What to do when your child constantly feels worthless and whatever is suggested, she gets agitated. She is 30 years old and lives in a different city and she is taking treatment.
Part of the agitation comes (I think) from the competing needs to 1) be rescued by you and 2) feel adequate.
She wants your help, and then gets mad that you think she can't figure it out herself. My SO's D19 is like this, too.
More than anything, your child probably wants to know that her feelings are ok -- this is kind of ground zero for someone with BPD. Her feelings rocket all over the place, dragging her along, and she feels bad about that (because other people don't seem to experience this, and her feelings are probably out of proportion to whatever is happening). Then, she ends up feeling bad about feeling bad, and has to lash out or push you away, something to keep the badness from swamping her entirely.
We often talk here about using validation skills with people who suffer from BPD. I found that validation could actually contribute to a dysregulation with SO's D19 because it seemed to let the genie out of the bottle, like getting permission to let those feelings really go. Things got a little better when I learned about
asking validating questions, because this addresses the feelings while demonstrating faith in her ability to solve her own problems.
Apparently, people with BPD may have a harder time transferring knowledge from one situation to another. Meaning, if she was able to take her car into the shop when it started to make a funny sound, she might not think to take her computer in when it stops working. Validating questions can help link together other times when she was successful solving her own problem.
It's made me very aware how irritating it is when someone tries to solve a problem for me. My SO has codependent traits (as do I) and jumps to fixing/rescuing, which strips me of the opportunity (and satisfaction) of doing something myself. Because I'm not BPD, I can brush it off or point it out gently, but D19 is so self-referential and quick to trigger she interprets his fixing as a vote for her incompetence, and that leads to a downward spiral in her self-worth.
