I had to re-frame my thinking - it was an enormous puzzle piece for my own decades of pain/dysfunction

[bethanny]

Thank you for the reads and comments.  I am sorry I didn't sustain my contact with this community longer my last sharings.  It means a lot to me how people did relate and share and I hope to be back to do more commenting on this thread and others.  

As I tried to look back and find it I didn't go back far enough.  

I have trust issues and I have worked so many decades on my recovery and yet they are still there.  I know I have trust issues with others but I think they come from trust issues with myself.  When my uBPD mother tasered me so profoundly with annihilating anger when I mis-stepped on the tightrope it jammed my natural instincts to trust my choices and thinking and feeling.  When I dared a modest expression of self-mastery the slap-downs were ferocious. Confusing. Confused comes from Latin, "fused" "with".  The uBPD parent creates so much insecurity and confusion it makes one all the more focused on her or him.  One is entrapped on their roller coaster of extreme and conditional approval and disapproval.

I know I project my irrational fear of sudden and extreme punishment or total abandonment onto others, others whether relatively close to me or more acquaintances.  

I suspect I have complex-PTSD.  The complex comes from the hopelessness of having been an entrapped captive with no way out for so many years living in the close orbit of my uBPD mother who kept me on a leash and no matter how I tried to stretch it she would cruelly and chokingly snap it back.  

I felt like a POW.  Prisoner of my parents' war.  That is what my relationship felt like with my parents' enormously unhappy marriage.  For years I excused my mother's abusiveness as simply from generated stress due to my father's alcoholism.  It was only much later in life, after years of 12 step recovery homework as an adult child of an alcoholic that I discovered my mother's disorder was separate and not only exacerbated by my dad's drinking but something that in reality exacerbated his drinking and inability to recover himself.  I can't play jury any more to their sins against each other.

I had to re-frame my thinking and it was an ENORMOUS puzzle piece for my own decade of pain and dysfunction.  What my mother's disorder had done to me.

Both parents' issues were erosive to my self esteem and existential sense of ... .well INsecurity.  I remember in 12 step rooms the Alanon mothers became angry at my shares about my codependent mother because I had a lot of honest anger to get out at her especially after I became estranged from my mother and horrifyingly to me the rest of my family network since I did not bargain for standing up to my mother would mean her assassinating my character righteously and ruthlessly to the family and social network we shared SO SUCCESSFULLY AND EFFECTIVELY, and the pain of her helping to engineer a detachment from the malleable rescuing siblings in my immediate family.  My heart kept getting broken, I cried an ocean of tears over the decades.  

Betrayal on steroids.  Horror as to how far she was willing to go.  I realize I had three mothers, one who could be generous and giving, one who was an hysterical child, and the third who was an annihilating, firebreathing Medusa who from early childhood could turn me to stone with a look or a juggular hitting put down.  

I went from the best little girl in the world to one who required an exorcism in a NY second!

I am interested in coming back and addressing more of the comments here and to comment on others' threads.  I am sorry I disappeared. I think when I did I was traveling and visiting family and I backed away from embracing the true history closely and wanted to be numb or sentimental. Maybe went on autopilot.  Wrong decision to stay away so long.  

12 steps say our emotional dis-ease can go into remission but it does not go away and we have to take care of monitoring it.  I monitor intensely but I need to keep riding the bronco of awareness and emotional processing.  I am grateful for my awareness and enlightenment, I chose that hard path.  It helps me fight the irrational self-hate I have been conditioned to have, as did my parents, sadly.  Both of them have passed on.

Thank you for being here.

I hope this is to be continued.  This is tough stuff.  Most people aren't strong enough to even begin to come to recognizing the hard truths of being in the orbit of an uBPD significant person in one's life and the enormous pain and emotional damage it can cause one.



Mod note: Split from: We were trained by parents to over-identify with them to the exclusion of our own identity

[ShieldsUp12]

I stopped therapy sometime after my father's death. I stopped coming here. I think for me, I just needed time to process it all. I have an issue with what I call delayed understanding. Sometimes with trauma, it takes me weeks/months/years to really "get it". But I fell into a false sense of security with my ability to really understand my situation, and the effects it had on me. The behaviors it shaped. But it was hard for me to talk about it in therapy because I couldn't even identify it until now. Con-fused. So, back to here, and back to T.

Keep going. Please keep posting. I have gained so much strength from this post and the previous post from long ago, about how we were trained to ignore ourselves. I wish you well.  

[Leaving]

I stopped therapy sometime after my father's death. I stopped coming here. I think for me, I just needed time to process it all. I have an issue with what I call delayed understanding. Sometimes with trauma, it takes me weeks/months/years to really "get it". But I fell into a false sense of security with my ability to really understand my situation, and the effects it had on me. The behaviors it shaped. But it was hard for me to talk about it in therapy because I couldn't even identify it until now. Con-fused. So, back to here, and back to T.

Keep going. Please keep posting. I have gained so much strength from this post and the previous post from long ago, about how we were trained to ignore ourselves. I wish you well.  

Shields & Bethany, I believe that it's perfectly normal to take a hiatus from therapy and from discussing our issues.  Gulping down a heavy dose of insight requires time to digest it and glean the nourishment it provides.  We could call it ' Applied Psychology'... .hahahha

Sometimes I get tired of talking about it- as tired as I get dealing with the sick people in my life.   Shields, the ' delayed understanding' is what we all experience for different reasons. Our perception of anyone or anything directly relates to our perception of ourselves in that moment. When we feel insignificant or unworthy, then good advice or wisdom has less meaning to us and negative feedback tends to be more easily absorbed.  Other people become more important, more intelligent, more wise, more successful.   Take for example... .my mother was diagnosed by two professionals as NPD.  I knew she was diagnosed as such since I was ten or so but ' NPD' meant nothing to ME at the time. My mother even told me that her psychiatrist committed suicide and blamed it on sessions with her and my father.   What is a ten year old supposed to do with that kind of information?  Mom seemed almost proud of that and much wiser than that weak doctor who couldn't handle her strength and courage.   How should a ten year old perceive a selfish mother that she depends on for everything?  She didn't seem all that selfish given how I had a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in and she gave me money to buy groceries.  She even bought me notebook paper when I started school!  WOW, she was my hero!

 When I was 20, my therapist, after counseling sessions with my mother, told me to stay away from her but her words didn't have the same impact on me as they would today because at that time, I could not imagine how she or anyone else could possibly destroy my well-being.  I was young and had a lifetime ahead of me to do whatever I wanted and I could even run away. But, I didn't.  I also didn't understand evil.  I had a very immature image of evil as a man in a red suit with a tail, or a serial killer possessed by the man in the red suit but certainly not my mother.  The word "mother" and evil just don't seem to have anything in common.  I also didn't realize that my mother had conditioned me to believe that I was the reason for all my pain and suffering ( like the doctor) and therefore, whether she was a narcissist or a devil, didn't matter because she couldn't do anything to me that I didn't allow or approve of.    It wasn't until I was 30 and married that the pieces of the puzzle began to reveal themselves to me, one by one, until I ended up with one enormous of pile of pieces.  Since then I've been putting them together and I have the puzzle solved.  The challenge is, what do I do now?  I have so much collateral damage to clean up.  I'm starting to create my own life, piece by piece at age 54.  My goal is to throw that ugly puzzle in the trash one day but for now, I still need the clarity of experience and wisdom  it provides.

[bethanny]

Shields, Thanks so much for reaching out to me!

I always hoped and naively assumed that getting to the bottom intellectually of what had happened to me and was happening to me psychologically, especially in terms of anxiety and depression, would finally free me from such great vulnerability.

So I have seen therapists and gone to 12 step meetings for years and spent a small fortune on self help books.  And they helped, though when I read that book on BPD mothers as I said it was such a huge puzzle piece finally, adding so much to the true picture of my history, breaking through more denial and minimization.  It blew the top of my head off.  One of those amazing books that seriously changes your life.  It brought up more anger and grief with the added large amount of enlightenment I was grateful for.  But so much pain, too.  And frustration.

I think of that slogan about accepting what I can't change and courageously trying to change what I can.  It is so profound the level of chronic wounding we endured.  And how we tried so hard to cope.  How we rallied all our spiritual power to survive and to try to help the situation and our significant others who not only elicited our fear but also our pity. And that pity made us all the more vulnerable.  I remember I used to talk about my inner child in 12 step meetings. I once said that when I tried to help others like my parents who had wounded inner children, their inner children beat my inner child up!

I know I am so much better than I used to be but I recognize how my work and social lives have been so challenged by my alcoholic family and BPD family conditioning.  How I overly-placate when I don't need to which means I don't respond truthfully to immediate things and am not able to do timely conflict resolution. 

And then eventually I will over-react to something when my gunny sack is full of unaired resentments I never tried to deal with (same pattern as my uBPD mother).  Then I become angry and risk honesty but by this time I am highly emotional and offputting to others AND myself, and either trigger anger in others or become so frightened of punishment and rejection I don't hang around to find out what the reality is.  And have no hope from my experience with my parents that conflict resolution is possible. 

Honesty always meant anger not resolution.  And I think with uBPD people tough love does not work.  I learned about tough love from the 12 step rooms but my persistent and intense honesty with my mother finally triggered a kind of paranoia that brought on a wall of rage and rejection and in my case years of estrangement and loss of support of mutual family members whose pity went to my mother who reported to them my cruelty and craziness.  I kept hoping with time that would change.  My point of view could be recognized and acknowledged by my upbd mother and there was love and respect and even affinity that would end my mother's all or nothing stance.  But intimate understanding and compromise was not possible.  I wanted what she couldn't not wouldn't give. I was tragically dependent on her and did not have intimacy with others to offer me ballast.

I remember getting angry at a therapist for hurting my feelings after several years of therapy.  I saw her one day as being condescending and angry because I had accidentally bounced a check.  Paying her at the time was a real struggle.  I was shocked and hurt by her annoyance with me, and I first numbed out, but I soon popped off at her by phone about how hurt I had been and I remember she freaked out at me for what she declared was judging her unfairly and her scolding me angrily and totally denying what I perceived.  There was no respect and no willingness to explore the incident rationally.  I thought after all the years of talk talk this was something real I could use some serious help dealing with from someone I trusted to help me cope and she was incapable of using it or really mentoring me.  After all my talk about my fear and anger at my mother, here we had a sample of my issues and she was incapable of looking at it in any of the context I had been sharing about for years.

I recognized her irrational anger.  I was scared of her but I also recognized an opportunity to work on our relationship.  But I wanted her to own her part.  I remember calling her and asking if I could have a session with her and pay for only half of it, since I felt she had lost her professional balance with me and the scuffle was the responsibility of both of us.  That was like pouring gasoline on a fire. She raged at me similar to my mother had. Wow.  Like I was insane.

I thought, wow, after years of therapy and so much money, she was so scary and angry and disgusted with the nerve of me.  It made me get cynical about the sense of entitlement of therapists in general and her in particular.  It was also a moment of testing of her as a therapist.  I remember recognizing that the rage and fear I was feeling with her on a much smaller though still distressing level was core to my emotional dis-ease. It could have been a healing opportunity.  It still was for me to detach from her since I saw she could talk the talk she couldn't walk as a mentor.

The therapist had turned into my uBPD mother in my eyes.  Like the mad queen.  How dare I inconvenience her or imply she had not been perfect in her role.  Off with my head.  The therapist did not want to explore or cop to any accountability or responsibility for setting me off. Not a molecule.

I may write her one of these days (its been so many years) and share with her my discovery of my mother's borderline condition and what it did to me.  There are some people through the years who triggered my PTSD terror of my mother and whom I even ran from or became inappropriately angry at.  Now that I understand why, it makes me feel sad but more understanding of myself and less ashamed and confused of the broken relationships. Some of these people may have been uBPD but others were not and shocked and confused and hurt by me.

None of my half a dozen or so therapists during my life ever came close to identifying my mother as a borderline.  I told them so much of her behavior and my terror of her.  Shows how cutting edge this website is. Some of those therapists were helpful. Some were so not.

I think we go through life like that movie Ground Hog Day where we keep on shadow-boxing and trying to win with our past.  To push on through the developmental stages of our past that conditions of our lives made the stakes too high to go through those necessary lessons for maturation in a timely and so much easier way.

Shields,  I look forward to hearing more of your brave struggles and history and sharing my own with you and others here.  As they say in 12 step rooms, "Together we can make it!"  I have been feeling lonely and thinking of coming back here for industrial strength honesty and understanding. So glad I finally did.

[bethanny]

Leaving, thanks. You like Shields reaffirm for me how profound this struggle is and as they used to say in program EASY DOES IT ... .BUT DO IT. 

I was dismayed by after so much commitment to recovery, decades, that I was still in such major denial until I comprehended the uBPD context not all that long ago in the arc of things.

I remember reading in some self help book about how one of the most important gifts and role modeling a parent can give a child is the ability to "self-comfort".  Instead from our wounded and unhappy parents who were at the end of conditional not unconditional love themselves in their histories we learned negative self talk. 

I want to focus on my ability to "self-comfort".  I know it will ground me. Remember my inner child sometimes abandoned by me as I compulsively over focus on others or numb out.

Thanks for your feedback about the processing process for recovery. It is a kind of spiral.  We need to advance at times and we need to stand still and cope at times and sometimes we need even to retreat and it is okay.  It is human.

I have a funny cartoon on my cube at work.  A man sitting in a robe with his feet up in front of the tv.  He says, today I am staying home to accept the things I cannot change.  It makes me laugh.

[Leaving]

Leaving, thanks. You like Shields reaffirm for me how profound this struggle is and as they used to say in program EASY DOES IT ... .BUT DO IT. 

I was dismayed by after so much commitment to recovery, decades, that I was still in such major denial until I comprehended the uBPD context not all that long ago in the arc of things.

I remember reading in some self help book about how one of the most important gifts and role modeling a parent can give a child is the ability to "self-comfort".  Instead from our wounded and unhappy parents who were at the end of conditional not unconditional love themselves in their histories we learned negative self talk. 

I want to focus on my ability to "self-comfort".  I know it will ground me. Remember my inner child sometimes abandoned by me as I compulsively over focus on others or numb out.

Thanks for your feedback about the processing process for recovery. It is a kind of spiral.  We need to advance at times and we need to stand still and cope at times and sometimes we need even to retreat and it is okay.  It is human.

I have a funny cartoon on my cube at work.  A man sitting in a robe with his feet up in front of the tv.  He says, today I am staying home to accept the things I cannot change.  It makes me laugh.

Bethany, I'm glad that you are here and yes, we will walk these steps together.   

Our life can only get better Bethany.  We know the truth and we have the ability to choose a different way to live.  We just need to believe and trust ourselves.

I'm sorry that you didn't have any therapists that were wise enough to help you solve the puzzle.  I was very fortunate that a therapist suspected that there was something wrong with the story I was telling her about my father and mother but even so, it took me another 10 years to begin to see that NBPD for what it truly is.  She asked me one day, ' So, tell me about your mom.  you don't talk about her much' and I sat there silent and then blurted out, ' Well, there's nothing to say, she's my best friend' and that therapist saw right through the 'friend' bit and invited my mother to a session.  Mom acted like she was thrilled to help ME, after all, I was the one with all the problems.  She showed up fifteen minutes late and barged into the room, sat down and said, ' Well, I think I need to make it clear that I"m not here to take blame for any of E's F-ups".  The therapist was calm but I was sobbing uncontrollably without even knowing why.  I still to this day couldn't tell you why but therapists have said that it was because I was feeling violated.  I'm not sure I understand that.  Anyway, the therapist attempted to be very respectful and thanked my mother for coming and mom cut her off and began a very ugly attack on me.  She said that I was angry because my brother learned to tie his shoe laces faster than I did and she said that my tears were fake and that I was the strongest person she ever knew and that the counselor should just ignore me crying.  At that point, the therapist thanked her for coming and asked her to leave.  I sat there crying, the therapist was silent and contemplating what to say to me.  She reached over and pulled me into her arms and held me and said, ' I've never had to tell anyone what I'm about to tell you but I want you to trust me when I say, ' Start distancing yourself from her and detach physically, mentally and emotionally from her because she will wreck your life."  And Bethany, she did.  Now, some therapists may argue, like my mother, that I allowed it to happen and for years I believed that crap.  Now I know different.  I know how dangerous these mothers and fathers can be.  I've met so many people in my life who had their childhoods stolen from them and opportunities to become happy and successful people.  It's a parents duty to provide everything they can for their children to help them become successful, independent and self actualized people.  I didn't have a chance and the only reason I'm not worse off than I am is because there were a few great people in my life who exemplified love, compassion, empathy and who believed in me.  Even so, it simply wasn't enough to counter my inner voice with all its negativity.  The healing and recovery rests entirely on us in our own time and the most we can hope for is the comfort and wisdom from others who understand while we keep working at finding emotional freedom and creating a happy life for ourselves. 

My favorite cartoon was on a card given to me years ago by a dear friend who understood and it was a Maxine card.  She's standing in the kitchen one morning, holding a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette with curlers in her hair and the card reads, ' Today I got up... .so what's up with you?" 

I remind myself every morning... .get up... .it's ok.  Just get up.

[Suzn]

I remember reading in some self help book about how one of the most important gifts and role modeling a parent can give a child is the ability to "self-comfort".  Instead from our wounded and unhappy parents who were at the end of conditional not unconditional love themselves in their histories we learned negative self talk. 

I want to focus on my ability to "self-comfort".  I know it will ground me. Remember my inner child sometimes abandoned by me as I compulsively over focus on others or numb out.

I agree wholeheartedly with you here Bethany. Without guidance where do we learn these techniques? It took me many years to see that my coping skills were very poor. I became dependent on others and shifted my focus to them as well instead of focusing on my perseverance. Yes, focusing on self soothing is comforting. What do your coping skills look like today?

I've done a lot of inner child work myself and I literally talk to my inner child when I'm feeling upset or overly anxious. (because I know it's her hurt from the past I'm feeling) We have an understanding. I am here to protect her now and she knows that if things get too out of hand we're out of there. Self parenting is teaching ourselves how to be there for this child within, we are the only ones that can do this.

We need to advance at times and we need to stand still and cope at times and sometimes we need even to retreat and it is okay.  It is human.

All great examples of perseverance. Becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable is a big part of recovery. We didn't get here overnight, it took a lifetime so recovery does take time. Two steps forward and one step back sometimes. Having self compassion and some self discipline works well as we slowly advance. 

I have a funny cartoon on my cube at work.  A man sitting in a robe with his feet up in front of the tv.  He says, today I am staying home to accept the things I cannot change.  It makes me laugh.

That is awesome, I'm going to remember that. 

The healing and recovery rests entirely on us in our own time and the most we can hope for is the comfort and wisdom from others who understand while we keep working at finding emotional freedom and creating a happy life for ourselves.

Well said Leaving.

[bethanny]

Leaving, thanks for helping me rejoin this site and feel so welcome.  And to reinforce and validate the courage and strength to embrace a very dark reality that is so hard to fathom even for a flash instance let alone sustain.

I know about the Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon, and I know I suffered from that for years.  Over the years, before I knew about uBPD and frame it re my mother, I had read about toxic parents and emotional incest.  Even a spiritual incest since my mother was very religious and from a very early age convinced me that she and God were always on the same page.  She was very religious in terms of church, praying, etc.  And the obey thy father and mother commandment was a biggie for her.  I felt like my mother owned God the father, but Jesus understood me.  My secret from her.  I am glad as a kid I used that perception as a buffer.

To disappoint my mother brought rage and horror as if I needed an exorcism.  It was the cultivation of a "false personality" in me.  A script thrust in my hands as a Stepford Daughter.  I became estranged from my core self in order to try to earn her conditional love.  I remember never seriously exhaling around my mother.  I was so hypervigilant and any self-indulging in any degree, like even fully breathing (hah!) was treasonous around her it felt. 

My father, the active alcoholic, was physically and psychologically threatening and I felt my mother protected us from his violent temper and extreme narcissism, and that my mother's crazedness and stress was all his fault and she would be saner if only he would stop drinking.  I rationalized that about her but sometimes when they had frightening altercations when he was drunk he said some truisms about her horrifying controllingness and lack of empathy that I wish he could have said to her rationally when he wasn't drunk.  A part of me recognized his perspective and anger rang true. More confusion.

I appreciate that therapy story.  Good for that therapist to validate your true situation.  We had to be delusional about the degree of narcissism and shame-drivenness and efforts at impression management of our uBPD parent to survive.  I remember being shocked the times my mother figuratively threw me under the bus to guard her own or the family's image.  When we became estranged she was so willing to assassinate my character to all family members.  I was mysteriously crazy after such a loving childhood.  People were seduced by her seeming loving concern for heartless me.

Re therapy, I do remember telling a story about a traumatic and violent fight between my parents and my mother blamed me for her danger then, that I had not been there in case she had gotten hurt by my father.  Shifting her at riskness entirely to me. 

I remember sobbing to the therapist about the degree of its violence, and sobbing about what was my poor mother to do.  The therapist kept making me put the focus on myself. She kept saying "What are YOU going to do?"  "Your mother is clearly a very disturbed woman."  She kept helping me try to "un-merge" from my pathetic and yet manipulative mother. 

My mother told me from a very young age that i was the only one who could fix my father from drinking.  When I did that everyone would be happy and only then the suggestion was I could have an adult life. 

In fact she told me angrily after college that my destiny was not to abandon my family but to stay and ease the pain of it.  No marriage, no family of my own.  MY DESTINY.  And she shouldn't have had to say it out loud.  That was disappointing for her.  I should know it. My going to college was more than she ever got.  And how dare I expect more indulgence from life?  It was my turn to become an adult and SERVE MY FAMILY SERIOUSLY.  I felt like I was chained to her and my father's misery and sinking into a quicksand, since I knew how all or nothing my mother was and so much of my ego-identity was influenced by her feedback which was rewarding when I was Stepford.  At that point I began to seriously and horrifyingly break apart psychologically.  Uncontrolled and frequent depression and crying jags. Anxiety attacks. Despair.  The beginning of complex-PTSD.  That PTSD is what hostages get.  And the "secrecy" and "self-sacrifice" code of the family contributed to my being hostage.

Scott Peck said that each of us has to climb the mountain of life. Some of us have healthier family base camps than others.  Sometimes our base camp needs a base camp.  How wise of him. In my case my mother wouldn't let me out of the base camp to climb the mountain of life.  And when I finally fought to earnestly she locked me out of the base camp entirely. 

This website is another base camp for the base camp and for the mountain climb. Thanks for being a part of it.

I just got up and I will raise my coffee cup back at ya.  TO US AND ONE DAY AT A TIME RECOVERY, my friend!  More power to us ... .all of us.   

[bethanny]

Suzn, thanks for your generous and wise support.  It will help me up my positive self-talk to my little Bethanny inside.  I feel like those of us who missed out on healthy and abundant nurturance and unconditional love and acceptance especially need to provide it to ourselves in recovery.  Sometimes I feel so frustrated when I go through the fight, freeze or flight moments of ambush in life.  So in a seemingly unnecessary MAY DAY mode.  I am also deeply ashamed of myself for being that way after so many many years of so-called recovery.  But that is the early on and so frequent conditioning -- tasering of projected shame and anger and self-hate from such highly wounded and pitiable parents and significant others.  I have to play it where it lays, so to speak.  Not always easy.

I also realize I need to encourage my inner child not to be so terrified to prevent healthy risk taking and enjoying positive stress.  I think my history has made me too phobic about all stress, and life is not to be avoided but engaged.  I feel burned out and it is not healthy for me to sit out life and not embrace and seek out joy.  Maybe I will post about that more soon.  Easier said than done.

[Suzn]

Bethany there is so much in this thread I can relate to.

I suspect I have complex-PTSD.  The complex comes from the hopelessness of having been an entrapped captive with no way out for so many years living in the close orbit of my uBPD mother who kept me on a leash and no matter how I tried to stretch it she would cruelly and chokingly snap it back.  

This really stood out for me. I have a PTSD diagnosis and this wording is exactly how my T explained the effects of an abusive childhood though at the time I really didn't see the depth of the situation. I came to these boards originally as a Leaver having left a r/s with a pwBPD. That was just the beginning of this journey 4 years ago. I can relate totally to being burned out on the subject. My T just recently told me that we should listen to that gut feeling of being burned out and needing a break just as we would listen to the need for answers. I agree we need to take the time to step back so we can breath and give ourselves a break during the recovery process.

Though our stories are different, they are relatively close in behaviors of others. My family is full of dysfunction. Name the family member and I can tell you what the original issue likely was and what the effects are today. In particular, one uncle was the alcoholic, he was my main abuser. The second in line was another uncle, not an alcoholic though very N, he had zero empathy for children. These two were physically abusive and in my mother's waif glory she never protected us from or prevented this abuse. In fact, she continually, over our whole childhood, put us in their paths. There was no escape.

I know how dangerous these mothers and fathers can be.  I've met so many people in my life who had their childhoods stolen from them and opportunities to become happy and successful people.  It's a parents duty to provide everything they can for their children to help them become successful, independent and self actualized people.  I didn't have a chance

This. This was the cruz of my recent epiphany. This came with, for me, an immeasurable anger. It was an anger I didn't know was lying under the surface. Today, seeing these behavior patterns repeat with my brother and his son and my mother's involvement in his (my nephew) upbringing (his mother being an active drug user and likely very BPD, she is not in his life much, there is a step mother who is a carbon copy of her minus the drug use) without being able to have any effect on changing it was too much. I had to step completely away from this ever triggering situation to keep my sanity and to keep what I had gained in recovery for myself. I had moved to be closer to them, I moved back home.

One of the similarities is I've felt my childhood was stolen. There was a mix of physical abuse, emotional abuse, religion (we were seriously isolated because of this), moving us almost once a year since she couldn't provide a stable household financially on her own and she refused to reach out to develop friends so social skills were not taught. Since she couldn't keep it together financially she would move in with these abusive family members over and over. There was also an aunt who was quite oppressive in relation to religion. She would put us in situations way above a child's understanding, push us to the forefront in a manner of speaking and then explain how poorly we were carrying ourselves In God's eyes. As if we should know better as children.

Sometimes I feel so frustrated when I go through the fight, freeze or flight moments of ambush in life.  So in a seemingly unnecessary MAY DAY mode. But that is the early on and so frequent conditioning -- tasering of projected shame and anger and self-hate from such highly wounded and pitiable parents and significant others.  I have to play it where it lays, so to speak.  Not always easy.

Agreed. It is very frustrating to be "on point" with my own recovery, me insisting I recognize my own behavior patterns all the time now. My point in sharing my past is the abusive situations were different but the result the same. PTSD is the result and also I see where some of these BPD traits passed down. I see it in myself and my brother.

I also realize I need to encourage my inner child not to be so terrified to prevent healthy risk taking and enjoying positive stress.  I think my history has made me too phobic about all stress, and life is not to be avoided but engaged.  I feel burned out and it is not healthy for me to sit out life and not embrace and seek out joy.  Maybe I will post about that more soon.  Easier said than done.

I use a lot of visualization in this respect. I hug her a lot in my mind's eye. There wasn't a lot of affection in our childhoods, for my brother and I, so I give myself that today. Lots of hugs for her.

I also relate to your struggle with stress. I found my limits and exceeded them in my recent situation. I think finding the balance is key. I left to give myself much needed space and a buffer of distance after that anger hit but I have decided I can and will visit. My nephew brings much joy and I refuse to throw out the baby with the bathwater. He's very young and I don't want to disappear from his life, I can be a positive influence.

There are other sources of stress in my life that can trigger the PTSD however they are small in comparison. They are more easily recognized and I have developed over time a plan to deal with those triggers. I know I have to step back when I feel it and ask myself "ok, what's really going on here? Do you feel slighted, did you get your feelings hurt (this almost always the answer if anger is the first recognition), etc... ." The hardest part has been to recognize it as it starts happening and stop myself and start asking myself questions. Once I do this then I can respond to the triggers more appropriately. Like you, I refuse to hand over my future to this. The PTSD is not going to go away, I asked my T, but I can manage it better over time.

Very much easier said than done, agreed! Always being "on." It was almost a full time job while living in the same city as my family. Now being far away from the dysfunction, it's like being on vacation.    I look forward to your future postings on this.

 

[Leaving]

I just got up and I will raise my coffee cup back at ya.  TO US AND ONE DAY AT A TIME RECOVERY, my friend!  More power to us ... .all of us.    [/quote]
Happy Sunday Bethany  

Seems to me that these dysfunctional people received the same secret society handbook.  Image is everything to the dysfunctional family.  That's why they have lots of happy photographs with everyone smiling.  " See?  You were such a happy child then"  There is always one person in the family that gathers enough 'proof' that everyone was fine and happy.

It amazes me how the most dysfunctional and abusive people can hide behind religion but even more amazing is how the entire congregation will play right along as if everything is Kosher. No wonder these people fear death- their entire life is one big fat deception.  

Re: honoring the parents- I confronted  a minister and a Rabbi about what it really means to honor the parent and the Rabbi told me that it meant that we always honor our parents with a proper burial ( whether they were good parents or not)  given how they did give us life.  Everyone will seek their own interpretation I suppose but that one works for me.  It's certainly doable and relieved me of my guilt.  I can scratch that issue off my list  

OH MY GOSH BETHANY... .the breathing issue!  I remember a therapist telling me that when I'm talking about my mother, I hold my breath.  Like you described, we don't exhale.  When I went to visit my mother at her home, I would sit in her living room on the sofa and instantly feel so catatonic, I held my breath, didn't say much and began yawning and feeling to foggy and tired.  It was literally like being gassed with a psychotropic drug.  I wondered why no one would ask if I was alright or ill or insane?  They would walk past me and pet me like a pet rock but no one ever wondered why I was so withdrawn and weird?  Oh yes, that's right, let's see, my mother had my brother convinced that I was autistic and LD, she had my grandmother terrified to say anything to anyone and everyone else was busy watching my mother's dramatic show.  :)uring the last few visits we had,  I would bring champagne spiked with koolaid for my grandmother and I to drink so we could get through the family event.  It was our secret.

That's really interesting how you were able to envision G-d as your mother's ally and Jesus as your ally.  I didn't have a father for much of my youth but I was a nature freak and I spent a lot of time in the woods where I would sit and talk to G-d.  I remember thinking, ' Ok, so I don't have my dad but I do have my father G-d so I'm ok.  I'll be ok' and then when I saw the statue of Abraham Lincoln, I thought that he looked like G-d, the way I envisioned G-d anyway so , I adopted Abraham Lincoln as my dad   We do what we need to to survive and feel safe and loved.  

Alcoholism/substance abuse is a horrible thing to deal with though every codependent family has some form of 'substance abuse'... .food, sex, violence.    Alcohol  wasn't an issue at all with my mother and father but if I had to choose the substance it was maybe my mother's habits relating to sex, money or violence?   My stepfather drank though I wouldn't say he was physically addicted since I know he abruptly quit without any problem.  However, he drank so much all the time and my mother would use that as an excuse for her violent behavior and manipulate me into confronting him about it. I remember screaming at him to stop and begging him. It's so disgusting to recall a memory of me playing a role or part that my mother created.   She often used me to fight her battles with my father and my stepfather and apparently, for the same reasons that your mother used you to do so.  When I was ten or so, she handed me a knife and told me to confront my father at the door when he came to pick us up for visitation.  He never came back and I didn't see him again for many years.  My mother was horribly violent with both of my fathers.   It's interesting that she recently told me how ashamed she would be if she had ever had to call the police due to spousal violence like my brother and I have had to do. She shook her head with disgust. She was arrogant  as if somehow she's better than her low life white trash children.  As I'm writing, I realize that the police never intervened at our house because my fathers never called for help.  I was the one who always intervened and stopped it.  Bethany, I was always tired/exhausted from being kept awake from the destruction going on upstairs.  I finally got so fed up  one evening, I pulled the shotgun out ( no bullets I don't think... .didn't even know how to use the thing) and pointed it at both my parents, made them sit in chairs in our kitchen while I prepared dinner and ate it with my brother in peace.  When we were done, I told them to go their room and shut the door and be quiet and if I heard one noise I would shoot holes through the ceiling into their bedroom until they stopped. I guess that's temporary insanity. I felt horrible for treating my stepfather that way when it truly wasn't his fault but he had a duty to end the violence and not burden me with having to manage them.  He did however apologize to me, always did, unlike my mother.  It wasn't long after that he filed for divorce and spent the rest of his life trying to make amends with his kids.

You and I were pigeon-holed in the same role in our families.  When I went NC the first time, my brother was furious and accused me of dumping mom on him.  He said, 'Now look what you've done!  Now I have to deal with her! and I have to work! "  and I thought, wow, even my brother has been using me to make his life easier and better. That was a rude awakening.  So, I was managing my mother for my brother when it was just the three of us.  When there were four of us, I was managing both of my parents but still in the role of peace maker.  I didn't realize I was the peace maker until a month or so ago.  Until then, I thought I was the trouble maker and that my brother was the peacemaker.  How crazy is that?  My brother never did a damn thing to defend me or help me in any way. He was totally focused on himself, his school or his work.  He lived a completely different life than I did.  Additionally, my mother demanded that I cater to his needs because it was very important that he become successful ( shaping her golden child).  My career and education were just a big joke to her.  She shaped me to become a prostitute, literally. I remember my sophomore year in college I was bogged down with difficult classes, my job and I was taking 3 dance classes 3 nights a week.  It was my birthday and my boyfriend and I decided to go to her house for my b'day dinner.  What was I thinking?  My boyfriend gave me a beautiful diamond necklace and commented on how proud he was that I was doing so well despite all the demands placed on me that semester.   My mother said, ' Are you still taking ballet?  Aren't you a little too old to be playing ballerina?"  My boyfriend shot her down with, ' Aren't you a little too old to be so jealous of your daughter?' and then we left.  But, her words penetrated me to the core and I quit dancing a few months later.

It's really strange how through learning about toxic parenting and abuse, it becomes slowly more and more relevant to our personal experience.   Like you, I had been reading psychology self help books for years.   I highlighted passages throughout the books probably because I could identify with what was written but that was in the days when I was only able to identify the ' lite' version.  The full pop-up book version took much longer to accept.  One of the most profound Freudian slips that ever happened to me was when I gave my mother the book, ' My Mother Myself' for mother's day one year... .way back in 1980 I think. I remember the confused look on my mother's face and feeling confused by her look.  In hindsight I wonder what the heck was I thinking?  Was I trying to tell her something? Was I trying to tell myself something? Was G-d sending me a warning?   Was I proud that I was trapped in her mirror?  In any case, I can't help but laugh at myself for doing that- I pat myself on the back.  However, I realize now how truly disconnected  from my true self I was then.  I had no identity of my own really.  I thought I did, I guess, but I struggled and struggled so with horrible anxiety and depression and that negative judging voice in my head all the time.  I went through a horrible period during college where I couldn't even grocery shop without feeling that everyone was judging what I had in my cart and I would run out of the store empty-handed in a panic.  I was living on my own away from her.  I had been on my own since I was 17 so during those first few years of being physically separated from her, my true self began to emerge and thus the battle between 'me' and the " her/me" began. Maybe that is what happened to you during college and then when you had to go back home the battle began.   It was an ugly horrible battle that left me physically ill at times, suicidal, depressed, terribly confused.  It was hell and it lasted for about eight years ( on and off but intense at times).   Bethany, you're not alone    

Who am I?  Which part of me is real?  Which voice should I listen to?  I thought I loved my job but mom says it's not for me.  I thought I loved my husband but mom says I'm not his type. I went to college but mom told me I'm like her and not the college type.  Besides academia is for the weak and lazy, right?  There wasn't a thought or things in my life that wasn't covertly controlled by her.  Yes, it's an identity crisis caused by emotional incest.  I didn't attend my stepsister's wedding because I was afraid that I was too fat ,my dress was too black and that my mother would be so ashamed of me( this was during the first NC).  I didn't talk to my sister for almost ten years  because I was so ashamed that I didn't go to her wedding!  See, this kind of stuff really angers me because it's so indicative of how these vampires steal our quality of life and destroy families. Thankfully, my stepsister understood very well what happened that day and she wasn't the least bit upset with me.  

I was telling someone on here recently about how I changed my name about 15 years ago in an effort to create my own image.  I no longer use my first name- only my middle name.   As superficial as it may seem, it really does help because it's a constant positive reinforcement throughout the day.  

Any small thing you can do to create your own identity helps.  I don't keep family pictures around ( except for my dogs). I don't have anything in my home that reminds me of her or triggers a memory of a bad experience.  Everything I have exudes peace, love and joy ( except when my husband is around but at least I have those happy props placed around me).  

[bethanny]

Suzn and Leaving -- thanks so much for your rich responses.  I had to and will be working double shifts so I won't be able to respond fully until tomorrow.  I am so relieved I came back here.  Thank you and others.  How precious to be with people who "get it" and "want to get it".  Messengers with vital messages for each other and validations offering a precious grounding.  We grew up and were blocked from doing reality checks in a surreal and oppressive world.  The outer world beyond our families is shut down to a great degree as well. To find and inhabit a "base camp" for our mountain of life journey, a wholesome and nurturing one, is so important. A great opportunity and gift.

[bethanny]

Suzn, thanks for your thoughtful response.

I appreciate your validating the "burn out" I finally reached and still am suffering to a great degree in terms of my being very avoidant now in my life and untrusting of my capacity for real intimate relationships, intimacy to varying degrees. 

I don't know what "r/s with a pwBPD" means.  Sorry. 

When i finally reached some insight into the depth of the pathology of my mother, I recognized it since early on in my narcissistic and alcoholic father, I still was not aware of or prepared for the pathology of my "borderline family", it as an entity and its conditioning.  The members of the family could not threaten their own conditioned roles and support me. How naive of me. How heartbreaking and despairing and threatening to have my character so easily assassinated and be ostracized and pressured to put the leash to my uBPD mother back around my neck by them.

Your quote from Leaving really resonated with me about how parents should encourage individuation and actualization in their children. I felt the real me was my mother's enemy.  I had to play the role of the perfect false personality to appease her and to garner praise from others for her ego sake and to get any kind of validation from her.  Children need to cultivate a sense of mastery but with an alcoholic father and a uBPD mother one was always getting tasered by shaming and guilting and criticizing again and again.  My mother was crazy-making and especially devastating when she turned on me in that she would heap on "conditional love" praise that I clung to as evidence of my worth during her Dr. Jekyll periods.

Dr. Phil has talked about the importance of less than a dozen or so defining moments in one's life in which significant others set up our belief systems.  When most or all of these defining moments were negative experiences, like my mother packing my bag when I was three when I told her I hated her, it engineers who we become and what thinking and behavior we have.  Negative defining moments program us to be self-sabotaging and reactive not pro-active. To have seriously low self esteem.

You speak of your aunt's brand of spiritual/religious incest.  My mother used that to enhance my trust in and fear of her judgments of me and others.

Suzn, I have a lot of work to do still.  I am tired.  I feel like a rubber band that has gotten stretched so much in life there is little resilience left.  The enlightenment has brought me inner peace and comfort and self-respect, but the PTSD still lives in me, maybe to a lesser degree, but I know I am unhealthily avoidant which is what I want to work on here. 

Thanks for sharing.   

[bethanny]

Leaving!  Thanks for the raised coffee cup back at me.   

You start talking about image. Amen to that.  Impression management. Ours was a BPD family and also an alcoholic one. I was the mascot role.  Hero, lost child, scapegoat and mascot. I started out the mascot at least. Since then I have been all but family hero.  But the mascot's job was to keep everyone happy and play family pr dept.

The honor thy parents meme.  When it is used to justify total tyranny over the kids. And sets them up to believe they must be respectful to all oldsters and authority figures no matter what they do to one is sabotaging a child's later life.

I have been so frustrated on the career path because my relationships with authority figures are often doomed since I am shadow-boxing with my parents, especially my uBPD mother.  With males I am more assertive. with women I over-oblige and then rebel and often the woman authority cannot forgive my humanness.  My impression is women in the workplace hold onto grudges more than men. I am afraid to express displeasure with women and when I finally do it is strident which ends up ending good will or makes me think it did and then running away, sometimes prematurely re career opportunities.

Thank you re the breathing issue focus. Not breathing in a healthy way. Being so anxious that it prevents renewing sleep is also another sabotaging result. Hard to function when our physical equipment from God is sabotaged by such high levels of fight, flight or freeze stress.

There was an aunt I used to visit and when I walked into her home without my mother there to monitor me I literally felt my chest expand with release and a sense of empowerment and a groundedness. I trusted she respected the real me.

I am glad you had your sense of an unconditionally loving and understanding God. I knew my mother had claimed God the Father as the zero tolerance for evil a/k/a humanness entity but I had Jesus when I was young. I also had an invisible shrink.  Hah!  Some kids have imaginary friends.  I had an imaginary shrink who sat and listened to my woes and admired and respected me. A male.

My mother at one point came out and told me that because of my father's drinking my destiny and duty was to focus my adult life on easing the family's pain and staying focused on it. That to presume to have my own marriage and family was not in my cards.  She also said that for her to have to tell me that was such a grave disappointment to her, that I should have grasped that for myself.  This mandate from her helped break me after college. I became clinically depressed and manic-depressive it seemed. these are old terms I know.

My mother was big on stuffing her anger in and then unleashing it long after, shaming one for having disappointed her and for so long. I would stand there trying to appreciate how she had deliberately not communicated something that made her upset but kept it gunny-sacked and the time as it passed enhanced her rage.  And then that period of obtuseness on my part was part of her evidence to prove just how selfish and evil I had been. Meanwhile, she had been Dr. Jekyll for much of the time before Mrs. Hyde arrived to unleash what Lawson in her book calls "annihilating" anger. 

Leaving I feel for you and relate to your absorbing all the violence and pain for so many times.

And there is the Karpman Triangle.  You have rescuer, persecutor, victim and the roles shift in a crazymaking way in a dysfunctional family.  Dad insults mom.  You rescue by insulting Dad.  Mom steps in to insult you for insulting Dad. Dad insults Mom for insulting you. 

My mother would set me up to go after my father and then scold me for doing that. 

They say schizophrenic personalities are created from authority figures giving contradictory double-bind orders.  I relate to that.

My mother.

Never leave my side, but be a glowing success in life. 

People please everyone you come in contact with but never take your focus off of me.

You are too nice but never don't be nice. 

Never say no but don't let people push you around. 

Especially if your parent won't let you say no or have boundaries, you go into life not having boundaries. Then they point that out to you as a flaw when they ensured that is the case. 

You are stuck in reactive mode because being proactive would explode their worlds, would not be walking on the eggshells.  God forbid.  I call it walking on mine fields between both parents.  Well, my bullying dad. My mother was like walking on a tightrope with no net.  I often knew her rigid rules, though sometimes I couldn't second guess what she wanted, like when she emptied the gunnysack of grievances on me and shamed me for being obtuse.

What got me most re my mother was that after she had been Ms. Hyde she would sometimes snap back to perky Dr. Jekyll mode and never refer to the scalding abuse until the next appearance of Ms. Hyde. As I got older I tried to reality check back to the viciousness later and that would trigger return of the ugly and mean Ms. Hyde.  I tried to assert tough love, but it didn't work. It unleashed this rage and paranoia.  I wasn't dealing with a rational being.

So it tasered me not to dare try to reality check or explore how over the top she had been.  And it taught me in life not to do more reality checking with people and often assuming malice they don't begin to have.  Geeez. 

Back to my mother, I didn't know if she had any good will for the real me at all.  As I wrote there was no reservoir of good will for me I finally grasped, she was incapable of that which I knew subconsciously which is probably what my years of depression were about. Affinity is not love.  My mother cherished "affinity" with me, but that was me playing a role and doing not of me just being and being the real me.

My brothers did what is called a "geographic" to leave my parents' hellish orbit.  That left me at home and later near enough to commute back and forth.  They were too far away.  And yet they pressured me to accommodate her needs and expectations for frequent visits.  She manipulated their pity for her and I suspect reduced their potential to respect the real me. 

When violence happened when I was not there for a weekend, the fault was more mine for being away than my alcoholic  father's.  She insisted he was better when I was there so it was my job to be there.  When I was focused on my non-family life, sure enough crises would yank me on the leash back dramatically and disorientingly.

I cringe about that putdown about ballet. 

I had a guy I was once dating remark to me what a different person I was around my family than alone. I had so much vitality and joy away from them.

Leaving, you are so eloquent and insightful re how you were separated from your true identity.  I so relate.  When I was little and did anything that inconvenienced my mother she would exclaim "whatever POSSESSED you?"  I felt disrespectful of myself for being so afraid of my mother and since I was in denial of the reality of her manipulation I was confused as to why I wasn't more honest with her. 

Thank you for recognizing how my mother had to re-break me and my self esteem post college.  I was too strong.  But after college I was financially dependent and I was isolated from my support friends and I was in the marital quicksand and suddenly my mother was spewing hatred and resentment at me for having been selfish having had college (I was still expected and had to come home most weekends while at college but being away for those five days illuminated for me freedom, it was a Camelot period of my life) and that it was time for me to SERVE her and embrace my real adult destiny according to her and her massive needs. I broke psychically.  I couldn't figure out what had happened to me I was such a mess and so frightened and mood swingy and fragile and despairing.

Again, my mother with the contradictory messages, my fear of success and failure.  She resented my successes and she shamed my failures.  Sometimes she wanted me to be her strong parent and other times needed me infantilized and there was a threat if I postured any strength.  So I did not get to evolve my identity. I had to role play as to her needs and that brings identity confusion.

I think we need to do what we need to do to parent ourselves and build a grounding identity. 

I wish I trusted people more.  Intellectually I know most people are safe and patient.  But there is this long time conditioning which makes me not want to test people and stay remote because so many times growing up when I assumed I was safe I was suddenly blasted and went from feeling respected to being vilified.

Even at the end of my father's life after my mother had passed on if I called him to check up on him I knew there would come a point in the conversation when he would say something horrifyingly invalidating to me. Then he would perkily go on to another subject as if what he had just said was totally neutral.  I would feel like I had just taken a punch to the gut. My mother had Jekyll Hyde periods, my father weaved in and out of that with such clueless brutality it awed me within seconds. Though, I would take a million of his insults to one of my mother's, but both of them were corrosive to my self esteem, along with one sibling also exercising for years growing up unbelievable steady malice toward me.

Okay, Leaving, enough for now. Take care of your precious self.   

[bethanny]

I will be back to respond to more of the comments on this thread.  Thank you for your heartfelt responses and your patience.

best, bethanny