Just realizing that my daughter has BPD and I am so scared

[Parents! Get help here!]

I feel like such a failure as a parent.  All I can think about is how beautiful and funny and happy my daughter was as a young child and how could I have failed her so much as a mother.  She is 19 and while I have known for years that she had issues, I am now confronting the reality of her condition.  She is acting out sexually and it is breaking my heart to see her so desperate and to realize how empty, lonely and scared she feels despite having a family that loves her.  Thank God she has a great therapist that she has been seeing for several years. Otherwise she would have been pregnant or dead by now.  She started college this fall and seemed to be doing so well.  But now she's on a downward spiral and I don't know how to help her.  This website has helped me understand a little better what she is experiencing and how progress can trigger relapse.  And I know I need to get past my own feelings and focus on being the calm, supportive patent she needs.  I just feel so overwhelmed right now. 

[Grebe16]

I feel like such a failure as a parent.  All I can think about is how beautiful and funny and happy my daughter was as a young child and how could I have failed her so much as a mother.  She is 19 and while I have known for years that she had issues, I am now confronting the reality of her condition.  She is acting out sexually and it is breaking my heart to see her so desperate and to realize how empty, lonely and scared she feels despite having a family that loves her.  Thank God she has a great therapist that she has been seeing for several years. Otherwise she would have been pregnant or dead by now.  She started college this fall and seemed to be doing so well.  But now she's on a downward spiral and I don't know how to help her.  This website has helped me understand a little better what she is experiencing and how progress can trigger relapse.  And I know I need to get past my own feelings and focus on being the calm, supportive patent she needs.  I just feel so overwhelmed right now. 

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

[Lifewriter16]

Hi Grebe16.



Your post is so full of sadness and regret and that's perfectly okay. You've come to a place where people will empathise with you and listen as you pour out your feelings because your feelings are important. Please be encouraged to let them all out, to vent, to be sad, to be angry, to feel frightened - everything you feel, because therein lies healing for you. When your healing is underway, you will be better placed to support your daughter in the way you aspire to. There are loads of resources here, no doubt you've found many already. I'm really glad that you decided to take the risk in posting for the first time. Would you like to tell us more?

Love Lifewriter

[landslide]

Dear Grebe,

Reading your post was like looking in a mirror-- I have thought and felt so many of the same things.  I am also relatively new to this board and have a 16 y/o daughter who is struggling with some of the behaviors you mentioned.  She, too, was once a happy, fun-loving child.  Something I am able to say to you (and to myself on good days) is that BPD is not caused by our failures as a parent.  Just like all mental illnesses, it is an incredibly complex interplay between many factors like temperament and environment (including family but also peer relationships, life events, school experiences, etc).  It sounds like you are doing everything you can now that you know more about what she needs.  Feeling guilty is part of grieving.  I hope sometimes you also can step back and give yourself credit for all the things you did right and be gentle to yourself for all the thins you couldn't have known.  I hope being on this board will help.  It is easy to see how much everyone here loves their children, and it is a place where our struggles are normal and supported.       

[Debmark]

I felt the same way for years.  I kept asking myself what I did wrong when my daughter who is 23 now was growing up. She was a " typical child" until she was 15 and it was as though a switch was turned on and to this day, every day is eventful. My daughter was diagnosed at almost 16 with severe depression along with bi polar. At 18 she was diagnosed with BPD and schizoaffective. It has been far from easy and along the way she became pregnant. She was in a relationship at the time and thought it would be fun to play house. When my grandson was born the state stepped in and told them they could not take the baby home. My husband and I stepped up and took him home with us. That was 19 months ago and we are currently in final steps of adopting him. I sometimes resent my daughter for forever changing my husband and my lives but that was a choice that we made to raise him. He brings so much joy to our home that it allows us to forget everything else that is going on with our daughter.   Stay strong and hopefully it gets better for you.

[Rockieplace]

Oh, so many of the sentiments above are so familiar.  I too constantly asked myself what we could have done differently.  My daughter was relatively happy, healthy and highly intelligent with really nice friends until the age of around 15 when certain problems arose.  When I expressed concerns they were dismissed by others (my h included) as being normal teenage stuff and just me worrying for nothing.  Recently I was walking along a river path and two little children who looked just like my two daughters when they were small came running towards me and I just started crying.  I'm grieving for the life my daughter could have had if not for this horrible illness. 

It is an illness that evokes so little sympathy too.  My BPDD33 worked as a mental health professional before her current crisis and diagnosis and even she used to say that she really didn't like BPD patients and found them really difficult to work with!  She also told me that they were universally disliked by the profession and were constantly discharged as being 'untreatable' which I found very shocking at the time. 

There is hope however!  I've learnt from the literature and this site that there are treatments that can have a dramatic effect.  There are also tools and strategies which make a big difference and can even prove to have beneficial effects on relationships with others than those with BPD.  On a good day I really believe this to be true.