Hi Everyone, this site was really helpful to me when my therapist proposed that perhaps my mom was on the BPD spectrum. After a 5-year cut-off initiated by my mother, she suddenly wants to resume contact with me.
I need to share my ambivalence and concerns with folks who understand; and would like to know any experiences that you have had with this sort of thing.
BRIEF BACKSTORY: I was clueless that all mothers didn't behave like my mother until I got married. My parents are divorced and my brother has been estranged from my mother for most of the last 30 years, so I was kind of her emotional captive. My mother's behavior became really bizarre after I married. My husband tragically became ill and died of cancer early in my marriage.
I think my mother thought that after my husband was dead that everything was going to return to "normal," i.e., that she would be numero uno in my life again. Of course, that did not happen; I continued my personal grief work and ironically that strengthened me; I set boundaries and expressed my feelings, even ones she did not like ... .hence the eventual cutoff.
For a long time I avoided extended family gatherings because of the cut-off with her; I felt ashamed, even though I had no reason to feel shame, and have struggled to work on that. I have had some understandable struggles with depression. However, I have had PEACE in my life, the most PEACEFUL TIME EVER in my WHOLE LIFE, these last five years! In hindsight I see it is life absent manipulation and drama that = peace.
I have had adventures and made a family of friends; it has been good.
Last year I took a big, positive step and I hosted one of those family gatherings I had been avoiding
! My mother attended and had nothing to do with me the whole time. That was ludicrous, and it was, ironically, such a GIFT to me. It was like the Wizard of Oz's screen collapsed, and I was looking at this small, insignificant, angry, hard, powerless little woman, and she wasn't scary anymore.
THE CURRENT SITUATION: I attended a family member's funeral last week and as I was leaving, my mother approached me and spoke with me. I was not expecting this; I just figured she'd keep icing me out. It was the typical BPD conversation that might sound perfectly normal to a bystander, but given the history and the context, and the lies she glibly spoke ... .you understand. She hasn't spoke to me in 5 years and says she wants to go to family therapy with me. She left it up to me to find someone and to call her for coffee to chat.
The thing is, I don't want to go to family therapy with her. It seems pointless, based on what I know of BPD; and based on the lies and the manipulation in that one interaction. I actually started crying in the car on the way home and sobbed my guts out for about an hour, mainly because I could feel the childhood feelings of fear and the adult feelings of complete lack of trust of her all stirred up. I have a message to my counselor to talk this over, because I've grown so much personally! -- and I don't want to go backwards just because she decided to talk to me for the first time in 5 years. I like my peaceful life, and I don't think this is just up to her.
Any thoughts, experiences that anyone can share? Any point to family therapy with a person on the BPD spectrum? Does it matter that she is in her mid 70s? It feels to me like the mom I thought I had died at least 5 years ago -- and maybe, she actually died when I got married. I mean, I look at her, and I feel this sad feeling like there's an alien from the "Men in Black" movie that is in the skin of my mother.
