How Many of You Have Told Your Parent They Have BPD?

[louis1]

I won't re-write my introduction but in a nutshell, I have barely been able to even tell my mother that she needs some sort of help without a Hiroshima incident in the house. My sister and her husband and I have often spoke about pulling an intervention, but we never want to get to that point because of the repercussions.

So my question is this:

I see many people with struggles like mine. But how many of you have fully confronted your parent with a plea to get help and mentioned that you think they may have BPD?

OR

How many of you have confronted your parent with the problems they have caused you in your life and asked for them to seek any sort of help?

For those that have, please share your story and tell me about your outcome then and now.

Thank you.

[SweetCharlotte]

I see many people with struggles like mine. But how many of you have fully confronted your parent with a plea to get help and mentioned that you think they may have BPD?

OR

How many of you have confronted your parent with the problems they have caused you in your life and asked for them to seek any sort of help?

Louis, My Mom died over 15 years ago as a result of alcoholism + smoking (cirrhosis will take a person much faster if they already have emphysema). I spent much of my adult life estranged from her. Much of the time, I was in therapy. I did try to express to her that I thought she had caused me a lot of trauma. Her reaction was to yell into the phone, "Get a life!" until I had to hang up.

As far as recommending that she get help, that was out of the question. There was nothing wrong with her, to her mind. Period.

After she died, I found that she had kept a very strange diary, charting her moods and blaming others around her for the way she felt at every instant. That was her way of trying to help herself, and it came from my very first therapist, who recommended I keep a diary when I was a teenager.

[Gerda]

I did this, and it's what resulted in me being in my current state of NC with her.

This subject comes up from time to time on this board, and the advice is always ":)on't do it! It won't do any good!"

But actually I don't regret trying. In the end, it was more for me than for her, I think. It let me (and my husband, who tried to help) know for absolute certain that there is no hope for her to change. Now I can move on from that and deal with the fact that if I want any relationship with her in the future, it will be up to me to do literally ALL the work in the relationship, and figure out if I think that's worth it.

What happened was my husband and I tried to talk with her about it at the same time she started some therapy, which we thought would help. We told her we think she might have BPD, and she might want to talk to her therapist about it. We even looked up some stuff for her about the type of therapies that have been shown to be effective.

Her reply was that her therapist was absolutely sure she DOES NOT have it, because she doesn't cut herself (gee, I didn't know that was the sole diagnostic criterion!  ) Then she said her therapist thought that my husband made the whole thing up to turn me against her. She said her therapist said that family members love making up these diagnoses as an excuse to not have to deal with family members who are going through a difficult time.

My husband and I were really insulted by these accusations because here we were trying to help. She then started forwarding us email conversations between her and a friend of hers, and between her and her therapist, to somehow "prove" that we're the bad ones here, because the conversations were her telling them about how bad we were, and the other person feeling sorry for her.

Of course her therapist didn't know she was doing this, but now I had her email address, so I sent her therapist an email giving my side of the story. She replied saying she deleted it without reading it, and told me to never email her again, but at least after that I never got any more forwarded emails from Mom. I figure her therapist told her to quit doing that.

So after being bombarded for a while with all these "See? Even my therapist thinks it's all your fault!" type emails, I blocked her from my email, and quit answering the phone whenever she called. I just couldn't take it anymore, and that's how I went NC with her. This was maybe about a year ago.

Mom was only in therapy for a couple of months anyway and then quit. As far as I know she spent the whole time talking about how everyone else is so bad to her, and her therapist agreeing with her. It merely reinforced all her ideas.

But like I said, I still don't regret it, because for me it's better to be certain than to live with that nagging thought in the back of my head that maybe she could get help.

My husband actually stayed in contact with her longer, until she finally drove him too far too. Now she hates him and is sure he turned me against her, even though it's more like the opposite. He encouraged me to stay in contact with her longer than I wanted to, because "she is your mother after all", and "she can't really be THAT bad." He finally found out for himself that she really is that bad.

So if you are considering telling your parent you think they have BPD, be prepared for it not going well, but it might not make things worse. It just depends on what you consider to be "worse".