BPD wife

[tyrol]

My wife’s mother was dying and went to her country of origin to spend time with her. I remained in London to look after our 5 year old daughter. When she came back she was very cold towards us. No affection at all and calls me evil and tells my daughter she is evil. i clean to the cooking and look after our daughter. She does not engage with us. If I ask her a question she screams at me. I text her at work telling her that if she needs to talk I will always be there for her. She did not respond. I have taken 2 months parental leave to look after my daughter. When she comes home from her part time job she goes to her bedroom and goes on her computer. When I ask her to join us for dinner she says she is not hungry and will stay in her room. i tell my daughter that mummy is not well because grandma went to heaven. I am an adult and can take care of myself but she has a responsibility towards the emotional well-being of our daughter as well. If I try to communicate with her she shouts at me. I do not know what else to do. I have told her that when she starts to shout we will remove ourselves from the house until she calms down. I don’t know if she is aware of the effect she is having on us.

[livednlearned]

Hi tyrol,

It's not easy when BPD sufferers rage or engage in silent treatment -- not for us, and probably even more challenging for the kids.

There is a really good technique you can use with your daughter. Have you heard about validation? One of the mistakes I made with my son was to protect N/BPDx (his dad), instead of validate son's feelings. So for example, if N/BPDx raged or drank too much and yelled at son, I would tell him, ":)addy had a really hard day at work" or ":)addy's mom was mean to him when he was little" or ":)addy loves you and doesn't mean what he's saying."

There are all well-intentioned things to say, but they end up causing our kids to feel emotionally invalidated. The truth is that your child's feelings are real, and if she feels sad when her mom is mean, it's better to say, "You feel sad when mommy yells at you. I feel sad too. It makes me feel sad when she yells and I wish she would stop."

Your daughter needs to know that her feelings about the situation are recognized, and that how she feels is ok.

Your wife might not be capable of taking care of her daughter's emotional well-being because she struggles to even understand what that means. BPD is a disorder about emotional dysregulation, so she likely won't even know what it means to treat her daughter well. She won't understand. It's also very difficult if not impossible to get someone with BPD to do something -- that feels very controlling. But it is possible to change how you interact with your D so that she learns to make sense of what is happening in a healthy way.

Power of Validation is the book I read -- it's targeted toward parents specifically and there are a lot of great examples to explain how to do this with your child.

How are you doing?