RobinWriter saying hello

Hi, Harry, Turkish and Polly, and thank you for the welcome! Sorry it took me so long to respond, but between work, my family and Mom, it's been a stressful couple months. Plus, every time I tried to write a reply, I couldn't figure out where to start. Trying to boil Mom's 70 years of conflict down to a single post was (and still is) overwhelming.

A couple of years ago, she moved to be close to me and my kids, so she lives about 25 miles straight down our road in the closest town to the south. To say it hasn't been fun is putting it mildly. I finally started seeing a psychologist because I couldn't figure out how to help either of us, and she's helped me come to grips with a few things. This week, for the first time, I managed to successfully deflect one of Mom's attacks rather than reacting to it, and I think it was good for both of us.

The reason why Mom hasn't been formally diagnosed with BPD and/or any other disorder is that paranoia has become a major issue for her. In fact, it rules her life now and has for about 25 years. She's moved all over the country in that time, and in fact, once moved to another town about 20 miles north of here to be near us, but then sold her house and moved away when the "the gossip" about her started getting around and people started giving her dirty looks. Since then, she's moved numerous times and even legally changed her entire name, trying to keep "the gossip" from following her through the medical community--which includes the psychiatric community. She's very intelligent and actually has a bachelors degree in psychology herself, and her latest pronouncement about mental health professionals was "I have yet to meet one that is not either an incompetent, stereotype-ridden, jerk with a God complex, or a lying, conniving backstabber. Both types gossip, and enjoy playing God in people's lives."

She sees my urging her to talk with a psychologist as an insult and/or gas-lighting, and she doesn't take it lying down. She goes back and forth between condemning me as a manipulative, controlling, disloyal little ingrate who's the cause of all her problems, and apologizing and thanking me for being her angel, the only good thing in her life and the only person in the world she can rely on. It really screws with my mind when I let it.

She has seen psychologists on and off over the decades, and recently even allowed that she might be bipolar, but she seems to have paradoxical reactions to all the antidepressants and antianxiety meds she's tried--they ratchet her up and make her even more anxious and paranoid. She tells me the only time she ever felt calm and at peace in her life was back in the 70's, when she was using LSD to relax. She told me she'd taken hundreds, if not thousands, of hits and I can't help but wonder if that's part of the reason for the paranoia. I think I read somewhere once that LSD use could cause paranoia later in life.

So right now we're in the lull after one of her storms, but it's not a very deep lull because she's run out of money and can't pack up and move to a new community where no one knows her. She hates it here--she's into the arts, and this is rural Nebraska, where everyone is into high school sports and bingo. She thinks the people here (simple farm folk) are, in her words, provincial and uncouth. When I tried to caution her that an attitude like that would keep her from making friends, she was angry that I thought she'd be insensitive enough to let her feelings show. *headdesk*

Of course she's hardly made many friends and she believes it's because everyone has heard the gossip about her from her doctor's office and the psychologist she saw for a few months (who didn't think there was anything wrong with her--she just needed to get out more). She claims everyone in town, from neighbors to grocery store clerks to my in-laws, is giving her dirty looks and talking about her behind her back, and she's TRAPPED. So her storms are coming almost weekly, and the lulls in between are shallow indeed. Most days she resents me for "luring" her here with false promises that my sister and I wouldn't gang up on her and shut her out, but she's so desperate for company that she puts on a happy face--and then resents that she has to "walk on eggshells" around us.

Last month she had a really big blow-up and filed a HIPAA complaint against the psychologist and the nurse in her doctor's office for gossiping about her, but then she withdrew the complaint because she hadn't intended to get anyone fired--she just wanted the gossip to stop. She showed me the complaint and I doubt anyone would take it too seriously--it was five single-space typed pages of ranting about how psychologists and the medical community in general had ruined her life by gossiping about her since she was in rehab twenty-five years earlier. She was so tired of the gossip and feeling so hopeless that she cried and told me she'd been searching the internet for painless ways to end her life.

I saw an opening there and asked her a series of questions--basically describing each of the BPD signs/symptoms and asking if she thought she displayed any of them. I didn't say what they were for because when I told her once I thought she might have BPD, she got hysterically angry at me, and years later she told me she thought her mother had BPD. Anyway, when Mom said yes to all nine of them, I told her they were for BPD and she was dumbfounded--she'd thought BPD was basically being nice to someone in public and cruel to them in secret, which was how her mother was. She seemed happy to find out what the issue might be, and that there might be help for her, and together we looked online for psychologists in Omaha who specialized in BPD. But then she went home, and by the next day she was sending me angry emails about how I try to turn her very real concerns about gossip into a stigmatizing mental disorder. When I confronted her about having talked about suicide, she claimed she'd meant a long time ago, not that she'd been looking for ways to end her life recently.

I honestly don't know what's going to happen now. My psychologist has tried to prepare me for the fact that Mom might eventually commit suicide. She tried back when I was sixteen, and in the last 20 years, she's made lots of offhand comments like "I'll shoot myself before I'll be dirt-poor again"--and here she is, broke again after inheriting more than half a million from her mother fifteen years ago. But my psychologists says that until Mom makes a very specific suicide threat that includes a time frame and/or a method that I can call the police to report, there's really nothing I can do.

Last night Mom came for supper and we played board games, which was fun and she went home very happy. But, as always, her suspicions percolated overnight and this morning she called asking me to explain to my sister when I saw her today that she (Mom) has been under a lot of stress with the gossip and that's why she was "so reactive" a couple of weeks ago. We were actually going to my in-laws' today but Mom didn't believe it--she was sure my sister and I planned to have an Easter get-together without her, and nothing I said could convince her otherwise. But that was fine, she understood... .*sigh* It's a merry-go-round that never stops.



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