Anxiety and Lack of Soothing as a Child

[Calsun]

I have suffered from a lot of anxiety over the last few years.  Growing up with an uBPD mother, who was of course dysregulated and abusive, my nervous system was always on high alert.  And there was a sense in life that if something went "wrong", if I had a conflict with a child at school, if I got sick, if someone abused me, when my mother abused me, it was my fault. I deserved it. My uBPD mother still believes that her abuse was discipline that I deserved as a child.  

So, it created this sense, and I think Christine Lawson talks about this in Understanding the Borderline Mother, that I could never be soothed. How can you be soothed and comforted by the mother who is inflicting the intolerable abuse and thinking that you deserve it?  That if something bad happened, it was my fault, and that I should be able to control everything, including my mother's temper and responses.  My father contributed to the pattern because he would say things to me like:  ":)on't get your mother started."  Hello could get my uBPD mother started.  So, when I needed comfort as a child, nurturing, encouragement, love, I got ridicule, condemnation, beatings.  I never received the soothing and love that children in healthy families get, and that soothing helps them to learn to soothe themselves and to go through life without feeling panic when things go wrong or when tough things happen.  In fact, I learned to be harsh with myself, thinking that if I did it to myself first, it would ease my mother's abuse of me and keep me safe.

I'm learning to try to soothe myself, to be able to turn to people in my life who can be loving and comforting and helpful, non-judgmental and non-shaming, to love myself and be kind and gentle with myself.  And I am learning that things in life are never going to be perfect, that's just the nature of life.

Calsun

[zone out]

Calsun

I so know where you are coming from.  Even when things are going fine, I always have that sense of anxiety bubbling away in the background - something is bound to go wrong.  I even have taken to worrying about things that might go wrong in the future.  It is so negative but it is a hard habit to break.  Mindfulness is probably one of the answers but if you have a mind that is continually firing on all cylinders it is difficult to practise effectively.

I have tried all sorts of things, betablockers which help the physical symptoms of anxiety but not the feeling, reiki, acupressure, aromatherapy etc etc.  I had quite good success from a medical herbalist but she emigrated!  Any good suggestions anyone?

Zone out   

[isshebpd]

Yeah, when my uBPDmom wasn't hostile, she was indifferent. After her third child was born, when I was eight, I learned not to go to uBPDmom about anything. And enDad was emotionally distant at the best of times.

I'm thankful for other maternal influences. Two Grandmothers, three Aunts, and a much loved Great Aunt.

The anxiety has caused me to abandon two careers. I wish it would go away, so we can retire in comfort.

[Bones like Stones]

I sympathize with you! No child deserves to be treated as such. I grew up also with a BPD mother and whatever I would say that was self-affirming, she would explode and say nasty things. And my Dad would often come to me afterward and ask "why on earth did you say that to her"!

I am slowly coming to term with the idea that I will never be able to rely on my mother for comfort, only stress and anxiety. There is an expression which states that the best way to deal with problems is to hold them tight like a handful of burrs of burdock; the tighter the grip, the less it hurts!

As for the anxiety, I dealt with it with a rather unconventional way, at least unconventional in some area in North America. This is probably not what a therapist would suggest as many would say it is a form of escapism, but I think it depends on how you approach it: If it is to numb you from the pain, then yeah it is escapism and that is not good: but if used to approach your problems from a more peaceful state of mind, to experience what it feels like to be in a body that is not in a constant state of alertness, then it is very good!

It might go against your beliefs though! If that is the case, then just keep in mind I was trying to suggest something and that I am from canada, therefore it is somewhat culturally accepted in my country! You might have guessed it, but I am talking about medicinal MaryJane, hashish type more like!

Whether or not it is something you might consider, I must tell you that I do not have the propensity to become an addict. I began smoking at the age of 22 yrs old, and only after coming back from work being so stressed out and panicked and paranoid about co-workers and constantly arguing with my mother over the phone, that my roommates, with whom I had been living for already a year and half without ever touching his "meds", said to me that I should puff one and he gave me "the light", his light freely! What I am trying to say is that if you think you have a natural tendency towards addiction, then don't take any! And if you're under-age, then don't take any! It might seem like an oxymoron, but there is such a thing as smoking responsibly. So be honest with yourself!

Also if you're in the USA, where legal sales are limited, do not put yourself in trouble to get any illegally. Beside, what is sold in the street is often mixed with other drugs or comes in limited options, meaning that there are different types of maryjane that have different effects: some might make you so sleepy, your head will fall on your pillow faster than a hammer, while others (like hashish) make you giggly!

I am not saying it is the solution, but I have seen so many people being more screwed up health-wise on anti-depressant, or anti-anxiety, that I was afraid of taking any. Maryjane is more natural and the effects last the day you take it. Also, always smoke it in the evening, at home, never before going to a job, or driving!

What it has done for me is being able to observe my relationship with my mother with a more forgiving place, and loosen my hypersensibility, therefore now, at 27 yrs old, after 4 yrs of no smoking at all, I can take the comments of others with a grain of salt and not constantly think I am being attacked or judged and feel unlove.

Obviously, I still have strong feeling against my mother, and I sometime think things spitefully, but I usually try not to linger on them. And I do not feel the guilt that she tries to make me feel, I only feel anger at her attempts, but again I try to vent it in places like this one and move on.

If you're really anti-drug, then please don't misjudge me, I was just trying to suggest an option that is culturally accepted in my country.

Cheers

[zone out]

Calsun

I have found a reference to 'anxiety' I want to share  ... . it might be edited out as I am not sure about the protocol of referring to a book not already recommended on the site but here goes ... . In Difficult Mothers; Understanding and Overcoming Their Power by Terri Apter... . she refers to the angry mother     "When anger overshadows everything, children live in a constant state of high alert.  This type of long-term stress is toxic to the young brain.  Flooded with unremitting anxiety, a child's brain has been shown to form fewer of the mental circuits needed to regulate emotional states.  The awful irony is that children who most need to acquire the skills to soothe themselves and control their responses end up being the least equipped to do so.  If not addressed, these problems can continue into adulthood"  Not a bit of wonder so many of us suffer from anxiety.

zone out 

[isshebpd]

"there is such a thing as smoking responsibly"

Also, don't mix it with alcohol. Even after a couple of drinks, if someone tries it for the first time they get horrible nausea.

It very much depends on the individual. At my age, I use an amount I can pinch between my index finger and my thumb. My wife doesn't use it herself (because it actually increases her anxiety), while she is fine with me smoking it to improve my mood.

I used it heavily in high school, which was a mistake, but it made me feel good despite the toxic environment at home. Somehow, I completed high school and University with decent grades despite heavy use at the time :P

[Calsun]

Thanks for the responses.

They really made me think about what anxiety is.  When I was growing up my uBPD mother would say and do the cruelest things.  She, of course, didn't think she was being cruel.  In her illness, she thought that she was responding appropriately to her environment.  If she abused or as she thought "disciplined" her children, it was because they deserved it.  An actor friend of mine once said that if you are playing the part of a villain, you never play the villain thinking that you're a villain.  You always play the part of the villain believing that you are right and good.

So, one of the things that she did as she was abusing was to universalize her reality.  She would say things like, don't you think other mothers do the same things, do you think a wife is going to treat you differently. People are only nice to you because they don't know you, if they knew you like I do, they wouldn't like you.  About my art, she said that people only told me they liked it, but that they laughed at me behind my back.  Because my mother was duplicitous, because she was mild and often sweet in public, I came to feel on some level that everyone was like that.

And she universalized her behavior, so that it was presented to me as though it wasn't just her responding to me, but she was representing the universe.  This was the way everyone really thought of me or would think of me if they were as acquainted with me as she was.

So, what I'm saying is that there is a difference between fear and anxiety.  I had every right to be fearful of my uBPD mother.  She was and is an unstable, dangerous, and destructive person who spread her unhappiness and misery.  But she so universalized her perception of things and her way of responding to me, that I came to fear or mistrust everyone and everything, and that's what anxiety is.  Anxiety is free-floating.  Fear is more manageable. With fear, you just avoid people and situations that you should be concerned about or fearful of. You address the situations that create the fear. Fear is a good tool to avoid dangerous people and situations, but anxiety is global.  And there are people like my mother that should be avoided.  But there are also healthy and loving people to whom I can turn for help and support.  Not everyone is my mother waiting to pop out and hurt and abandon me.

It helps to understand that difference.  And the more I really understand my mother's illness, the more I can turn my anxiety into fear,  the more it goes from being global to being localized to unsafe people like my mother. The more I embrace loving and healthy people and understand that my mother's BPD is her condition, and not the condition of everyone as she believed or the condition of the universe, the anxiety does become right-sized and begins to ease.

Best,

Calsun

[Bones like Stones]

"One of the things that she did as she was abusing was to universalize her reality."

From that passage, what I take from it, in my own words, is that she made you doubt your own perception of the world and the people around you. (My mother uBPD did the same thing). Being unable to trust oneself, our own instinct, eventually leads anyone to doubt the people around them, and it is at the source of this toxic anxiety that BPD parent impose on their children, and they do it so they can manipulate us.

I am an artist as well, and of course I've always been extremely nervous and anxious about what people would think of my art and myself, thanks to my mother! It probably was obvious that I cared about people's opinion of me so much, because some of them took advantage of it. Not anymore and thanks to something I knew about myself so well, that not even my own mother could make me doubt it. I am gregarious with good interpersonal skills, thanks to my father's genes!

One day, when I was working in a restaurant-cafe and doing literally everything, from cashier, to lattes and take out and dishwashing, a customer complained that I wasn't smiling at all. Well DUH! I was doing everything, I was like an octopus, and I was really concentrated to keep everything in order. I was pissed off, but then came that waiter that I really didn't like because he never had anything good to say about me, always was criticising everything I did or said (like my mother), and he had heard that customer. When the customer was gone, obviously he had seen it had bothered me, and he added "it's true, you don't really have good interpersonal skills". I was so struck by this comment, like an epiphany: This guy was a jerk and here I was caring for his opinion of me. I wanted to laugh so much, but laugh of relief actually because his comment had proven to me that he didn't know me AT ALL and therefore his opinion wasn't worth anything. Some people's opinion of us are not worth paying attention to, simply because they are possibly the greatest idiots alive!

Why exhaust ourselves to please someone else's better judgement of us? And I mean Someone Else we don't know! Which equals to pretty much the rest of the world! We don't know how other people's perception works, what they have seen or done, or lived through that has influence their ways to look at the world and judge it. Everybody is subjective! And to try to monitor everybody else's perception of us, is completely nuts, because it means to live your life in function of the others. WHY? live your life for yourself, not for the others.

This is why a BPD parent always make the child doubt their own instinct and fear the opinion, judgement and perception of others on us, because they want their children to sacrifice themselves, to sacrifice their lives FOR them(BPD parents).

Surely you're mother must not have made you doubt yourself entirely, there must be something you know about yourself that you can stand on solidly! Grow from there, built from there. No need to be anxious about how people sees our arts, or ourselves, in the end, what really matter is to know ourselves.

I think that the fact you have come to this place to heal shows you have a pretty darn good Emotional Quotient, unlike the BPD parents.

Cheer up!

[cleotokos]

Universalisation... . my mother used it in a similar but slightly different way. She had this perception that every parent out there was equally as or more abusive than her and her boyfriend. And thus, I had no right to expect anything of them since there was someone worse out there. Her take seemed to be, "well that person gets away with it, why not me?"

[Calsun]

It's true.  I do have a pretty solid sense of what my reality is.  And yet I still struggle with people pleasing.  My uBPD, also a narcissist, wanted to turn us into machines to get approval from other people.  And so I still fight that inclination to try to win the approval of people whose opinions are just not even worth caring about.  My mother was really conflicted about other people's opinions.  She so desperately wanted to get everyone's approval of herself and her children.  Because she saw her children as reflections of her, and her whole identity was practically tied up with her mothering, she wanted to turn her children into advertisements for the success of her mothering.  And yet she would adamantly declare that she didn't care what other people thought of her.  In fact, often she would sabotage positive feelings that others might have of her, to make that point. She overcompensated because she also must have deeply resented the power that she gave away to other people.  In the end, her judgment of my value and worth as a person, and as a child my own sense of my value and worth as a person, was based inordinately on the opinion of others, a very precarious place to be in life.  It throws you off center and compromises your integrity as a person.  It also can take you away from your true core values and get you to undermine who you really are.  But uBPD's don't really know who they are.  They are fragmented people who have never really come to a place of integration.  

Interesting, I never thought about the fact that integration and integrity have the same etymological root in the Latin word, integritas:  the state of being intact or whole.  BPD's are not integrated people, they are not whole.

Calsun

[Kwamina]

Hello Calsun,

But uBPD's don't really know who they are.  They are fragmented people who have never really come to a place of integration. 

Interesting, I never thought about the fact that integration and integrity have the same etymological root in the Latin word, integritas:  the state of being intact or whole.  BPD's are not integrated people, they are not whole.

Interesting indeed. I fully agree with you when you say BPD's aren't whole. I look at my own uBPD mom as someone who misses certain key elements, it's like she misses essential building blocks that  'normal' people have in their personality. Like you say she doesn't really know who she is, she just doesn't have a stable core which also largely explains her splitting behavior. She can go from one extreme to the complete opposite extreme just like that because she doesn't really know what her true feelings are about anything.

[Finding Courage]

Carlsun-  Anxiety and always feeling like I am high alert is one of the main problems I deal with now as an adult.  I compare it to a thermometer that it set too high because crisis, stress, and overload was the norm growing up.  Every single day of my childhood was spent trying to assess my uBPD mom's moods and doing everything in my power to have any measure of control over that.  For me this meant chronic stress and anxiety.  It also meant completely hiding my own feelings and identity because there wasn't room for that.  I haven't found too much that truly soothes that feeling of chronic low grade anxiety that I struggle with, so I sympathize with your struggles.  I do try and remind myself sometimes that I am still alive, I am safe now, I can have control over my life now, and her pathology doesn't have to be my pathology. 

Take care,

[MammaMia]

It must be horrible to have had a uBPD mother with all the cruelties and emotional abuse she inflicted on you.  Fortunately, today many fathers take a more active role in their children's lives, and BPD is recognized more than it has ever been.  In the past this disorder was "a family secret" concealed from others and rarely acknowledged for what it actually is.  A mental disorder.

My heart goes out to all of you who were raised by uncaring, unforgiving mothers who ultimately forced you to grow up much faster than you should have and created lives filled with anxiety and fear.   

In the posts above, the role of a upbd mother is obvious.  But it is not always so.

Even the best, most responsible, and loving parents can produce BPD children.  Genetics plays a very big role in why children from "normal" families have BPD.  If you look back at the family history, there is usually evidence that the disorder was present somewhere, even generations ago.  In this instance, creating a BPD child is not directly related to poor parenting but heredity.

[cleotokos]

MammaMia, I've tried to find out more about how BPD is developed in a person. I've seen it often cited here that BPD is the result of being abused as a child; I know my mother perceives that she was abused, but I don't necessarily put much into that since I've seen her constantly as an adult think she is being victimized in situations where she's actually the aggressor; or, she feels victimized when people try to erect healthy boundaries. Just curious where it comes from, that it is said that this disorder develops from abuse? Is this from self-reports of BPD sufferers (perhaps not so reliable) or observations of siblings? Admissions of parents that they've abused their BPD children? And even if so, is there proof that BPD would not have developed anyways? Is there a scientific study that has been done? I'm not taking the opinion that this is not the case, I just would like to know where this comes from, if anyone knows... . I've not been able to find anything out. Sorry this is a bit off-topic from the thread but you bringing up the hereditary aspect sparked that curiosity once again as you seem to know something about the subject.

[MammaMia]

Cleo

Check out this link.  According to it the predisposition to BPD is almost 50/50 with environmental factors (i.e.traumatic childhood) and genetics.  Childhood abuse and trauma often activates the underlying genetic predisposition.

www.BPD.about.com/od/causesofBPD/a/BPDgenes.htm

[cleotokos]

Thank you, MammaMia

[Heartbroken Daughter]

I just wanted to thank you for this post today was a particularly hard day for me and my anxiety is something I battle daily. You really helped me put a lot of perspective on it. I'm just now recovering from a pretty heavy Benzo problem I don't like to call it an addiction but maybe it was although I was aware of the fact that I had created a crutch the entire time and upset with myself for being on them. The way you talked about how she universalized her reality really hit home it was one of the moments where I sat here saying "exactly... . see someone else has been through this." Anyway just wanted to say your not alone and thank you this discussion really helped me a lot with putting my anxiety in perspective and it's one of my biggest battles in life.

[CinnamonRadio]

Hi Calsun,

This post and the responses totally resonated with me.  I was raised for the majority of my childhood by a single BPDmom.  Although I have not lived with her for over 12 years, I have struggled with anxiety almost as long as I can remember.  In my mid-twenties, as a struggling student (who couldn't afford effective therapy) it became so crushing sometimes I couldn't function.  

I can totally identify with the history that everyone has shared.  I was never good enough, I was always a problem and an inconvenience.  If I did anything "wrong" like spilling my drink or losing a small item, I was screamed at, put down and maybe hit.  The most lasting effects were the shaming and the guilt though.  Aside from putting me down personally, what really hurt was when she would say things like "You must not love me if you lost your shoelace.  Kids who love their mothers don't lose everything,"  Or "What is wrong with you?  Are you trying to kill me?"  Forget about self-soothing, even at a very young age, I would sit in my room and the guilt would be so intense I would pray to God to make me feel better, or help me fix what I had "screwed up"

Learning to self-soothe has been a huge climb for me.  I finally found a T that understands BPD and how it affected me.  That has been my biggest help, along with an incredibly supportive partner.  

It's a tough subject to talk about, and I definitely continue to work at it.  It's probably my biggest challenge, but I'm really proud of the progress I've made.  We have to keep at it!

[January86]

But uBPD's don't really know who they are.  They are fragmented people who have never really come to a place of integration. 

Interesting, I never thought about the fact that integration and integrity have the same etymological root in the Latin word, integritas:  the state of being intact or whole.  BPD's are not integrated people, they are not whole.

When reading this I thought of myself, not about my mother. Unfortunately, as daughter of BPD mum, I feel fragmented and very desintegrated. Sometimes I'm sure I feel one thing and other times I'm sure I feel another and I have a hard time trying not to hurt the people who is close to me but a the same time being honest and true to myself. This is increasing now as I found out about BPD and I'm trying to figure out my own self, wishes... . I had many limitations and low expectations, and now I'm breaking those barriers but I don't have my own barriers so, for example, I can't distinguish a plausible goal to achieve from an impossible dream.