Fears for my grandson

[goldinggirl]

To sum up my story so far:

My mother has npd traits, my ex-husband is fully-blown narcissistic and my daughter has BPD. These are undiagnosed by acknowledged by the therapist I have been seeing for 15 months.

My daughter had her son at 16 years old - he is now 8 months old and they both live with me.

My daughter has horrendous rages where she blames me for everything wrong in her life. Her boyfriend is a prolific weed smoker. I spend a lot of time looking after my grandson and my daughter goes out every evening and just leaves the baby with me. I am verbally abused by her - accused of favouring her brother, always thinking I am right etc etc. She has been like this for years and I have tried to protect her from herself when I realised there was something seriously wrong. I had a breakdown four years ago caused to some extent by being the scapegoat for so many people.

She refuses to accept any responsibility, has episodes where she says she is going to kill herself yet refuses to take her medication or engage with a therapist.

I am truly at a loss as to how to deal with her and I am concerned about my grandson. It does not matter how much I try to explain things she just wants to blame me. Her father has washed his hands of her. I fear I am reaching the point where I cannot take any more abuse from her but I am worried that if she leaves who will keep an eye on the baby?

Any advice would be welcome.

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[satahal]

Hi GG,

I'm somewhat new here so take my two cents with a grain of salt.

There are some excellent tools and lessons on this site that will help immediately to take some of the high tension out of your verbal interactions with your daughter. Look up SET and validation. These are easy to understand and implement.

I'm currently reading a wonderful book that gives very specific practical advice to interacting with the Bpd person in your life. It's called: Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder by Shari Y Manning and Marsha Linehan.

The first place to start is working on your communication skills - this will hopefully help you when things start to escalate. You can also set boundaries around her abusive language and behavior. Many people have seen great progress.

My daughter has BPD - she is married, without kids and lives far from me. She doesn't have the raging/abusive behaviors but I've utilized validation and SET and it's made our communication much more positive. (On a side note my partner is also BPD and he has raged a lot and been verbally abusive. I've been able to set and maintain some boundaries with him thanks to what I've learned here.)

[lbjnltx]

hi goldinggirl,

I'm glad you are here and sorry to learn about your daughter's illness and how much you are suffering.   

Her explosive behaviors are her heightened emotions talking and when you respond to her with JADE (Justify, argue, defend, explain) she doesn't feel heard, understood, or validated in her feelings which only adds to her emotional distress.  It's not your fault that she can't listen to reason and logic and there is something you can do to communicate with her in a way that she can hear you.

samanthal mentions validation and set and this is what I'm referring to as well.  Coupling beneficial communication skills with healthy boundaries for self preservation can give you back a sense of power in your own life... .something moms to BPD teens have lost.

We are here to help and support you while you take back your life and your power over it!

lbjnltx