Your experience having a mother with BPD

[Our abuse recovery guide]

Hello,

Let's just get this out there. When my 14yo son's phone crashed and needed to be restored, I discovered he had a ton of texts from someone I didn't recognize. So, I looked.

It turns out he has a new secret girlfriend and he has confided in her about his BPD mom. I never realized how much he and his sister were being affected by his mom's rage and controlling behavior until I read what he wrote. I was praised in the texts for acting as a shield, but it's clear that it is not enough.

For those that had a borderline mother, how do you feel about your father now? Are you glad he stayed, or do you wish he had left and taken you with him? If he had stayed, what do you wish he did more of and what do you wish he did less of?

Thanks,
DearHusband.

[DearHusband]

Hello,

Let's just get this out there. When my 14yo son's phone crashed and needed to be restored, I discovered he had a ton of texts from someone I didn't recognize. So, I looked.

It turns out he has a new secret girlfriend and he has confided in her about his BPD mom. I never realized how much he and his sister were being affected by his mom's rage and controlling behavior until I read what he wrote. I was praised in the texts for acting as a shield, but it's clear that it is not enough.

For those that had a borderline mother, how do you feel about your father now? Are you glad he stayed, or do you wish he had left and taken you with him? If he had stayed, what do you wish he did more of and what do you wish he did less of?

Thanks,
DearHusband.

[HappyChappy]

Hi

The worst abuse was always when I was alone with my BPD mum.100% just anyone, Dad or anyone around was better than being alone with her. A BPD has no empathy, they are capable of extreme cruelty, what holds them back is being seen, they care about their image.

100% I wish my Dad had taken us away with him. But as it was, he was an enabler, he didn't want to cause a fuss, he wanted an easy life, so he and we all walked on egg shells around our BPD. Each BPD is different, but I would never leave anyone vulnerable alone with a BPD, its in their nature to take advantage, or much worse. I have serious C-PTSD, my sister has bulimia all  due to our mother. As a husband you won't be as vulnerable to all this, it may not effect you as badly as it does a young child. A BPD is very skilled at hiding much of what they do, so you probably don't know the half of it, and your kids probably think you won't believe them or you'll side with your wife. Have you spoken to your kids about the BPD thing ?

[zachira]

Good topic to bring up! I admire your courage in looking at how your children are affected by their mother with BPD and wanting to know what you can do as a father to help your children to deal with their mother. Both my mother and sister have BPD. Both choose to marry men that enabled them, and it seems that the role of both husbands was/is to keep the wife with BPD from getting upset, sometimes at the expense of the children's well being. When I was a teenager mom was having one of her melt downs and I stood up to her, unlike my father who let her get away with her terrible behaviors. My father had a private talk with me and asked me not to upset my mother, that he had done all he could do by trying to get her to see a therapist, and she had refused. I am now in the later part of my life, and I often sit and cry about how I deserved better and wish my father could have done more to protect me. As a teenager, it was not my job to sacrifice becoming a mature and happy adult to keep my mother from getting upset. My sister's adult children have also suffered terrible outcomes and are very immature because of their mother's rages and narcissism, and overall inability to be a mother to them, and their father's enabling of their mother. Do discuss with your children their mother's behaviors and when you have to choose between condoning her behavior and siding with your children, stand up for your children in their presence. Your children need to know that their well being comes first before that of their mother. This will be hard on you, and yes, it will make a difference. In the field of psychology, it is well know that victims of sexual abuse can heal if they are believed, whereas not being believed especially by a non abusing parent can lead to life time scars.

[Notwendy]

DH, cool post.

I have written volumes about my Dad. He was to me my only parent. As a teen, I also was affected by BPD mom in many ways. I'm glad your son has a friend he can talk to. I am grateful for the friends I had as a teen.

One thing to consider though is his age and the age of the girl. I had my first "boyfriend" at 14. Nothing really happened physically, but the feeling that someone actually cared about me was overwhelming. I know I looked to this relationship to give me the love and stability I was not getting at home. However as adults we know that this is beyond the capacity of young teens. Young teens have strong feelings. Your son may be looking for something in this girl that he is lacking at home. It's normal to have a teen puppy love but also give him the love and care he is seeking. My teen puppy love was probably the only positive attention I got and that's not a good situation. My father loved me but BPD mom and the drama she created was the focus of our family and took a lot of his attention.

I idolized my father. I thought he was the "normal one" and a victim of BPD mom. I realized later when dealing with issues in my own marriage that my co-dependent tendencies were part of them. Only when I began to work on my own co-dependency did I see my father's role in the dysfunction.

I don't have bad feelings towards him for being co-dependent. I still think of him as my only "parent" as my mother does not act like a parent to me. My father did a lot of good for us kids and I attribute a lot of the good we had growing up to him. However,  his own co-dependency led him to constantly acquiesce to my mother. He lost himself somewhere in the relationship and when he lost himself, it felt like we lost him too. 

As tough as it is to grow up with a BPD mother, it was also tough to see how she treated him in his elder years. I wished for him that he was able to stand up to her and say no to her demands, but I also understand how tough it is to say no to her. He is now deceased. He was a much loved father and grandfather.

The best gift I can give to my own children is to work on my own co-dependency. They learn a lot by observing me. My father role modeled co-dependency and enabling to me, and I learned it naturally. It was my "normal". I can not tell you whether or not it is better to leave or stay, but if I could say anything that is better, it would be to role model healthy boundaries. Demonstrate how to manage relationships without losing yourself. Whether you stay or leave, their mother is their mother and you will be in a position to relate to her. Teach them the tools here on this board. Raise them with a healthy sense of self- but to do that- you have to have it. To help them, you need to first work on you.

[Harri]

I was praised in the texts for acting as a shield, but it's clear that it is not enough.

Cay you describe what you do to shield your kids?

[Zabava]

DearHusband,

You clearly love your son and recognize that he is hurting.  Talk to him about how you feel. 

I don't know if you should stay or go, but I do think you should get help for yourself.  As the child of a BPD mom I wished my Dad had protected my sister and I from her rages.  But as an adult I feel sorry for what he endured.  I lost my Dad too early to substance abuse partly fuelled by his years of living with my mum. I wonder how you have been affected by his mom? 

[CautiousHopeful]

Hi DH, It's great you are looking out for your kids and recognising how they are being affected.

In my situation I wish my dad had been able to set firm boundaries with my mom (but I realise how difficult that is with BPD!). She raged at him relentlessly for their entire married life. If he tried to reasonably defend himself she just raged harder. He didn't rage back at her but instead took his rage out on my brother and I in explosive verbal and physical attacks. He was also sometimes enabling, asking me to help my mother after she had just been abusive to me, as a way of trying to restore some equilibrium. I'm sure the reason he never left her was because of the severe abandonment and neglect he experienced in early childhood. He'd already experienced the loss of a family. So in a hypothetical world where my dad did leave and did cope, I would have been better off with him, as despite his explosive rages, he was still a more validating parent and was genuinely remorseful about some of his behaviours which he apologised to me for when I was about 18.

I can't possibly know what is the right thing to do in your situation, but I think whatever you do if you can model good adult behaviours for your kids with healthy boundaries, that will help them. That might mean getting additional support via a good therapist with an understanding of BPD dynamics, who you can look to as a balancing support, as it sounds like you don't have this kind of support and balance in your family situation.

Even though my parents didn't split up, my dad's kindness at particular times and his relative normality (despite the explosive rages) remain a strength to me to this day. There was an innate goodness in him despite all he had been through in life, and he also was able to show appreciation to me for things I did for him. He once said to me, 'You've given us a lot of love and I really love you'. I think this was the first time I'd heard that from a parent, and those few words remain a strength to me to this day. My mother could be so severely invalidating and could not give hugs or say she loved you, so I think feeling loved is so important for kids and they will carry that for the rest of their life. If you can be a stable and reassuring influence in their lives, a  balanced adult presence, that will really mean a lot.

[Notwendy]

It's interesting to see that a common theme from the adult children of BPD mothers is that we wished to see our fathers get help for themselves and set limits with their BPD wives.  One might have expected to see us write down what we wished our father's did for us, but a wish is for our fathers to take care of themselves, set boundaries, which benefits them, and also role models these skills for us.

I realize how tough this is. My relationship with my parents was a triangle. My father also enlisted me as my BPD mother's emotional caretaker/enabler as it made it easier on the whole family if we all appeased her. So she was allowed to be abusive to me, and I was expected to be nice to her anyway. I did it- not because I wanted to but because I wanted to please my dad and gain his approval. So I learned to tolerate people treating me poorly in order to be loved and this is the pattern I brought into my own adult relationships.

I didn't stop wanting to please my father until it wasn't possible anymore. I did set boundaries with my mother eventually and that was met with his anger and disapproval- which was hurtful.

I have empathy for my father in his situation as setting limits with BPD mom results in her raising h*ll. There were divorce threats, suicide threats, and suicide attempts. This had to  be terrifying.

If I tried to stand up to my mother, usually she would enlist my father to punish me, which he did and so it often worked to either get me back in line or hurt my feelings. My father was able to set limits with me. He had higher behavioral expectations. I don't think he worried about me like he did about BPD mom but thankfully I think he realized that I would be able to take care of myself.

Now when I have boundaries with BPD mom, she rages,  paints me black to her friends and family. But I don't give in. Over time, the pattern between us has changed. Our relationship is actually better now that I am not following the steps of the Karpman triangle and enabling dysfunction. I realize though that it would be harder to do this in a romantic relationship. My father loved her.

[stark]

Like some others have said, for me the worst times with my BPD mother were (and still are) when it was just the two of us, alone. My father moved out when I was about 10, to take a job in another city. On some level, of course, I know this was just an excuse and a way out for him, without having to deal with confronting my mom or thinking about divorce, but at the time I really believed he had no choice but to go. (He did have a choice -- he had work in our city, too.)

I idealized my dad for a long time, thinking if I could just get away from my mom and be with him, my life would be perfect. I didn't hold him responsible for leaving, and leaving me with her, until years later. That process was very painful, because for so long I thought I at least had one "good" parent, even if he wasn't around.

Obviously every family is different, but I think you can be sure that not leaving your child alone to deal with his BPD mom will be in his best interest.

[DearHusband]

Thanks All.

I am usually the target of my wife's rage and her anger at me spills over to the kids. Increasingly, my son is perceived as being disrespectful (he's 14!) and she will lash out at him first, and then at me for not teaching him better.

Recently, my son asked my wife to lower her voice as he was trying to sleep before a big event. She was arguing with me at the time and he didn't ask me to lower my voice because it wasn't raised. She became incensed and threatened to make him sleep outside, at which point I physically placed myself between her and him and said there was no way that was happening. I told my son to go back to his room and escorted her away from the area. She was visibly upset and said that her parents fought every day and there is no way she would  ever talk to them that way. Obviously, her family of origin plays a strong role in her current behavior.

I have talked to my kids about their mothers behavior and how it makes them feel. I have not told them about BPD.

More later.

[Turkish]

DH,

It sounds like you're standing in the gap and that's good. 

I was the only child of a single mother and was targeted worse once I started becoming an adult.  One,  because I was asserting becoming an independent entity,  no longer dependent upon my mom; two, that I was becoming a man,  given my mother's issues with men. 

My ex used the excuse, "but my parents' marriage!" And how that influenced her relationship style. 

[Notwendy]

DH- this is typical developmentally for your son.

Parents with PD's see their children as extensions of themselves. Yet children seek autonomy starting at an early age as part of the process of becoming independent adults and especially in the teen years. This is disturbing to the parent with the PD who has difficulty seeing the child as an autonomous person. Although I was my mother's scapegoat child, this became even more of an issue as I reached my teens.

BPD also involves immature emotional skills. Your son at this point may have outgrown his mother in some ways emotionally but he is still a child and needs parenting. Teens can challenge a parent, and your wife may not be skilled emotionally at managing a teen. It was confusing to me as a teen to know that certain behaviors were inappropriate and yet, in my home it was somehow OK for mom to do these things without consequence. And, I had to obey her too? The adolescent years for us were difficult. Of course your son will ask someone to stop yelling if it bothers him. He is exerting his normal boundaries, but this isn't going to go well with her.

The Karpan triangle was a model for how this behavior played out in my family. Mother was in victim mode. She is usually in victim mode. My father was in rescuer mode with her. So if she was upset with me, and my father stepped in to defend me, it would violate this expectation. Mostly, he rescued her. When your son challenges your wife or makes a request from her, she goes into victim mode and then fights back. If she sees herself as a victim, she doesn't perceive him as a child, but as someone persecuting her.

[myDisplayName]

My mother has BPD. Coping with her illness was tough.

My father did not put her any limits or boundaries. He usually went to work early in the morning and arrived 5 minutes before dinner by 9:00 pm. He often worked on weekends and traveled on business trips for several days almost every month. My father protected himself by not being at home. My siblings and I were alone.

As an adult, I had two daughters with a BPD. While suffering all this behavior over me again, I learned about BPD. I split. I am working a lot with my kids to diminish the impact of her own BPD mother behavior in their own life. I have 50% custody.

I think that I can help more my daughters 50% of the time and offer them a healthy environment to growth than being in a sick environment 100% of the time. It was a hard decision.

[Harri]

Hi.  It is good yuou are standing up for your son.

I think a lot of parents here don't realize just how damaging witnessing conflict in the house and feeling the stress is for kids.  Even infants can pick up on this. 

You asked how I feel about my father.  The thing is, it does not matter really, not for you and your situation.  You are worlds apart from my dad who did nothing and ignored, appeased and looked to me for comfort.

Keep working on you and teach your kids boundaries, validate them and help them cope with their own emotions and help them problem solve.  They are old enough now that what has already passed probably influenced them but it does not have to cripple them.

 

[CautiousHopeful]

Hi DH,

What you describe with your son asking for his mom to lower or voice so he can sleep, mirrors a memory I have of being about 7 or 8, and getting out of bed because my parents had been arguing for a very long time, and asking them if they could be quiet so I could sleep. These arguments were always started by my mother and would go on for a long time and the underlying issue would never be resolved. My mother didn't threaten for me to sleep outside, but I do remember at the age of 5, taking a pillow, box of tissues and a bowl outside at night time, as I decided I was leaving and these would be the worldly possessions I would need. Of course being just five I got as far as the driveway, and after about half an hour realised I had nowhere else to go and would have to go back inside.

What seems to be happening with your son is he is having to fall into an adult role, and is showing adult responsibility, because he knew he needed to be up early the next morning and needed his sleep. In my case, I ended up in a caretaker role where it is like I had to become the adult to my mother, and perhaps to a lesser extent my dad. If continued unchecked, this caretaking behaviour can continue into adulthood (as it did with me, and I'm trying to now unlearn this is not my purpose in life in relation to others, and starting to finally get it). So it is good that you are being a balanced parent, which will reduce some of your son's struggles in this area. It sounds like you are doing a lot of work yourself and are very aware of what is happening, and so you are well-positioned to support your kids. It does sound like your wife is experiencing resurfacing trauma in relation to her own past experiences. It might help to validate how she is feeling, as this can be calming for the other person if they feel their feelings are being recognised and understood. It might open her up a bit more to actually deal with the things from the past affecting her, if she feels her emotions are validated (even if the way she has been expressing those emotions up till now has not been helpful or constructive).

I realise you are not in an easy situation, so take good care of yourself in all of this. You sound like you are being a reflective and balanced parent, and really working to do the right thing by your kids 

[Panda39]

I think that I can help more my daughters 50% of the time and offer them a healthy environment to growth than being in a sick environment 100% of the time. It was a hard decision.

This is the path my partner took, he left his marriage and wanted 50/50 custody, his uBPDxw of course wanted 100/0.  When the divorce was final it was more like 60/40 his favor.  Dad had weekdays and one weekend, mom had 3 weekends.

The girl's mom had multiple issues...evictions, and no job for example.  Yes it was drama central with their mother but every Sunday they returned to the stability at dad's house and that lasted the rest of the week. 

In 2015 because of their mother's dysfunction directed towards them (she sent older D to college with the promise to pay and didn't putting her in debt to the tune of 15k and she sent younger daughter out of state to camp...only she didn't pay for camp and sent daughter to the parents of a childhood friend of hers without telling dad) both girls voted with their feet to move in with dad full-time.  D22 is no contact with her mother and D18 is low contact.  Both girls have felt the effects of their mother's problems.  D22 is distrustful can be passive/aggressive and still functions in a parentified manner particularly regarding her sister, she also has some anger and depression regarding her mom.  D18 has been diagnosed with PTSD, has been inpt herself 2x for suicide threats, is on medications for anxiety and is a people pleaser.  Yes the effects of their mother are there and even with their issues in other aspects of their lives the girls are doing really well.  They have one parent that has been there for them that has provided stability, consistency, has met their needs and yes even some wants. 

Both girls because of their issues have chosen friends with similar family issues...alcoholism, mental illness, self absorption, parent in jail...to me these children are going to have a tough road because they have no parent supporting them, they are flailing around on their own without a safety net, without direction, without the support they need to launch with the best tools possible into the adult world...it's terribly sad.  This is not to say they can't or won't be successful people overcome things everyday...I see it with people here all the time...but it could have been easier if there was a parent that could put their children's needs before their own.

My Partner's daughters over time have let go of most of these friends as they themselves have become healthier and have moved forward, many of their friends are stuck or are slipping backward.

So whether you stay in your marriage or you leave it, what matters is that you can put your child's needs before your own so they have the best chance for success.

The family dynamic that was going on before his divorce was...everyone in the family focused on the needs of his uBPDxw.  There was nothing left for anyone else.  My partner has described his younger daughter in particular as growing up like a weed, due to lack of attention.

The catalyst for leaving his marriage was recognizing the abuse from his wife towards their daughters.  He had to save himself to save his daughters from the dysfunction they were living.  He gave them all a chance at something better.

Panda39