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CC43
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« Reply #2 on: February 14, 2026, 10:50:46 AM » |
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Hi MM,
You've come to the right place. Please feel free to share if you're comfortable. Even if you're not comfortable, my guess is that if you spend some time reading through the posts of parents on these boards, some themes will resonate.
I can relate to your situation as I have an adult stepdaughter with BPD, and my husband and I don't always see eye-to-eye on what to do. His role has mainly been one of provider and fixer, and he has operated in a FOG of fear, obligation and guilt for years now. Because of this, the household has been incredibly tense sometimes, and my husband has had a tendency to take out his frustrations on me. His daughter seems to cycle back and forth between loving him and hating him, but honestly I think she hates him 99% of the time. Nevertheless she maintains contact, seemingly only when she wants something, namely money, housing, insurance, co-signing and logistical support, such as moving her in and out of various living situations. I see a cycle of enablement, but by the same token, she has turned her life around with therapy, and her life looks relatively healthy now, ruptured relationships notwithstanding.
Right now my BPD stepdaughter is estranged from her entire family. That's sad, but by the same token, she has operated independently from her dad and me for the last few months. I'm wondering if she has finally carved out an adult's life for herself. But I know not to get my hopes up, because experience has taught me that BPD is fraught with periods of instability and self-destruction. I try to stay cool, level-headed and also loving (as much as possible), hoping for the best but bracing for the worst. I suspect it's only a matter of time until she runs out of the money her dad had given her, including the proceeds from the sale of the car she was given. But for now, I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt.
It would help to know whether or not your son is living with you. In my experience, the absolute worst scenario is for you to enable him to be NEETT--short for Not in Education, Employment, Training or Therapy, while he's treating you like crap. That set-up is basically rewarding him for being dysfunctional, and it's not sustainable unless you're loaded and can tolerate his abuse indefinitely. My biggest issue with my husband has been allowing his adult daughter to live in our home, on and off for years, while NEETT and not helping out one bit. What happens when a person has no purpose or responsibilities and does nothing except ruminate about negative thoughts? Eventually they feel like nothing, alienated from the world. In my stepdaughter's case, that invariably led to feelings of hatred, depression and emptiness, passive-aggressive behaviors and outright hostility. Daily marijuana use of the self-medicating kind only worsened her problems by an order of magnitude.
Meanwhile she adopted a victim mindset and blamed her family and former friends for all her woes, eventually accusing them of being "toxic," "bullies" and "abusive." Her life became a dismal trail of fractured relationships (not just one or two, but many), which was ironic because I think she craved closeness and belonging more than anything. She lashed out, broke down, teetered on the brink of despair. Fearing for her very life, her dad bent over backwards to "save" her, basically by giving in to all her demands, while implicitly accepting blame. And so the cycle of enablement continued. But she had become an emotional terrorist, because in her world, the incentives were all mixed up. The worse she acted, the more money and concessions she got. She made adult-level decisions, but her dad shielded her from facing the natural consequences of those decisions, in the name of protecting her and keeping her alive. Sound familiar?
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