I am an adult child of a BPD mom- but do I have it as well?

[LiiselC]

Hello everyone

I am a 30 year old woman and indeed I have felt lost most of my life until just 2 days ago I discovered information about BPD. I am very interested to get as healthy as possible mentally despite the cards in life I was "dealed"... .

So I will shortly relate my life story. My family life growing up has been emotionally very tumultuous and sick because of my mother. I have two older sisters and my parents divorced when I was 12 years old. My mother has undiagnosed BPD and she shows severe symptoms. I don't even know how to explain it all in a nutshell. She has been a very abusive mother verbally and emotionally all my life. Finally I am not afraid to say this. She does not recognize her emotions at all and shows mainly anger and is a very poisonous person. She has always had very severe rage attacks against family members and people outside our family, has threatened to kill us all and has threatened to kill herself when I was younger. She sees things in black and white and labels people as good or bad only. She is very clingy and manipulative emotionally and tries her best to control my life. I suspected for a long time that she is an alcoholic and I even talked to her about this a few months back with some serious consequences. She was enraged and behaved in a very hostile manner for months and the only thing that made her ease up a little was my daughter's birth this spring.

My biggest concern now is not my mother but myself, for the sake of my family including my lovely husband and the little baby girl of mine who is now only a couple of months old. My husband is an alcoholic, sober now for one year. We have been married for several years. I went with him to therapy for a whole year and together we have conquered a lot of the issues considering alcoholism. However now that I know about BPD, I have read a lot about it and honestly I present some symptoms of the disease still. When I was younger, I behaved very much like my mother. I suffered from bulimia at the age of 19 and I have had ideas of suicide since 12 years old for years and such. Tried cutting myself once. Have had binge eating problems. 3 years ago I had a depression for 1 year. Also I had a hard time managing myself at work and I was very controlling of my husband. This was all when my husband was actively drinking.

But lately after my husband got sober our life calmed down by 95%.  The only symptom that has remained is a light fear of abandonment/controlling people and matters and this feeling that I cannot seem to "start" my life. I feel stuck when it comes to my goals and such, but things are fast improving. The past year I have felt healthier than ever and our life has improved and I have for the first time in my life felt immense freedom and happiness... .

but we made the mistake to move to the small town where I am from.

I started working for my mother and since that things have gradually went to hell with her. Whenever I get in any contact with my mother, I feel that I shatter. It is more that she contacts me since any contact with her makes me anxious and my behaviour many times resembles hers. My husband and I both notice this bad influence she has on me and our whole family. When she is not around, were a pretty normal and a happy family. I really work hard to show my husband the respect that was always lacking in the family I grew up in.

The question is do I have BPD? Unfortunately my oldest sister has it, she is just like our mom except she knows it and goes to therapy and she suffers immensely from it poor thing. My oblivious middle sister seems to have it as well and she is a younger version of my mom, very abusive and explosive. I felt also for the longest time that our family life is a "play" and the only ones questioning what is normal behaviour is me and our father who left years ago.On the positive note since I kind of "snapped" out of this weird wonderland or "borderland" when I realised how sick she is, I am quickly getting independent of her "poisonous" influence and I have found myself and what I want to be. But please help me with your comments and experiences, you family members of BPD's:

How do I cut the "cord" to my mother to free myself from her influence and continue healing myself? The thought of cutting all contact with her seems too harsh since she obviously is also a person with a good heart but just had a BPD mother and an alcoholic father herself. And more importantly do I then myself have BPD or am I just a child of a very sick woman with this condition and have deep emotional wounds and some adopted behaviour patterns of hers?

   

[Kwamina]

Welcome LiiselC  ,

Thanks for sharing you story, this must be difficult for you but I think you'll find many people on here who can relate to your experiences. I know I can!

To answer your most important question ':)o you have BPD?'. I'm not a therapist of course, but the fact that you're asking yourself this question and worry about it is often a strong sign that you don't have BPD yourself. Many children raised by BPD parents do adopt certain BPD behaviors though, on this website we call them fleas . In many cases this is just learned behavior that can also be unlearned. You say yourself that you've made tremendous progress, that sounds like you've been able to identify and unlearn a lot of unhealthy behaviors. Your light fear of abandonment and controlling people is actually very common when you've been raised by a very controlling and abusive parent. The abuse basically is a form of abandonment too because by abusing you she wasn't there for you like a 'real' mother should be.

You work for your mother now, I can imagine how extremely difficult this is. Do you have any options for alternative employment?

[LiiselC]

Oh wow, I feel real relief. After all, the greatest fear I always had was to end up like my mother completely. I have a long mother leave right now and yesterday I made a decision that I will not return to work for her. No way, I have worked so hard and there is no going back anymore to always taking the blame and being at her service.

We are in a process to move to my husband's home country which sounds like this amazing relief. Finally I can again get away from her, yet it of course brakes my heart since I do still love the "loving part" of my mother. She still has a good heart and she is very generous, however I have now realised that the motivation behind that must be to feel important, keep me dependent on her money wise and so on. Sick thing is that I dont even know honestly if she loves me for who I am (never felt this way accepted) or if she just says she does-- gives me just enough to along with a massive amount of guilt so she can feed on my attention.

Reading some of the posts here have raised so many memories and I feel like I have finally found the source for everything painful in me.

I feel grateful and relieved.

[ScarletOlive]

Hiya LiiselC,

I'm glad you found us, but sorry for what brings you. You're not alone here. Lots of us can relate to your story, including the suicide threats, black and white thinking, rages, and addictions that you see in your mom.   And working for your mom must have been really rough. Mixing family friction with work can cause problems among family members even without mental illness thrown in the mix. Good for you for working on healing - it sounds like you've come a long way, and for that, you should be super proud of yourself.

Kwamina is right, we all come here with fleas. It's okay. We learn by example, and so we copy our parents' behavior. I really do understand the push-pull between loving your mother and wanting to be away from here. It is wise of you to know what you can handle. So, in the future, what would you like out of your relationship with her?

You deserve some space for yourself. Setting boundaries for yourself is a really good skill to have and will help you as you try to decipher how much contact and what kind of contact you want with your mother. This article is really helpful: BOUNDARIES: Upholding our values and independence

[Calsun]

Hi LiiselC,

I was very moved by your post.  I'm quite new to this site, but have already benefited enormously from reading shares like yours and having an opportunity to post.  It is a confusing part of relating to my uBPD mother that, of course, she had good qualities, there were efforts on her part to be a "good" mother and that she often had good intentions. For me, I have come to see that it is not about intentions, however but illness. That "nice" behavior was actually confusing to me, both as a child and as an adult.  It kind of sucked me into having more contact with her and fed into a feeling that I could possibly have a functional and loving relationship with her when that wasn't possible.  It also made me feel guilty for not "wanting" to be closer to her, when in reality my reluctance was borne out of the reality of constant experience of her destructive disease.

One of the things that reading others' stories with their BPD family members has taught me is to see the BPD as a complex of behaviors and to not just see particular "destructive" behaviors as the evidence of the BPD.  I don't know if that makes sense, but it seems to me that when my uBPD mother is trying to give me things, do things for me,  give me money, all those things might in of themselves show generosity or goodness.  But with an uBPD it is not necessarily a person with a good heart who is not manifesting the disease at that point, but someone who is also likely trying to create dependence so that I never leave her, so that in her dysregulation she can control my life and destroy my will and freedom.  And it is important for me to see patterns.  If I get drawn into an attempt at a closer relationship with her because she is being "nice" or trying to be nice.  I can be aware that I am not a heartless son who doesn't want to be close to his mother, but based on a life-long experience with BPD, I know she will eventually turn on me or she will act out in violent and abusive ways, that she will degrade the people that are closest to her.  I've come to see that the "nice" moments are as much a part of the BPD complex as the other moments.  It's part of what can lure me in, wanting as I do to have a mother who is loving to me.  If I draw the telescope back far enough, I can see that it is part of the constellation of BPD and one of the ways I can be vulnerable to being hurt by it.  

As far as intentions are concerned, in her controlling and destructive behavior, I truly believe that my mother thought she was acting in my interest.  It reminds me of the line of a soldier from Vietnam who when asked why his battalion had destroyed a village, said:  We destroyed it in order to save it.  I think that was how my uBPD mother saw it on some level, that by controlling and destroying my insides, she was actually making me better or making me safer.  However "well-intentioned," that's ill and destructive. And that's what I have to remember.  It is still such a powerful longing to want a loving mother and to want to form a close bond with her. But I know that it isn't possible to have a functional, stable, loving, respectful relationship with my uBPD mother.  That's a very sad reality to have to accept, but it's also liberating.  

I really respect your asking yourself these questions and the insight from Kwamina and ScarletOlive about our being fleas.  That was a helpful distinction between living with the effects of a BPD parent and trying to unlearn them and actually manifesting the disease, ourselves.

Thanks,

Calsun