Key moments

[Our abuse recovery guide]

“My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil a third event to me” -- Emily Dickinson

When I think of my childhood and life when I lived with my uBPD mother, these words often come to my mind. There were certain periods that my mother's behavior was really out of control in which she truly damaged me psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. There are two crucial periods of my life that I still often think about:

- My last year of primary school/first year of high school

- My last year of high school/first year of college

Very important periods in a child's life in which my mother showed her worst behavior towards me. Extremely controlling to the point that I felt completely suffocated and trapped. In her book 'Understanding the Borderline Mother”, Christine Ann Lawson describes several character profiles of BPD parents, including the 'Witch'. In my first week of college I was subjected to an intense all-out Witch-attack by my mother. The next day she threw a big birthday party to celebrate her 60th birthday and acted as if nothing had happened the evening before  That whole year her behavior was extremely controlling and she was becoming increasingly psychologically and emotionally abusive until she exploded on me. I literally felt something break inside of me when that Witch-attack occurred.

The same thing happened when I was in my first year of high school. I was totally drained by my confusing home situation and at one point felt something shift/break inside of me. These were important periods in my life in which I was making transitions that are very significant when you're that age. This fact alone already caused me stress and made me vulnerable and that's exactly when she intensified her verbal attacks an controlling behavior. Now that I know about BPD I am able to see more clearly what was going on and can identify the projection, splitting, fear of abandonment etc.

I still find it difficult to look back upon these events because they so significantly impacted me. In high school I was severely bullied. I don't blame my mother for the actions of others, but I do hold her accountable for damaging me and making me vulnerable to attacks and abuse by others. She assaulted my self-esteem and did not allow me to protect myself or stand up for myself when she verbally abused me and/or was being controlling. I took this broken self-esteem and attitude of 'not protecting myself/not standing up for myself' wherever I went which made me a very easy target. I've done a lot of healing since then but I also experience the pain of healing. I'll finish with a more positive and hopeful quote:

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all,” -- Emily Dickinson

[Kwamina]

“My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil a third event to me” -- Emily Dickinson

When I think of my childhood and life when I lived with my uBPD mother, these words often come to my mind. There were certain periods that my mother's behavior was really out of control in which she truly damaged me psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. There are two crucial periods of my life that I still often think about:

- My last year of primary school/first year of high school

- My last year of high school/first year of college

Very important periods in a child's life in which my mother showed her worst behavior towards me. Extremely controlling to the point that I felt completely suffocated and trapped. In her book 'Understanding the Borderline Mother”, Christine Ann Lawson describes several character profiles of BPD parents, including the 'Witch'. In my first week of college I was subjected to an intense all-out Witch-attack by my mother. The next day she threw a big birthday party to celebrate her 60th birthday and acted as if nothing had happened the evening before  That whole year her behavior was extremely controlling and she was becoming increasingly psychologically and emotionally abusive until she exploded on me. I literally felt something break inside of me when that Witch-attack occurred.

The same thing happened when I was in my first year of high school. I was totally drained by my confusing home situation and at one point felt something shift/break inside of me. These were important periods in my life in which I was making transitions that are very significant when you're that age. This fact alone already caused me stress and made me vulnerable and that's exactly when she intensified her verbal attacks an controlling behavior. Now that I know about BPD I am able to see more clearly what was going on and can identify the projection, splitting, fear of abandonment etc.

I still find it difficult to look back upon these events because they so significantly impacted me. In high school I was severely bullied. I don't blame my mother for the actions of others, but I do hold her accountable for damaging me and making me vulnerable to attacks and abuse by others. She assaulted my self-esteem and did not allow me to protect myself or stand up for myself when she verbally abused me and/or was being controlling. I took this broken self-esteem and attitude of 'not protecting myself/not standing up for myself' wherever I went which made me a very easy target. I've done a lot of healing since then but I also experience the pain of healing. I'll finish with a more positive and hopeful quote:

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all,” -- Emily Dickinson

[Turkish]

I like the Emily Dickenson quotes, Parrot!

I was bullied from kindergarten until about my second year in high school. My mom was often an advocate for me... .but was verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive of me at home, too. So confusing 

Lawson said: ":)egradation by someone who claims to love you is qualitatively different than degradation by a stranger,"

I thought about killing myself when I was 13 or 14. Living in a rural American area, I actually had my own gun, a sawed off .22 long rifle. I remember sitting in the woods several times with the gun to my head, my finger on the trigger, a bullet in the chamber. I depressed the trigger to its initial set point. Then I thought, "what am I doing? This is it. I only have a few more years until I'm 18 and I can escape. Is that enough? What will I take with me?" I literally saw no future past high school, just a cliff overlooking an abyss. Then I reasoned, "what's 40 or 50 more years as opposed to an eternity of oblivion?" And I relaxed the pressure on the trigger, lowering the gun.

It got worse before it got better. I graduated his at 17, and that summer was the longest ever, especially with my mom going into therapy and being put onto Prozac, which messed with her head worse. I started community college (2 year lower divsion in the US), combining it with a technical certificate, all what my mom didn't want me to do. While still recovering from a horrific motorcycle accident only 3 weeks past, I moved out in late October on my 18th birthday, never having spent a night back since in 25 years.

To quote Neil Peart, "The point of a journey, is not to return. Anything can happen... ."

It's what we make happen which counts, and despite anything and everything, that's fully within our power to do so.

[bethanny]

Kwamina,

Thank you for your honesty and insights. I so relate.

Looking back what awes me the most is how I struggled against self-honesty as far as my uBPD mother was concerned. I was so brainwashed because of my early-on terror of her and her rationalizations about her plight repeated over and over to me. 

I tried to put in the background the irrational malice that poured out of my mother at me at usually unpredictable times.  I must deserve it I told myself and how shameful of me to be so clueless to my evil.  My mother was so religious.  Smart.  Self-sacrificing. My alcoholic father upset her so much. She had so much responsibility caretaking us all it made her snap periodically.  She was always sacrificing so much for all of us, etc., etc. etc. I was bad for letting her down since she thought so highly of me, but that perfectionism she pretended to celebrate in me when I was doing my Stepford compliant stuff was her way of entrapping me and blinding me into the F-O-G, fear-obligation-guilt.  Conditional approval as opposed to unconditional acceptance.  No recognition on her part that a person is unique and evolves naturally.  Not is a compliant cookie cutter creation of a dictatorial parent.

All the time I was haunted with how my real mother felt about me, which of the seeming multiple personalities was the real her. The role-playing stoic mother who could be kind with food and praise and even money when I did compliant things, or the fire-breathing witch who spewed what Lawson aptly calls "annihilating anger." 

My father's alcoholic rages were terrifying but didn't hold a candle next to my mother's that were rarer but as you write, Kwamina, they were timed at crucial times to most effectively try to stunt the growth of a child doomed to arrested development if the witch could have her way and an anger that was so scalding and personalized and ego-destroying.

Also haunting to me I have written about before was whether my mother in non-witch mode even was conscious of the vicious bile she had spewed in witch mode.  There were never amends and if I brought up what she had said, the super witch reappeared for another found of vilification.  And witch mode never erupted except when we were alone or when she was duking it out with my father toward him in the next room often with him having come home drunk.  But those moments he had the Dutch courage to tell her some basic truths about her irrational and extreme controllingness. I appreciated those truths but torn in loyalty since he was so scary physically and I feared for both myself and my mother.

When my leash to my mother was lengthened during college a bit, after college it got yanked in and I actually got post-punished for the joy and the freedom i had enjoyed at college and for having any assumptions of more of that and I recognized that my mother's blessing to embracing a happy adulthood was an illusion and my mother actually considered any joy and freedom garnered away from her was EVIL and TREASONOUS to my duty to her and she would be my jailer as an adult the same way she had been jailer in childhood.  The set me up for complex-PTSD since the complex has to do with being a hostage with no hope of escape.

You know, Kwamina, when I was in second grade I had a teacher I really worshipped. Probably desperate for approval from another adult female to counterpoint the vilification of my mother. Also, garnering appreciation from other adults seemed to feed my mother's ego and prime the pump of good will for me from her. 

My mother came home enraged after meeting with the teacher. The teacher told my mother that if she told me to jump out of a 5-story window I probably would.  My mother felt ashamed of me because of her saying this and enraged at me for being such a little automaton.  She came home and gave me hell. I got that the teacher I worshipped disdained my enthrallment to her and that felt like one more material authority figure betrayal, and I was too young to recognize that since my mother broke my will, she was crazymakingly demanding I have it with other adults when her authoritarianism over me had sabotaged that capacity in me toward other adults.  Catch 22.

Eric Berne called the child ego state posing as the parent ego state the "pig parent". The big lie is that the anger from the pig parent has nothing to do with nurturing and helping us.  It is a monstrously angry and primitive crazed child behind the mask of a caretaking parent punishing us for any and every inconvenient feeling the parent is experiencing!  Scapegoating us destructively.

best,

Bethanny

[Kwamina]

Hi Turkish and bethanny

Thanks for your replies

I like the Emily Dickenson quotes, Parrot!

She's my favorite poet!

I remember from one of your previous posts that you were bullied in school. Being bullied is though, especially when you're also being bullied at home. Then you really have no safe place to turn to. During those years I felt like I was under constant attack wherever I was.

Lawson said: ":)egradation by someone who claims to love you is qualitatively different than degradation by a stranger,"

This is so true. It is also so confusing that the person who is supposed to protect and take care of you, is the one attacking you. It's a child's natural instinct to run to their parents for protection when they are being attacked, but how can you run to the person that is doing the attacking? How can our attacker at the same time also be our protector? Very confusing for a child.

I thought about killing myself when I was 13 or 14. Living in a rural American area, I actually had my own gun, a sawed off .22 long rifle. I remember sitting in the woods several times with the gun to my head, my finger on the trigger, a bullet in the chamber. I depressed the trigger to its initial set point. Then I thought, "what am I doing? This is it. I only have a few more years until I'm 18 and I can escape. Is that enough? What will I take with me?" I literally saw no future past high school, just a cliff overlooking an abyss. Then I reasoned, "what's 40 or 50 more years as opposed to an eternity of oblivion?" And I relaxed the pressure on the trigger, lowering the gun.

I am very sorry you felt so badly that you considered taking your own life. The hopelessness of depression is really hard to deal with. I slipped into depression when I was 12 and one of the main reasons was that I lost hope for a better future. I am very happy you were able to talk yourself out if it though and are still here with us today

It got worse before it got better. I graduated his at 17, and that summer was the longest ever, especially with my mom going into therapy and being put onto Prozac, which messed with her head worse.

I had the same experience with my mother taking Prozac, it only made things worse unfortunately. She went to therapy very briefly, she talked about it with my aunt on the telephone once when I was in the room. From what I heard then she presented herself to the therapist as the poor victim who had never gotten over the death of her own mother. Shortly after she started therapy, the therapist got sick and died. My mother never went to another therapist and saw this as a 'sign' that she shouldn't be in therapy and that she isn't the problem.

To quote Neil Peart, "The point of a journey, is not to return. Anything can happen... ."

It's what we make happen which counts, and despite anything and everything, that's fully within our power to do so.

Thanks for sharing this quote Turkish!  We cannot change our past but what we can do is make things happen for ourselves now in the present.

[Kwamina]

Hi again bethanny

So much to respond to that I'm gonna do it in this separate post!

Looking back what awes me the most is how I struggled against self-honesty as far as my uBPD mother was concerned. I was so brainwashed because of my early-on terror of her and her rationalizations about her plight repeated over and over to me.  

Brainwashed is a very fitting term I think when you're raised in such an environment. It's all you know which makes it a lot easier to 'program' you.

Conditional approval as opposed to unconditional acceptance.

This is also something that kept me on edge all the time. Once you realize the approval is conditional, you also get terrified of doing something 'wrong' which could lead to the removal of this approval. The threat of taking away her approval is a powerful mechanism that my mother used to control me.

Also haunting to me I have written about before was whether my mother in non-witch mode even was conscious of the vicious bile she had spewed in witch mode.  There were never amends and if I brought up what she had said, the super witch reappeared for another found of vilification.  And witch mode never erupted except when we were alone or when she was duking it out with my father toward him in the next room often with him having come home drunk.  But those moments he had the Dutch courage to tell her some basic truths about her irrational and extreme controllingness. I appreciated those truths but torn in loyalty since he was so scary physically and I feared for both myself and my mother.

In my case I think my mother was conscious of her Witch behavior but not conscious of how damaging that behavior was to me and also not in control of herself. When she turned into the Witch, she became something else. When I experienced that Witch attack in my first week of college, my mother was totally out of control and I realized that while she was in this state, she really was capable of doing anything to hurt me. Eleven years later I experienced the same thing with my sister on Mother's Day. My sister (and) mother then totally lost it and that's when I fully realized the extent of their dysfunction. Or to be more accurate, I already realized the extent of their dysfunction before but this extreme behavior they exhibited got me out of denial. It had now become impossible for me to keep holding on to the fantasy of having a loving family of origin.

The set me up for complex-PTSD since the complex has to do with being a hostage with no hope of escape.

The sense of being trapped or held hostage is something I can very much relate to (unfortunately). When even your hope of a brighter day is taken from you, it feels like nothing remains.

Eric Berne called the child ego state posing as the parent ego state the "pig parent". The big lie is that the anger from the pig parent has nothing to do with nurturing and helping us.  It is a monstrously angry and primitive crazed child behind the mask of a caretaking parent punishing us for any and every inconvenient feeling the parent is experiencing!  Scapegoating us destructively.

And making a child believe that mask of 'caretaking parent', allows the abuse to continue and also makes it a lot easier to keep a child from telling others about what's going on because that would be betraying the 'loving' parent.

The things we've discussed in this thread are difficult things to reflect upon. Something that has recently been helping me cope are these words from Pete Walker:

Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. (Feeling small and little is a sure sign of a flashback)

Take care

[bethanny]

Kwamina,

Thank you for being such an incredible listener and empathizer to both impressively honest Turkish and me on this particular thread, as well as your insights and kindnesses elsewhere.

My siblings at this point struggle to empathize with me but I sense their own need for denial or minimization along with the separate natures or degrees of their experiences in the family which prevent full out communication between us.  Though I don't want to minimize their efforts and my own to communicate what we can.

Your epiphany about your mother and your sister must have been so painful and yet freeing at the same time. Sounds like the first step in the 12 step program.  Grasping the unmanageability of our lives and the people's lives around us and a spiritual surrender.  The serenity prayer talks about the need for accepting what we cannot change and the courage to change what we can.

I had a sensitive therapist whom I ran to during a violent interchange between my parents when I was living with them and I kept declaring to my therapist, "What is my mother going to do?"  The therapist kept repeating, "What are YOU going to do."  She also said something about my mother being clearly dysfunctional.  I was dismayed to have her put the focus on me at all, since I had been raised to NEVER do that, and to caretake my mother's needs over everyone else's, and hers and everyone else's over my own. She also emphasized how sick my mother seemed to be psychologically, though she never grasped the uBPD stuff.

Exhaling deeply seemed a treasonous activity in relation to the hypervigilance demanded from me to pick up cues from my mother ... .or else!  Not fully breathing is a way to numb out and stay ungrounded in your own body and mind.

Learning about co-dependency all those years in the 12 step rooms helped me begin to deal with this in myself as an adult.  That hardwiring is tough to turn around.  Hypervigilance needed to monitor that slippery slope for ourselves.  When you have been rewarded and threatened to be REACTIVE, becoming proactive is tough.

And you talk about those significant stages of development that get arrested by a dysfunctional parent who wants to prevent abandonment and loss of caretaking from us as we grow, it begins so early. 

They say saying no is the cornerstone of identity. We start that in the terrible twos.  But I remember at age three I have shared and been traumatized into not ever naturally and spontaneously expressing negative feelings to my mother.  My mother packing my bags literally to abandon and reject me for daring to emotionally express anger at her.  Talk about early trauma and playing hardball -- life and death threatening --  with a child's tender psyche.

I was raised to be a ROLE not a person.  Or maybe raised to be "roles" which was all the more crazymaking, since depending on the ego state and needs of my mother, primarily, and even the ever oncoming needs of others.

I had to fulfill various roles at various times according to her emotional clock and not my own. No wonder my identity got confused and I felt unstable and ungrounded.  Existential insecurity. 

"Be the child because I need to control you as parent.  Be the parent because I am a needy and hysterical child.  Be a success out in the world.  Be someone who never leaves my side.  Be accommodating to people.  Don't let people walk all over you.  Don't think or feel any way that I wouldn't.  Be the perfect me that even I can't be."

Thanks, again, Kwamina!

best,

Bethanny

[oceaneyes]

Thanks so much for starting this thread. I'm at the beginning of my healing process and I've spent a lot of time reflecting on my childhood and working through a mixed bag of emotions, so this post really speaks to me. 

Now that I know about BPD I am able to see more clearly what was going on and can identify the projection, splitting, fear of abandonment etc.

There were several times throughout my life where I felt like things were "off" or "wrong" with my home life but I couldn't place why. Having my T confirm my uBPDmom's likely diagnosis gave me the knowledge I needed to go back and assess all those moments. I blamed myself for a lot of the problems in my life, including the poor relationship I have with my mother. Knowing the reason why my mother acts the way she does, and that it actually has nothing to do with me, has been empowering.

I still find it difficult to look back upon these events because they so significantly impacted me. In high school I was severely bullied. I don't blame my mother for the actions of others, but I do hold her accountable for damaging me and making me vulnerable to attacks and abuse by others. She assaulted my self-esteem and did not allow me to protect myself or stand up for myself when she verbally abused me and/or was being controlling. I took this broken self-esteem and attitude of 'not protecting myself/not standing up for myself' wherever I went which made me a very easy target.

I was also bullied, not just at school, but also at home by my emotionally and physically abusive, alcoholic step-father and emotionally abused by my mother. It took a larger toll on my self-esteem than I really knew. Maybe I wouldn't have been bullied as much in school if I hadn't been abused at home. I'll never know, but I can imagine my self-esteem would be in a much better place if I didn't have kids as school calling me fat during the day and then came home to my mother who would tell me my shirt was too tight and I should suck it in.

There are many moments in my life that I recognize as shaping who I am and being responsible for the struggles I face today, but there are two that particularly stick out:

- Late middle school/High school years

All throughout my late middle/high school years my step-father would have violent outbursts. I was the scapegoat, and I was told that often—it was not a secret at all. Almost every weekend my step-father would get extremely drunk and pick fights with me. Most of the time they were about the most mundane details, my hair being dyed a fantasy color, or criticizing the amount of time I spent on the internet. From that kindling, he would start a fire. Screaming so loud he spit in my face, throwing household objects at me, blaming me for all the family's problems. One time when he did this, I got really scared and called my grandparents and let them listen in. When he found out, he took all the phones in the house and threw them into the lake on our property. I think he wanted to tear me down, but really I just used my hate for him (and it was pure hate) to fuel my own success. All I wanted was to do great in school so I could get into college and get the hell out of there.

Ironically, before going NC with my mom, she would tell me how he shared with his friends how proud he was of me, as if he had anything to do with my success. It makes my stomach turn. This is a "man" who told me to my face that my relationship with my boyfriend, now husband, would never last, but then was genuinely shocked when he wasn't invited to my wedding. He and my mother, surely, deserve each other.

- Adulthood

As I've grown up, gotten married, moved away, become successful in my career, my uBPDmom has become very hostile and hard to be around. I've noticed it gradually over the years, but there was one key moment when I knew I could no longer trust her with sensitive information and that she was not going to be a source of support for me anymore. A few years back, my husband was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. She called me to check in and I allowed myself to be vulnerable and cry/get upset. She was more supportive than she'd ever been, I thought maybe she had changed. After he was discharged from the hospital, I called her to give her an update. During the call, I had detailed how his discharge went, how he was doing and also brought up how awful the bill was. She snapped at me "WHO CARES?" in the most annoyed tone I had ever heard. I did my best to quickly end the call. From that day forward, I quit sharing personal information with her, and I began seeking support from others. It was also when I knew something was very very wrong with her. A year later, here I am, in therapy learning about BPD and currently in NC with her.

[Kwamina]

And thank you for joining the discussion oceaneyes!

There were several times throughout my life where I felt like things were "off" or "wrong" with my home life but I couldn't place why. Having my T confirm my uBPDmom's likely diagnosis gave me the knowledge I needed to go back and assess all those moments. I blamed myself for a lot of the problems in my life, including the poor relationship I have with my mother. Knowing the reason why my mother acts the way she does, and that it actually has nothing to do with me, has been empowering.

That sense of things being 'off' is something I can strongly relate to. The cliche that knowledge is power, truly applies when it comes to BPD. I am glad that you are now able to see that it had nothing to do with you and that you were not to blame. When you look at the survivor's guide to the right of this message board, where would you say you are right now? Or what areas listed there do you find yourself dealing with now?

I was also bullied, not just at school, but also at home by my emotionally and physically abusive, alcoholic step-father and emotionally abused by my mother.

I am sorry to hear that you got bullied too in school and unfortunately also by your abusive stepfather and your mother. Was anyone outside the home aware of the abuse going on in your family? You mention letting your grandparents listen in to one of your stepfather's violent outbursts, were they aware of the full extent of the abuse?

A few years back, my husband was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. She called me to check in and I allowed myself to be vulnerable and cry/get upset. She was more supportive than she'd ever been, I thought maybe she had changed. After he was discharged from the hospital, I called her to give her an update. During the call, I had detailed how his discharge went, how he was doing and also brought up how awful the bill was. She snapped at me "WHO CARES?" in the most annoyed tone I had ever heard. I did my best to quickly end the call. From that day forward, I quit sharing personal information with her, and I began seeking support from others. It was also when I knew something was very very wrong with her. A year later, here I am, in therapy learning about BPD and currently in NC with her.

MS can be quite a difficult illness to deal with, how is your husband doing now?

What your mother said there was extremely insensitive. The tone of voice you mention is also very important here. When I look at my uBPD mom and sis, it's not just what they say, but indeed also how they say things and the look in their eyes that convey a certain message.

[oceaneyes]

When you look at the survivor's guide to the right of this message board, where would you say you are right now? Or what areas listed there do you find yourself dealing with now?

I think I resonate strongly with 11, 13 and 16.

11 & 16 - I had no idea how much my mother's behaviors had affected me and really molded how I perceive myself and others. My self-esteem is basically non-existent so building that up has been a big part of my recent therapy sessions.

13 - I never realized how much control she exerted over me. Her feelings were a consideration in every major life decision that I've made. I chose what I thought she would want me to do, rather than what I would want to do. I've started changing that already and the few small things I've done have left me feeling so empowered and freed. I can't imagine going back to how things were.

I feel like I'm living in a completely new reality where I can feel confident in my ability to make good decisions and be my own person.

You mention letting your grandparents listen in to one of your stepfather's violent outbursts, were they aware of the full extent of the abuse?

I believe they knew, they certainly heard the entire exchange up until my stepfather found the phone. I remember telling them over and over again that I wanted to live with my dad. Practically begging. My grandparents were very religious and "old school" and I think they didn't feel comfortable getting involved. The relationship she was in prior to marrying my stepfather was even worse, and I think when they compared the two, that maybe it didn't seem as serious to them? Surprisingly I don't really feel resentful or upset at them for that, but I do feel extremely resentful at my mother. She knew it was a bad situation because she always had an excuse for why we couldn't leave. Either because we needed the health insurance or because she felt she couldn't make it on her own. Living on the street would have been better.

MS can be quite a difficult illness to deal with, how is your husband doing now?

He's doing wonderfully, thanks for asking. He was diagnosed pretty early, just after his 30th birthday. His initial flareup was terrible, he lost complete control of his entire right side and had to go through 6 months of physical therapy. He was a gym rat before being diagnosed and after a lot of work on his part, he's back to doing everything he did before and then some. At his last MRI his largest lesion had actually healed which is pretty unheard of. He's my hero.

I know exactly what you mean when you talk about the look in their eyes, I've heard some other people call it "shark eyes." The last time I spoke face to face with my mother she had that look, like she was looking through me and I could almost see the storm clouds. The rage she spewed at me after that was what led me to seek therapy.

Thanks for listening, it's pretty therapeutic to write things out. Participating in this board has been a really huge part of my healing process, just knowing that I'm not alone is such a comfort.

[Kwamina]

it's pretty therapeutic to write things out. Participating in this board has been a really huge part of my healing process, just knowing that I'm not alone is such a comfort.

Same here!

I find looking back at these key moments difficult because they had such a huge impact on me and my life. I've been thinking about the article we have here about reality acceptance skills. In it the concept of willingness vs. willfulness is discussed. The following definitions are given:

So what's willingness? Willingness is the realization that you are part of  and connected to some cosmic process. Not only that, but it's a commitment to active participation in that process.

... .

Willfulness is the opposite of willingness.  If willingness is realizing that you are a part of and connected to life, willfulness is when you forget life. It's when you deny it. It's when you refuse to be a part of it. When you want to sit on the sidelines.  Or, you try to ignore it. Or you try to destroy it.

I've come to realize that approaching life with willingness is indeed very important if we want to move on with our lives. I've also come to realize that during my childhood my connection to life itself, my connection to the universe or that 'cosmic process', was severed. As a result I was approaching life with willfulness, not really feeling connected to anyone or anything. Now as I try to re-connect I experience everything more intensely. In my initial post I talked about experiencing the pain of healing. I find this pain sometimes overwhelming, but I am trying to feel my way through the pain. It's like uncovering more and more layers of denial. Not a rational denial now but more an emotional denial of the pain I feel. Staying in the denial would allow me to not deal with those feelings but would also mean not healing and not dealing with reality as it is. The more pain we feel, the less pain we suffer and radical acceptance (in this case of the past and all its consequences) has the potential to transform unendurable suffering into manageable pain.

[Kwamina]

Hi again bethanny,

Your epiphany about your mother and your sister must have been so painful and yet freeing at the same time. Sounds like the first step in the 12 step program.  Grasping the unmanageability of our lives and the people's lives around us and a spiritual surrender.  The serenity prayer talks about the need for accepting what we cannot change and the courage to change what we can.

It was painful indeed but also very freeing. It felt like I was knocked out of denial-mode and into reality. As painful as the experience was, it really was the catalyst for me to start looking for information about what was going on with them. It took me a while, but about 1.5 years after this incident I learned about BPD and personality disorders. I had heard of the term 'personality disorders' before but until then didn't really know what they were. It was a surreal experience reading an article about BPD and how BPD parents affect their children. It was like the author knew me and my family without ever having talked to any of us. Also a great sense of vaildation to find that I was right that the way my mother treated me was wrong and hurtful.

I had a sensitive therapist whom I ran to during a violent interchange between my parents when I was living with them and I kept declaring to my therapist, "What is my mother going to do?"  The therapist kept repeating, "What are YOU going to do."  She also said something about my mother being clearly dysfunctional.  I was dismayed to have her put the focus on me at all, since I had been raised to NEVER do that, and to caretake my mother's needs over everyone else's, and hers and everyone else's over my own.

This is an important point your therapist raised here. We can't change anybody else but what we can do is change our own behavior. I love the serenity prayer

Exhaling deeply seemed a treasonous activity in relation to the hypervigilance demanded from me to pick up cues from my mother ... .or else!  Not fully breathing is a way to numb out and stay ungrounded in your own body and mind.

This is very interesting bethanny! I never looked at the hypervigilance like that. I was always on high alert to detect a possible 'Turn' or otherwise unpleasant behavior from my mother. But you're right that another reason children of BPD parents are hypervigilant is that we unfortunately are often expected by our parents to sense what's going on with them and cater to their needs to the total exclusion of our own.

Learning about co-dependency all those years in the 12 step rooms helped me begin to deal with this in myself as an adult.  That hardwiring is tough to turn around.  Hypervigilance needed to monitor that slippery slope for ourselves.  When you have been rewarded and threatened to be REACTIVE, becoming proactive is tough.

Very well put! It's though indeed but I do believe it's possible to undo at least some of that hardwiring and start to 'reprogram' ourselves.

And you talk about those significant stages of development that get arrested by a dysfunctional parent who wants to prevent abandonment and loss of caretaking from us as we grow, it begins so early.  

Arrested development also makes me think of something Pete Walker says in his work about PTSD and emotional flashbacks: Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we were in childhood..

I often do feel as if a part of me is frozen in time. The key moments I talk about felt like breaking points.

They say saying no is the cornerstone of identity. We start that in the terrible twos.  But I remember at age three I have shared and been traumatized into not ever naturally and spontaneously expressing negative feelings to my mother.  My mother packing my bags literally to abandon and reject me for daring to emotionally express anger at her.  Talk about early trauma and playing hardball -- life and death threatening --  with a child's tender psyche.

That's a horrible experience. You were just three years old and your mother actually packed your bags threatening to throw you out

I was raised to be a ROLE not a person.  Or maybe raised to be "roles" which was all the more crazymaking, since depending on the ego state and needs of my mother, primarily, and even the ever oncoming needs of others.

I had to fulfill various roles at various times according to her emotional clock and not my own. No wonder my identity got confused and I felt unstable and ungrounded.  Existential insecurity.  

"Be the child because I need to control you as parent.  Be the parent because I am a needy and hysterical child.  Be a success out in the world.  Be someone who never leaves my side.  Be accommodating to people.  :)on't let people walk all over you.  :)on't think or feel any way that I wouldn't.  Be the perfect me that even I can't be."

I can really relate to what you say here about being required to be a role or multiple roles instead of a person. My mother treated my youngest sister as the all-bad child and my oldest sister as the all-good child. She was engaging in that mind-boggling splitting behavior. After both my sisters moved out, life became extremely confusing for me as my mother started splitting me. One moment I was treated as an angelic being and the next I was completely demonized. This was very confusing and hurtful because nothing in my behavior had changed. It's obvious that the demonizing was hurtful but the idealizing also felt very uncomfortable because it was too extreme. Plus it was also very uncomfortable because I knew it wasn't real and she could go to the total opposite extreme any moment just like that. In a way you could say that the moments my mother was in a mellow mood caused the most anxiety because I knew it wasn't real and wouldn't last for long.

[bethanny]

Kwamina,

Thanks for coming back and addressing my comment!

So much I relate to when you share and that is so validating to me after decades of my stifling even from myself the gravity of the levels of stress I was enduring and not addressing and relieving. 

I put so much effort into trying to understand what had happened to me and my family after my NC which I didn't know I was choosing to do, except my mother had zero tolerance for ANY communication over what seemed a relatively modest defense of a choice of will -- putting my needs over hers -- and she busily went about dramatically poisoning my reputation among my family support system. Out of respect for her image I would not bring it up assuming it would be resolved privately.  She resorted to peer pressure fueled by her to control me.  I feared her then but I had underestimated on a conscious level the degree she was willing to go for complete authority over my will.  I think I had been fighting that recognition in my subconscious.

The learning I acquired re the framework of the toxicity of family alcoholism was a huge breakthrough from my fog of denial but I was still overwhelmed and lost to the fog of my mother's BPD contribution and in fact blaming my father's addiction and the pity for my mother it inspired made me more vulnerable to exploitation and control of my mother and her merciless disorder. I also now see it as exacerbating my father's condition.

It is still heartbreaking for me to generalize about my mother on this website, let alone in my own mind, and apply the judgment of such a high degree of narcissism to my mother. She has passed on which adds to my guilt at judging her so unsympathetically (and I know she was suffering inner horrors to make her so brittle and irrational at times).  And yet I know that even for the "nice mommy" moments I walked that tightrope carefully not to bring out the witch mode flip from the seemingly "benign" mother -- who was clearly a conditionally benign DICTATOR. That dictator was coming from I believe what Eric Berne calls the "pig parent" -- a primitive child ego state that was posturing as a parent but lacked any sense of humane ability to respond and seriously nurture.

My mother could not offer real unconditional love. And she was only capable of being impacted by a sense of affinity and satisfaction in having her will served. How tragic for herself and others she could not honor and enjoy real love.

Thank you for your empathy re that as Dr. Phil calls them "defining moments" -- that defining moment when my mother packed my bag after my three-year old self said I hated her.  She turned to ice and refused to look at me and moved methodically to the bedroom I shared with my grandmother and began coldly removing my clothes from the dresser.  I had to discern what she was doing and it horrified me.  I also wondered if my father, grandmother, great aunt and brother who shared the house with us would let her.  My mother was totally convincing that her will ruled the world. That memory is so clear in my mind.  That horror.  I see her doing that today.  Her slow and deliberate and cold movements, her hard face and eyes refusing to look over at me.

The lesson was it was a matter of my life and death to NEVER upset my mother.  She was prepared to shove her daughter at the age of 3 out into the cold city night.  I remember asking myself ":)oesn't she know I am too little to take care of myself?"

The added horror to this, Kwamina, was that I brought up this memory years later and my family found it hilarious and convinced me it was not only funny but terribly strategic and smart of my mother.  They called it the time my mother used psychology on me.  "Used psychology"?  Let's call it using first degree TRAUMA!

The idealization and then demonization roller coaster of identity-manipulation by the borderline parent leaves a child and this carried into adulthood with a fluctuating and unstable sense of self.  Also a mandate to please people and then be entrapped in over-commitment to others and the unreasonable and ongoing sacrifice of one's own needs with an eventual meltdown or burnout and guaranteed disappointment of the receivers of one's energy and attention and projected anger at them by us as people pleasers recognizing our self-destruction and triggering stress to relationships that deserve more mutually defined contracts but are often doomed by our conditioned patterns to over-accommodate.

Kwamina you give me chills when you talk about your mother's mellowness as bringing the worst high anxiety periods for you. That is true. The mandate of perfectionism dooms one, the other shoe is bound to drop of our human-ness, whether us lapsing into what our pbd parent vilifies as "selfishness" or simply not second-guessing what the agenda was or needy feeling and thinking our BPD parent had been expecting us remedying them from. 

My BPD mother did not even issue instructions.  Like her coldly packing my clothes when I was three. No verbal communication, no effort to reason or appeal, the ax just falls fiercely without any hesitation that with the "emotional reasoning" of the BPD, if she feels discomforted, irrational feelings masquerading as "parental responsibility" lowers the boom.  You are wrong. Wrong for focusing on yourself. Or simply wrong for knowing what you couldn't possibly know telepathically, what needs and wants unspoken existed in her mind and heart.

Thanks again! 

To be continued.

best, Bethanny

[Kwamina]

I titled this thread key moments. One of the main reasons I still struggle with these events is that they really altered the course of my life and significantly affected me. They changed me. Even when you are an adult and have studied this disorder and have acquired new skills and tools, it can still be quite challenging dealing with people with BPD. Dealing with a 'Witch' attack and all the other types of extreme BPD-behavior is difficult enough as an adult with all this knowledge about BPD, but when you are a child you are totally unprepared for it. It was way more than I could handle.

These key moments are for me strongly linked to the concept of 'reality acceptance'. In some ways I find it easier to accept that my family-members are uBPD in the present because now that I'm an adult I have learned new ways of dealing with them. What I find a lot harder to accept is how this has affected me growing up, when I was a child and a young adult who didn't know about BPD and didn't possess all the skills and coping strategies required for dealing with the BPD chaos.

Reality acceptance in this case also means accepting the past reality and most importantly the immutability of that past reality. And also accepting the effects all this has had on me. This acceptance goes hand in hand with the letting go of all the different courses my life would have taken before this point if these key moments hadn't been part of my life.

It's an interesting (for lack of a better word) journey because to be able to truly start a 'new' life I have to first accept the harsh reality of my past life and how it affected me and also let go of the 'fantasy' life I might have longed for, might have planned even, yet never had. Opening yourself to new life and new opportunities requires letting go of the old life and the old fantasy.

[GreenGlit]

Thank you for starting this thread... .it's so enlightening and comforting to hear the thoughts of people who have experienced similar things. It's too easy to feel alone when dealing with people who live at such extremes of normal human behavior that it is basically impossible to make people from normal families grasp the difficulties of a life with a BPD parent or sibling.

Kwamina... .you said something that really resonated with me

"I've come to realize that approaching life with willingness is indeed very important if we want to move on with our lives. I've also come to realize that during my childhood my connection to life itself, my connection to the universe or that 'cosmic process', was severed. As a result I was approaching life with willfulness, not really feeling connected to anyone or anything. Now as I try to re-connect I experience everything more intensely."

I know that feeling of disconnection with everything. All the family drama surrounding my wedding has given me more perspective on that feeling than ever before. I can't describe it better than looking in through a one-way mirror and seeing the small and limited world of my mom. For most of my life I lived in that room - smothered and ignorant about the world around me that my mother so desperately kept me from. I felt like something was missing, but I never knew what it was. But now that I'm out here, REALLY out here, I look in and see her in this small dark world that is so limited and unhappy. I want so desperately to reach in and pull her out, but she can't fit into this world. She can't function like the rest of us, follow the same rules, and behave like a normal adult. Moreover she is infinitely angry that I made the choice to live with everyone else, because I left her alone in that dark room. I abandoned her, and am damned for it in her eyes, even though she chooses to live in the dark room.

Once I was out, I could let myself FEEL again. I unburdened myself from responsibility of pleasing my mother at every moment. I unburdened myself from the guilt that plagued her life... .because it just isn't my fault. I can be sad and happy and whatever and don't have to worry about how my mom will feel about it.

Key moments. For me this happened early my freshman year in college. My mother had enough insight to give us the choice of whatever school we wanted to attend, so I chose a small university several states north, conveniently out of physical reach for my uBPD mom. Nonetheless she found a way to keep me on that tight leash.

We talked daily. We HAD to talk daily. I would initiate the calls because otherwise she would be angry I wouldn't call her all day. How inconsiderate of me -- my mother pays for my school and gives me everything, and in exchange she just wants a phone call to know that I'm ok. Seems like a more than fair trade, right? If I didn't return a call within 10 minutes, I would get another call or text until I did. It was truly torture. I clutched my phone in my hand wherever I went, during class, at parties... .out of fear of missing her call and suffering the consequences.

One day I had a very special date with a super cute boy named S. He had asked me to be his date to Homecoming. It was my first date ever, and my first date to a social function (my mom kept me home every weekend in high school so I didn't really have many friends, much less went on dates). I had a beautiful sky blue cocktail dress with gold speckles. I put on my favorite pink lipstick. I felt wonderful. We went to his fraternity and had a few drinks and danced. I was so happy that I didn't even look at my phone for 3 hours. The next time I did... .I had 45 missed calls (I remember the number distinctly). 45 new voicemails. I had a few missed calls from a local number I didn't recognize. My heart just sunk.

When I went back to my dorm room, everyone was in the halls whispering to each other, and when they caught glimpse of me, everything went quiet. There was a security guard in my room, which he had unlocked, and he was looking around at my things. I was mortified that I had left a bra on my bed which was now visible to any passer-by. He asked me where I had been. I said I was at a party. Your mother called us that you were missing, he said. She's terribly worried, he said. He left me in the hallway, surrounded by my classmates talking about "that girl who got her room search by campus security."

It was horrible... .but according to my mom, my fault. I should have answered the phone. I should be considerate of my poor worried mother who loves me more than anybody. I should be less of the selfish brat that I was and think about other people for a change. She threatened to stop paying tuition and put me in my hometown state school. I felt like I was in a prison. But worse, because I got to look around and see other people being happy, becoming adults, finding themselves... .and I was trapped.

This continued well into medical school, until one day last year she threatened, again, to stop paying tuition. We were arguing because I told her I was going camping and wouldn't have cell service for 12 hours, and she couldn't handle it. Her constant leverage was the fact that she was helping me financially. I was sick of it, and  was much more empowered than I was in college. I said, "Fine mom, nobody asked you to pay tuition. I thought you were doing it because you wanted to help me. But you don't get to use it as leverage for me to do everything you want. If you don't want to help me, I can easily get loans tomorrow and finish school without you, just like all my other classmates. Shall I do that? Let me know." She shut up after that. But the damage was done.

[Kwamina]

Hi Greenlit,

Thanks for your response

I can't describe it better than looking in through a one-way mirror and seeing the small and limited world of my mom. For most of my life I lived in that room - smothered and ignorant about the world around me that my mother so desperately kept me from. I felt like something was missing, but I never knew what it was. But now that I'm out here, REALLY out here, I look in and see her in this small dark world that is so limited and unhappy. I want so desperately to reach in and pull her out, but she can't fit into this world. She can't function like the rest of us, follow the same rules, and behave like a normal adult. Moreover she is infinitely angry that I made the choice to live with everyone else, because I left her alone in that dark room. I abandoned her, and am damned for it in her eyes, even though she chooses to live in the dark room.

Very well put This pretty much sums up what it's like growing up in an isolated BPD environment. We might not like how things are, but it's still all we know and are used to. Only after leaving this environment is it truly possible to see just how dysfunctional our family dynamics were/are. It's indeed her choice to remain in that dark room. No matter what she says or does, you aren't responsible for her happiness, nor her misery.

That incident with your mother reporting you as missing while you were in college was horrible. It sounds like your mother was extremely controlling and used the telephone as a 'leash'. We actually have a workshop here about this exact same subject that you might find interesting:

COMMUNICATION: Handling inappropriate phone calls