Hello, after my visit with my therapist today I was recommended to visit this site. I am currently diagnosed with OCD and severe depression, and my therapist believes my mother has BPD from when I describe her... .I love her, but I can't be around her all the time. I try to limit our time together because of this and she just sees this as me hating her. Anytime I'm upset it's 'her fault.' I am just so tired.
I'm not sure there is anything I can write to make you feel better just now, except your story is very similar to my own (and many others who share on this website).
It got to a point in my late teens where the whole deal was just too overwhelming and inevitably the anxiety attacks and generalised sense of dread and foreboding plunged their insidious fingers deep into my being.
The good news is that if your therapist is right (and the stories you have shared certainly fit that diagnosis) you have an excellent first step in resolving how to approach the challenge of handling a borderline mom. I'm absolutely confident that you can take full control of your life! Your troubling feelings may well be connected to surviving a childhood with a BPD mom and thereby be fixable.
Once I worked out that my mom was suffering from BPD I read the book "Surviving a Borderline Parent" by Kimberlee Roth (you can find this on Amazon in Kindle and printed copies). The contents of that book confirmed for me that I was on the right track. Reading the stories on this website showed that I was not alone! The 21-step process on the right hand side of the screen outlines an effective pathway to get things sorted out!
That said, there are some common experiences which we all share that indicate something of a reality check.
No matter if we love our mom, we still have to learn to put ourselves first in order to heal ourselves. For many that means spending time apart from their mom, whatever she may say or think.
The sad truth is that a person with BPD simply doesn't have the same e motions and feelings as a non-BPD person - everything for them is intensified. The bottom line is that it can be very hard indeed to have a trusting relationship without negative psychological and emotion impact.
When I left home, my mom went arounds telling her friends that I had stolen from her. People with BPD have very strong fear of abandonment. Similarly, she would try to undermine any relationships with my partners.
Mom plays hot and cold - nice as pie some of the time, then switches into unreasonable and emotionally manipulative mode. I have learned to see this for what it is. When manipulative there is a risk of falling under her spell and becoming enmeshed all over again and repeating a negative cycle.
The key is to recognise that the borderline mom tends to force the child into an adult role, so instead of the mom nurturing the child, the child ends up nurturing the adult. This can have a number of impacts which you can work through with your therapist and the resources on this website.
Moving out and well away from her into a situation where you have control of how much contact you want may be a crucial step. Space for you without distraction. A time for you to transcend the depression and learn to see any OC traits as simply coping mechanisms to be gently eased away. Let her go for now and tend to yourself.
Another key step is to accept she will never be a "real" mom in a "perfect" world - for many it is quite hard to accept that their own parent has anything but their own best interests at heart. I'm not saying they are necessarily bad, rather very troubled people.
Many of us have had to learned to put our interests first no matter what may be said to us or behind our backs.
Please let us know how you're getting on... .I promise that you feel much better inside yourself soon... .