How do you help someone who won’t help themselves? I know self-sabotage is a characteristic of the illness, but it’s so difficult to watch my child struggle.
Hello and welcome to the family. I'm so sorry we're meeting under these circumstances and I went through the same ordeal with my 26 year old BPD daughter. Things were at their worst between 16-20 and it sounds like your kid is right there in that range.
For your direct question- how do we help someone who won't help themselves? I think you already know the answer since you're asking an illogical question. It's the same as, "How do I turn iron into gold?" or "How do I convince a ravaging lion to be my friend?"
The answer to all three of those questions is, "You don't."
Your daughter processes thoughts differently from most people and sometimes, her way of thinking can lead her astray. Something seemingly small can feel like a world-changing event to your child and your actual question is, "How do I stop making her think like that?" Because that's the whole problem here, the root of everything. It's disordered thinking.
Only, we can't convince anyone of anything if they're not willing to listen.
In other words, the only person who can help your daughter is your daughter. You can't save her, and neither can the best physicians and psychiatrists in the world. If your kid doesn't want the help and isn't willing to actually work through the process of self-discovery, then there isn't a thing in this world (other than God) that can change her thinking. She has to want it and has to be willing to work for it.
So what do you do? As a parent, I know this feeling of helplessness all too well. A fantastic psychiatrist could not save my kid when her entire world was crumbling at 18. But he also focused on my ex-wife and I to explain how we could make an actual difference in helping my daughter. And the advice seemed so "out there" we couldn't even hear it at first, but it's ultimately what saved my daughter. I'll share that with you now.
The doctor simply said that we were trying to work so much harder than our kid to improve her health, and what we were trying to accomplish was impossible. By trying to do the work ourselves, all we were doing was enabling our kid to blame everything on us, and our efforts were only making things worse.
Then he added that we had one job as parents- to teach right from wrong, and to punish accordingly. If our kid did something stupid, then punish her. If she rebelled and made our lives hell (which was a given), then kick her out. If she was ungrateful and demanding, then stop helping her financially.
The only trick was, every time we made one of these steps, to let our daughter know that it wasn't our wishes to cut her off....we were respecting her wishes to remain toxic. If she was kind, we were kind. If she was mean, we walked away, all in a very predictable pattern. We made it very well known that each of our decisions was based on her decisions...she was the one choosing everything that happened through her behavior.
Long story short, we kicked our kid out at 19, and she was homeless for almost a year. She bounced from couch to couch, only to be kicked out for her toxic behavior, until she literally had nowhere left to go. We invited her home if she chose to be civil...the door was always open...and she refused. She ended up in a halfway house instead with drug addicts and criminals.
As much as it hurt, we let her choose her own path because she was in control. She had to see the world through her own eyes to actually appreciate having a family that loved her.
At 22, my kid finally found rock bottom and asked me to take her to a mental health treatment center. I gladly helped. She was in-house for a few weeks and then attended daily therapy sessions for around six months. From there, she worked one on one with a counselor for another year.
Now, this was all the same stuff she rejected from 16 to 22. It was nothing new and she had most of it memorized already. But this time around she was actually letting it sink in and applying it to her life. She finally made the correct choice.
At 26, my kid is far from perfect, but we have a very healthy, normal relationship. She has bad days at times and every now and then, she has a bad week. But at the same time, she calls mom or dad to discuss it productively. There's no more anger or blame coming our way, and she genuinely appreciates all we do for her.
I know that is an impossible lesson to take in because I once sat where you are today. I thought I was doing the right thing by trying to put in all the work. But with mental illness, we're only making things worse and fueling the fire, so to speak. We literally have a better chance of turning iron into gold or calming a raging lion than we do saving someone from mental health.
I hope that helps!
