My daughter

[Tripod]

I don't know where to start. I am reading Loving Someone With BPD by Shari Manning. So is my husband. I have had three counselors in ten years tell me they think my daughter has BPD. They were not diagnosing her, as only one of them had met her. They were admittedly guessing from what I had described to them about her behavior. My daughter refuses to get counseling. She is 27 years old.

My husband and I had a son too, born with a severe congenital heart defect. He was five years old when our daughter was born. He had many other health and mental health issues in his life. He died 15 years ago at nearly 17 years of age. My daughter was 11 years old when he died, which was horrible enough. She was a pre adolescent at the time, and diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Looking back, she had started acting out before he died, but I took it to be the ADD, her brother's situation and hormones. It was hard for me to deal with her as a teenager, but again, I thought she's lost her brother and teen years can be difficult. But it grew increasingly difficult. I thought, she'll grow out of this, it's a phase. I started seeking counseling to deal with her behavior. She ran up $2,000 in cell phone bills and said it was our fault. She was calling strange men and emailing them too. She became so hostile toward my husband and me that we were not allowed to call her affectionate names and no hugging or touching at all. No photographs. She would scream and yell at us, breaking things.

Once she took a wooden board and hit me across the head with it. Anything we said was wrong and she'd accuse us of abusing her. She barely made it out of high school, even though she is very smart. She has lost many friends, two roommates and several boyfriends due to her demands and terrible outbursts and temper tantrums. She moved from our home at age 20. In seven years she has moved six times and that doesn't count the time she moved back in with us. She has had seven jobs in seven years. She is always calling me about the horrible people she has to work with. I've noticed a pattern where several coworkers have been her friends until they move up in the company, then she hates them with a passion. One day she can't say enough about them, the next day she wants them to be fired.

It's only been in the last year that I really started to read and learn about BPD. I guess up till now I've been afraid to know what it is. Now I wish I'd started reading Shari Manning's book sooner. My daughter has thrown four major tantrums at me in the past twelve months. The last one was last week, Sept 24th. I keep saying "Never again" and then I'm in the thick of it again. I try to be nice, I try to keep my distance. Nothing works. But I am beginning to understand through this book what might work with her.

She is getting married on October 25 to a 30 year old man with Asperger Autism. I am heartbroken for both of them, for many reasons. They owe money everywhere, live in a 500 square foot apartment with seven cats, and it's in an unsafe area. Her father and I have bailed her out a few times but cut the purse strings two years ago. I suspect her fiancee's family has helped him too. He is smart but in many ways unable to function without help. She asked me to help her with their small wedding reception on Nov 1st. But last week she called me a "f---ing princess", and screamed and yelled at me to the point I told her I'd call the police if she did not leave my home. She said she was going to call off the wedding reception because she didn't want to have explain her parents to anyone at the party.

Well, the reception is still on and I am wondering how she will find the nerve to ask me to help her without apologizing. She doesn't apologize. She pretends like nothing has happened. My neighbor told me the other day that while my husband and I were out of town, and my daughter was watching our pets, she heard our daughter screaming at her fiancee. I just cringed and apologized. I know I have gone on quite a bit here. And yet I haven't even scratched the surface. Thank you for reading this, I appreciate it.

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

[livednlearned]

Hi Tripod,

Welcome to bpdfamily -- I hope this site is as helpful to you and your family as it has been to mine. I am so sorry to hear about your loss and the grief that you must feel, first with you son and then the sense of losing your daughter to BPD. It is a heartbreaking and challenging mental illness, not just for BPD loved ones, but for the families who love them in spite of the struggles and wrenching drama.

It's a good sign that your husband is also learning about the disorder, so that you are not alone in this. Sometimes feeling as though you are carrying the entire burden can feel harder than the burden itself, if that makes sense.

There are so many tools and techniques and communication approaches that can help with these challenging relationships. Have you found anything specific that has helped?

[jellibeans]

Dear Tripod

I want to welcome you to this site as well and tell you how much it has helped me through some pretty tough times with my dd17. The communication tools listed to the right are very helpful and I found that I really need to interact with my dd differently. I really only have control of myself so I encourage you to do what you can to change. When I first began to try how I behaved then I saw a difference in my dd and I hope you will too.

I would think that your dd suffers from anxiety and the wedding is only increasing her fears about the future. Try to look behind the behavior to see what is tha cause.

There is another book that I think is very good to read by Valerie Porr... .overcoming BPD... .this book has really helped me and there isn't a week that goes by without me picking up to reread. Please get it if you can. Learning how to validate and set boundaries are very important. Also using SET has help our family when my dd is raging.

tripod if you can even make small changes at first you will see results. For me the raging was very hard to take... .at times my dd would become very violent and verbally very abusive... .that has improved greatly and it is because of the tools I have learned. I am glad you have found us here... .we truly understand what you are going through... .it can be hard and very hurtful at times.

[HealingSpirit]

Dear Tripod,

I'd like to join livednlearned and jellibeans in welcoming you to our family.  My DD will be 18 in 2 weeks, and reading your description of your DD's behavior is very familiar.  I'm so sorry you're dealing with this, and that you lost your son.  It sounds like you've been through a tremendous amount of pain and grieving already!  And you're still dealing with your DD's hurtful behavior.  We're not doctors here, but from what you've described, your DD's behavior does sound very much like BPD.  Whether or not she gets a diagnosis or not is not as important as the skills and tools you can learn here.  Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) techniques can help you deal with anyone, but especially with someone with BPD.

You are not alone here!  My DD also has ADHD, and I noticed her behavior and mood swings worsened right around puberty.  But in our case, I attributed her mood swings and depression (which escalated to suicidal) to DH and me being less available because we had been helping his mother who passed away after a 4-month convalescence in a nursing home.  Then we were busy handling funeral arrangements and estate issues.  I later learned my DD had started cutting herself to relieve her intense feelings.  Like your DD, ours is also gifted, but she was failing high school, so she took the proficiency exam and got her GED and spent what would have been her senior year at a junior college instead.  I had always attributed her poor school performance to her ADHD, but it may have been BPD all along.  Our DD has always been extremely sensitive and has never been able to soothe herself, since birth.  When she's upset, she cannot function.

I read Shari Manning's book too.  It was excellent.  Jellibeans suggested you also read Valerie Porr's "Overcoming BPD" and I second her recommendation!  I'm almost done reading it now, and I wish I'd started with this book.  Porr talks about BPD behaviors in a way that makes it easier to feel compassion toward our loved one's suffering.  Validation really helps, but it only works if it is 100% sincere, and I've found it is impossible to validate my DD when I'm feeling angry or resentful towards her.  Seeing her behavior with compassion helps me to not take her rages and abuse personally, though it is still exhausting.  Therefore, self-care is crucial to our success in dealing with our daughters.

Porr also describes DBT techniques in detail so that we family members can help ourselves and our loved ones get control over emotions. 

I'm glad you found us!  This is a safe place to vent and talk about issues (like your neighbor's report about your DD's tantrum with her fiancée).  Everyone here knows the embarrassment of trying to explain our DD's behavior to others. 

And I think we've all felt the isolation from living in a society where we parents are blamed for all of our children's bad behavior.  You're in good company now. 

 Hang in there!