I'm sorry, I don't quite know what I'm saying. I just thankful to have somewhere to post this. Thank you all for listening.
It's an interesting post, and I'm glad to have read it.
Welcome to the Healing board -- I looked through some of your earlier posts and see you were on Coping until now.
I think zubizou87's and Calm Waters' words are wise.
One thing I'd add is that it's understandable, given the life that you described in your FOO in your other posts, that your emotions would be trained to be for her benefit, not yours. And this is common when you're raised by a self-centered person (whether BPD or NPD).
In other words, horrible as it may sound, it's not only our thoughts that we need to retrain, but our emotions. We need new boundaries there too.
Why do I hurt for her? I don't even feel this for myself.
There's no reason you can't get to a place where you can feel some empathy for your mother and feel good about doing it -- but to get to that place you have to be able to feel the full gamut of empathy for yourself and what you went through, first. If you've only got the mother-empathy part, then the boundary-work isn't done.
I read that you were looking for a good T, but it's been a long time since those posts. Did you find one? Disentangling the emotions and the thoughts is difficult work. You've been doing well with the thoughts, IMO, based on your posts -- but I think having a T would be helpful for the emotions.
In some ways I'd like to think she loves me, she is just too sick to show it properly.
If true BPD, she has a mental disorder. Parts of the brain are formed differently; these are measurable using various brain measurement devices. It means that her emotions are dysregulated. She interacts with reality, 'the present moment', in a different way.
Perhaps think of it as if your mother was blind. She could love you, but she could never love 'how you look', right? She would love you in other ways. But with a BPD person, it's that she can't perceive (and therefore can't love) the
meaning of certain kinds of actions. Things that a normal kid could do or say will trigger a core and unbearably terrifying feeling in her, and she'll dysregulate into life-saving actions like attacking and raging.
So, she actually was never capable of loving you in the way that many children are loved. It's not that she 'really loved you' in those ways but she just couldn't show it now because she was too sick. No, it's that those ways could never exist. She did love in other ways, probably; but not those.
If she'd gotten DBT, perhaps she could have changed that. But most people with BPD don't get that far.
I know these things are hard, but I think facing them squarely makes recovering our own balance easier in the long run.
PP