How does he present his opinions to your parents, what does he say to them?
I can imagine my response would be, "none of your business. There's the door--->"
From this and all that you wrote on your intro post, I'd say that he's looking for control over his environment. Given what you said about his childhood, he may be carrying over what was told to him as a child. My ex was/is similar. I share custody, and just 10 mins ago received a text about my home... . I well remember her Saturday morning cleaning rampages, even after we did a good job cleaning the kitchen after dinner the night before. Not good enough. She's diagnosed with clinical level Anxiety. She's talked to me about how it stems from her childhood. Yet still she projects it upon me and the kids. So despite the Dx, it's up to us on our side... .not to change her (that's impossible), but to change how we react. Make sense?
DaddyBear77 provided a good link about validation.
SET statements can help validate him on this and other issues:
https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=143695.0;allValidation is good, but we also need boundaries. Growing up on a disordered family, there were likely not good boundaries between him and his family. He's just using the behaviors he was taught, not knowing better. You don't know what you don't know. A therapist versed in BPD once wrote something like these dysfunctional coping skills feel like "survival." She was talking about lying and BPD, but I think it's applicable to other behaviors as well.
I like this discussion on boundaries:
This thread is about "
examples". In this thread we will discuss your
value, your
boundaries and how to
defend your boundaries.
For some background information with more depth, there is a great discussion regarding the 3 types of boundaries (mental, emotional, physical) that everyone should read on this thread:
BOUNDARIES: Upholding our values and independence Remember, our values and the boundaries of those values aren't about someone else. They are about how
we choose to live our lives.
I have an eye analogy. Eyelids play an important role in protecting our vision, right? In this case, vision is the value. To have good vision, dirt and dust are seen as harmful to the eye - thus we need a boundary to keep our eyes safe. Eyelids block the dirt and push the dust out - this is our boundary defense in action.
Eyelids don't try to control or punish or change the dirt, they just protect the "vision", consistently, day in, day out - often in subtle ways, sometimes in very visible ways - 400 million times in a lifetime.
Relating our boundary defenses back to the
value is very important. If we don't do this, we run the risk of loosing sight of our objective - and we may make matters worse. To be constructive, we need to have realistic values and we need to understand what
our responsibilities are if we want to truly live them. Talk is cheap.
There are 3 parts, the values we have, the boundaries of those values, and the actions we take when the boundaries are threatened.
Some examples:
| Value: | Important aspect of life that I commit to live fully. |
| Boundary: | Defining what falls outside of my value, what is unacceptable. |
| Action: | One of the options I have when a boundary is threatened. |
Click on the quote from at the top to see the whole discussion. Let us know if this makes sense and if you think you can apply it to your specific situation.
Turkish
