Feel deeply sad that I am never gonna get a real mom

[Terle]

I am just (again) trying to grasp how insane my mom is. I cant even.

She is a uBPD with a religious psychosis to boot. She thinks nothing of doctors, diagnosis etc, and everyone else is wrong and 'hethens'. She is the one who has it right.

The only 2 people she hasnt alienated is my younger brother and her dad who is 89.

I honestly feel like i might hate her? All the while i feel guilty fo having cut her off (im 28 and should have cut her off at like 17)... .

Anyone have advice for how to grief? Anyone experienced BPD AND a religious psychosis?

[MoreGuilt]

Yep, my uBPDm claims to have had a religious "vision".  No one in her religion has believed this vision to be true, so they of course, are all "frauds".  I wish I knew what I know now about BPD years ago, but at least I know now and can move forward from here 

[unicorn2014]

I highly recommend you look up ACA and see if there are meetings in your area. That is a program of recovery for adult children of alcoholics or dysfunctional families and I have found it instrumental in my recovery. I also found that long term therapy helped with that. I was around your age when my whole life blew apart and I got diagnosed with PTSD. There is something called a Saturn return that happens at your age. The fact that you are on this board is a good sign. I just finished reading Understanding the Borderline Mother. When you are ready I recommend checking out that book but I recommend getting some therapy under your belt first.

[EaglesJuju]

Hi Terle,

I am sorry for your grieving.     I have felt the same way too a mixture of almost hate/resentment and guilt. Somewhere in the middle of that, I mourn for the mother that I wished I could have had.  I have seen glimpses of a loving and caring mother, which makes it so hard to cut her off.

My mother has had religious psychosis phases throughout her life. She has said that she was chosen by God to avenge people. Also, she has seen the devil. She has heard voices before. Does your mother do this too and have hallucinations and delusions?

She is diagnosed with schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder and Bipolar I, which she tends to have psychotic episodes a couple of times a year. Along with all that, she fits the "witch" typology; BPD/NPD traits.

Grieving is allowing yourself to go through emotions such as anger.  Many times BPD sufferers use FOG (fear, obligation, guilt) to deter behavior or expression of feelings/emotions.  What usually happens is that you become conditioned to their reactions. You end up reverting to what works. For me it was obsequious/self-sacrificing/people-pleasing behavior when my mother raged or became volatile. I was not allowed to be angry or think of myself. Essentially I learned to suppress anger and think that anything I did for myself was selfish and horrible.  A huge thing for me was to work through feelings of anger and express them towards her. Did your mother deter you from expressing anger?

[Buck]

Terle - My mother is an alcoholic with BPD and growing up with her was very difficult, to say the least. I also struggle with accepting just how sick she really is and what it has meant for me. She and my father are very religious and we would put on our best clothes and go to church every Sunday and act like the perfect family when we were so far from that. My mother even went through a period when she believed everybody was possessed by demons and she would try to exercise them. I still have this weird mixture of anger and pity for her, and I guess I always will, but I try to protect myself from her and my father by establishing firm boundaries. If I feel like being around them is not good for me then I give myself permission to get the hell away. My advise would be to trust your instincts. 

[disillusionedandsore]

Yes, I can both sympathise and empathise.  My mother has had Jesus appear to her... .giving her messages for the rest of us (sinners/heathens etc). Over the years there has been so much insanity (delusions) around prophesies, miracle healings etc Any one who would listen to her was brow beat with it... .She was the authority on all things saint-like and holy!

We (then kids) got preached at, criticised, scare-mongered, raged at and guilt tripped all under the guise of saving our souls.

How to grieve? For me it just happened once I had the awareness of what was done to me,  what I witnessed and experienced and how I had tried so hard to make things better,  to no avail... .Counselling gave me a place to go and a space to work on identifying and labelling my feelings about my experiences with my mother.  I was taught to sit with my feelings and to turn my attention inwards.

[kirsten_2010]

I can also relate to what you are saying here, I have had similar experiences with my mom. it's really hard to deal with the difficult behavior that especially comes out when I set boundaries with her.

[Terle]

Hi Terle,

I am sorry for your grieving.     I have felt the same way too a mixture of almost hate/resentment and guilt. Somewhere in the middle of that, I mourn for the mother that I wished I could have had.  I have seen glimpses of a loving and caring mother, which makes it so hard to cut her off.

My mother has had religious psychosis phases throughout her life. She has said that she was chosen by God to avenge people. Also, she has seen the devil. She has heard voices before. Does your mother do this too and have hallucinations and delusions?

She is diagnosed with schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder and Bipolar I, which she tends to have psychotic episodes a couple of times a year. Along with all that, she fits the "witch" typology; BPD/NPD traits.

Grieving is allowing yourself to go through emotions such as anger.  Many times BPD sufferers use FOG (fear, obligation, guilt) to deter behavior or expression of feelings/emotions.  What usually happens is that you become conditioned to their reactions. You end up reverting to what works. For me it was obsequious/self-sacrificing/people-pleasing behavior when my mother raged or became volatile. I was not allowed to be angry or think of myself. Essentially I learned to suppress anger and think that anything I did for myself was selfish and horrible.  A huge thing for me was to work through feelings of anger and express them towards her. Did your mother deter you from expressing anger?

She would in the sense that she would ask me to talk more silently if i ever raised my voice, not in anger, but in confusion for example. She'd always say: be gentle with me, i am so delicate. even when we were just talking normally, she would ask me to be even more gentle. She also said i scared her, when i was a child.

As for hallucinations i dont know fully, but she claims to have had 'visions' or foresight into like when im getting married and stuff, which comes off weird seeing as i am almost always single and have never even lived with a man.

[Terle]

We (then kids) got preached at, criticised, scare-mongered, raged at and guilt tripped all under the guise of saving our souls.

How to grieve? For me it just happened once I had the awareness of what was done to me,  what I witnessed and experienced and how I had tried so hard to make things better,  to no avail... .Counselling gave me a place to go and a space to work on identifying and labelling my feelings about my experiences with my mother.  I was taught to sit with my feelings and to turn my attention inwards.

This is very much how i feel she is operating. She thinks she inspires some desire to be 'a good christian' when in reality she does anything but. All I see is concepts such as quilt, blame, fear of sex etc, and stuff like that - and then the ONLY THING that can make 'everytinh alright' is GOD. Which of course SHE knows better than other people.

Sigh... .

[Terle]

Thank you all, i feel less alone. I wil think about joining an Al-Anon group even though my mom never drank :D

[Courage2016]

Dear Terle,

Always better to have no mother than an abusive mentally sick one, remember that. You do not need that negativity etc in your life. Nothing wrong with feeling hate for your bmother, she must have created those feelings inside you herself. I can't say anything about the religious psychosis (and I think you have received quite some responds on that issue), but please mind to follow your feelings. They will not leave you alone.

Love, K.

[Terle]

Always better to have no mother than an abusive mentally sick one, remember that. You do not need that negativity etc in your life. Nothing wrong with feeling hate for your bmother, she must have created those feelings inside you herself.

This is true, ofcourse. I am thankful she left home when i was 14 and since then has only spouted abuse over the phone and on occassion. I would probably have been insane if i had to listen to her everyday from the age of 14 to 18 as well.

[HeidiLou]

I too miss the mother I should have had.  I have hoped against hope that the snippets of normality would someday become permanent.  She has also missed out on being a mother.  As I have said on another post she lost her own mother aged 6  and once said to me that she didn't have a mother so she didn't see why I should.

What parent could possibly think it is ok to say something so nasty and cruel about a child she carried that grew inside her nine for months? 

Well I guess the kind of mother who smoked 20 a day through pregnancy and at 8 months was so drunk she fell onto her bump on the pavement.

[unicorn2014]

Thank you all, i feel less alone. I wil think about joining an Al-Anon group even though my mom never drank :D

ACA is for adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. I encourage you to look them up online and see if you can find a local meeting.