Introduction

[Depression = 72% of members]

Hi!  I am grateful to have found this group and really feel like I need some support to move forward.  Here is my story in a nutshell. My mother's father was an alcoholic and very abusive.  My mother grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family.  I believe she really started off with good intentions but, looking back, there was a lot of dysfunction in my family, though my mother painstakingly tried to make it appear like we had the perfect family.  My sister was the golden child and I was the scapegoat.  I started showing signs of extreme anxiety at that time.  I had a brief bout with anorexia as a 13 year old.  I was also treated for depression.  The depression resurfaced during college.  I was, again, put on medication.  There were lots of issues with my mother.  She was passive aggressive, favored my sister, manipulative, often angry, very controlling, often.  I was confrontational but always frustrated because she refused to deal with any emotional issues.  At 19, I was depressed and suicidal.  My mother told me to just "Go ahead and kill yourself." To this day, she reminds me of that as if she is proud of telling me that.  I always find it hurtful.  We did family therapy but the main message that was taken from it was that it was somehow all my fault.  I was the "messed up, crazy" child.  I often felt invalidated and ignored.  I became bulimic for a number of years.  I got pregnant right out of college and became a single parent.  My son's father and I never married and he has not been involved in my son's life.  A few years later, I became a functional alcoholic.  This went on for a number of years as well.  About 13 years later, I met my husband.  I had just been arrested for dui and was about to begin rehab.  After rehab, with my husband's love and support, I stopped drinking and have been sober since (about 14 years now).  My life now is nothing short of a miracle compared to what it had become before I met my husband.  I am beyond grateful to be alive, I am healthier than ever physically, emotionally, and spiritually, have two beautiful, young children and love our life together.  My son was 10 when my husband and I met and my husband had an 11 year old daughter and 12 year old son.  So, we blended our family.  We certainly went through a lot but our family is very close and I feel like our older kids turned out really, really well, given all that we were dealing with.  I have grown and changed substantially over the years.  My older sister passed away two years ago and my father passed away about a month ago.  My parents divorced about 20 years ago and my mother has been very bitter since.  As I have grown healthier, I have become more acutely aware of her unhealthy behavior and narcissistic tendencies.  We moved after we got married so we are out west and, honestly, it was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me in terms of healing.  My mother has an unhealthy relationship with my son.  She considers my son, her son.  She "helped" me a lot when I was drinking but it consisted of taking my son for visitations with her, badmouthing me to him, giving him gifts, overstepping her boundaries with him and enabling me to continue in my drinking.  I did ask her once why she never confronted me or tried to help me but she just said nothing.  I don't blame her for my choices.  I just feel like she never really cared what happened to me.  She does not seem happy for me in my sobriety, at all.  She is angry that I have this amazing life now when she does not believe I deserve it.  People, in her eyes, are either good or bad and with the exception of a few, she can find faults in just about anyone.  She is very judgmental.  Since my sister passed away, she is doing everything she can to ruin my relationship with my son.  She sends him huge amounts of money and tells him that we should be doing that if we really loved him.  She uses money and gifts to manipulate people.  I have confronted her about things she does to undermine our parenting.  She just ignores it and does as she pleases.  She was horrible when my sister had cancer.  She made it clear that she was in control of everything and dismissed that I had any sadness or suffering watching my sister go through that.  It was awful.  I always forgive her because there is that little kid in me that so desperately wants my mother to be proud of me or just love me for who I am but I never feel that I can ever get there.  I have tried to talk to her about all of these things over and over and over but she always swiftly shuts it down and blames my father or makes me feel like I am just crazy.  Last time I tried to talk to her about it, she told me she was too old for all of this.  My own son told me that she talks about me to him as if I am a pariah, which is pretty sad.  I am a pretty compassionate, loving, kind person.  I feel like she doesn't even know who I am.  I have spent years searching to understand all of the family dynamics and once my sister passed away, I hoped that my mother and I could have a better relationship but it seems worse, actually.  Everything I say to her is used against me.  She gossips and maligns people maliciously.  She does it to me and when I try to confront her, she lies and denies... .always.  Recently, my husband got on the phone and confronted her and she wasn't able to deny it.  She cried and asked him if he would ever forgive her (which he would and did... .he is an incredible human being) but then she just became angry a day later and is back to her old self again and acting passive aggressive because we confronted her and her lies were exposed.  I feel sorry for her and have tried to be extra compassionate.  I know it was hard when my sister passed away but I am beginning to realize that I cannot change her, only how I choose to respond.  She has done so much damage to me and to my adult son, though she has managed to convince him that it is a good idea for her to move in with him and his fiancée during the winter so she can be closer to my younger children.  Personally, I am dreading this.  It will be awful for everyone.  She often tells me who she considers a real daughter or son (as if to replace my sister with someone worthy... .I never will be).  There are no pictures of me in her apartment and whenever she comes to visit, she photographs everyone else but me.  She wants direct access to my young kids, regardless of her poor relationship with me, who I am trying to raise to be kind and compassionate and emotionally healthy.  I am deeply concerned about her trying to force herself into our lives and I know she will manipulate my little ones if given an opportunity.  She badmouths me to my adult son constantly.  Triangulation is something she is very, very good at.  My father's passing has been difficult.  She hated him for leaving her and did everything in her power to turn us (me and my sister) against him.  It didn't work with me and I have always maintained a loving relationship with him.  Anyway, before he passed I read, Will I Ever Be Good Enough?  by Karyl Mc Bride.  It was like reading the story of my life.  It has been life changing in that I finally feel like so many pieces of the puzzle make sense.  It has been like having a huge, overwhelming epiphany and profound insight into what has transpired in my life and why.  I guess it is a "breakthrough crisis?"  I feel relief in that things finally make some sense to me but I am also angry that I have been blamed for so many things and that I continue to be made a scapegoat by my mother.  I am fairly happy when she is not around but when she is, there is so much drama and I have so much anxiety.  I could literally fill an entire journal with things she has said and done that were so wrong to do to another human being, let alone your daughter.  She did it to my father as well, who started drinking later in his life.  He was sober for the last three years.  I am so sad that he passed away before I could talk to him about any of this.  He is guilty of being passive and enabling her behavior when I was younger but she was very emotionally abusive to him in the last three years of his life when he was emotionally vulnerable and physically unhealthy.  She used that time to make him tell her that everything that went on in their marriage was his fault and that she did nothing wrong.  Then, she proceeded to notify family members about how he made his choices and basically did all of this to himself but how nice of her to go visit him.  I do realize that she is a product of her upbringing as well.  In the most ideal world, I would love for her to have some awareness, maybe even apologize for things she has done (though I don't think that will ever happen and know I shouldn't expect it) and try to grow and be a better person.  Our family has been blessed enormously by the power and transformation that compassion, forgiveness and love can bring about.  It's just that I have no idea what to do with all of this understanding and all of these feelings I have.  I don't know how to go about establishing healthy boundaries with her.  Every time I try to assert myself, she is angry and nasty.  I want her unhealthy behavior to stop affecting me and I am done being treated the way I have been treated for much of my life.  I am really done.  We have made an amazing life out here for our family and I feel like she is going to cause a lot of drama for all of us when she comes out here for the winter.  Most importantly, I really want to be a healthy role model for my children and have inner peace.  I kind of feel like I am in turmoil right now.                     

[An876543210]

Hi!  I am grateful to have found this group and really feel like I need some support to move forward.  Here is my story in a nutshell. My mother's father was an alcoholic and very abusive.  My mother grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family.  I believe she really started off with good intentions but, looking back, there was a lot of dysfunction in my family, though my mother painstakingly tried to make it appear like we had the perfect family.  My sister was the golden child and I was the scapegoat.  I started showing signs of extreme anxiety at that time.  I had a brief bout with anorexia as a 13 year old.  I was also treated for depression.  The depression resurfaced during college.  I was, again, put on medication.  There were lots of issues with my mother.  She was passive aggressive, favored my sister, manipulative, often angry, very controlling, often.  I was confrontational but always frustrated because she refused to deal with any emotional issues.  At 19, I was depressed and suicidal.  My mother told me to just "Go ahead and kill yourself." To this day, she reminds me of that as if she is proud of telling me that.  I always find it hurtful.  We did family therapy but the main message that was taken from it was that it was somehow all my fault.  I was the "messed up, crazy" child.  I often felt invalidated and ignored.  I became bulimic for a number of years.  I got pregnant right out of college and became a single parent.  My son's father and I never married and he has not been involved in my son's life.  A few years later, I became a functional alcoholic.  This went on for a number of years as well.  About 13 years later, I met my husband.  I had just been arrested for dui and was about to begin rehab.  After rehab, with my husband's love and support, I stopped drinking and have been sober since (about 14 years now).  My life now is nothing short of a miracle compared to what it had become before I met my husband.  I am beyond grateful to be alive, I am healthier than ever physically, emotionally, and spiritually, have two beautiful, young children and love our life together.  My son was 10 when my husband and I met and my husband had an 11 year old daughter and 12 year old son.  So, we blended our family.  We certainly went through a lot but our family is very close and I feel like our older kids turned out really, really well, given all that we were dealing with.  I have grown and changed substantially over the years.  My older sister passed away two years ago and my father passed away about a month ago.  My parents divorced about 20 years ago and my mother has been very bitter since.  As I have grown healthier, I have become more acutely aware of her unhealthy behavior and narcissistic tendencies.  We moved after we got married so we are out west and, honestly, it was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me in terms of healing.  My mother has an unhealthy relationship with my son.  She considers my son, her son.  She "helped" me a lot when I was drinking but it consisted of taking my son for visitations with her, badmouthing me to him, giving him gifts, overstepping her boundaries with him and enabling me to continue in my drinking.  I did ask her once why she never confronted me or tried to help me but she just said nothing.  I don't blame her for my choices.  I just feel like she never really cared what happened to me.  She does not seem happy for me in my sobriety, at all.  She is angry that I have this amazing life now when she does not believe I deserve it.  People, in her eyes, are either good or bad and with the exception of a few, she can find faults in just about anyone.  She is very judgmental.  Since my sister passed away, she is doing everything she can to ruin my relationship with my son.  She sends him huge amounts of money and tells him that we should be doing that if we really loved him.  She uses money and gifts to manipulate people.  I have confronted her about things she does to undermine our parenting.  She just ignores it and does as she pleases.  She was horrible when my sister had cancer.  She made it clear that she was in control of everything and dismissed that I had any sadness or suffering watching my sister go through that.  It was awful.  I always forgive her because there is that little kid in me that so desperately wants my mother to be proud of me or just love me for who I am but I never feel that I can ever get there.  I have tried to talk to her about all of these things over and over and over but she always swiftly shuts it down and blames my father or makes me feel like I am just crazy.  Last time I tried to talk to her about it, she told me she was too old for all of this.  My own son told me that she talks about me to him as if I am a pariah, which is pretty sad.  I am a pretty compassionate, loving, kind person.  I feel like she doesn't even know who I am.  I have spent years searching to understand all of the family dynamics and once my sister passed away, I hoped that my mother and I could have a better relationship but it seems worse, actually.  Everything I say to her is used against me.  She gossips and maligns people maliciously.  She does it to me and when I try to confront her, she lies and denies... .always.  Recently, my husband got on the phone and confronted her and she wasn't able to deny it.  She cried and asked him if he would ever forgive her (which he would and did... .he is an incredible human being) but then she just became angry a day later and is back to her old self again and acting passive aggressive because we confronted her and her lies were exposed.  I feel sorry for her and have tried to be extra compassionate.  I know it was hard when my sister passed away but I am beginning to realize that I cannot change her, only how I choose to respond.  She has done so much damage to me and to my adult son, though she has managed to convince him that it is a good idea for her to move in with him and his fiancée during the winter so she can be closer to my younger children.  Personally, I am dreading this.  It will be awful for everyone.  She often tells me who she considers a real daughter or son (as if to replace my sister with someone worthy... .I never will be).  There are no pictures of me in her apartment and whenever she comes to visit, she photographs everyone else but me.  She wants direct access to my young kids, regardless of her poor relationship with me, who I am trying to raise to be kind and compassionate and emotionally healthy.  I am deeply concerned about her trying to force herself into our lives and I know she will manipulate my little ones if given an opportunity.  She badmouths me to my adult son constantly.  Triangulation is something she is very, very good at.  My father's passing has been difficult.  She hated him for leaving her and did everything in her power to turn us (me and my sister) against him.  It didn't work with me and I have always maintained a loving relationship with him.  Anyway, before he passed I read, Will I Ever Be Good Enough?  by Karyl Mc Bride.  It was like reading the story of my life.  It has been life changing in that I finally feel like so many pieces of the puzzle make sense.  It has been like having a huge, overwhelming epiphany and profound insight into what has transpired in my life and why.  I guess it is a "breakthrough crisis?"  I feel relief in that things finally make some sense to me but I am also angry that I have been blamed for so many things and that I continue to be made a scapegoat by my mother.  I am fairly happy when she is not around but when she is, there is so much drama and I have so much anxiety.  I could literally fill an entire journal with things she has said and done that were so wrong to do to another human being, let alone your daughter.  She did it to my father as well, who started drinking later in his life.  He was sober for the last three years.  I am so sad that he passed away before I could talk to him about any of this.  He is guilty of being passive and enabling her behavior when I was younger but she was very emotionally abusive to him in the last three years of his life when he was emotionally vulnerable and physically unhealthy.  She used that time to make him tell her that everything that went on in their marriage was his fault and that she did nothing wrong.  Then, she proceeded to notify family members about how he made his choices and basically did all of this to himself but how nice of her to go visit him.  I do realize that she is a product of her upbringing as well.  In the most ideal world, I would love for her to have some awareness, maybe even apologize for things she has done (though I don't think that will ever happen and know I shouldn't expect it) and try to grow and be a better person.  Our family has been blessed enormously by the power and transformation that compassion, forgiveness and love can bring about.  It's just that I have no idea what to do with all of this understanding and all of these feelings I have.  I don't know how to go about establishing healthy boundaries with her.  Every time I try to assert myself, she is angry and nasty.  I want her unhealthy behavior to stop affecting me and I am done being treated the way I have been treated for much of my life.  I am really done.  We have made an amazing life out here for our family and I feel like she is going to cause a lot of drama for all of us when she comes out here for the winter.  Most importantly, I really want to be a healthy role model for my children and have inner peace.  I kind of feel like I am in turmoil right now.                     

[Mutt]

Hi An876543210,



I'd like to welcome you to bpdfamily. I'm sorry to hear about your sister and your dad. Is your mother diagnosed with BPD or undiagnosed? I'm not familiar with the book Will I Ever Be good Enough by Karyl McBride, I see that it's a book for daughters with narcissistic mothers, maybe another member is familiar with it. I do see some BPD behavioral themes in your introduction post mainly projection, and triangulation.

I just wanted to state that we're not doctors and cannot diagnose, only a professional can do that, what we can look at are BPD and NPD traits.

Triangulation is something she is very, very good at.

This is a frustrating experience, I'm also the scape goat in my family and I understand very well what it feels like when you're blamed for everything possible and family members can't connect the positive and negative aspects about you - everything about you is negative and you can't convince them otherwise. There are a couple of tools on the website that I found were eye opening and liberating, maybe you'll find them to be the same way, I'll share one with you a little later.

I want to touch on triangulation, an important part of healing is reading as much as you can your hands on about the disorder. It helps you in several ways, you can learn to depersonalize the behaviors and become indifferent to them, you neither like it or hate it. It helps with normlizing BPD and lastly, it helps with raising your awareness around you and also internally.

You mentioned pariah, BPD is a persecution complex where the person is truly convinced that their circumstances are not caused by a choice that they make, it's caused externally by others. A pwBPD will usually cast themselves in the position of victim, sometimes rescuer and rarely persecutor. Your mother is likely casting you in the role of persecutor often, for example when she lashes out when you set boundaries, when you find yourself in that position, the best position to be in, is move to the center of the triangle, in order for her to continue her drama, someone has to be cast in one of these positions, don't side take sides, remain neutral.

I feel relief in that things finally make some sense to me but I am also angry that I have been blamed for so many things and that I continue to be made a scapegoat by my mother

 

In the most ideal world, I would love for her to have some awareness, maybe even apologize for things she has done (though I don't think that will ever happen and know I shouldn't expect it) and try to grow and be a better person.

Radical Acceptance For Family Members (DBT skill)  

Earlier I mentioned a tool, I completely understand the anger that we can feel towards a caregiver, when we wish that a parent / caregiver would change, take ownership of their dysfunction in the past it can cause a lot of negative feelings and suffering for us because we're going against reality and not flowing with it. Radical acceptance is accepting a situation or person for what they are and not for what we wish them to be.

Your mother is who she is, she'll likely not change, I can't be 100% certain, you might surprise you but don't hang on to hope that she will. She is who she is. That being said, it doesn't mean that you can't have your feelings about her, validate those feelings here on the board. Mnay of us can relate with you, we're here to listen to you, you can share freely here without being judged or invalidated for having those feelings.

I don't know how to go about establishing healthy boundaries with her.  Every time I try to assert myself, she is angry and nasty.

I know how difficult boundaries can be when we're not used to them, I think that it takes practice and support from others to help us through it, we can certainly help you there. I agree with you that boundaries will help you with your mother. Many of us didn't have boundaries or we had what are called floating boundaries. In simple terms boundaries keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out, they protect you.

Our morales and values are something that are not negotiable that's what boundaries are, boundaries are not supposed to be high fences, sometimes when a parent that suffers from a PD, they have to be sometimes. Your mom is lashing out when you set boundaries with her, a pwBPD have little to no boundaries on themselves, you can see that with your son, they don't understand the boundaries of others, when dysfunctional family members had their way for many years and we set boundaries, they're not used to it. That's why you get the lashing out, that's the tough part, come here and start a thread for support when that happens, that lashing out behavior will eventually die down. It sounds like you probably want to set boundaries with your mom and your kids?

[An876543210]

Thank you for your reply!  I will start to read more about triangulation.  I know I have my work cut out for me but I am really glad I found this site and look forward to growing and learning how to make this situation better for me.  It does feel empowering to realize that just by starting to understand all of this, I can learn how to respond in ways that will be better for me.  My mother definitely puts me in the role of persecuter.  I am looking forward to learning how to depersonalize because, wow, it has been a lot to deal with.