33 yo Daughter high functioning BPD

[Pomsie]

Hello everyone. My daughter is 33 and was diagnosed with BPD when she was about 17. She is fairly high functioning, nice to everybody, polite, always hold down a job, end it seems I should have nothing to be concerned about. I suppose the hardest thing for me over the years, and it’s been 16 years since she became ill, is her inability to see that her choices and the things she does hurts other people. If you tell her that anything she is doing hurt you, she just acts as if you’re trying to make her feel bad. And that part of it has gotten a bit worse as she’s gotten older. Much of her previous self-destructive activities such as over drinking, starving herself, and going out with nightmarish men, have subsided quite a bit. She is spending more time alone at home trying to take better care of herself during covid, but it seems her withdrawal from me and other family members has gotten worse. I guess I’m kind of resolving myself to the fact that I’ll never have much of a relationship with my daughter who I’ve always been very close to. It’s hard to have her be so disrespectful to me and my mother and we’ve both been so kind and caring and have helped her a lot. She only seems to see her pain. That part of her personality seems to be getting worse. She is finally going to counseling and sticking with it, I think. I have a feeling she may have dropped out again. I guess I don’t know what to do because she put zero effort into trying to have a relationship with me, or drive the 45 minutes from her house to come and see me or her grandmother. Ever. We have to go see her. It’s hard for me to relate because I never was that way, and I was always nice to my family because they helped me and were supportive, as we have been. So I guess I’m wondering how many people have kids who have just drifted away further and further and how they have coped with that. She’s my only child and we were really close for many years, she will come back and contact me and be super sweet and say let’s get together, and then we never will. She goes silent for weeks, months. Does anyone else get this silence from them? We don’t fight or say bad things to each other. She just goes silent. It seems there isn’t much else I can do anymore. It makes me so sad.

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

[HappyChappy]

Hi,

I appreaciated how frustrating this must be. You put all that love, time and loyatly in, of course it would be good to see it recipricated. Your daughter sound to have very A typical BPD behavior so it's not personal. My BPD  always expects you to make the first move or you to apologies, it's part of the power play. Don't forget they normally think everything is someone else fault, so you should make the effort.

Under the age of 21 our minds are still developing and being flexible is easier, so your daughter , and people in general,  become less flexible with age. Hence why they prefer to diagnose after 21.

The  best thing you can do is use the tools on here to communicated best as you can, and then work on acceptance to minimise the effects on you. Talk to empathetic people about the situation, they can give the emtional support a BPD can't. Also BPD are very unchanable, so you'd have the "mother of all battles" if you tried. I hope this helps, sorry there's no cure.