My 21 yo daughter has BPD...I’m struggling

[Runner21]

I could write a book about our situation. My daughter was diagnosed w BPD and bipolar over a year ago after a suicide attempt and hospitalization. A lot clicked for me and made sense thinking about her whole life growing up. The last 7 months has gotten very bad. Her disrespect and demands of me have become disheartening. She decided she hates my fiancé and wants me to end it w him and kick him out. She doesn’t live w me...moved into the grandparents 7 months ago. I postponed our wedding to try to focus on my relationship w her and she was happy for about a week. Now it’s not enough. The other night on the phone she wanted me to promise her I wouldn’t be w him the rest of my life. She also told me I’m choosing him over her and if she were to commit suicide it’s 100% my fault. I currently pay for college, books, her car insurance (which is high risk) and am there for her every way I can be. BUT now I’m suppose to give up my happiness or I don’t love her? I’m struggling so much. Thanks for listening.

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

[PearlsBefore]

I've seen quite a few people here who have loved ones with BPD/Bipolar and I'll admit I'm often skeptical - it seems to me like medical professionals recognising there's serious emotional disturbance and an inability to moderate reactions often can't tell what's physiological and what's purely psychopathy...so I suspect they sometimes diagnose "both" to cover their bases so they're certain one or the other therapy should work. That said, I'm not an expert of Bipolar...and the behaviors you're describing DO sound like BPD (and I often politely tell newcomers if the symptoms do not sound like BPD).

As you're probably aware, BPDs aren't able to moderate...well, anything. Spending, substance use, love, hate, everything is seen as "all or nothing" - and it sounds like that's leading to her current problem with her emotional attachment to you. To her mind, if you love him with x% of your heart...that must be stolen away from your love of her. I had something similar with a pwBPD your daughter's age...who was jealous of just normal relatives about whom I cared. I suspect part of the reason why BPD symptoms flare up in the teens and then (hopefully) taper down after the young 20s is because "love" is such a many-splendoured and confusing thing even for the most healthy among us.

Ultimately I found it did help to give her a book on CS Lewis' four types of love...not that she read the book, threw it aside and declared I hate her of course...but it did lead to some brief conversations about WHY I had given her the book and the different types of love we feel. Something similar in your case might be cracking a joke about how "Bob" tried to pout his way into guilt-tripping you into spending the afternoon with him but you just laughed and drove off to see your daughter leaving his pouty little ass to figure out what to make for lunch himself...or trying to de-emphasize that you're marrying your fiance because you love him and playing a little more often of the "Oh you know, I'm marrying him because he's so sexy, yeah that bald spot is totally my fetish" - because that's an arena in which she's not competing with him for your attention. (Imagine the minefield for the more common situation around here, the Jocasta - where she's competing for her father's attention against a new woman...even more difficult to handle in some ways).

Regarding suicide, it's always a good-news, bad-news issue for newcomers. The good news is that the vast, vast majority of the time no matter how loud their cries for help it will not result in anything permanent. The bad news of course, is that it only takes one "mistake" where they cut too deep or calculate the pills incorrectly or somehow manage to tie a knot correctly for once, for the unthinkable to happen - and pwBPDs do still have the highest rate of suicide attempts whereas Haltlose-without-BPD (uncommon) I think is the highest rate because they seek out less dramatic but more lethal means.

[old97]

Hi Runner,

Your post could easily have been written by my partner - I had to read closely to ensure you weren't her!  Our situation is similar to yours in a number of ways.

I have no particular expertise to share with you. Just an observation to support Pearls' point about suicide. The other day, my partner's 21-year-old daughter with BPD (whom I have referred to as "Jane" in other posts), in the midst of a tirade, went loudly rummaging in the cabinet where household medications are kept. She's done this before and has always got a reaction out of my partner ("Sue"). This time Sue did not rise to the bait. So Jane dumped most of the bottle of Tylenol into her mouth. Sue reached for her mobile phone and stated, matter-of-factly, "I guess I better call 911." Jane spit out the pills and stormed off to her room.

Sue has been working on boundaries with Jane. This was the most dramatic instance to date. It's too soon to tell if there's any real change, but Jane, who had been threatening suicide several times a week, hasn't mentioned it since.

Hang in. Keep posting. There are lots of people here who want to help!

[KBug]

Take care of yourself first and don't let her emotional blackmail dictate your life.  A good therapist who understands BPD can really help you set boundaries and handle her bad reaction when you enforce those boundaries. It's tough, but if someone is trying to dictate your behavior and life choices, that's emotional abuse.  You deserve better.  

[Broken Mama]

OMG!  I am so sorry you are suffering like this.  I am not in the "same" situations as you but am in the situation of my daughter having BPD and is completely unreasonable with me.  I can't even say the simplest things without her imploding on me. I can't finish my thoughts or explain myself without being called a pathological narcissist liar...brutal, and that's just the tip of it.

May I ask how old your daughter is?

[Whozit]

Hi—I’m new to the list, but I’m astonished at how similar this is to my situation. I have two daughters, both adult. The older one has BPD (mid-30’s) and after some very difficult and scary years, seems now to be doing so much better. The younger one (early 30’s) isn’t currently diagnosed with BPD, but with C-PTSD, ADD, anxiety/depression, and a high-IQ/low executive processing disorder that is particularly devilish—it makes her aspire to achieve great things, then lose her mind when she can’t manage the logistics to make it happen. I help her when she asks for help—I don’t ever overwhelm her with unwanted “help;” I want her as independent as possible. She lives near me, and at times we are tremendously close, but then I do something that enrages her and she will cut me off for two weeks or longer. It’s usually when she’s asked for my help with something but I haven’t done it in exactly the way she would have wanted—and she expects that I would know, without being told, all details about how she would have wanted it done. Currently she’s decided that her stepdad, who’s been with me for 25 years, is a malignant narcissist (he’s not—my first husband, her bio-dad, definitely was/is), and that I need to break up with him immediately, and she can’t have a relationship with me until I “straighten out my marriage and my life.” She has suicidal ideation, doesn’t threaten to actually follow thru, but uses the ideation as a cudgel against me for what I’ve done to trigger her. I notice that I am reacting like an abused person—I’m flinching, walking on eggshells, and doing everything I can to try not to raise this reaction in her, but I always “fail” because of course there are always things she can find to criticize. I am working with my therapist to try to find better tools to deal with my own reaction and gain some peace, but it’s a struggle. The best tool has been to visualize seeing her through a window—I see her and connect with her, but I have a window of emotional protection against her rages. It’s hard, tho, because my maternal instincts make me want to bend over backwards to fix things for her.

[PearlsBefore]

Hey Whozit I'm happy to hear that your older daughter seems to have improved, how old was she when you noticed the upward trend? The cacophony of diagnoses on the younger daughter sounds very similar to BPD other than "normal" BPD usually not containing so much of the ADD...but C-PTSD overlap is always there in my experience, anxiety always, depression commonly, some form of Daddy Issues very commonly, the high-IQ/lowProcessing isn't in the "normal" matrix but I've definitely seen it.

I assume she's not in a relationship, but does she have close long-term friends by chance? My "main" pwBPD obviously had trouble identifying positive influences for her life, but boy was it a relief for her family when she'd go out for a weekend, or cry to friends about how unfair the new parking lot was to her or something...it was such a mixed bag. "That friend Kat, in fact any person who goes by Kat really, is not a healthy influence in your life - you should really do better...oh dear, some boy didn't answer your text? Don't suppose you want to rant to Kat about it, she seems like such a great friend who really cares about you."

Regarding the flinching, I think it's one of the things that bothers me most in my life because it "betrays" me when I least expect it because when instinct takes over my mouth opens before I think about what I'm saying - recently a friend just tried to put her arm around me for a compassionate hug after I'd confided a hardship in her and I jumped back a foot and to make it worse uttered the phrase "Oh, sorry, I thought you were going to hit me".

     

There is NO coming back from that; I mean she was nice enough about it puzzled and a little offended "Uhh...hit you? Why on earth?", "I don't know, you were quiet for a few seconds and I thought maybe I'd said something that upset you and then you reached your arm up, you know let's just stop talking about this, okay? Can we pretend this never happened?"

But it's a stigma that doesn't go away, and possibly men are more annoyed by it than women because of the stereotype "we don't like to identify as victims as often as women do,  because it emasculates us" or something...but it's only happened a few times to me in life but I'd definitely count them among the most mortifying experiences. Of course then they want to know, "Was it a parent? A lover? A sibling?" and I just want to shout "Did I not say shut up and never mention this again?"