How to coach my BPD wife to help her BPD daughter?

[SiriusHertz]

I'm new to this forum and to the world of BPD, but I'm not. I'm going to avoid abbreviations and acronyms for now, because I'm so new to the forum I'd just mis-use them and confuse everyone.

I've been living with two family members with BPD for the last 5-12 years. I'm lucky, in that we have a great family therapist with a strong grounding in personality disorders who has been helping us as a family for about 3 years now. With her help, we've made incredible progress as a family. Many of the concepts here, I am finding that I know or partially know - they're new names for things I've been learning with our therapist.

Until recently, our therapist has completely avoided the formal BPD diagnosis. She is still discouraging my wife from learning too much about it (for now). We haven't gotten into her reasoning for this decision yet. Instead, she's been encouraging me to learn as much as I can about it, so I can provide some emotional structure when my wife starts learning more about the disorder.

My wife has high-functioning BPD. Her 15-year-old daughter, my step-daughter, has low-functioning BPD. My wife has been formally diagnosed; my daughter has not. My daughter has been inpatient something like 5-6 times, had anorexia nervosa at age 10, and as I'm learning is normal, has a whole slew of other mental-health diagnoses - GAD, OCD, ADHD, the list goes on. She's BPD, and the only reason she's not been diagnosed is that she (currently) actively avoids therapy with anyone who could make the formal diagnosis. We're hardly strangers to the world of mental health management.

I'm honestly finding it easier and easier to deal with my wife as I learn these skills. Years of mistrust, fear, chaos, and pain are fading away, and the family support structure is recovering for our other 3 children, and for me as well, even as the occasional outburst continues. The outbursts are becoming shorter with proper external management, if no less intense. My wife, while she is able to rely on that new structure with most of the family, gets into a BPD echo chamber with our BPD daughter. It's amazingly bad. They bounce off each other so hard I'm sometimes surprised the neighbors haven't reported us for child abuse - no physical abuse, thankfully (I'd get in the way of that), but tons of verbal/emotional abuse in both directions.

I do not have enough of a relationship with my step-daughter to employ many of the techniques that are working so well with my wife. The years of disfunction and abuse - and my bad reactions to it and involvement in it - have left a lot of scars and even some open (emotional) wounds. I'm working on healing that and starting to have a more supportive relationship, but it takes so much time for those years of trauma to heal, especially with an adolescent who's struggling with normal teenage things *and* BPD.  My wife is *just barely* beginning to put some boundaries and compassionate support in place for our daughter, over the last 2-3 days.

I could really use some help in coaching a high BPD mom through using SET and setting boundaries with her BPD daughter, while balancing her own BPD fear/self-loathing. Are there resources available for BPD parents of BPD kids?

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[an0ught]

Welcome S H,

due to phone typing this is short -  ask if unclear... .

Connection to SD: Validation builds connection. There are different way of validating - check out workshop section and pick situation and age appropriate ones.

Coaching SET:

1) Plenty of validation, Build emotional self awareness.

2) Emo situational education: Do SET with E hers and T your emotion.

3) Work with her on addressing D - Prep her approaching D by clearifying D emotions and reframing T in a way that has little emotions left. Stress first listening. Then send her into the battle with D  

Coaching Boundaries:

Unlike validation it gets tricky to work together here as you are often in a win-loose conflict (unless it can be transformed but not all can as such is life). Coaching requires meta discussion and for your relationship w/ her this is not possible. Coaching her in boundaries with D is also tricky as you may well take the role of a T and that is neither ethical nor really healthy. The best I found us starting with the conflicts we are faced with that relate to the outside. Unreasonable demands on us as a couple. There we can figure out that is important to us / our values and what are we committing to pay in case we have to defend the boundary. Here we can talk about extinction bursts on the other in our case MIL side.

Leading by example is key - talk does not affect much.

Again welcome,

a0

[pearlsw]

Hi SiriusHertz,

Welcome to the community! I hope you will become a regular here with this - sharing your insights and support with others!

Let me follow up anOught's post with some links to things he is referencing:

SET

Validation

Please be aware that there are boards for Parents of children with BPD as well as relationship boards.

Can you share with more about how you managed to get the situation with your wife to a bit more manageable of a place? I am sure members would really like to hear about what you've tried and how it worked!

sincerely, pearl.

[SiriusHertz]

a0,

The parts of that I understood are exactly what I need - thank you!

Questions:

2) Emo situational education: Do SET with E hers and T your emotion.

I translate this as "Emotional Situation Education: practice SET with her Empathy and my Truth, and also my emotion"? I'm not sure I have that right. I also am not sure what that would look like. Can you give me an example?

The best I found us starting with the conflicts we are faced with that relate to the outside. Unreasonable demands on us as a couple.

Boundaries are very hard, and I've been mostly providing support for her as our therapist provides the coaching on proper setting of boundaries. My wife has a really great concept of where those boundaries should be with our daughter - better than I do, usually. She just lacks the S and E to put them in place consistently and compassionately, instead going into a fit of anxiety/rage/fear as soon as they're approached or broached.

I think you're saying that you have had the most luck working on boundaries for conflicts that face outside of your nuclear relationship, such as the relationship with your MIL. In those situations, you've been able to (jointly) identify what constitutes an unreasonable demand on you as a couple/family, and go from there. Is that right?

[SiriusHertz]

pearl,

I can share what little I've learned - I'll do my best to relate things to similar/identical concepts under different names, but as I said, I'm just learning some of the language of BPD, so please ask for clarification if I'm unclear.

So here's the backstory:

I began dating my wife about 12 years ago, in 2006. We had a pretty immediate chemistry, but the relationship was also intermittently rocky from the start. Neither of us entered the relationship on the best footing; we both had unresolved prior marriages that we had to deal with - separated but not yet divorced. She had 2 kids from the prior relationship, as did I, for a total of 4 - just 2 short of the original Brady Bunch. The prolonged separations, fighting (her with her ex, I never fought much with mine), and divorces were really traumatic for all of the kids, although we tried to co-parent with mixed success.

We had a lot of arguments and strong disagreements, especially about parenting - any time the kids were involved, the family had problems. She spanked my son at one point (for choking one of the neighborhood kids when he was about 5), which led to child abuse allegations from my ex. That wound up in a court of law, where she pled to a lesser charge. Her daughter was diagnosed as AN (anorexia nervosa) in 2012, and went through her first inpatient stay at a dedicated treatment facility. After that, she’s been in and out of public school, home school, and various psychiatric treatment facilities. She has self-harmed, tried various drugs, and bounced from living mostly at our home to her dad's and back (we all live in the same small city) at various times. My son, our youngest, had behavioral problems from age 8 onwards.

Throughout this period, our home life and relationship were extremely up and down. We would be great one week, not great the next. Her moods have always been erratic; she would go from euphoric to suicidal in hours or minutes, for no reason perceptible to me. There were verbal and emotional confrontations, sometimes in front of the kids. We both threatened to abandon the relationship multiple times, sometimes on a weekly basis. The threats of suicide were always more “I’ll kill myself if you can’t prove to me that I’m worthwhile as a person” or “I’m worthless to everyone and should just die” than actual attempts to sneak off and die.

The good times were golden moments, and I tried to savor them as they came. The bad times could be walking, waking nightmares. I couldn’t tell you, now, how much was good and how much was bad. I suspect I was so traumatized throughout this period that I’ll never really be able to sort it out. I know some of the bad periods lasted weeks or longer, and some of the good ones were equally long.

Eventually, after much pleading and many threats to leave, she started taking medication - Wellbutrin. That seemed to calm the outer oscillations. She took it for a while, stopped, started again when I threatened to leave. After resuming the meds, she complained that it helped outwardly, but she still felt empty inside. So I (almost literally) dragged her to a psychiatrist, who added Lithium as a mood stabilizer. That combination was almost magical - she was a lot more stable, she felt better, she behaved more rationally and consistently. She stayed on them for maybe 8 months before stopping them - first just the lithium, then just the Wellbutrin, then both together. She “didn’t like having to take so many pills” because they made her feel like she was sick.

I honestly don’t remember when she started therapy, or how the therapy overlapped with her medications. We had tried therapy a few times, but the couple’s counsellors always eventually stopped and recommended separate therapy for each of us (which she refused), or she just stopped going. We were also concurrently trying to find therapy for our daughter, and also for our youngest son. I eventually had to seek therapy on my own, about the same time she tried a new therapist. My therapist didn’t work out because the poor guy had no idea how to cope with what was going on at home, but he did teach me some great mindfulness and coping techniques.

Her therapy went in a weird direction. The therapist started by seeing my wife. My wife, typically, couldn’t address her own problems - she insisted I was at fault, my kids were at fault, her ex was at fault, my ex was at fault, etc. The therapist responded to that by offering to teach me a parenting class that my wife was also working through, a therapist-led approach to empathic parenting called Circle of Security. She not only took me through the class, she also taught it to both of our ex-spouses - so all 4 adults in our kids’ lives had some common footing to work from as parents. Then, she started seeing me individually, and our youngest, who was continuing to have behavioral problems in school and at home.

So what started as individual therapy for my wife is suddenly family therapy for fully half of our family. My wife both loved and hated that - loved that I was admitting I had problems, hated that we were all “usurping” her therapist. I did have problems. It took a lot of work for me to see that my parenting technique wasn’t great, that I was depressed and needed meds myself, and that I needed to completely reassess how I approached the relationship with my wife. I also had to deal with baggage caused by years of verbal abuse from my wife.

Our therapist started with that parenting class. Circle of Security teaches a balance of emotional support and compassion (S and E in SET) and age-appropriate boundaries (T in SET), with the focus on the right balance at various developmental ages. It has an emphasis on recognizing and dealing with your own anxiety when your kids hits one of your triggers, which the program calls "shark music". There is also a lot of work on mis-cues, where a person (for example) pushes you away so that you'll pull them closer.

I started using the exact same approach with our kids and with my wife. It took about 2 years, maybe a bit more, before I was able to be consistent enough with that approach. I also had to deal with my own tendency to withdraw when under emotional pressure, and figure out how to effectively stand up and set boundaries that I could hold. Determining where those boundaries needed to be, and setting them firmly but not maliciously, was a struggle. There are probably 400 more little things that I had to learn and work through.

My wife was continuing to see the same therapist the entire time, although I have no idea what they discussed. Our therapist was able to use this to give me feedback on what I was doing right, what wasn’t working, and what I should do to change it. She was using the same technique with our son. I think it helped that my wife couldn't really bail on therapy because I was refusing to stop - in retrospect, it sometimes seemed almost competitive.

My wife, who barely graduated high school, decided to leave her (abusive) job and return to school in fall of 2016. She completed one semester, before she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. We went though treatment for that - hysterectomy, a second surgery to get clear margins around the (very early) cancer, and complications caused during the second surgery when the surgeon nicked my wife’s bladder. After a long period of convalescence, she got back on her feet. That hysterectomy resolved a problem with painful sex that she had for years. I don’t know what part it played in her mental development, except maybe that I didn’t abandon her when she was sick. She went back to work eventually, in a much more welcoming and supportive environment.

Maybe 8 or 12 months ago, the tide changed, things really started to stabilize. My wife was suddenly happy and content in our relationship, and generally cheerful more often then not. Like everything else, it was such a sudden change that I didn’t trust it for weeks. I honestly didn’t really begin to be sure it was real until she had a period of anxiety/uncertainty/fear, and then recovered from it in a much shorter time than usual. This bad period was maybe 2-3 days, when most of them had lasted for a week or more. That pattern has since repeated a few times, with the outbursts more and more focused away from me, and onto things that are really bothering her - lately, our daughter’s inability to regularly attend school.

Since I’m not the surrogate target any more, I am much more able to help support her and empathize with her when this happens. My wife also went back to school this semester, with the intent of completing a nursing degree. There’s still a lot of disregulation around balancing work, school, and family, and a lot of fear of failure in one or more of these areas. That plays into the bad reactions to our daughter’s constant demands for my wife to leave school/work and come rescue her from school with no notice, or in my daughter’s failures to get to school in the morning when it impacts my wife’s schedule. All of these are boundary issues, with the added problem of the wife->daughter->wife anxiety feedback loop.

That’s a lot of reading,  and I glossed over a ton of details. I hope it helps explain a little better where we’re at, how we got there, and what I’m doing here on the forum.

[an0ught]

Questions:

I translate this as "Emotional Situation Education: practice SET with her Empathy and my Truth, and also my emotion"? I'm not sure I have that right. I also am not sure what that would look like. Can you give me an example?

S: Let me help you

E: You are not sure you got the message, it took some courage to ask but better ask than staying confused

T: I‘m disappointed and you can see my face heating up! Inconcivable that my beautifully convoluted description did not work.

Ok: You see I got you. I also shared my absurdly elevated expectations which are as I really! hope obviously totally inapproriate in any case but especially towards you as a newcomer. The idea is to use E to build a basis of calmness and connnection. T is here ‚disappointment‘ and knowing that I‘m deeply disappointed helps you to interpret my future behavior e.g. ignoring you. OK a0 is disappointed, but if I don’t understand his advanced magical spells that‘s not really a problem for me. If he is grumpy that is not aggressive but diva mode. Great I can navigate this board now better approaching him with questions when he does not look like a diva which I know I can recognize by the skin color of his egg.