What if they do not want to work? Force rent? Force move out?

[20yearsHRS]

Good Day,
My diagnosed BPDd has just lost her second job.  She is only just now completing her first semester in college but seems unable to hold a job.  We are not sure of her grades yet (posting next week).  We only have 5 weeks before spring semester starts.  I'm looking for ideas on how to handle things if she will not get or keep a job when the summer starts.  The only money she has is life insurance from her undiagnosed BPDm.  Forcing her to pay rent if she is not working just pulls money from what is now her college savings.  How do we get her to take and keep a job for the summer to encourage the independence?  Do we make things uncomfortable and start charging rent?  We have other children at home and do not want this to become a thing - living off mom and dad because we just do not feel like working.

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

[Swimmy55]

Hi
Well the good news is she is going to college and plans to return.
 BPD kid may not be able to juggle job and school  at the same time.  My gentle suggestion   is lowered expectations on your part. 

Here is something to read through.  https://bpdfamily.com/content/setting-boundaries
These are just things to think about, not guarantees that anything will work, though. 

[PearlsBefore]

Unfortunately I have to agree with Swimmy; if she's been diagnosed as BPD then she's likely either high-functioning BPD or else doing an incredible job of low-functioning BPD (largely categorized based on how well they can hide their symptoms if they want). For what it's worth, of the two dBPDs closest to me - one never finished school and worked sporadically before "retiring" at the age of 35, the other one did some community college and got good grades but didn't complete it or show interest in picking it back up later (although there was always a micawberish "I'm going to finish my community college degree and become a famous psychiatrist!" fantasy that we all tried hard not to discourage.

If she hasn't had a job before, just to prepare you based on my own experience - she'll be decent at it and quickly focus on trying to determine who her new "best friend" is at the workplace...after juggling a couple, of course she may decide she now needs to determine which co-worker is to be her mortal enemy (direct quote btw from my nearest dBPD - honestly believes they have "mortal enemies"...and that it's based on scheduling sheets, floor moppings and copied hairstyles)...after that point, a few months into it - it's not likely to remain a long-term position.

So the good news is that your daughter may turn in "normal" grades or may not (BPD is not a detriment to intelligence - but to work/study habits and focus), but be grateful that she's trying at the very least. I don't know the actual numbers, but I think it's safe to say 30-70% of dBPDs will be living with their parents for at least a notable portion of their 20s. The good news is that it's likely your other children already identify her as "different" and will seek to excel her example, not copy it; they're more likely to have stable relationships, job advancement or interests that draw them permanently out of the house.

Ultimately, it is a life-changer; she may reach developmental milestones 10 years later than others do - but the good news is that the majority of BPD females (and I believe males but haven't read/known as many) DO calm down over their 20s and 30s and the parasuicidalism drops significantly in those cases.

[beatricex]

hi 20yearsHRS,
 
Also hi to Swimmy55 and PearlsBefore.

I wholeheartedly agree with (and laughed at) PearlsBefore's "Mortal Enemy" comment.  In fact, I'm pretty sure in the family I married into, my BPD'd stepdaughter, at the moment, considers me her mortal enemy.  I know this because she disowned her Dad 9 months ago after she gave him the ultimatum to divorce me or she would disown him.  (in case you are wondering what I did to deserve this, I texted her sister's ex-husband and was too nice to him.  he's the enemy too, don't I know that?)

My stepdaughter also is highly intelligent (she testing into Honor's classes in highschool, although, never applied herself and actually took honor's classes).  She has a high IQ.  Like your daughter, she took a few semesters of college.  At one point, she wanted to be a nurse.  My husband (her Dad) and I got our hopes up...we know she's smart.  Secretly, and too my husband I fretted "can she get along with her coworkers, though?  I've never seen her actually get along with people"

Shortly after proclaiming the nursing major, she decided she would just goto dental school instead.  That never materializsed.  Her fiance at the time (now husband) and her started talking about moving to different states (California and Texas were thrown around).
 She talked about moving to the bible belt and I almost laughed out loud (having lived there, and knowing she would Not fit in, too vocal).  She married her highschool sweethard, and her MIL got her into sales.  She sells makeup now.  They did not move, they live a half hour away from his mommy.

All of this to say, your daughter may change her mind several times within the course of the next few years.

I think with a kid that doesn't have any mental health issues, these years are hard.  I think with a kid that does...well, there's nothing wrong with getting married and having kids, right? 

hang in there, you will be fine

Pearlsbefore, PLEASE post more, you are making me feel a whole lot better!  (and if nothing else, I'm getting a good laugh, so thanks)

b

[20yearsHRS]

OMG!  The "friend" and "mortal enemy" are like text book behavior for my dBPDd.  She already had friends from day one and then that person that "yelled at me" and "does not like me" from day one.

So to continue this discussion, how do we get her to want to move out and get a job?  We cannot even get our dBPDd to get her driver's license.  When the summer gets here, I do not want to be the person, nor does my wife or mother-in-law, who is driving a 19 yr old back and forth to a job.  Are we bad people if we think she should be moved into town on her dime where she can walk or catch a bus to a job?  Like the money would come straight out of her college account (deceased mom's life insurance) and she would eventually have to pay back the rent to the account or stop college.  Yes, we want her to get a degree, No we do not want to be her transportation. 

I know based on things I have read in the forums, we should be thanking God she is going to school and is not violent towards us.  I want my life back though.  I dealt with her deceased mother for 20 years with uBPD.  I do not want to deal with another BPD person.  I'm sorry for saying this but 20 years was enough.

[Swimmy55]

HI,
I truly get that you don't want to really have to deal with her in your house  as an adult that needs transportation and care.  Maybe other options can include college summer course  away from home. ( However, that would mean you paying for shelter / food , but at least she will be out of your house).   Are there any relatives willing to have her visit for an extended stay?   Another option ( again, $$$) is renting a short stay hotel/ Airbnb for her during the summer)  This one is tricky though, as you would have to take on all expenses, food. No one size fits all solution, maybe there are others here that can tell you of their alternative plans that have worked.

 The short answer is you can't make her want to get out and get a job.  Even if she  wants to, the steps needed to  put that plan into play is where the problem (s) are.  The BPD usually will be experience overwhelm/not being able to cope.  My adult son actually graduated college, wanted to go out and get a job and leave my house.  He couldn't put 2+2 together for this:  He sabotaged himself on job interviews  and when he did get a job, he "exploded" out of them within a couple of months ( had some type of rage/ meltdown at the job). Could not cope.
  .  I am not saying this will be your story, but save yourself some heartache and headache  by knowing your dreams of an independently working BPD in college will probably not come to fruition right away.  Even many "normal" adult  kids have to be carted around at the beginning ,due to not having a driver's license/ $$$/ access to car or public transportation.

[PearlsBefore]

I don't have many good answers, but one warning is that if you try to push her out of the house for financial/independence reasons...you might be shocked to find out that a BPD "living independently" can often actually end up costing you MORE and taking MORE time.

Take for example her rent, say her rent is $500/month, groceries $100/month, and the job will give her $600/month - that's an "ideal world" (leaving aside issues of wage slavery). But the issue is that she's very likely to not be employed in the near future which means suddenly there's a 12-month lease, she owes $500 and needs $100 to avoid starving...and has no money. Guess who she needs to step up? And it might take her 4-5 months to find work again...and the cycle will continue.

Now that's not all BPDs, but it's a substantial number of them. The nearest and dearest of my dBPDs had the issue of u-Haltlose Personality Disorder layered on top of the BPD which meant if you gave her $100 for groceries this month, she'd phone from the parking lot of Taco Bell to announce that she'd just spent $11 on lunch, and she didn't understand how the money was supposed to last until the end of the month because it'll be gone by Thursday because TGIFridays has half-price margaritas if you bring all your "chicas" or whatever the heck. (Hear that edge in my voice? ). Those with haltlose alongside, which is another substantial number, are absolute trainwrecks if you give them independence. And they won't "figure it out and clean up" after a couple months - they lack a stable sense of time, so today, last week, last month, next year, they all blend into amorphous blobs of "right now" and "not right now".

I'm not saying not to encourage her independence, but you'll likely be wise to plan ahead to "limit your liabilities" as my son says when dealing with BPD relatives. Something like the driver's license is probably the best risk/reward payoff - you can spend a little extra time now with her teaching her to drive your car, front up the $100 for the permit, and let her coast on the gas costs...but at least in a few months she'll have some increased responsibility - not only can you stop driving her to and from work (which are ROUND trips for you, so take you twice as much time/gas as they would take her) but you can even start sending her out on errands to buy hotdogs and lighter fluid and potato salad, or to go pick up her brother from detention, or to drop your in-laws at the airport at 4am, etc.

For what it's worth, five years of driving and my dBPD had only a single no-damage fender bender (in a rainstorm), and was actually quite a good driver when she didn't have either "her soulmate" or "her mortal enemy" in the car with her (don't think she ever had a soulmate morph into a mortal enemy WHILE driving in the car together - happy to report, don't want to imagine that scenario). She was your daughter's age when she first got her driver's license - which was again a point of a few snarky comments "When are you..." over the years. Not sure about other people here, but I'm a voice in favor of it.

[beatricex]

I have also heard the "soulmate" comment.  So odd, because she thought her Dad was her soulmate when her Dad and I first started dating.  I kept commenting to my now husband (boyfriend at the time) "why does your daughter think she's your best friend, that's such as strange thing to say because she's your kid!"

A lot of the conflicts I've had with her, it feels like she's an ex-wife, because that's exactly how she acts. 

[PearlsBefore]

Beatrice, without any commentary on your specific case - one of the more common denominators in the childhood backgrounds of pwBPD is inappropriate relationships between with an adult figure. It's a delicately danced-around topic, and leads to no shortage of "Did we somehow cause this...and we know maybe possibly it might be that we did" at in-person BPD-caregiver groups as everybody tries to remain judgment-free and focus on the present not the past.

However while it was the vogue thirty years ago to report that an astronomically high number of pwBPDs had been involved in inappropriately adult relationships from prepubescence - later clinical research seemed to swing in the direction that it was not quite so prominent as the numbers suggested...because a portion of those who had claimed such were actually "splitting" and falsely implicating caregivers but also later implicated doctors, lawyers and others who attempted to help them, and a separate portion were what Freud wrote about as children who imagined themselves in such situations with their parents as part of happy imagination games that became phantasiæ. So, based on my readings, the current number is still considered high (25-75% depending on the source), but not nearly as astronomically high as it was once considered. It's an excellent illustration of the problems of examining ætiology for something like Borderline Personality Disorder...because there's a high chance that self-reports by the pwBPDs will border on pathological dishonesty, but for an overlapping percentage their parents may also not be objective witnesses of their childhood influences.

Again, none of this is related to your situation specifically - it's just to say that "Daddy Issues" of one stripe or another are far from uncommon with BPD. Best to focus on the present in all cases, since we cannot rewrite the past.

On a related note, one of my pwBPDs (who was an only child) was furious whenever she saw her romantic obsession with his sisters but not with his brother, seemingly because she felt in "competition" to be his female focus...but with an infant-level jealous lack of understanding that sisters were not a threat to her goals. Since you've stepped in as a step-mother who IS romantically bonded to her father - yes, you're going to be cast as evil and it's probably not even Disney's fault. Best casual advice I can offer if you do talk to her is to add a couple of "Your father was ranting about X the other day, well I don't need to tell you how he is, you know him better than I do, but yeah I was laughing..." and hope it helps put her at ease that you "acknowledge" her primacy. Good luck, we're all gonna need it!

(anywhere else on the internet my opinions are limited to  " "...but boy can I ramble on about BPD for ages...