I want courage and strength to care for myself too

[JsMom]

Hi, My son turned 45 yesterday.- this has been a long painful road and I have been trying to do, say, buy, help, sacrifice, love .... my adult son to a better place emotionally.  I'm tired and my anxiety is over the top. I'm scared to set limits, I'm scared of how far he'll fall, scared of his raging at me. Feeling guilty that I've failed him. Sometimes I feel manipulated but I'm not sure. I've been in a spin cycle and a part of me really wants off. As far as I know my son hasn't been officially diagnosed with bpd but he fits many of the criteria. He is in intense pain and talks suicide more than I want to hear. He's seen therapists off and on over the years. He spent 2 weeks in a facility after a suicide threat after a divorce.  He blames me for that stay. He says he was fine. Anyway, thank you all for being here. I'm sorry you've lived this. I don't burden sisters and other family talking about this. I think it's too much for people. It feels too much for me too. BTW, he isn't in treatment,  I've recently started therapy. Thank you

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

[Sancho]

Hi JsMom and welcome.
You sure have been on a long road, and all the things you mention do tick the BPD box. Here we are very experienced in living with the chaos, blame and exhaustion from trying to support a loved child with BPD.

It is such a serious, complex illness. I am very lucky that I came here when my DD was a teenager – I was desperately trying to find a solution, to keep her on a track to a future – to find something that would ‘fix it’. Reading the posts of others here helped me realise that ‘fixing it’ was not always possible. I had to find myself and at the same time keep the love that I had for my DD.

There are a lot of practical skills to learn about how to interact with someone with BPD, and a lot to understand about what this illness is. In starting off though, I found help in small things such as making sure I had ‘time out’ from thinking about my DD each day – a DD free zone each day to put my mind to something else, something positive.

The anxiety can be really terrible. The mantra ‘I didn’t cause this, I can’t control it, I can’t cure it’ was my go-to help for my anxiety. It is about letting go of responsibility – a hard thing to do as a parent, especially for a child who does not seem able to take control of their own lives. This mantra was a great help for me.

If you can find the Nelson Mandela poem ‘Letting Go’ on the internet, have a read and find a couple of the sentences that touch you. I like the final one- I think it is ‘Letting Go is to fear less and love more’.

Re the blaming – as I began to understand BPD I realized I was the ‘target of blame’ – because the BPD person has such a fragile sense of self, it could destroy it if they acknowledged their own failings as part of the problem. I became relieved by telling myself over and over again 'I have done all that I can’, and ‘I did the best I could at any point in time’.  We can look back and think we should have done things differently, but that was then and we looked at options and chose the best on offer at the time.

Be kind to yourself. You have one of the hardest roads to travel, so don’t lose yourself along the way.

[JsMom]

Thank you. Your words and caring touched me deeply. So much you said resonated with me. As far as taking breaks from my obsession over my son's well being, I have a long way to go but I have started not carrying my phone with me at every moment.  I will respond more later.  Thank you again, very much