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[Our abuse recovery guide]

Hello,

I'm trying my best to find my way through the maze of confusion I'm feeling. I'm having a very hard time. My mother has been a source of severe pain for my entire life and I'm just beginning to acknowledge it. It suuuuucks.  I have been having nightmares about my childhood and a flood of meme routes I had buried and forgotten about that cropped up and is taking over any peace I might have otherwise had. Hoping to find some help here

[FeelingLow101]

Hello,

I'm trying my best to find my way through the maze of confusion I'm feeling. I'm having a very hard time. My mother has been a source of severe pain for my entire life and I'm just beginning to acknowledge it. It suuuuucks.  I have been having nightmares about my childhood and a flood of meme routes I had buried and forgotten about that cropped up and is taking over any peace I might have otherwise had. Hoping to find some help here

[Highlander]

Hi FeelingLow101 and welcome,

Your not alone. I'm assuming that seeing your here, you believe your mother has BPD?

My mother-in-law (MIL) has undiagnosed BPD and NPD.  Every morning when my dear husband (DH) wakes, I ask him how he slept.  Often enough he tells me about his nightmares about his mother, father and his childhood. 

These are not memories he can erase, but what helps to find him some peace is being able to understand BPD better.  This helps him to realise that his mother's BPD behaviour and their projections onto him were not  intentional, even though, most of the times it seemed like they were.

But the more he reads about BPD, the more he realises that she is a very unwell woman and in her case most likely will always be unwell (tried to tell her she has BPD and is in denial so won't get therapy for it).  DH husband gets peace knowing that as a result of her own childhood environment, she never learnt how to constructively deal with her emotions, nor treat people close to her with the respect they deserve.

This doesn't make her treatment towards him both in childhood and adult life acceptable, nor gives him a reason to tolerate her abuse on him.  However, you are in the right place to learn skills to help you.

You haven't said whether your mother is still in your life or not?  If she is, there are a community of people on this forum that can guide you to resources that may help your interactions with your mother become less toxic.  Or if you are no longer in contact with her, like my husband, people and resources here that can also assist with this circumstance of no-contact (NC).

The more you read, or interact in this forum or read BPD books like 'Stop Treading on Eggshells', the more you will see, you are not alone and there are other people out there that have experiences eerily similar to your own.

Are you seeing a therapist?

If so, is it a therapist that is well versed in BPD? 

DH was definitely traumatised by his childhood, to such an extent, he actually got BPD himself, although many children can escape it, he wasn't so lucky.  His recovery was not only based on Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT) but understanding his childhood better and his parents own disorders (father also has NPD) to know that the things that happened to him as a child was NOT his fault, even though his parents quite often pushed their blame games onto him.

[DaughterOfHera]

FeelingLow101, Welcome.  You are not alone.  Thank you for sharing your current situation and feelings.  This can sometimes take courage, or even desperation, but on this site you are among so many others who truly understand because we have been in the same or similar situations.  For myself, everything that you have shared here is the same for me, or at least in the way that you have described it.  I have sometimes found that, upon waking from those nightmares, getting on to this site ---- even just to read others' posts ---- can certainly make a difference for me... .I find that I end up breathing a sigh of relief that I'm not alone and I'm not crazy.  My whirlwind thoughts calm down, the knot in my gut un-clenches, and I remember that I'm a real person in the real world.  You deserve that peace that you were mentioning.
 You deserve calm times and recovery.  I send you gentle wishes for ease when you find yourself waking from those dreams.  I send you gentle wishes for ease as you continue to work through those memes that can re-emerge, build up, and stick around.  I send you gentle wishes for sighs of relief.