Adopting characteristics of "friends"

[1hope]

Our BPD daughter has always had low self esteem.  She tends to have a need to be around people with strong personalities, and has trouble making her own choices.  She appears to take on characteristics of her friend groups.  We sometimes wonder if some of her characteristics are really hers, or whether she just adopts them from her "friends" (the friend groups don't seem to have strong bonds, and she gets easily manipulated).  Has anyone else experienced this? 

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

[wendydarling]

Hi 1hope

We all want to be accepted by our peer group when we are young and developing our fragile and vulnerable self-concept. It is a human instinct, particularly pronounced during adolescence, to want to be accepted by the group, acceptance by the group added to our chances of survival. So it may follow adopting characterises helps acceptance and being around people with strong personalities provides a greater sense of self. What I have noticed with my 28DD is through DBT she has questioned some friendships and distanced herself from a few that she recognises are unhealthy relationships for her, which we all do from time to time, and more often as we get older. Can you give an example of a characteristic she's adopted?

[1hope]

The behaviours seem to vary depending on who she is around.  She sometimes will start to display different behaviours that relate to issues that others are having.  If she is around someone that is anxious, she will display anxious behaviour.  Once one of her friends said she had "disassociated episodes", then she started to say that this happened to her too (although we've never seen it, and she'd never mentioned it before).  She has also done regular teen stuff like changing her clothing, attempting to colour her hair, etc. 

It's hard to put in words, but we sometimes have a hard time knowing if these things are really her, or whether she is absorbing things from others.  Her old therapist recommended that she not go to group therapy for this reason too.   (She only switched therapists because that one didn't do DBT, not because we weren't happy with her).