She is not working and so has zero way to support herself. She is technically supposed to attend college in September. I want to be hopeful but with no treatment I don’t know that will work.
On paper I know all the things. I just see her ending up on the streets or dead if I try to enforce some of the boundaries that need to be put in place. It feel like an impossible situation. I am 3 weeks into a family connections program so want to learn some more of the skills before doing anything drastic. And I am working on acceptance of the fact that she is an adult and responsible for her decisions now. I am offering her all the things but she has to be willing to do the work.
Hi Mars,
I was right where you are now when my stepdaughter was 19. That seemed to be an age where she had adult freedoms and privileges, and yet she couldn't handle any adult responsibilities. She had adult-sized problems, but emotionally, she wasn't ready to handle them at all. She was bumping up against a world where she was expected to be an adult, and she failed miserably. As she see-sawed between rage and despair, she made numerous self-sabotaging decisions. She lost all her friends. Alas, she became less functional than a kindergartener. At least a kindergartener attends school, eats meals with the family, picks up toys, bathes daily and can say please and thank you. My stepdaughter wouldn't do any of those things. Worse, she'd self-medicate with marijuana, which fried her brain and sapped any motivation she might have had, as well as made her very paranoid and delusional. It was the paranoia and delusional thinking that led to suicide attempts and landed her in the hospital a few times.
OK now I know you're hoping your daughter will go to school in September. Right now it's only February. My stepdaughter would be waiting for months on end like that: expecting to go to school in the fall, but not doing anything AT ALL in the interim. She was basically on an extended vacation, stewing, waiting, hating everyone full time. You'd think she'd enjoy a vacation, but no, that's impossible with untreated BPD. On the contrary, she experienced vacation in the sense that she completely vacated her life. She gave up on everything, including herself. That manifested as refusal to work, refusal to interact with family, sleeping all day and raging. She was absolutely miserable, and she made the rest of the family miserable, too. Let me tell you, if your daughter is doing nothing for months on end while refusing therapy, she WILL NOT be able to bounce back and be successful at college, no matter what she says or promises. If she enrolls, and you pay tuition, you are setting her up to fail, and you will have wasted all that money you saved up. Because if college is intense for normal students, it's an order of magnitude more difficult for someone with untreated BPD, who self-destructs in the face of mild stress and disappointments. My advice would be not to throw away the tuition, like my husband did on his daughter, until your daughter demonstrates that she's ready. She might demonstrate readiness by getting therapy, working a part-time job and maybe taking a course or two online. Readiness might also look like respecting a normal daily routine, including getting up in the morning (consistently!), doing chores around the home, acting civilly with the family, attending therapy and volunteering. In my opinion, ideal readiness would include working part-time to earn enough money to make a meaningful contribution to tuition, say 5% or 10%, plus money for books, so that she has "skin in the game" and won't drop out so easily.
I understand how hurt you are, and how you feel you can't kick your dear daughter out of your home. My husband and I also felt that if my untreated BPD stepdaughter left the home without support, she'd soon be dead. She was clearly unwell, and she wasn't thinking straight, as she'd make all sorts of self-destructive decisions. She did experience a phase of bouncing from living situation to living situation, but invariably she'd mess up, burn her bridges and end up back at home with us. And let me tell you, she was an emotional terrorist in our home, threatening suicide or attempting suicide if she didn't get what she wanted. Worse, what she wanted was absolutely delusional--for example, she thought she'd be "discovered" as a top model, famous artist or internet influencer, but without putting in any work at all. When nobody selected her for the runway, or when nobody purchased the one painting she made, she'd self-destruct, thinking her life was over (before it even started). It was like she expected to be a quarterback at the Superbowl, rich and famous, the best amongst millions of aspiring football players, but without playing on the JV team in high school first. The female equivalent would be to dream of being Taylor Swift, but giving up after taking one singing lesson. Compounding this problem was a very tenuous, unstable sense of identity, which is a feature of BPD. I think that doing nothing didn't help one bit, because when you do nothing, you end up feeling like nothing.
Anyway, my stepdaughter had to hit bottom before she decided to commit to DBT therapy. And my husband had to give her an ultimatum: either she follow doctors' orders and participate in recommended therapies, plus take any medications as prescribed, and do everything the doctors said (including stopping marijuana!), or else she'd be on her own. The doctors also gave her an ultimatum: since they had tried to help her but she refused the recommended treatments, there was nothing else they could do for her; if she attempted suicide again, she'd be involuntarily committed. The good news is that she decided to do the recommended therapies, and she's doing much, much better now. Since she had already tried and failed living on her own, and because she had burned all her bridges, I think her choice was an easy one. One little point here: I think my stepdaughter warmed up to the notion of getting professional help, because the advice was professional, rather than "tainted" parental wisdom (note the paranoia there); and because getting therapy validated her identity of being a traumatized victim, where only professional help can work. And my husband liked this idea too, because nothing he had tried in the past to help his daughter had seemed to work.
Now, if you can't let your daughter live on her own, you can decide to enforce healthy boundaries in your home, to protect you and the rest of the family. I think that means if she's violent, you need to call 911. That might land her in a residential therapy program, which it sounds like she needs. Note that it might take more than one 911 call and one residential therapy program, because there's no quick fix to treating BPD. But it is treatable, and I've seen living proof. Moreover, I'd be more optimistic if treatment and intervention happened while your daughter is still young, so that she doesn't have to suffer needlessly for years on end, and while she can still count on you as an ally in her journey towards a healthier life. I'm no expert, but that's my opinion, after seeing my stepdaughter make a great deal of progress in a relatively short time. Yet I felt that her dysfunctional period of "waiting and hating" lasted longer than it should have.
