36-hours after possible recognition that my 31-year-old son has BPD

[Wendybird]

My husband and I are retired and in our late 60s.  I believe we are mentally intact although I have been on anti-depressants for 13 years.  I began them about a year after my son was diagnosed at age 18 with Type 1 Diabetes and a couple of weeks after he had almost drowned.  He has smoked marijuana and probably used other drugs since his early teens.  He had a learning disability diagnosis (ADHD) and the sort of problems in school that can cause.  So all in all, he has had a tough life.  It was not made easier because of severe sibling rivalry with a high-performing two-years-older sister.  I have suspected he is clinically depressed for many, many years.   The family was in therapy from the time he was eight.  In his early teens, he was seeing a therapist privately for anger management.  How dismal it is to write about this.  Right now, he seems to be hurtling toward some sort of breakdown.  He has had trouble keeping a job or a roof over his head all of his life, I thought because of marijuana use and sales at work, rage issues, arriving late at work and so on.  He works as a video game quality assurance sort of job and earns $17.50 an hour; he is beside himself because he is being passed up for promotion, others in his job category with less seniority on the job and who are younger than he are making more money per hour than he is.  My daughter has a restraining order against him because he has threatened her life and he also has threatened to take his own life.  Ours, too.  But suddenly he is much worse. Since 2012, he has lived in a house we own and benefitted from serious subsidies from us.  Even when he has money, he expects us to subsidize his housing expense.  We gave him a car so he could get to work on time.  We babysit his dog five days a week.  We was eating dinner with us as much as five days a week.  His housemate recently moved out -- this was the guy making more money than him and getting promotions.  He does not understand why this guy moved out -- possibly the commute, but the house is filthy so that could be a factor.  At this time in the hope of his getting another roommate, we are getting his floors redone in about half of the house and will be paintining it too.  He is very destructive and we have had to get holes he's smashed in doors and walls repaired.  He hasn't vandalized the house in some time, but naturally we fear he'll start up.  Supposedly, he does not like some of the decisions about how we're fixing up the house.  He claims the white tile we purchased is ugly and it's not even white.  I'm afraid he will smash up the tile as it sits stacked in the garage.  I can hardly believe what I am writing.  Our lives were not like this when we were young.  Last night I started thinking borderline?  I got on some websites and was just sick at heart.  Later, I was unable to sleep because of panic.  I feel certain something is coming and it may be violent.  He has this script about how we shouldn't have made him move out from the house where my daughter lives with her husband, child and a bunch of roommates.  This had been the family home.  Instead, he is forced to live in a house near us in a town far from the urban center where we used to live, but within commute distance.  He continually says he hates this house, that we "force" him to live there.  But he also says he cannot get along with other people (possibly true).  We cannot afford to subsidize his life in the other house because we used equity from that to buy the other two houses, so the original family home has huge mortgages and will have to be sold when its HELOC starts amortizing in two years.  Another one of his complaints, which he screams at us, is that we gave him his car too late.  He predicts that he will be fired because his long commute made him repeatedly late for work.  But he's had the car for 19 months and more.  He does not take care of it and when I commented that he had yet to change the oil, he accused us of giving him a bad car.  There's hardly a thing we do for him that does not enrage him, that was not too late or too little.  He has not seen his sister in almost five years, and he still rages on about her and how we came close to selling her the family home with a $100,000 gift in home equity.  The house he lives in for $500 month has a fair market value of over $300,00.  He probably cannot believe that we receive the benefit the rent my daughter and the roommates pay -- if he lived there he would collect and keep the rent and gradually antagonize the roommates until the house would have to go into foreclosure.  He has no friends except for us; somehow this is our fault because we force him to live away from the original family home.  Does this sound like borderline?  If so, what can we do?  Sometimes I feel like I'd like to sell everything we own in the state where we live and go live in another country far, far away.

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[twojaybirds]

   Wendybird,

I think you may have found a home here.  Much of your story resonates.

Look at some of the resources on the right.  There is much to wade through and a supportive community to help you.

How are you and your husband doing/

How do you two care of yourselfs and each other?

[bpdmom1]

Sounds very frustrating!  I've just recently watched the video in Lesson 1 on the right and found it interesting and helpful.

[Wendybird]

I posted before but without identifying myself as a first-timer except in the text.  It appears no one has read my post, so I'm starting over.  Please reply if only with one word to this post, so I can be sure I'm doing this right.

After reading several posts, I am pretty convinced that my 31-year-old son is borderline.  My husband and I are retired and living on a fixed income plus savings.  We are in our late 60s.  We are not poor but if we don't stop subsidizing our kids, we may be.  I particularly refer to my son who lives in a house we own without carrying the weight of the expenses -- a 3 bedroom for $500 month.  The taxes, insurance, and the utilities we pay for exceed his rent... .and then there's the mortgage and the constant repairs due to his vandalism of the property when he is in a frenzy.  Whenever he has a crisis, he finds a reason to not pay his rent -- e.g. he got a ticket last week, so no rent for us for February.  I could whine on but I am sure you get the picture.  He has this terrible script describing how we favored his sister, who has a restraining order against him on account of death threats.  His place is always dirty with laundry scattered in every room, so I totally understand some of the comments made by others here.  Anyway, I am frantic 80% of the time.  My own childhood sucked due to narcissism, borderline behaviors, abandonment, alcoholism and poverty.  I was determined to do better by my own children and made incredible efforts to not be moving around all the time, to support my children who I loved so much.  My mother once said to me, "You really love your children, but they were so beautiful and I always thought I would have other children."  Both of my parents were quite happy to scapegoat me for any difficulties they had in their second marriages.  They divorced their second spouses when I was in my 20s: I had not lived with either since my junior year in high school and intermittently before.  It was this background that makes me so solicitous of both my children.  My husband has similar issues.  I guess that our experiences of abandonment as children makes us afraid that our children will abandon us and certainly makes us not want to abandon them.  He is more of an enabler than me.  Please let me know if this has posted properly.

[Dibdob59]

Welcome

From what I can see your first post had 2 responses to it - can you not see them?

Dibdob