Is this mirroring?

[OnPinsAndNeedles]

My uBPD daughter-in-law is always copying everything I do.  I bought new pillows for my sofa, and about a week later the daughter-in-law purchased the same pillows.  I made homemade donuts for my granddaughter, and all of the sudden she is making homemade donuts.  When I planted rose bushes in my front yard, she planted rose bushes.  I cut my hair short, and then she cut her hair short.  It's bizarre.  Does your BPD family member copy things that you do?  Is this common among BPD's? 

[Woolspinner2000]

Hi OnPinsAndNeedles, 

This a great question and example! Thank you for posting it.  For some reason I'm not doing well in posting the link to this article so I will copy it below. It addresses some of what you are questioning. Let me know what you think!

A Person with Borderline Personality Disorder Doesn't have the Emotional Language to Express Themselves
Posted by bpdfamily.com
Did you ever ask someone to scratch your back and they keep missing the itchy spot?

How irritating that is even though you ask them "to go up, now to the left, harder, up and down" and sometimes even shift around hoping they will get it when they are not.   It can be very frustrating if the other person completely misses the spot.  After awhile you just give up - - your communication isn't working.

This is not unlike communications with  our partners with  Borderline Personality Disorder (pwBPD).

A pwBPD doesn't have the emotional language to ask for what they need.  They often communicate "up, now to the left, harder"  when they really mean "down, to the right, side to side"

The "itch" is the hurt our very sensitive pwBPD feels inside. Often our partners don't even know how to process what they are feeling or put it into words.  As a result, some become demanding and controlling, some become mean and nasty, some give up and move on to someone else, and some just stop asking all together.

Can you imagine a lifetime of this? As they have grown up,  a pwBPD finds way to adapt - alternate ways to get their needs met - projection, mirroring, manipulating, sex, alcohol, drugs - pulling others into a relationship enmeshment.

As responsible partners, we want to respond appropriately. We listen to the words and the directions - we "scratch harder, softer, slower, faster, bigger circles, and up and down" in an effort to appease our partner. We think we are good listeners. We struggle when we fall short. We change and change and change. We lament over our failure to make things better.  What are we doing wrong?
Part of the problem is Borderline Personality Disorder.  Part of the problem is us. Trying to follow or pwBPD partner's words rather than learning to read their emotions and their actions.
pwBPD are mentally ill.  They are highly emotional beings, very sensitive, and misleading communicators.  When we stop responding to their  alternate ways to get their needs met - projection, mirroring, manipulating, sex, alcohol, drugs - - and instead learn to read the unexpressed needs - - only then will we understand them and be able to help them.

 
Wools

[Turkish]

At best this might be flattering,  but maybe creepy? How do you feel about it, and is it impacting your relationship with her and your son?

Have you seen the info discussion on mirroring? Click on the quote link for more.  

The term mirroring is very useful, but also very confusing because of its other, more prominent uses.

1) The theory of mirroring was developed by Heinz Kohut, MD.  Kohut said that children need to have their conversations and accomplishments acknowledged, accepted and praised by others.  Kohut felt that it is important for a child's legitimate feelings of be mirrored by its parents. The parent's mirroring gets internalized in time by the child, so as the child gets older they can provide their own mirroring, their own sense of self-appreciation.  Children who do not get enough mirroring are considered by many psychologists to be at risk of developing a narcissistic personality later in life.

[Pilpel]

I was thinking along the lines what Turkish says.  That it can be flattering.  And in some ways mirroring can be a way of expressing a type of empathy.  It could be that she likes how you do things, and she wants to emulate some of those things.  To some degree, I think we all do that.  Though we may not focus on imitating one person like your DIL seems to be doing with you.   How do you feel about it?  I'm assuming that because she's BPD that she is also kind of difficult to get along with at the same time.  So maybe that makes it even more weird?
 
Over the years of reading things on this board, I have heard stories of people saying that they had a BPD friend or relative that imitated things they did.  I haven't experienced that with my n/BPD sil like that.  Though my SIL will do things like --years ago she accused me of being intrusive when I playfully suggesting she get a bigger ring because I had friends who wished they'd gotten bigger diamonds years after they got married.  I didn't think she would really believe that I had anything at stake in the size of her ring.  And when she got angry and offended and accused me of being controlling, I was in complete shock.  How could she not pick up my playful tone?  In what reality would I actually have anything at stake in the size of jewelry she wore?  Well, fast forward years later, and out of the blue she tells me that she's thinking of trading her ring in for a bigger diamond.  I wanted to say, "I still don't care about the size of your ring."  But I'm careful about what I say around her. So I just looked at her blankly and said, "Oh."

I bring this up because I think in her own backwards way it was her effort to connect with me.  But from my point of view, it's not a genuine connection.  A genuine connection would have been "I'm sorry I got so upset and accused you of having bad intentions when you made a suggestion.  I now think it was a good suggestion, and I'm thinking of following up on it."  Instead what she did made me feel --as usual -- that she's trying to connect with me through her own tightly controlled narrative.  She starts from a false idea about me, that the size of her ring really means something to me.  And now she's not just changing her ring because she wants to but I think she has convinced herself that she's doing it to please me. I wonder if she saw it as a bonding moment for us.  But for me it was really weird. 

[OnPinsAndNeedles]

I've often wondered whether she imitates me, because of her fear of abandonment.  I know that might seem like a weird conclusion, but I wonder if she is afraid that my son might like the way I do something better and that she won't measure up.  It seems like everything is a competition to her.  I know that people who don't have BPD might also do this to a certain extent, but she carries it to an extreme.  She even said (in a nasty tone of voice) to our granddaughter (her stepdaughter with whom she is verbally abusive)  "I don't know why you like them better than me, you live with me."  Well maybe if she treated our granddaughter better, our granddaughter would like her too.  We took her on a vacation with us once, and even though she was 40 years old at the time, she was hanging out with the teenagers, even telling one of them "You're really cool.  We should be best friends."  When our daughter-in-law was younger, she always had long straight brunette hair, but when her first husband divorced her she suddenly cut her hair short, permed it, and dyed it blonde to match her exes new wife.  In essence trying to become the woman that her ex husband chose over her.  I think this also might be caused by a lack of a stable self image.  What makes this even stranger for me is that once she imitates me, she claims that she has always done things this way and I'm copying her.  It also doesn't help my feelings that she complains about me and the rest of our family loud enough for us to hear, as she is walking out of the room, making it impossible for us to respond. Maybe it is best that we can't respond, because when we ask her nicely to clarify why she is upset, the rage begins.  

Turkish-  We are way beyond her actions impacting our relationship with her, our son, and her children from her first marriage.  She doesn't like to be around us, even though we have only been supportive of her.  We are going to see her this afternoon, and I can already feel the tension in my body.  She has such negative energy, you can feel her presence when she enters a room.  We are pretty sure she would be diagnosed as a "Queen/Witch" BPD person.

[zachira]

It can help to remember that mirroring is not always healthy. If a person is angry and we get angry as well, this is not healthy. If a person is sad, and we have a tear in our eyes to show our compassion, that is healthy mirroring as long as we do not show more sadness than the person we are mirroring, because if we are sadder than they are than it is about us not them. Mirroring involves a bodily response to what the other person is feeling, like having a sad face. If it is just imitating behavior like buying a pillow because another person bought one, than this is not really mirroring, which sounds like what you are describing. I think your daughter-in-law wants to more like you, and does not know how. What are some things about the relationship that you have with your son and other people that your daughter-in-law might want to have, because she sees the positive response you get when you are doing these things? Is it possible she wants your admiration as well?
Hard to know how to answer your question, and yes it is a good question. I have seen people with BPD be extremely superficial and pretend to be a different kind of person in different situations. My question with a BPD is always who is this person if he/she can change so rapidly into a totally different person without any real obvious trigger?
Keep asking the good questions, and let us know what you think. We are here to learn from you and help in any way we can. Keep us posted.

[Turkish]

The core feeling of a person with BPD is that they are inherently worthless and unlovable. The fear of abandonment, mirroring, primal rage and the like lie above the core distorted world view.

Said in another way, "my feelings don't matter, therefore I don't matter." That's why the tools focus upon validation (of the top level feeling).

Crossed with zachira... .who mentions she wanting your admiration, which gels with what I said above. 

[OnPinsAndNeedles]

Thinking more about your responses, It's possible that my daughter-in-law sees that people seem to like me.  I have friends and family that care about me, and are loyal to me.  Like most people with BPD, our daughter-in-law has very unstable relationships.  She only seems to be able to keep friends for 6 months to a year, before they become tired of her manipulative, explosive personality.  She can be a lot of fun at first because of her child-like impulsive behavior, but it is embarrassing to go out to a restaurant with her, because she can be very demanding of and nasty to the waiters.  Maybe she thinks that if she copies things that I do, people will like her and want to stay around.  I try to be tolerant and understanding of her, but when you are constantly criticized when you haven't done anything wrong, and when she steals things that belong to you, it is hard to be around her.  We have an expression in our family, "What belongs to "daughter-in-law" is "daughter-in-laws" and what belongs to you is "daughter-in-laws." 

[Pina colada]

I was thinking that because they feel so empty inside, no real sense of self, if you are doing it, buying it, etc. then it must be cool so yes they mirror us and as Turkish said, flattery... .

[Notwendy]

I think it is the lack of sense of self. My mother creates her sense of self from other people.

Over the years in conversations, I have related things I did with my kids just in sharing my day. She'd call and ask what's up. I'd reply something like- "well I was driving carpool to school today and ... ."

Then later if we were visiting, she's say " I remember when you were little and I was driving carpool and... ." I would realize it wasn't her story. It was mine. She was "remembering" the things she did as a mother when we were little, but it wasn't her. It was eerie. I think though it came from her own sense of shame. She didn't do those things. She was too impaired to be a consistent parent.

She also presents things her kids did as things she did herself. When I was a teen, she signed up to bake brownies for a school function but she hadn't baked them before. She then came home and raged at me to make brownies for her so she could bring them to school. She joined a book club, then got a sibling to make flyers for her. I imagine she told people she made them.

She will sometimes call me up to ask what I think about something. Then, I suspect she repeats that to others as if it were her ideas.

It has been a family secret to "pretend she is normal" and we kids were enlisted in that early on. We were not allowed to discuss any of her BPD behaviors- didn't even know she had BPD but figured it out on our own much later. It is said that parents with PD's see their children as extensions of themselves, so perhaps if we did something she felt it was as if she did it.

I don't feel flattered by this. It feels sad to me that she feels she has to do this instead of feeling pride in her own accomplishments. Sadly, we- her kids- were trained to enable her. Instead of baking brownies for her, she is quite capable of doing it herself- but we were so afraid of her rages, we just did things for her and so she didn't get the chance. 

[OnPinsAndNeedles]

we were so afraid of her rages, we just did things for her and so she didn't get the chance. 

Notwendy -  That is the saddest part of living with someone who has BPD.  Your whole life revolves around trying to keep the BPD person from raging.  Unfortunately, no matter what you do they will find something to be upset about.