Different sort of family

[Filmore16]

I'm a college professor with a PhD student I am pretty sure has at least traits of BPD maybe NPD also.  To my knowledge they are undiagnosed.  As a parent, I can say that grad students become somewhat like your own family, as there is similar investment, pride, worry, etc.   I think this person and I were close at the start; getting to know a new person you are going to mentor is usually an exciting time and this particular one is very smart, outgoing, funny, and as for their professional skills I see a lot of myself in them.   But I felt from the start that they had defensiveness built into many of their answers to my questions.   Over time it was clear that criticism was very hard for this person to hear, although a week or two from being criticized they seemed to silently take it to heart.   As time went on they started to devalue me and even act contemptuous, while at the same time performing very generous acts on a sort of big-picture scale.   Eventually we had a falling out after I lost my temper over something and then after maybe 6 months things thawed and were fun again for a while.  But recently they fell apart, as I confronted them with their authority problem and my concern about its effect on the rest of their career.   I tried to explain that I care about this person but sentimentality makes them very uncomfortable. We still work together but the student largely works from home and won't join meetings, casual or working, with the rest of my students and tries to avoid any sort of small-talk with me.   Basically now I just give deadlines and they are pretty good about meeting them.  I still see massive amounts of potential in this person, but also potential to fail due to problems with interpersonal skills. 

I guess I am writing here because I miss this student and go over a lot in my mind what I could have done differently, but it's also kind of a relief to not interact, which is a matter of some guilt for me as I feel professionally responsible for them.  I am very confused about whether to let things go as they are (which my other students see as a double standard).  But I think maybe I need to just focus on this person's productivity and not worry about the rest.   Anyway it's all sad and confusing, and from what I have read it's usually not a successful strategy to tell someone with one of these disorders that they need help.

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

[Turkish]

You are right that it isn't productive to point out the possibility of a mental illness,  and you don't know this student's past. 

Being in the position of prof/mentor/authority figure (kind of a parent?), the issues of dealing with your other students and how they view things sounds hard.  It might be time to teach the others a little empathy and grace, but I might imagine that this may result in issues due to your position. 

Though it isn't your job to fix things (or any of ours), you may benefit from learning some of the communication tools in Lesson 3 on the Improving Board:

https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=56206.msg913190#msg913190

Let us know if you see anything there which makes sense and can help your interactions with your student.  If you narrow it down,  it might help (like a Pareto Chart).

Turkish

[Filmore16]

Thank you, I wish I had understood these communication strategies years ago and had time to practice them, perhaps this situation would be in a better place.   I can see how they would help, although in the workplace validating someone's feelings without necessarily agreeing with their actions seems like a fine line to walk.  Especially when a student (who I am also paying as an employee) is accusing me of unfairness, and yet I am trying to get them to finish something. 

Where I can see that I contributed to this problem is that I assumed a Ph.D. student would behave in a certain way without needing explicit expectations or boundaries (many don't... .they are naturally motivated to achieve and to be collegial in my experience).   So from the start I was not always very clear in my expectations with this person. I just got increasingly frustrated when they were not met, even when this person was telling me that they needed more structure (which in light of some things I have been reading about these disorders seems like encouraging self-awareness).   But I felt that when I tried to impose structure, they would fight it.   They also seemed to fight against me harder the closer we got to a goal.  I would love to help them to see achieving stated goals as a positive instead of as scary.   They are also not very impressed by positive feedback, at least not overtly.

I should say that whenever this person gets formally judged (like an oral exam for instance, or a public talk) they tend to impress.  I do think they have to push themselves hard to face these sorts of occasions every single time, moreso than most students, and I have to push harder than normal to get them to do it.  But they do it, in the end.   These glimmers of hope have prevented me from giving up.   

At this point our interactions are rather limited but I will try to employ some of the strategies I see here, when we do interact.  I would say my main goal is to not only reach a successful graduation, but to figure out how to get to where I can be the job reference that I always wanted to be for this person.  Right now I'm agonizing over that somewhat.