Talking to my daughter for the first time about BPD

[Superflytchr]

Hello. I am new to this site and so grateful to have found all of you. My daughter is 24 and exhibits all of the signs of BPD that I have recently read about. Learning about BPD gives me some comfort because now I know that we are not alone and that there is hope for her. However, I am feeling actually scared to share with her what I have been learning about BPD because I don’t want to offend her, you know? That sounds like a weak excuse, as I write this, to possibly save her life, right? I would just like to know other parent’s experiences with approaching their child and discussing BPD. Thank you.

 

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

[Resiliant]

  Hi Superflychr and on behalf of everyone here, welcome to this thoughtful and caring community.

Myself personally, I do NOT recommend telling her yourself.  You could pay for this for years.  No good deed goes unpunished?  I know you have the best of intentions. 

I feel this needs to come from someone other than you, and not from an opinionated friend or relative but from a therapist.  If you can get her to a therapist.

Your risk is getting accused of gaslighting.  She might feel that you are blaming her for everything and not taking any responsibility for your part in the relationship by telling her there is something wrong with her that you have diagnosed.   And she might never let you forget it. 

That is what happened to me by my son when I asked him to see a therapist because he was telling me he wanted to end his life.  My reaction before I knew about BPD, before I read any books was really?  You tell me you are suicidal but when I respond with "you really need to talk to a professional" your answer is "how dare you!?"   He felt that I was telling him that there is something wrong with himself personally and not his situation.  In his mind it is his situation that makes him want to end it all, not his brain.  He feels that I have undermined his character and ignored his situation.  Thank goodness I read some books, came here and learned about validation etc.

I wish I could tell my son he is BPD but I never have and I can't.  The hope would be that he would finally understand why he is and has been going through so much pain.  And then he would feel so much better knowing there was help out there, right?  Except that is not how it would turn out if I told him. 

I'm interested in hearing from others who have successfully gotten their adult children diagnosed.  Did it take a suicide hospitalization?

The only way that I was able to get my son to a therapist was to find one who also described himself as a "mediator".  That worked and he came to the first appointment but skipped the second.   I think he was afraid to be found out or called out.

Thanks for posting and asking this question!

R

[CC43]

Hi there,

It can be a relief to put a name to your daughter's troubling behaviors, and to have access to resources like this site to learn how to cope and communicate better.  If your daughter has BPD, the good news is that it's treatable with therapy.  I think the other good news is that your daughter is still young--she can turn her life around and not have BPD dysfunction derail her entire life. The not-so-good news is that for therapy to work, she has to want to change for the better.  With BPD, a typical coping tactic is to play the victim, and the trouble with that is, she thinks that everyone else is the cause of all her problems.  She expects everyone else to change, not her.  Does she seem extremely demanding, entitled and mean?  That can be a manifestation of the victim attitude (you hurt me = you owe me = you need to fix it and pay = if you don't you're the most evil person on the planet and I hate you). And that's a key reason why the therapy might not work.

My advice would be NOT to suggest to your daughter that she has BPD.  Nobody, especially someone with a fragile sense of self, enjoys being labeled by others as having a disorder, no matter how much you love your daughter or how good your intentions are.  If you told her you thought she had BPD, I bet her reaction would be to accuse you of being toxic, psycho and in need of help (see the projection here?).  And then she might become estranged from you, precisely when she needs your support the most (i.e. early adulthood with untreated BPD), in a misguided attempt to "punish" you for your evil words.  To hear that you think she's disordered will only give her a reason to hate you more than ever.  Do you see what I mean?

If you do broach the topic of getting therapy, I'd recommend that you frame it as a way to get some extra help to cope through a bad patch.  I bet your daughter is saying she's been abused and/or traumatized, and you could use that angle to broach the topic with her:  getting extra help to cope with trauma.  If she's saying she's depressed, anxious or suicidal, then maybe you say, though you don't fully understand her pain, you'd like to support her in getting therapy so that she can feel better.  Wouldn't it be worth it to give therapy a try, if there were a chance that she might feel even a little bit better?  My BPD stepdaughter really warmed up to the notion that she'd be getting help from professionals, as they were experts in helping people deal with trauma, anxiety and depression.  They see this sort of thing all the time, they'll know what to do!  In a way, getting therapy was validating to my stepdaughter, because she didn't have to abandon the notion of feeling "abused," but in the process she got the right medications and support to learn how to cope better with life's pressures.  The process was bumpy at first, but when she bought into it, she really turned things around.  One of the keys was finding the right therapist.  Since her very life was at stake, ultimately I think she felt therapy was worth a try, because nothing else had seemed to work.

My other advice is only to approach this topic when you and your daughter are calm.  It's not the sort of conversation you want to have when she's actively raging, and when you're stressed out by her behavior.  

Finally, though therapy helps, it's not a quick fix.  She really needs to want to make changes.  Sadly, if you are supporting her fully, you might be enabling and prolonging dysfunction, such as if she's not working/studying/taking care of her environment and lashing out with inappropriate anger at everyone.  If you are supporting her and she's acting like this, in her mind, YOU are the one causing all her troubles.  She might have to try living on her own before she comes to the realization that you aren't the one causing the problems, she is.  Unfortunately, my stepdaughter had to go through that process herself.  She was "enabled" for too long in my opinion, around four to five years, when she was highly dysfunctional, blaming her parents for it and not getting treatment (or not taking treatment seriously).  She had to try (and fail) living on her own a few times to admit that she couldn't cope anymore, and therapy was a last resort.  The good news is that she really turned her life around in a couple of years, and I bet that doctors would say she doesn't qualify for a BPD diagnosis right now, because she's not showing a number of the behaviors anymore (suicide threats/attempts, persistent feelings of hopelessness, paranoia/delusions/losing touch with reality, intense bouts of uncontrolled anger).  Though she still struggles with her intense emotions, she's managing them much better now.  She's also reduced the frequency of therapy visits to every other week, down from weekly.