Greetings! Sorry we had to meet due to the difficult circumstances. It is what it is.
It is best to be proactive when defending yourself. Being an appeaser and acquiescing to demands does not work long term. The person with BPD (pwBPD) will generally see kindness, niceness, fairness, etc as weak boundaries to be challenged and overcome. So do not feel bad for choosing to set firm boundaries for better behavior. (
Boundaries by Henry Cloud.) She may never respect them, seeing how she surely views herself as The Authority. Fact is, however, family court is The Real Authority, even if it prefers to sit back and hope the parents work it out. A truism I have repeated is, Court will almost always be "less unfair" than your Ex. And court sometimes almost has to be led by the hand to realize how oppositional and obstructive your Ex is. Courts and lawyers assume all the complaints will fade over time once the initial separation fades into the past. That's mostly true for reasonably normal parents but not with our cases, sadly.
Most of our experiences in family court were similar, that a diagnosis was not easy to obtain. If ther was already a diagnosis such as past rehab or hospital evaluations, that might be helpful, but court and the professional around the court were more interested in the behaviors and behavior patterns. No so much about the poor adult behaviors (such as against you) but more so regarding the parenting behaviors (how the children were impacted). Keep that in mind when developing strategies with your lawyer on presenting your case.
William Eddy & Randi Kreger have an excellent handbook - SPLITTING - for the legal struggles. It has a longer title but their names and that word will pop it up in searches.
www.HighConflictInstitute.com
