18 year old daughter, crises 24/7

[Anu]

 

We are so lost and confused, our 18 year old daughter is making our life and hers completely miserable. Daily anger tantrums, panic attacks, suicide threats, and recently got arrested for marijuana use.
She blames all of her issues on either parents or life in general. She lives in a very nice home, private school, etc. etc.
We have tried our best with medication, therapy, counselling, etc. but things are not improving at all.
We need help from parents and their experiences. Please tell us what to do? We are in Dallas, TX

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

[Aralia]

Hi this sounds like a terrible time for your family. I do not have specific advice other than today I signed up to join a Family Connections support group, which is a support group for ppl dealing with a bpd loved one. There is a waiting list but there was a box you can check if you are in crisis (we are stable at the moment so I didn't check it so the wait could be up to six months without a crisis). I encourage you to check it out--the application took 5 minutes. Also I received a reply email that had links to a bunch of modules that I just binge watched. I've heard a lot of it before but I still found it helpful. Actually watching the dramatizations was  stressful but the modules themselves were calming.

[BPDLife]

Hello,

This is my first post here so apologies if I'm not right in tone/culture with the board.

Your post so resonates with my experience.  My daughter grew up in lovely houses, pools, sailing, water polo, violin, international trips and yet at 14 she went completely off the rails.  She was expelled from 2 private schools, went to rehab for drugs, was arrested multiple times.  We had no idea what was going on and why she was behaving that way.   She tried to kill herself multiple times, self-harm regularly.  I spent many hours in the emergency room dealing with all of this.  After a couple of years her psychiatrist got her onto some anti-psychotics that regulated the behaviour.

We returned to our home country with poorer psychiatric care (despite my private health cover) and she's now covered in tattoos, piercings, has an OnlyFans account and I am thankful that we're out of the school system as the judgement was pretty hard to bear.  I honestly did everything for her, there was no neglect, no environmental issues but just absolute bewilderment about what happened.   She's just 19 now, still with me but in another crisis.  While she's stopped self-harming she is self-harming by restricting food (she's previously been bulimic and anorexic) and spending excessively on "stuff" that is cluttering up the house.  I love her dearly but she's so chaotic and I see no pathway for her to have an independent life at the moment.

Edited to Add -  I think the emotional stress does manifest itself in physical symptoms, which I'm sympathetic to.  I do also think there's an attention-seeking/medical validation behaviour that she also needs as part of her BPD.