Hi mitten, good question.
I've also heard it said that love means wanting what's best for someone, and I think M. Scott Peck (author of The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie) expanded that by saying that if love is wanting what's best for someone, then what is best for someone? To grow, especially spiritually (which I don't take to mean religiously, necessarily, rather "as a true human being" or "at your core").
I don't think loving someone means being nice to them, necessarily. We might often be nice to people we love, but that is coincidental, not definitional.
Loving people who disparage us, criticize us, put us down, and minimize us is difficult. We could be nice to them without loving them -- that might be the "doormat" approach, where we mustn't disturb them and so we roll over for them. Or we can be loving to them, and it can look very, very "not nice". (Sometimes, we can be loving towards them and it is also nice [in the sense of -- they are happy or pleased with what we did or said, it felt good to them], but again, I think that's coincidental).
What would it mean to want the best for someone like that?
One perspective is that if loving someone means wanting what's good for them and wanting their positive growth, then I know it isn't good for someone to have opportunities to be abusive, and to take those opportunities. That stunts growth, that isn't healthy to be abusive. In the case of an adult child with a parent with BPD, for example, old beliefs might tell us: "I have to be nice to Mom or Dad, I have to be there for them, I have to be around and check on them" even if it means exposing ourselves to their rages and abuse. Instead, what if we declined to make ourselves available to be raged on? It might look "not nice" to not spend much time with a parent -- but what if it's more truly loving to not offer ourselves up for them to abuse [I'm speaking about people who truly have control about staying in or leaving the situation, not those trapped with a BPD parent]? How could it be loving to participate in giving a pwBPD more opportunities to act abusively?
That doesn't make how they act okay. It's more pointing out a perspective that may help us get over the FOG, especially the Guilt, telling us: "You're only a loving person if you're always around them and supporting them and trying to help." It's saying -- maybe what's really loving for them is uncomfortable for us, and looks mean.
In the specific case of my H's kids' mom, I can truly say with integrity that I wish for her to be healed and I want for her to overcome her BPD-type challenges. I have genuinely prayed that she will come to a realization about how she has behaved and will turn her life around. And as you mention in your post -- I don't like her.
I dislike her. I treat interactions with her as a task vs an enjoyable moment.
I also think that minimal communication with her is the most loving thing I can do -- she's not going to hear any kind of insight, suggestion, or call-out from me, and the more communication we have, the more opportunities she has to blame and to enlist the kids in adult communications/conflicts. I have control over how much communication to her I initiate and I choose to keep it to a minimum of frequency and length.
I guess in a way, a lot of it is about loving the kids -- if I provide their mom with excess opportunities to expose them to adult conflict, that isn't loving to them. So that's a big part of it.
I think this can be helpful:
Not sure who said it first - "Love is an action, not a feeling." But it's really hard to love a person when you're constantly being attacked and criticized by them. What are some ways you overcome this when you strongly dislike a person with BPD? How do you try to love them? For me, I try to remember the childhood trauma and loss they experienced, that likely caused their BPD.
We can have compassion for the difficulties they faced in the past, while at the same time making choices in the present that recognize that past experiences aren't a "free pass" for any kind of behavior. We can be in our
Wise Mind to accept that many horrible and hard things happened to our pwBPD, and also we can't make up for it by enabling them to continue to act hurtfully.
Maybe it's a question of -- I might choose minimal communications with the kids' mom for two reasons. One might be "to teach her a lesson" and to be a control freak. That's not loving her. The other reason might be to decline to provide opportunities for her to blame and abuse. That is loving.
The external part looks the same in both cases -- it may look "not nice" to not have one of those Hallmark stepfamily situations. But one reason behind that might be not loving, and one is. We can separate out how a choice looks to others, from our motivations behind the choice. Are we truly wanting what's ultimately best for the pwBPD in our life? Then no matter how "not nice" it looks on the outside, we are loving to the best of our ability.
Thanks for the prompt, mitten.
