How do I help my brother?

[Our abuse recovery guide]

Hi everyone! My brother was recently diagnosed with BPD at 20 y/o. My mother, husband and family are looking for some support so we can best help my brother as he navigates life and tries to cope with everything. Any help is greatly appreciated. <3 Much love.

What is the type of relationship? 
Brother/Son

What is the status of the relationship? 
Very close although at times, our relationship does get a bit strained. My mother and my brother's relationship is currently very strained and my brother is not currently speaking to my mom.

How is the current status working for you?
Not amazingly. I don't know how to make him believe me that I will always be there for him and my mom wants to try to move forward from past trauma and try to help as best she can and get their relationship back to a healthy place.

What is the top challenge you face with your loved one?
Trying to get him to understand that my mom and I love him and that he isn't a burden to us. Understanding him better and helping him to understand us. He often has difficulty understanding our side of things as well and often doesn't listen and is stuck in his thought pattern even if his thought pattern isn't true at all in relation to my mom and I.

How would you categorize your loved one?
Recently diagnosed within the last year

What do you struggle with yourself?
Coping with seeing my brother struggle so much and not getting frustrated with his stubbornness.

What are your goals at bpdfamily?
To try to love and support my brother as best we can without also losing ourselves. To try to understand what he is going through and help.

[StrugglingSister]

Hi everyone! My brother was recently diagnosed with BPD at 20 y/o. My mother, husband and family are looking for some support so we can best help my brother as he navigates life and tries to cope with everything. Any help is greatly appreciated. <3 Much love.

What is the type of relationship? 
Brother/Son

What is the status of the relationship? 
Very close although at times, our relationship does get a bit strained. My mother and my brother's relationship is currently very strained and my brother is not currently speaking to my mom.

How is the current status working for you?
Not amazingly. I don't know how to make him believe me that I will always be there for him and my mom wants to try to move forward from past trauma and try to help as best she can and get their relationship back to a healthy place.

What is the top challenge you face with your loved one?
Trying to get him to understand that my mom and I love him and that he isn't a burden to us. Understanding him better and helping him to understand us. He often has difficulty understanding our side of things as well and often doesn't listen and is stuck in his thought pattern even if his thought pattern isn't true at all in relation to my mom and I.

How would you categorize your loved one?
Recently diagnosed within the last year

What do you struggle with yourself?
Coping with seeing my brother struggle so much and not getting frustrated with his stubbornness.

What are your goals at bpdfamily?
To try to love and support my brother as best we can without also losing ourselves. To try to understand what he is going through and help.

[wantmorepeace]

Learning about the condition will help you engage with him in a way that works better for him and for you.  But at the end of the day he's the one who needs to do the work with therapist and/or support group that are informed by the best evidence-based approaches to BPD.  I hope you will also avail yourself of the support systems for family members and take good care of yourself.  That's the most important thing for you to do. 

[Mommydoc]

Welcome Struggling Sister, this is a great place for family members to seek support.  I agree with wantmorepeace that your brother needs to do the work.   You and your parents can’t do it for him. 

Your kindness and empathy, towards his struggles, and your self awareness around the way it might impact you and your family demonstrates a high level of self awareness.   

Reflecting back to the beginning of my journey with my sibling, the most important first step was around Radical Acceptance.  Radical  acceptance for me, meant  letting go of the hope that things with my sister could be different than they are. I needed to recognize that I had no control over her feelings and couldn’t take responsibility for her feelings ( even when she constantly blamed/ blames me for her toxic emotions).  I had to allow myself to accept my own negative emotions, surface them, accept them, process them and take actions ( set boundaries, protect myself and assure my own needs were being met) to move forward positively. My sister has not done the work and she has not changed ( she is actually getting worse unfortunately) but I have changed.    I no longer fight my negative emotions, and work to accept them and act on them which has made me feel a sense of empowerment and self compassion towards myself. 

I am not sure this is relevant to your situation.   As you begin this journey, I hope you will focus inward on self, and how his actions and words make you feel.  Stay in touch and share any specific things you need support on. 

[wantmorepeace]

Struggling Sister and MommyDoc: It helps me to know there are others out there experiencing and expressing what I experience.  Hope it is of some help to you as well.  Sending good thoughts.

[livednlearned]

I don't know how to make him believe me that I will always be there for him

In my experience it helps to see this as part of the disorder, not him, if that makes sense.

Meaning, the content of what he says is disordered thinking. It's the disorder talking.

People with BPD have a hard time filling the emptiness they feel. So they look elsewhere to fill it because what is external is indistinguishable from internal. There are no boundaries.

It's more like he's saying, "I cannot feel myself. I feel empty. I am not whole."

Since that is a weird thing to know about one self, when one doesn't have a fully developed self, he looks for someone else to fill that void.

Which cannot be done.

This is why you read so much about validating someone who has BPD. We look for things we can validate (to a point). "You must feel so much pain" instead of "I don't know how many ways to assure you I'm here for you."

Validation must be paired with boundaries because the hole is deep and it's easy to disappear into the abyss if you prioritize his needs over your own.

Two helpful books (when it's siblings or child w/BPD) are Loving Someone with BPD by Shari Manning and Overcoming BPD by Valerie Porr. Both are often recommended by NEA-BPD Family Connections workshops.