Help for My Kids from BPD Mom

[BPD2016]

This message was originally posted on another messed board but someone suggested I repost it here as well.  I am new to the BPD Family website.

Reading through these posts it's comforting to know many of my wife's behaviors are common among BPDs.  From projection, to waking me up in the middle of the night, to warping memories.  I've made a lot of progress during the past 12 months in setting boundaries but still have a long way to go to the point where I would say we have a healthy, or even tolerable marriage for the long haul. 

My last therapist gave me the business card of a family law attorney with experience dealing with high conflict BPD divorces.  I have found a new therapist.  I plan to ask him to help me develop the skill I need to maintain my own mental health, continue setting boundaries, and validate my wife.

My biggest concern, and frankly the issue that scares me more than anything else in life, is helping my three sons.  They are in elementary school age and overall great kids.  I'm worried because they are emotionally very sensitive.  I'm afraid they, too, may develop BPD if I don't get them the emotional support and love they need.  Also, my wife once told me that her grandfather was a dry drunk, and her mother had some kind of personality disorder (probably BPD).  So my wife is likely the third generation of BPD in her family.  I'm terrified that my kids might grow up to have it as well. 

Can anyone recommend resources (articles, books,  websites) for how to counsel and support the children of BPD so they don't grow up with this disorder? 

[Notwendy]

I am a middle age daughter of a BPD mother, and if I related all my experience it would take a larger book than War and Peace. So, at the risk of being too brief, I will try to summarize this.

Children learn a lot by example, so what you do may have a greater impact than what you say or other professionals. While getting counseling can be an important help, they see you 24/7 and you are their biggest role model.

You getting help and support for you and modeling emotionally healthy behavior is probably the best way to help them learn what is emotionally healthy behavior. Since you are in a relationship with someone with BPD, neither of you may have had this modeled for you in your own families.

So, the good news first, then the bad news.

Your children may not be destined to have BPD.

Now the bad news: one does not have to have BPD to learn dysfunctional relationship behaviors and being raised in a dysfunctional household has intergenerational affects, as you have seen. Your kids will be inevitably affected by this.

More good news though- you have the opportunity to make an impact on this cycle, by not perpetuating it- by understanding your role in this pattern. Getting help and counseling for you may not only help your kids but make a change in this pattern for generations to come.

To do this, you have to take the focus off your wife and on to you. Behaviors on your part such as codependency and enabling are not good for you, or your kids.

Growing up, I saw my father as the victim of my BPD mother. I also saw her as the one with the problem and my father as the "normal one". I do not have BPD. People thought I had no effects of this as I did well in school, attained a respectable job, married, raised children. Having two choices of role models, I did not want to be like my mother, and I admired my father. Only when I was an adult did I realize that he didn't role model "normal" to me when I had to deal with my own co-dependency and enabling behaviors.

Although none of us kids have BPD, we still encountered the emotional impact of being raised in such a family. However, we are not children now, It is now our job to work on these issues ourselves. Perhaps the best way to help your kids is to look in the mirror, get help yourself, and so model for them how to do this too.