Grasping Reality of Mother with uBPD

[CautiousHopeful]

Hello! Firstly thank you for this website. While I have thought about the possibility of my mother having BPD over several years, I think I've tried to think she doesn't fully have that, or it isn't that bad. However, after a distressing conflict with her post-Christmas I think I've finally seen it in the cold light of day. I am now in my 40s and have been dealing with her tendency to fly into volatile rages and emotional meltdown states since I was a small child. Her own mother could be extremely cruel, both psychologically and physically abusive towards her. Despite her re-enacting many of these behaviours towards me (more psychological than physical), I have still always loved her and tried to support her, but I also know I have fallen into a caretaker role and that this can be unhealthy. She depends on me to be her emotional regulator and has done since I was a small child, so I learned early that I could not be vulnerable because this would mean she would become uncontrollably angry and attack me. Effectively she has always looked to me to parent her. Recently I stayed with her for a couple of weeks thinking things are so much better lately and that it would be a healing thing to do, to share time together, but she got into one of her anxious states where she started melting down and I needed to get a way for a bit by going to a park. This of course triggered her abandonment issues and on my return she was extremely upset with me. I normally try to hold it together and remain stable, but I just cracked and started crying and couldn't stop. This led to her raging at me even more severely and I could feel myself splitting off from myself as I did as a survival mechanism as a child. Once home I was depleted and exhausted, and found myself googling BPD and realising that this fits her more than anything else and that I have to face the reality that this is what I'm dealing with.
My mother's mother committed suicide two decades ago, and she undoubtedly had BPD. She would take even friendly comments from people as offensive and then never speak to them again. She taught my mother's brothers to pick on her and effectively severely damaged my mother, including at times physically attacking her. The most painful thing is I can see how my mother has been so broken by her mother, and it is so distressing to process how damaged she is, and also profoundly distressing that she has repeated similar patterns with me, including blaming me for things that have nothing to do with me. She has even blamed me for her arthritis and told me I am responsible for making it better!
I know of course this is highly irrational and I am in no way responsible for such things. What makes things so challenging and emotionally confusing is that she can also be a really good, kind person much of the time, who at least some of the time shows wisdom and insight, and sometimes shows some ability to reflect on her own behaviour. I then can get a false sense of security that things are improved and that I am dealing with a more balanced person. However, something as small as a tradesman not turning up can send her into an extreme distress state for weeks. She was at least recently able to identify that this is related to her own abandonment issues in relation to her mother, which followed me trying to say such issues were affecting the way she was reactive to me during the post-Christmas conflict, which at the time she denied but she had obviously thought about it and then was able to see it was also connected to her extreme distress at the tradesman not showing up. So there is some awareness there, but she can easily collapse back into a kind of mindless rage, anxiety or emotional collapse that she cannot regulate.
When she does get in a severely distraught state my biggest fear is she will commit suicide. While I know it is not healthy to be a caretaker, I worry that this will happen and feel I have to make sure she is ok, especially when I pick up that she is in a broken, collapsed state. As you can probably tell from this, I have been somewhat enmeshed in an unhealthy dynamic where I feel I have to try to protect her and make sure she is safe. I am trying to separate from this pattern. However, it is like they sense it when you are pulling away even slightly from them, which then sends them into a kind of desperate emotional turmoil, and then that increases my worry about her.
So anyway, I thought I'd just ask others how they have balanced still having a level of contact without being dragged into enmeshment, or how they have extracted themselves from enmeshed dynamics? Also, how have people reconciled the good traits in their mother with the not so good? I feel at my age I should have worked this out by now, but I still find it a struggle. I am also an eternal optimist by nature, so I keep thinking my mother will get a lot better at some point, but I've found things can also get dramatically worse very quickly too.
I think the answer is largely that I have to get on with my own life and lead by example. It's like I've always had to model adult behaviour for my mother. I also know I'm not meant to be the parent, but it seems the best thing I can do is just carry on with managing my life as effectively as I can without being drawn into dysfunctional dynamics. My father died two years ago and I worry a lot about my mother being on her own and isolated in her extremely anxious, emotionally dysregulated states. Do others struggle with the glimmer of hope that their mother (and their relationship with their mother) is improving, only to find it all seems to break apart again? Also, does anyone have thoughts about how to deal with fears about a parent suiciding? I've had this fear for many years and I think the fear of losing a mother is really powerful, and I had recurrent nightmares as a child about losing her in air crashes and other situations. I would be in a plane crash with her and would search for her desperately afterwards, and either couldn't find her, or I would find her but it was in no way comforting when I did. I guess I am finally facing up to the reality that my mother has BPD, but I doubt she would accept this herself and actually telling her that would lead to an extreme out-of-control reaction from her. So I'm trying to work out skilful ways of interacting and communicating that might help the situation without being enmeshed but also without triggering extreme rage and abandonment fear in her. Sorry for long post!

[smokyquartz]

I am right there with you. Having to be the “grown up” is my life too.

My therapist has advised me to have a time limit for phone calls, and limit visits. That has helped. It can be difficult if she uses tactics like threatening to kill herself, or that I am a terrible daughter and she “doesn’t know what she did to deserve this”.

Not sure if you experience this too, but after a rage or unraveling my mom will act as though nothing has happened moments later. I am trying to see this as a silver lining, because it stops things from being dragged out even longer.

The way I usually put a stop to issues (which she often starts via text) is that I pick up the phone and just say “Hi mom, let’s just press reset. I love you, and I want you to be happy”. Now that I’m almost 30, it’s a lot easier to be the adult.

[CautiousHopeful]

Thanks smoky quartz.

Yes I can definitely relate to the rage thing being followed by acting as if nothing had happened. It's like she has a brain snap and then acts as if it never occurred. It's almost like a strange kind of amnesia. I do not normally bring up her past behaviours with her, as this will lead to another rage brain snap and her spinning out of control and complete denial of her past behaviour, as I found out when I did once do this. It's like I instinctively know this will be counterproductive. But as you say, there is a kind of upside/silver lining in that it doesn't drag on indefinitely.

And yes I think time limiting contact, whether phone calls or visits, can be an important management tool. This is how my brother manages his interactions with her. I'm able to do this some of the time, but there is another part of me that can see when she is really in a bad way, and I am torn between being there more for her or keeping a distance. An example would be a few years ago when she had chemotherapy. She was absolutely the most terrified I had ever seen her and I simply couldn't not help her out during this time. I took her to her chemotherapy sessions while my brother would not be involved at all, as he can't handle being around her when she is in an extremely anxious state. My Dad had an advanced illness at this time, and so I was trying to support him and her caring for him at this time as well, as his care needs were very high.

I am having to learn to find the right balance, but I think when we decide on our own boundaries and maintain them, things seem to work out best, and it's a case of accepting that our BPD parent may not be able to fully attain an adult level of behaviour. Looking back I can see how my mother was like a small child when I was a small child, not really quite knowing how to parent and frequently overwhelmed. When this overwhelm got too much she would emotionally shut down completely and cease to show any expression. She would look like a statue with no emotion. She could fluctuate between this frozen state and the rage attacks. I'm certain now she was moving between the freeze survival response and fight-or-flight survival response, like overwhelm/collapse or attack are the only two responses available, which I know are linked to her childhood trauma.

I'm currently seeing a therapist who is helpful and understanding of the situation. About 15 years ago I went to therapy for the first time and had the misfortune of seeing someone who I eventually realised is almost certainly borderline herself. She divulged large amounts of personal information to me about herself and her family members, and was actually starting to view me as a parent and go into childlike meltdown states about her own problems (which I should not have been privy to). She told me my mother is not normal and I need to trust her and not my mother, but then would act out in emotionally unstable ways. She would take offence to something I said that was in no way meant to be offensive and then become uncontrollably angry at me. This actually really messed me up, and I become more confused than ever about whether there is anyone who can be trusted.

I guess what I have ultimately learned is that we need to trust ourselves, parent ourselves and effectively manage our boundaries, while at the same time still being compassionate human beings but without compromising our own well-being. My mother does not actually threaten suicide, nor did her mother before suiciding, but I think there is a primal underlying fear I have of this which is me regressing back to being a small child and the fear I am going to lose my mother (who was quite literally drifting away from me at that time and was unavailable emotionally).

I like what you said about pressing reset with your mom and saying that you love her and want her to be happy. I think just being straight forward with them like that and keeping things in the positive reduces the chances they have to start acting out and going into negative emotional dynamics. I need to keep practising this kind of approach so I don't fall back into being enmeshed with her emotional turmoil. Thanks and all the best.

[smokyquartz]

Yes, I think limits, and being straightforward and repeating things many times is the best route for communication.

This board is so helpful with feeling less alone in this. Thanks for you post. ♥️

[CautiousHopeful]

Yes thanks I agree! This board is very helpful in not feeling so alone. Take care 

[Harri]

Hi CautiousHopeful!

It sounds like you have a pretty good handle on how your moms behaviors can affect you and have played out in both your life and hers.

So anyway, I thought I'd just ask others how they have balanced still having a level of contact without being dragged into enmeshment, or how they have extracted themselves from enmeshed dynamics?

Well my mother is now dead but when she was alive I had to work hard on separating myself from her emotionally.  It took hard boundaries, with lots of mistakes and mis-starts, and what I know know is differentiation.  Not letting her words, beliefs, opinions define who I was or the choices I made about my life and my contact with her.  Granted, I am still enmeshed but no where near to where I was.   Learning about the disorder and the associated behaviors also helped.  For me, the biggest thing to learn about was projection.  Are you familiar with it?

Also, how have people reconciled the good traits in their mother with the not so good?

  I worked hard on reminding myself there was no good vs. bad mom.  There was just one person and I could not have one without the other.   It was quite difficult because when she was good she was really good, but the bad was something else. 

I feel at my age I should have worked this out by now, but I still find it a struggle. I am also an eternal optimist by nature, so I keep thinking my mother will get a lot better at some point, but I've found things can also get dramatically worse very quickly too.

I can relate to this too.  I am old enough now and my mom died back in 2007 so I should be farther along.  But I am where I am right?  Besides, it sounds to me like you have done a lot of work on this stuff already.   

I think what you said about getting on with your life is exactly right.   Disordered people often need to be shown a better way for it to sink in but even if she never gets it, it is your responsibility to take care of you and live your life.  Balancing that with caring for your mom will be hard but I think you have done a good job of it already.  Helping your mom with her chemo and not cutting her off when you can tell she is down is a very loving thing to do.  They can be done with boundaries and in healthy ways too.

I'm trying to work out skillful ways of interacting and communicating that might help the situation without being enmeshed but also without triggering extreme rage and abandonment fear in her.

We offer several communication strategies here that can do the very things you are looking for.  Can you give one specific situation with details that we can start with?  I don't want to give you too many links or ones that do not apply.

[CautiousHopeful]

Thanks Harri!

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Yes I think I'm realising that getting out of enmeshment is a process rather than something that can be just switched off overnight, and it may always be there to some extent, as an ongoing process. And yes differentiation is a good word to describe what I need to do for myself. My understanding of projection is when a person projects into another person something from their own experience that may have nothing to do with the other person. I'm guessing this might be what you are referring to? For example, I might say or do something that is meant to be kind, but my mother interprets it as rejecting because of the way her mother was rejecting with her. So even though I may have nothing but good intentions, she sees it differently, takes offence and gets intensely angry.

Thanks regarding the good/bad mom thing. I have had great difficulty reconciling the contradictory aspects of her, but I think it is coming to terms with the reality that all those things are part of the one person, and it isn't possible to have one without the other.

In terms of an example of trying to communicate and interact without triggering rage/abandonment issues, I can give an example of a situation that has played out several times with her.

She will ask for my help with something such as a task she wants to do on the computer. I will sit down with her and carefully go through the steps of what she wants to learn. She will get agitated and say that what I am saying doesn't make sense, so I try other ways of explaining. Even though I'm extremely patient and in no way hurrying her, she gets increasingly agitated. I carefully go back over what she says she doesn't understand. She nonetheless has this building anger and then starts attacking what I am saying. It can be something as simple as explaining she needs to click on the link highlighted in blue rather than the black text above it, but she will keep telling me that asking her to click on the blue link doesn't make sense. It becomes impossible to proceed further and I feel stuck and her anger is getting out of control. She will start to rage, accusing me of talking nonsense. Eventually I get up and walk away to another room as it is too stressful to cope with her rage and there is no way I can continue to try to help her. Sometimes she will pursue me to where I have retreated to and attack me further. I might leave her place shortly after this. When I visit a week later she will say to me, "I've been upset for the whole week because of you". I often have no response at all to this as it is so irrational. Sometimes I say something like "I didn't mean to upset you", but I think I need to assert a clear boundary with something like "If I am explaining something to you as well and as carefully as I can and you get increasingly angry at me, it makes it very difficult for me to continue to help you". However, the thing about BPD I find is that it doesn't matter how rational what you say is, they still seem to twist it against you and blame you for their uncontrollable feelings. I guess this is where I need to differentiate and leave her to deal with her bad feelings.

While I've got other examples I won't provide all of those, but it is basically how to manage someone creating a situation with you (asking for help), attacking your attempts to help eventually to the point that you retreat, and then blaming you for creating their emotional state when it is actually created 100% by them and has nothing to do with you. On another occasion when she picked a fight with my dad that was totally irrational I remember eventually having to leave the room. She pursued me and yelled at me, "You need to learn to live in the real world!" and then went back out to my dad and said "See now look what you've done". So she was in an uncontrollable rage which she was blaming both my dad and me for when we had nothing to do with it.

When she is in a more normal state it seems impossible to bring up these behaviours with her, as she will almost certainly regress into a volatile rage.

So anyway, I hope that example helps to explain the dynamics. At the same time, she can also be kind and thoughtful, so it can be extremely difficult to process these different aspects of her. Also, she has improved in recent years, but she can still regress into these disturbed emotional states.

Many thanks!

[abeatofthedrum]

I'm new and relate to this so much. I am deeply enmeshed with my uBPD mother. This is really helpful to know I'm not alone. Thanks for sharing. I hope things are going ok with you.

[Harri]

I am so sorry it took so long to get back to this thread. 

"If I am explaining something to you as well and as carefully as I can and you get increasingly angry at me, it makes it very difficult for me to continue to help you".  This is good!  I would add that she can look for a class at the local library or pay for a class but clearly you are not a good teacher for her.  ;)

However, the thing about BPD I find is that it doesn't matter how rational what you say is, they still seem to twist it against you and blame you for their uncontrollable feelings. I guess this is where I need to differentiate and leave her to deal with her bad feelings.

Yes.  This is where you need to let her deal with her bad feelings and not soothe her or take blame by apologizing.  She will get upset.  Expect it.  You know what she says and does when she is upset so plan for it.  Remove yourself, have a reply ready, work on separating so her words do not wound you to the point of being devastated.  Remind yourself of who you are, that what she says is a projection of how she feels and see herself and she is not even seeing you.

Does that make sense?

[CautiousHopeful]

Firstly thanks thebeatofthedrum. Yes I have found this forum really helpful too, including realising there are so many other people out there dealing with BPD related issues. It is good to have normal, balanced discussion when we are otherwise dealing with often destabilised relatives, friends etc. All the best on your journey with it.

And thanks so much Harri for your comments. Yes what you say makes sense. I can find myself falling back into trying to soothe her, but of course she then depends on me for that, and that is not healthy. I've been in this role since a young child and I think there is a primal fear of losing my mother that is still there and very hard to shake.

But I think the answer is that I just have to keep operating at an adult level, and neither parent  my own parent nor regress into being the frightened child I was as an actual child. I find learning from wise, balanced people I know who are adult and stable in the way they relate to the world is helpful. They are like role models of how to orient to the world.

I've just been through the process of separating from a BPD friend of 30 years (since childhood) who I came to realise is so much like my mother, in that she has used me as her go-to emotional support while bitterly complaining and raging to me about everyone else in her life. I managed to put a boundary up with her and no longer engage in that one-sided support role, which of course has made her very angry at me and I now am another one of those 'bad' people in her life that she resents along with all her family members, friends and work associates. I've just had to relinquish the friendship for self-preservation, and it is like I am now really seeing just how unbalanced some of my relationships with other people have been.

It is somehow harder with a parent in that you still want some kind of relationship with them. I think the only way is just to keep being an adult, a clear communicator and remembering to take care of yourself. I think I'm going to try and develop a daily meditation practice of working on that, and hopefully I can retrain myself out of old patterns. I'm already starting to shift those patterns, which I think can be painful at first, including grief that comes up, but I think that is what happens when you reach a point of acceptance about the reality of an uBPD mother. I cannot be her healer, she has to do that for herself, and I need to work on caring for myself on a daily basis.

Thanks again for your helpful feedback and support!

[Harri]

 

But I think the answer is that I just have to keep operating at an adult level, and neither parent  my own parent nor regress into being the frightened child I was as an actual child. I find learning from wise, balanced people I know who are adult and stable in the way they relate to the world is helpful. They are like role models of how to orient to the world.

Yes!  So hard to do when our instinct is to do otherwise but even then we can change.  Another member often talks about surrounding herself with heathy people and it sounds like you are doing that as well.

I've just had to relinquish the friendship for self-preservation, and it is like I am now really seeing just how unbalanced some of my relationships with other people have been.

Ugh.  I went through the same with having to let go of relationships that were formed Before.  Before recovery and working on healing and becoming healthier.   My last friendship that ended was with a friend who moved in with me for a while.  That was an eye opener!  I learned a lot from it though.  Once it was over, my T ever so carefully asked "Harri, do you have any other friends still in your life from before?Because if you do we need to talk".   

but I think that is what happens when you reach a point of acceptance about the reality of an uBPD mother.

I agree.  I think there will always be an element of grief and sadness surrounding this issue.   I think it is in part attached to the primal fear of losing a parent that you mentioned before. 

I cannot be her healer, she has to do that for herself, and I need to work on caring for myself on a daily basis.

Yes.   We talk about giving the pwBPD time and space to learn to self-soothe and I am starting to see that I need to do the same for myself. 

Good work here.