helps to identify it for the purpose of dealing with it, in therapy.

Friends will have an opinion and possibly agree/take sides but that isn't a theraputic situation. I think therapy is helpful to anyone who has experienced abusive behavior- no matter what kind or severe. The label is more helpful to them in that sense.

 

Hi Pursuing Joy- I remember you from the other board and your challenging relationship with your MIL and her relationship with your husband.

I am sorry to hear you are also dealing with a BPD child.

These issues involve family dynamics and can be intergenerational. There's also a genetic component to BPD but it's not a absolute that a parent with BPD will have a child with it too. It seems more complicated than that. You didn't cause this. It isn't your fault.

What baffles me is the capacity of someone with BPD to get others to align with them. In my situation it was my BPD mother who got angry at me, then my father and her other family members aligned with her.

I was estranged from her FOO for many years. They did resume contact with me later when they saw the extent of her behaviors.

I am glad to hear that your other children have resumed contact with you. I can relate to the sense of anxiety around them due to their being influenced by their sibling with BPD. My BPD mother is now deceased but I still am cautious about my relationship with her FOO.

I believe you deserve to be happy. I hope you can find some moments of that and more of them. Your D has made a very sad choice and IMHO, it's her loss. 

My girlfriend with diagnosed BPD just broke up with me two days ago and it feels like my life is falling apart. This was my first ever "long term" relationship so I feel incredibly lost and conflicted on what to do or feel. I have no one to talk to so this post will just be a trauma dump to sort out my thoughts.

We have been dating for about 6 months, but I already got to know her some time before through mutual friends. I am 21 and she is 25 so there's quite the age gap.
When I first got to know her she was already involved in an on-/off- relationship of 4 years with her now ex boyfriend, however from the very start we had incredible chemistry and she made it obviously clear that she liked me. She opened up very quickly to me about her relationship and told me that she was unhappy, because her boyfriend was constantly lying to her, wouldnt commit, pretended to only know her as a friend in front of his family and she also suspected him of cheating on her with his ex girlfriend.
After a few months we then hooked up whilst she was technically still with her ex boyfriend whom she finally broke up with after we kept seeing each other for about a month. At that point I already saw lots of red flags, but I chose to ignore them, because I finally felt loved by someone for the first time in my life. (I grew up in an orphanage before getting adopted and have terrible fear of abandonment, trust and loneliness issues)

She was incredibly communicative and also told me about her past trauma of sexual abuse  as a teenager and her BPD diagnosis. We were also both having issues with substance abuse (weed).

I always perceived her as very self aware, reflective and smart person. The first few months with her were extremely exhilarating, she was very needy, texting constantly and asked for constant reassurance, which i had no problem with as i pretty much felt the same deep inside me. She also had major problems with her self esteem which she voiced to me and i was successful at being uplifting her and giving her a more positive outlook on life in general. The sex with her was also amazing and she asked me about my past and i could finally open up to her.

After about 4 months her behaviour then suddenly shifted, she was more distant and started ignoring my messages, which triggered my fear of abandonment and anxious attachment. A few weeks after this shift I voiced my needs and concerns and she seemed extremely understanding, reassuring me, however she would always go back to being more dismissive shortly after. This then created this sort of spiral where I would bottle up my feelings and then ask for reassurance in a more and more agressive and irrational ways, I even indirectly accused her of cheating one time. All of this took an extreme toll on my mental health, i was overthinking constantly, getting 4 hours of sleep each night and also developed cannabis related psychosis.

During all of this she was trying to find a new apartment and I helped her with that and the whole moving process aswell. After she moved things got better for a bit until the spiral continued. She then eventually told me that she needed space before finally meeting with me in person and telling me that she didn't want a relationship because she didn't want to hurt me. She seemed like a completely different person then and for me this is still impossible to fathom. I tried to convince her to work through our problems together, started therapy and stopped consuming cannabis about a month before the breakup but i couldnt get through to her.

I told her i cant keep seeing her because it would tear me apart, but now i feel like I've completely lost my identity, im an emotional and physical wreck, experiencing constant tremors, sleep paralysis, hallucinations of her voice and I can't stop crying every minute of the day. All these symptoms started since the breakup, i miss her so much, I feel like im slowly dying and reached out again in a long text message that she didn't reply to. I don't know what to do anymore and how to make it stop, I feel like I need to let her go to heal myself but it's just getting worse.

Has anyone else experienced something like this and can provide me with any advice or options on what to do. The pain is extremely unbearable and i have never been at a lower point in my entire life.

My BPD mother had access to my father's email. She was able to read anything I sent to him or he sent to me. I couldn't tell sometimes if what he was saying to me was what he wanted to say or what she wanted him to say. This is why I question this email and also it doesn't sound like a 13 year old would write like this.

I understand the concern about your son's behavior. Having been raised by a BPD mother, I think there's going to be some effect. I don't have BPD but I did learn some behaviors from my mother that I worked on changing later.

I also learned some co-dependent behaviors from my father that I had to work on too. It only makes sense as these are what kids see their parents do and it can be a normal in the family.

There were also emotional consequences. I think they are unavoidable. I worked on them as an adult through my own therapy.

I think at age 13, it's difficult to know if your son's behaviors are learned ones, emotional responses to what he experiences with his mother, teen age hormones and mood shifts, or actual BPD.

There were times I worried my teens might have BPD but they were being moody teen agers. If a part of BPD is emotional immaturity, it would make sense that teens act like this also at times. The difference is that teens will grow out of it.

One thing that happens is that as teens become adults, as they mature and differentiate, the relationship becomes more challenging to the pwBPD who may not have the emotional maturity to handle this. There's also parentification going on, and the teen may be expected to be an emotional caretaker. That your son is intelligent is in his favor but it also promotes the parentification. The chances he gets to act like a kid may be when he's not with his mother.

The best intervention I can think of is time away from his mother if at all possible and to be around stable adults. For us, this experience was staying with my father's family during some school breaks. My parents stayed together. For your son, maybe it could be some one on one time with you, if you can get more custody time or even trips with Dad to something he'd enjoy. If you have extended family so he can experience other stable adults, hang out with same age cousins. Just time away from mom where he can feel emotionally safe and be a kid. He will need counseling too. Both helped us kids.

Yes, these terms, wife, mother, husband, dad- have associated meanings. One thinks of a mother and also a wife as loving and supportive. For a Dad- a protector, reliable. When the person in these positions doesn't fit the meaning of the title, I think not using it is a way to emotionally guard oneself and also to not give them the title when it doesn't fit.

In my mind the word "abuse" implies a repetitive pattern... whether it's abusing a substance like alcohol, or abusing another person.  A single instance of some sort of negative or hostile behavior toward another is a fight.  It could be a one-and-done event, for whatever reason: to establish dominance, to blow off steam, to right a wrong, to deter someone from doing something, or to steal something. 

He's had a bad day and he snaps at you when you say you're tired and don't want to get dinner out.  Is that abuse?  Maybe not.  It's not great, but in an otherwise good relationship, it's forgivable.  But if it becomes a pattern, then it's abuse. 

Abusive conduct toward another, as I see it, is to condition them to accepting a certain role in a relationship between people. 

I do think the word itself can get overused - or abused if you will - but it has a very real definition, and it happens.

And "abuse" would indicate a need to take corrective action whereas "poor behavior" may not be considered to need a strong countermeasure.

Related to this, we often mention that the "acting out" personality disorder traits (Cluster B ... Narcissistic, Borderline, Antisocial, Histrionic) are generally harmful to others while some of the other PD have traits are "acting-in" which tend to be more toward self-harm.

I refer to my ex as an ex-spouse, almost never as ex-wife.  By the time we separated and divorced, that inclination had been shocked out of my system.

I'm honestly not sure, apparently it was sent while on a 2-hour drive with his Mom (other kids in the backseat confirm) but he wasn't upset or arguing or crying or anything...which is odd if he were really writing that kind of email I'd expect some level of rage or biting back angry tears...but they report he was totally fine...which raises the chances it's a pre-written email that his mother just hit "send" on when she got out to pump gas or something. It's also a brand new email account for him, not his regular one at all - making it more odd...is he hiding it from Mom, or is she hiding it from him?

He does struggle with either BPD symptoms, or possibly just mirroring BPD stunts he's seen performed by his mother so many times- it's not healthful by any metric - so I'm still concerned, even if this might be his mother's hand on the keyboard.