Hello from a new person with a BPD Dad and sister

[LittleLucy]

Hi I am a newbie here and wanted to say hello.  I had a father with BPD and Narcististic Personality disorder and my sister who was the golden child and very enmeshed with my father also has BPD.  Following my Dad's death from cancer my BPD sister who was very stressed and grieving physically attacked me and tried to strangle me.  I was in shock at her abusive behaviour and attack for months and it caused me to have a serious episode of depression.  Since this attack I have gone no contact with my sister and gradually feel better and am trying to come to terms with my own feelings of childhood shame and invalidation from my abusive father, but I am feeling stronger and healthier for working on this, I just wish I could talk to my Mum and also my sister about the issues but my sister thinks there is nothing wrong with her behaviour and my Mum fully supports her in her views. 
I also feel guilty for not trying to enable my sister and her son to understand that she has BPD and this explains her difficult feelings and behaviours, this would be so helpful to her son, my nephew, but I am scared to get back involved with her as she is agressive and abusive to me and has no awareness of these issues in our father or in herself (and to some extent within me too).  I hope to find a good online supportive community.  Thanks, Little Lucy

[Mutt]

Hi LittleLucy, 



I'd like to welcome you to bpdfamily, I'm so sorry that you had to go through that horrible ordeal with your sister, good call with no contact. Some people pause and think and some people think that to succeed in life, you don't pause and think, you try to accomplish as many things possible. Don't be hard on yourself, you understand that your sister has no self awareness, even if she did have self awareness we don't know if she'd get help for herself. The disorder is not your fault, you can't cure, you can't fix it, you can have your feelings about it though. It sounds like you don't get much support from your mom, I'm sad to hear that, do you get support from friends in real life?

[Highlander]

Hi LittleLucy and welcome,

I can completely relate to your concerns you have for your nephew and have often felt the same pangs of guilt towards wanting to do the right thing by my nephew and niece and expose the truth to their mother (my SIL had BPD), so much so that my husband and I often raised our concerns with our therapist after recognising the intergenerational patterns that appeared in his family after my husband received a formal BPD diagnosis.

I'll try to cut a long story short.  I married into a dysfunctional family wracked with BPD and NPD.  Husband BPD (clinically diagnosed after we met), had one sibling - a sister (undBPD), his mother (undBPD & undNPD) and father (undNPD).

Good news is that my husband has now recovered.  I was heavily involved with his therapy by seeing the same therapists individually and other times, together.  However, part of his journey to recovery was recognising how he contracted BPD in the first place, especially when I was once pregnant.

Great emphasis was placed on the invalidating parenting he received as a child (yes I am aware that some children do not get BPD from parenting but in my husbands case, all psychiatrists and psychologists had no doubt).  Any way in addition to invalidating parenting there were other factors within his family dysfunction (fights between parents), divorce, abandonment and corporal punishment as well as sexual abuse by a family friend which his parents knew about but failed to report or seek therapy for their son.

One day, after having my SIL visit with her two children for just 2 days (thankfully she lived a long way away), my husband and I had an epiphany - "Oh No"  We turned around to each other and recognised that everything our therapist had been discussing with us so that my husband did not expose any child we were to have with the same intergenerational parenting he had received, my SIL was doing to her own children.  In addition, her lifestyle was dysfunctional, going from man to man and leaving them within a few months always blaming them for being verbally and physically abusive towards her.

What do we do now? 
We discussed telling my SIL the following with our therapist:
-That we believed she had BPD
-That we had noticed she was mimicking the same parenting as her parents. 
-That these parenting techniques had been proven within her family to be so toxic it resulted in her brother's life threatening disorder.  So... .
-Therefore her children were at risk.

As Aunt and Uncle, there was a sense of responsibility for the children's sake to tell her.

But, if we were approach her with the above facts, unlike her brother that had low functioning BPD (accepted BPD diagnosis graciously as a result of being rushed to hospital), my SIL was more 'high functioning' and telling her would likely lead to a blow up most likely resulting in her removing herself and her children completely from our lives.

If so, we would then be cut off and unable to help the children later in their teens BUT we also noted what could happen if we didn't tell her the children were at high risk!  It's really a no win situation.

Our solution was to slowly introduce some facts to her about her brother's diagnosis.  But this was not easy and would not be for you if your father was not clinically diagnosed?  I am not clear on whether he was officially diagnosed or not? 

Like you, we had distanced ourselves from her and the rest of the immediate family to avoid dysfunctional outbursts.  She was allowed to stay at our house but we had given her a 2 night limit and told her our house was alcohol free.  We never visited her at hers due to being unable to place these restrictions on her in her own home. 

This had been our boundary we had set with her after recognising that spending too much time with her and being around her while drinking alcohol triggered her BPD outbursts.

In addition, another complication to my story - my BPD MIL had been poisoning my BPD SIL for years with mistruths surrounding my husbands BPD diagnosis.  It was a common scenario for both my husband and SIL to be manipulated by their BPD mother with outlandish accusations about many members of their family.  They never argued or questioned her in fear she would abandon them as she had done so often throughout their adult lives.  My BPD MIL also expected for both her children to take her side in the many altercations in her immediate family.  As adult children, if my husbands Aunt had done something to piss his mother off (in her perception anyway), he was expected not to have any contact with his Aunt.  If he did he would risk being cut off from his mother.

So it was not so surprising that my SIL was poisoned by my MIL to believe that her brother contracted BPD from is wife (me) after he met me at age 29!   We knew what they had been saying from other members of the family but didn't care and just let it go to avoid any outbursts and work on my husbands recovery.  Many years later, we recognised that telling my SIL the truth for the sake of her children's health, was certainly going to turn her world upside down.

The last time I saw my SIL during a 2 day visit with the children, after cringing, yet again, at her degrading her 11 year old son for the umpteenth time (a form of invalidating parenting) and smacking her 2 year old daughter I don't know how many times that day,  I pulled her aside and said as softly as I could "There is something I need to tell you about your brother's BPD diagnosis.  The condition is a childhood condition.  He's had it most of his life.  It can be partially genetic but there's other components too that kind of make up the mix.  It's in your children's best interest to begin researching it so that you can be on top things with your children because they may be at risk of contracting what their Uncle had".  Her eyes darted all over the place, obviously being told something different to what she was led to believe but she didn't argue, she couldn't because she'd done nothing to research what BPD was.  In her eyes having BPD meant you self harmed and now she was being told that BPD was much more complicated than that and her brother didn't get it from me in his adulthood.

She agreed to look into it.  We were going to give her a few months and again raise the topic softly by asking if she'd had the chance to look into it.  If she hadn't, we were going to send her a couple of books  but she passed before we had the chance.  She left behind an orphaned child but that's another epic BPD story for another day.

Our therapist discussed that there is no right or wrong approach, if your sister is likely to cut you off from your nephew then telling her the truth can be detrimental to the child as you wouldn't be around to assist your nephew if he were to show early signs or even to give him positive and unconditional 'Aunty' love.  You also look like you are considering what having your sister in your life would be like for yourself, just so you can help your nephew.  This includes having children of your own and the implications on them from any future dramas associated with exposure to a BPD Aunty.  I myself had a sociopathic Aunty and as much as my parents tried to shelter us from her, there was no avoiding many upsets especially when it came to the care of myself and my siblings and my cousin and all the dynamics of getting the cousins together.

[LittleLucy]

Thanks so much for the kind replies, I do have one good friend as well as my hubby to talk to who are supportive and understanding which helps. 

Thanks for your reply Mutt and telling me about your experience with your sister in law and her children, it is a no win situation as you say.  My BPD sister will not accept that there is an issue with her behaviour, my hubby and I have already tried to talk to her many times about it and it only makes her angry and abusive to us.  I do have children of my own and they both dislike my sister who has never been at all empathetic with them (she used to bring her son to gate crash my daughters birthday girly princess parties if he was not invited as he is male etc) so my kids don't miss her and are able to see her son at school without her which is good.  I have told them to tell him that he is welcome to come to us if ever he needs help or is in difficulty and this is my compromise as I have no way to keep in touch now I am no contact.  Thanks for the kind help, Lucy