Alone and freaking out

[Allnighter]

Hello, all!

I can’t believe I’m finally here. I’ve just begun to wake up and realize the abuse I’ve suffered from my mother. I’m on my mid 20s. She had a very hard life but I’m tired of making excuses for her and putting up with the behavior. I’ve decided to start setting limits. I have a wonderful therapist and have done a lot of work. I also read The Emotionally Abused Woman by Beverly engel, and that has been very helpful. I booked myself a retreat away from my very loving, not-abusive (thank God) boyfriend and cut off contact with everyone I know to try to confront my past. I could contact them if I want to, but I’m trying to really go there with my emotions and not take an emotional dependence shortcut by calling anyone right now.

That being said - all the memories and emotions surfacing about growing up with my mother are really scaring me and hurting me. I’d really like to know that I’m not alone right now. Also that I’m not crazy. Some people have primarily fond, loving memories of heir parents and secure attachments, right? I’m not an ungrateful, selfish brat like she always tells me? Am I alone in experiencing such excruciating pain upon examining my past, when my reality has always been the same?

Thank you for any kind words you can face to a person battling the reality of her past and feeling pretty lonely. I’m glad there is a community like this out there so I can get some help from people who went through difficult times with a BPD mom.

[Panda39]

Hi Allnighter,

Welcome to the BPD Family    You most definitely are not alone, everyone on this site has someone with BPD in their life... .we get it. 

And yes it can be hard for others to see the abuse.  Most symptoms of BPD are directed at and seen by those closest to the person with BPD and kept better under wraps in public.  I also think folks that haven't experienced this type of thing can have a hard time seeing it too.  That does not change your experience though.  BPD can sometimes be very subtle... .manipulating or gaslighting and other times it can be in your face... .verbal abuse... .physical abuse.

If you're comfortable sharing what types of things have you been experiencing and what is your relationship with your mom like currently?

Also, there are many good books on BPD that you might want to checkout, knowledge is power... .

Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change
by Valerie Porr

Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder  by Paul Mason MS, Randi Kreger

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson

Link to our site Library/book reviews... .
https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?board=33.0

I'm glad you've found us there is a lot of support, information, and tools that is shared here. 

Take Care,
Panda39

[Harri]

Hi!  I am joining Panda in saying welcome to the board. 

You definitely are not alone and you are not crazy.  I know how hard it is to feel that way though.  The good news is you have found a place that will support you and where we get it.

Several of us here are in or have been in therapy, confronting the past and working on recovery.  I am glad you are working with a T as this can be very difficult to work through.  We have a Survivor to Thriver program that you might find helpful.   Each step opens a popup with more to read.  Seeing where you are can be helpful though the healing process is not linear at all. 

I hope we hear more from you.  Feel free to jump into other threads and posts and read.  We have a lot of reading material here. 

[Allnighter]

Thank you SO MUCH for the resources and the help - wow it meant even more than I thought it would to read responses from someone else suffering from the same thing. I will use every resource I’m given here - I want to break the cycle for her, my family, and my kids without trying to change her.

Do you ever wish you could help your BP? I spent most time wishing I could change her but when I read that it’s mostly from unresolved trauma... .I wish I could tell her in a loving way to work through her childhood I guess if she could, though, she would.

I think the most comforting thing actually is realizing that her symptoms are predictable. Again that I’m not alone. Thank you for the encouragement! I’m so glad to be here.

[Harri]

   Yep, that feeling of not being alone is wonderful and shocking.

My mom died in 2007 but even now, knowing what I know now, I do wish I could help her.    Where I think I could have a chance of helping the situation (not necessarily my mom) is by changing the way I interacted and responded to her.  Not that she would change but that I would have had more control and a better understanding of what was going on with her... .and me. 

I wish I could tell her in a loving way to work through her childhood I guess if she could, though, she would.

I agree.  Confronting the past especially an abusive one is very hard.  I am back in trauma therapy after a 5 month break and it is daunting and hard and I have to drag myself in sometimes kicking and screaming but I am determined.  I can't imagine how someone with BPD struggles to do the same and I am not surprised that many often stop going all together.

I'm glad you are here too! 

[Allnighter]

Oh, and you asked me what time of abuses and what my relationship with her is currently like.

The most recent eye opening experience is that she physically attacked my little brother. They were in a verbal battle and she just lost it, apparently sat on top of him and hit him in the face saying “I hate you” over and over. My poor brother begged for my dad’s help, and instead of helping my dad reached for his throat. I cry every time I think of that. My other two brothers also did NOTHING. He recently left for college so I guess it’s the fear of abandonment thing.

She attacked me once too. Over pretty much nothing. It was when she was afraid of having divorce my dad since she was smoking in secret (something I often can’t blame him for as he has little to no control over his life; they conceived me at 17). I also was home for a visit, it was the day before my birthday, and she chased me up the stairs and grabbed my hair with both fists and started shaking me back and forth with all her might. There was nothing I could do, I was entirely powerless, she is very strong from taking karate and could have broken my neck. My oldest little brother had to bodily pull her off of me.

Other than that it’s just constant complete denial of her responsibility in any situation. I’m always the one who has to apologize. Gaslighting. Constant criticism. Verbal abuse. She consistently finds a way to say or imply that I am selfish in advert sifle argument we have ever had. She always splits me more than the oldest brother who pulled her off of me. She always lumps me and my middle brother, who was attacked, who has begun to wake up to the abuse too! So I finally feel less alone. I have a third brother who gets angry a lot butt grew up much more social than my brothers - Boy Scouts, etc. we were all homeschooled and very isolated. We grew up, due to my parents’ age and poverty, extremely poor with my grandparents and 3 auntsin a 3 story, 100 year old fixer upper with permanent grime on everything, rats and squirrels scratching or dying in the walls, lots of shouting. A couple times we out without warning when my mom had a fight with my grandfather or grandmother, once in the middle of the night before we got our own house. This destabilized me a lot. My mom also would constantly threaten us to get us to behave - arbitrary disproportionate punishments for “misbehaving” or, in other words, bickering from the constant dreaming tension. Always made me believe I was a bad kid. And really made us feel stupid if we didn’t understand correctly because she saw or success as a reflection on herself. I remember her picking up my oldest brother by the collar when he was four, pinning him against the wall, and screaming at him until he got the answer right to one of the Korean terms in his karate class. My dad was standing by silently. My parents were always getting into fights, some physical, with my aunts as well.

Man does it feel good to say that out loud.

The survival instinct I had was very powerful. I’m beginning to value the fact that at 17, I knew I needed to get out and that she was on some level “crazy” as I called it. I wasted a lot of time and energy fighting back in unproductive ways, but the point is that I fought for my reality. I fought soo hard to individuate. And she actually on some level genuinely hates me for that, and thinks I turned my brother against her. She did that herself when she attacked him.

What I’m most angry about is her bringing me into poverty, out of wedlock, on purpose. They tried to have me. And my crazy grandmother supported this. She has TOLD me, not as a fight but a cautionary tale, that the reason she conceived me was so she would have someone to love her. It makes me feel so terrible to know that I exist because a 17 year old kid with no healthy models or sources of love wanted a being to satisfy her emotional needs. Currently our relationship is pretty much that we say goodnight every night, a ritual she insists on “out of concern for my safety” but which I know is her fear of abandonment and a need I am supposed to take care of. I don’t really have a relationship with her. I’m currently setting boundaries and trying to stave off an argument she’s tried to start over nothing and has brought up daily for a couple weeks. She actually tried to ambush me in my home town, physically came to town to try and manipulate me into pursuing the argument. She’s not taking the boundaries well. The argument is: she just got a new job, and she perceives that I asked her for some of her new money. I didn’t.

Thank you to whoever reads and listens to this!

Harris I am so sorry I’m grateful to all of you for the empowering and sharing you can do as a result of your learned experience. It’s not for nothing!

[Allnighter]

*harri *type of abuse

[Allnighter]

Also, Harri - that’s a very good point. It helps me. If I have such a hard time confronting the abuse I suffered and couldn’t even see it til now, I’m sure it would just be so so hard for my mom to do so. Truly impossible for now, maybe. I still wish I could get her in for some help

[Harri]

Allnighter, thank you for sharing more details of your history and the ongoing abuse of you and your brothers.  I am so sorry that it is still going on and I am concerned about the physical abuse of you and your brothers.  What are the ages of your brothers?  It sounds like they still live with her.  What do you do after she attacks you physically?  Do you have a safety plan? 

We talk a lot about intergenerational abuse here.  Some of the behaviors are learned I believe and it sounds like that may be a factor in your family.  good for you for breaking free of that and recognizing that there are better and healthier ways of being.  Some people here were able to recognize the dysfunction early on and escape it (to an extent) and others, like me, were in it for a long time.  I am always amazed when people figured things out early.    

What I’m most angry about is her bringing me into poverty, out of wedlock, on purpose. They tried to have me. And my crazy grandmother supported this. She has TOLD me, not as a fight but a cautionary tale, that the reason she conceived me was so she would have someone to love her.

Whew.  Yeah, this is heartbreaking.  The amount of self-centeredness and severely limited view of consequences is stunning as is the fact that she has no idea what it means to you as evidenced by her sharing that information.      I think anger is appropriate here.  One of the things that often runs through my head is that everything that happened was so unnecessary. 

We all help each other here by sharing and talking.  Please check out this link on a Safety Plan.  I am not sure how old your brothers are but they need a plan as well.

[Allnighter]

Thank you so much! I will share the safety plan info. To be honest, the attacks happen so rarely that we don’t usually count it as a real threat. But I do know that right now my brother is stronger than I was when I was attacked because he is avoiding going home at all right now.

Two brothers live away at the same community college. The youngest one still does live at home. These incidents now have been happening on visits. I really appreciate having a resource to prepare for if things get physical. I’ve been worrying about it lately. To be honest, I’ve been fantasizing about beating the crap out of her. If I had been there when she attacked my brother I would’ve probably diverted the bull onto me; I’m not gonna kid myself that I could take her on but sometimes it’s fun to imagine.

This is where the need to ventilate the rage comes in. Anyone have excellent tactics that worked for you to channel the rage? My youngest brother has rage too, and apparently my mom has blamed my middle brother (attack victim) for that.

More info about my oldest brother: he has OCD, visual and auditory processing issues (disability on tests at school), and is emotionally stunted as far as I can tell. I can’t have a real relationship with him because my mom never treats him the way she treats me, or if she does on the rare occasion he disarms her. He’s chosen to stay in the safe ally position. I guess I can’t blame him. But it hurts to wonder if he is this way because of the emotional trauma we incurred. I feel terrible for needing to distance myself from him so much. I blame myself. Especially because my mother constantly blames me for “abandoning” him when I went to college. She claims I never answered their calls or called them back... .in reality we spoke every day! Not my brothers every day but they were so little, what would we talk about? Projecting her own anger issues!

Ugh so much is coming up right now. Anyway I feel bad that I can’t connect with my brothers because I can’t be myself fully around them, and my mom has turned them all against me (excepting my middle brother just beginning to wake up to the abuse). The oldest brother really doesn’t know me, in fact he recently made a disturbing statement that shows just how brainwashed against me he is - “you’ve always had a hard-on for disobeying mom.” He also never ever uses foul language. He said this in response to me saying he doesn’t need to text my mom everywhere he goes (when he leaves, when he gets there, when he leaves the destination, when he gets home, he sends a text. He’s in his early 20s. He thinks it’s genuinely cruel to my mom to refuse to report).

They are so enmeshed. Why is my mom ok with the enmeshment? Why is my brother? He’s never had a real girlfriend. Girls stay really far away from him. Sometimes I wonder if he will ever be “normal.”

I want to take this random moment to shout out to my amazing supportive boyfriend of 4 years. He has never shied away from any of this terrifying stuff. My therapist said that choosing a non-abusive, healthy, loving partner I could form a secure attachment with was my survival instinct. So I’m proud of myself for that and so so grateful for him. Will my oldest brother ever have this though? And will he ever be able to see reality and finally bond with me? Sometimes I’m not sure. Obviously my mom likes him better because of the way he is, so why would he change?

[Panda39]

Hi Allnighter,

I'm on a quick lunchbreak but have been reading your story and it made me think of a lot of information from the site that you might be interested in so I'm just going to throw them out there. (The information here has been so helpful to me I love to share it with others)

Why is my mom ok with the enmeshment? Why is my brother?

https://bpdfamily.com/content/was-part-your-childhood-deprived-emotional-incest

Family systems--understanding the narcissistic family... .
https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=108970.0

FOG (Fear, Obligation, Guilt) Emotional Blackmail... .
https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=82926.0

He’s chosen to stay in the safe ally position. I guess I can’t blame him... .I blame myself

 

Allnighter, there is only one person we truly control and that is ourselves.  Everyone in your family is making choices.  You are correct in your statement that your brother has chosen the role he is in and I also agree it is how he is coping.  The thing is that there are consequences to our actions and the consequence of aligning himself with your mother is that it has created some distance with you, he could change his behavior if he chooses to but he hasn't and it's hard/painful but you can't make him.  Everyone has to take their own journey their way.  You are doing an awesome job by taking all of this on and you will show your brothers another way but it is up to them whether they follow the new path you are forging or just stick with what they know.  My suggestion is focus on you and your own healing.  We often use the airplane analogy around here.  When your on the plane and the oxygen masks come down the flight attendants tell us to put our own mask on before helping someone else.  Why, because we are no help to ourselves or anyone else when we are unconscious.  So focus on you for now so you can help your brothers if they reach out.

And your boyfriend... .He's a keeper! 

Panda39

[Allnighter]

Thank you Panda! I find this so helpful. Including the  links you posted. I’m glad I’m making some sense of things and I’m onto something with my brother. I never fully realized (though I expressed it subconsciously) that he has literally CHOSEN to be this way. He and my mom prefer to think of me as the bad guy, that I’ve distanced myself from him. It’s such a relief to put some of the responsibility on him. I walk around with that guilt every day - it feels really good to realize that he in some sense has been one of the people who abandoned me.

A lot of the hard work has been reliving all the abusive moments. They are just coming and coming and coming now. And I was so helpless, and my needs were soo ignored... .sigh

Thank you again for your support!