How do I help support and motivate my daughter with BPD?

[TheMightyWren]

Hello everyone.

Reaching out to a community for help in relation to my daughter is new for me. We have seen many professionals and the like, but in my area there is not a lot of peer support. My daughter has been diagnosed with BPD. She is 17 years old. She also suffers from an eating disorder. We have been struggling with her emotional volatility since she was 4 years old. When she became a teen, things escalated rapidly. Her moods are all over the place, and my husband and I constantly feel like we are walking on eggshells because we don't know what will set her off next. At times she is physically violent with us. She has always had a difficult time self-regulating. When her emotional outbursts start, she will escalate for hours. If I try to remove myself from her verbal abuse, she will pound on my door and scream at me for literally three hours straight. We try to help her regulate, but she always refuses. Self-harming seems to be her go to for a release. She cuts and she bangs her head off of the walls. She often threatens to kill herself if we don't give her what she wants. She also threatens her boyfriend with suicide. My husband and I are at a loss as to how to help her. We try to keep her safe, but at the same time it feels like we are being held prisoner.

Recently, she has had no motivation to do anything. She dropped out of high school. She is supposed to be getting her GED, but is making no progress toward that goal. My husband and I have tried to support and encourage her, but we are usually met with a fight. It has come to the point where we have had to set down some boundaries. We have told her that if she is working toward a goal and being a supportive member of our household, that she can continue to live her after she turns 18 in a few months. However, if she is not abiding by our boundaries then she will need to move out when she turns 18. At times I feel good about our boundaries, and at other times I feel like gut wrenching guilt. It almost seems like she is incapable of learning how to care for herself and that she is intent to light everything on fire around her. I am watching my daughter go down a terrible, scary, hard path and there is no way of knowing how it is going to turn out. As a mother it ruins me to see her in so much pain and to see how much of a struggle it is for her. It is the scariest thing in the world to not know if your child is going to be okay. I don't know what to do anymore. I feel very alone.

What are some strategies you all have employed with your children? I know every child is different and every case of BPD is different, but I am willing to try anything at this point. How do you deal with the overwhelming emotions and exhaustion that come with loving someone suffering from this illness?

Thank you for your time and for listening.

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

[Pook075]

Hello and welcome to the family!  I cringed a bit reading your story because you could have written it about my BPD daughter, that's now 26.  All the same timelines though, the same abusive tendencies, the same rebellion and punishing us for punishing her.  My kid even got expelled her senior year for bringing a knife to school, and I begged and pleaded to get her into online school for a regular diploma. 

She did nothing for months and then completed all the course-work three days before graduation with the help of her mom, grandmother, little sister, etc.

It's exactly the same story, with all the same violence and abusive behavior.

So I'll tell you what the best psychiatrist I've ever met told me.  You're responsible for you.  Your daughter is responsible for her.  You can't make your daughter do anything, so stop fighting with her...over everything.  She will get help when she's ready to get help and nobody can convince her of that.  She is 100% responsible for her own life and must live with the consequences.

As mom, your job is to ensure she lives with every consequence, because that teaches her right from wrong.  In her mind, this is all your fault...and all dad's fault...because her life is upside down and full of chaos.  The goal is to make her realize that she's creating the chaos BUT you can't tell her that, she has to see it for herself. 

So you enforce super-strict boundaries and make it known- mom is always here for you, but if you begin to yell, mom is walking away.  If you pound on my door and decide to not respect my boundaries, mom is hopping in the car and going to enjoy a milkshake in a fast food parking lot until she calms down.  If you threaten self harm, mom is dialing 9-1-1 and having an ambulance take you off for a mandatory psych evaluation.

These are your boundaries based on her choices...meaning they only come into play when she steps over a line that causes you harm.  And Its okay to say that you don't want to do any of these things, that you love her and want her at home, but it's not up to you at all...she has to make the decisions to respect your boundaries or reject them.

And if she rejects them, no problem...she can go live her best life somewhere else in a few months.  You love her enough to respect her opinions.  But she has to see that she's the one making the choices, not you.  Everything you do is in reaction to how she treats you, and it's all very predictable.

Now let's look at the other side of the coin, and this is what helped my relationship with my daughter more than anything.

When she was disordered, she would say the most God-awful things, threaten who knows what, and lash out at me with so much anger.  I learned to completely ignore almost 100% of what she said and focused solely on calming her down.

If she was angry, I grabbed her arms and spoke barely above a whisper.  "Hey, what's going on?  Talk to me about it?  Why are you so upset?  I'm here, just talk to me..."  And to my amazement, her anger would fade.  She would still rant on about what someone said or did,  how something wasn't fair, etc.  But I was still ignoring words because she wasn't completely calm yet, she wasn't thinking rationally and it wasn't time for a conversation. 

The only goal in that moment is to calm her down, to make her feel loved and in a safe place.  Nothing said actually mattered, it was only how it was said.  Picture talking to an upset infant, that's how I'd talk to my kid because my emotions played a much bigger part than my words.

Why does this happen?  When a BPD is off-kilter, they rely almost solely on emotion- the logic part of their brain disengages and they FEEL everything much more than the average person.  Sometimes it's great for them; a good day is amazing, the best day ever!  But it also works against them as well and your job is to help her get those emotions under control.

Once she's calm and speaking rationally, the logic part of her brain is functioning like normal.  Now would be the time to talk out what happened, why you said/did something earlier, etc.  You never talk about disordered stuff when she's disordered though; you might as well be talking to your neighbor's cat since it means absolutely nothing.

As situations arise where your kid goes nuclear and you calm her down, everything about the relationship begins to change.  Instead of being seen as the enemy, you become an ally and those blow-outs happen less frequently.  And even when they do happen, the intensity is much lower. 

Your kid just wants validation and someone to say that everything is okay, and they seek that in the worst possible way known to mankind.  That's BPD in a nutshell, and now you know how to "fight back."  You do so with love, compassion, and patience, your three most reliable weapons.

[Sammy Jo]

I agree with everything Pook075 said. It's all true.

When my BPD DD was 17 we had the same situation—holes in the wall, holes in the doors, broken window, and broken hearts. I don't know if it will work for you, but I often got in my car and go to a friend's house or walk to a neighbor's house. Get away and hope the situation diffuses. Or as Pook said, the method os simply hugging her and trying to calm her sometimes works. There were also times when I had to threaten to turn her phone off, and many times I did, to get her to calm down. Just called AT&T, and they will turn it off and back on when you call them. We had DD hospitalized twice in her early teens, and then at the beginning of her senior year, we found an absolutely fantastic place called Mercy Ministries. They are life-changing. Our only problem was that we pulled DD out too early (after 5 months) because we wanted her to graduate from high school.

Her transformation lasted about six months and then reverted back to normal. I honestly believed we would have seen lasting results if we had left her there a year or longer.

As anyone on this site will tell you, you cannot calm her down unless you are calm. Her rages will inflame your entire household, which is so sad. I know what it's like to lock yourself in the room and have her banging on it. That's why I recommend leaving the house. Then take her car keys with you so she can't drive anywhere.

Good luck and take care of yourself.