Seeking support, knowledge about homeless, untreated BPD mother

[gkm93]

TW: mention of incest, domestic violence, other abuse

Hi everyone,

Have just stumbled upon this forum as part of my deep-dive into the Internet to find some relief from the BPD mom burden. Not really sure what I'm looking for; maybe wondering if anyone has a similar situation? Looking to feel a bit less isolated with it all, perhaps, as no one in my friend circle deals with these sorts of familial issues.

My mom is 60 years old and has had a rather tumultuous life. She was born into a wealthy but very abusive family, and was on the receiving end of incest, physical violence, and psychological abuse growing up and through her teens. Perhaps unsurprisingly she transitioned from familial abuse into spousal abuse: her ex-partner was quite a terrible person and beat, belittled, and gas-lit her quite mercilessly for many years. I entered the picture a couple years into their relationship, and so I was unfortunately also witness / subjected to much of this abuse as well until we escaped in the middle of the night when I was four.

My early years were a struggle as much of the abuse continued in other forms. We lived with poverty and homelessness on and off for the better part of 15 years (fortunately never slept on the street thanks to my mom's drive and ingenuity as well as the good will of others who had our backs). We knew our way around the shelter system and learned to live out of a backpack and suitcase.

This prolonged stress and lifestyle took its toll on both her and I.

By the age of 19 I was riddled with depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and was able to survive solely because of grit and stubbornness. I had had enough suffering and began doing what I could to truly end the cycle once and for all. It was a slow and painful process compromised of a lot of crappy jobs, a lot of therapy, but in the end, a bit of good luck. I am now 27 and have a well-paying, extremely secure job, a beautiful home, excellent mental health, and a very secure circle of long-time friends. By all accounts I am where any 27 year old could hope to be, and for that I am grateful. My mom, however, is not as lucky. For a variety of reasons - some within her control, some not - she lives in her van, struggles with financial security (I am her primary money safety net), and deals with moderate to severe mental health struggles on the daily. I'm not a psychologist but from my own experience in therapy and hours of research I suspect she has challenges with C-PTSD, BPD (I understand the two can appear similar but are separate from each other, however she fits a lot of the criteria for BOTH disorders unfortunately), anxiety, and depression. An unfortunate plethora to deal with but I am sure all too common on these boards.

One of her biggest struggles is relationships. Both romantic and platonic. The usual cycle is: someone enters her life, she idolizes them, unconsciously creates a mental laundry list of why they'll finally be the safe person she's been looking for, they will let her down in some way / do something which she perceives to be a slight or a threat, and then she demonizes them and severs all contact. Rinse and repeat. Unfortunately this means that she doesn't really have any significant friends in her life, which leaves me as her primary attachment figure.

This pattern then translates to our relationship as well.

In my late teens and early twenties it would manifest itself in highly reactive arguments between the two of us, a complete lack of communication (she used to "brag" to friends and family that we never fought, we'd just go silent - something I used to take pride in however I now know that healthy fighting can be good, and silence actually erodes the integrity of any respectful, trusting relationship), as well as self-harm. For me, hurting myself was the way I could regulate my emotions as well as express to her the pain she was causing me. It was the only way I could show her what her actions were doing to me that didn't involve words, and thus meant she couldn't read into anything or construe malice where there wasn't any. It was a form of communication that was untaintable by her hyper-sensitive smoke detector and was usually what would calm her down or snap her out of her flailing fit of anger.

I don't think she partook in overt self-harm as a teen or young adult, however she has struggled with bulimia on and off for most of her life. I had no idea that this was a common comorbidity for females with BPD. I struggled with anorexia as a teen.

Our daily life together nowadays has its ups and downs. When she is feeling okay, we can have a semi-easy time in each other's company and enjoy doing things together every now and again. When she isn't doing great, the grand gestures of anger or suicidality or preemptive relationship severing arise. One of her favourites is to threaten to drive away in her van and never return. One time she did just that: fled in the middle of the night, destroyed her phone, and drove off into the great beyond for many days. I had no idea where she'd gone. She eventually had car trouble and had to return. Other times she likes to talk about walking into the woods and never coming back. This isn't always meant as a negative thing as she loves being in nature, however she likes to get angry with me when I say that it makes me feel unsteady or unsure of what her plans are. Then it "becomes all about me, like it always has been". Sometimes she does mean it a thinly veiled suicide threat and has made indirect yet direct reference to such. She texted me that she was "going into the woods" on Boxing Day, and got angry when I asked for some clarification on what she meant / where she was specifically going. Said that I was making it about my own fears and to not burden her with my worry, and to leave her be. My job is such that I am exposed to the daily tragedies that occur in the large city I live in, and I therefore am acutely aware of the frequency with which suicides occur, how they occur, what happens before they occur etc. This knowledge amplifies my concern for her safety.

The end result is an ever-changing, consistently inconsistent daily dynamic which is extremely exhausting to keep up with. As I have aged and done more work in therapy, it has almost become MORE difficult to deal with her because I can see with greater clarity what she does, why she does it, and things that may help mitigate her struggles. Yet as we know all too well, there is nothing I can say or do that can "fix" her or "cure" her of what ails her. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Thus I am instead left at what feels like the mercy of her and the whims of her brain, and it demands a Herculean amount of resolve, confidence, and self-assuredness to maintain my grounding. Nine times out of ten I have no problem and can do just that, but even the successes are exhausting.

Anyway... again, not sure what my end goal in writing all of this out is. Maybe the writing out alone is therapeutic I do know that it would be nice to talk with folks who deal with BPD moms, more specifically those that are underhoused / homeless and rely on their child to be their sole support caregiver. If any of you are out there, it would be good to know that it ain't just me!

Keep up the good fight, folks!

[beatricex]

hi gkm93,
Welcome.  You sound very grounded for someone who has been through so much.  Thank you for sharing your story, it is quite inspirational.

My mom is BPD'd but not homeless.  My parents do live in a somewhat eccentric way, they have no central heat/air, bats/bugs/birds can easily get into their place (it's more like a shed than a house, definetly illegal for them to live this way) it is a lot like camping.  Thus far, my siblings and I have not had to support my Mom financially, but I do see it coming to that one day, as she always says that her backup plan is her kids.

b

[Turkish]

How old is your mother gkm93? Is there a option of government pension or assistance, or does all of her money sourced by you?

My mother had a similar tendency to be attracted to friends who were "on the edge" and I can't count how many friendships she blew through, a few people that she invited to live with her.

I was never her primary source of income, but I'd helped her save her property from foreclosure (of course a last minute--3 days-- request and I had to take a credit card advance and then sell stock). I gave her money for property taxes, utilities that steers on the verge of shutting off (how about that $1000 water bill!), to rebuild the engine in the bullet proof Toyota truck I gave her (I think she continually overreved it in 4WD in the snow], and so on. Paid the registration the year she didn't have money.

Yet after the foreclosure, on the verge of paying off her property, even when she took social security at the minimum age of 62 (and then complained about it not being enough though she did that which ensured she wouldn't get the full pension), she still seemed to always be in crisis.

She told me she once had to cut up her debit card because she'd compulsively purchase jewelry from the TV show QVC. I visited her once and saw stacks of jewelry boxes on her desk. 3 feet high, no joke.

Her neighbor later told me stories of how she felt sorry for my mom and would leave food at her gate, animal food also for my mom's menagerie. She gave my mom money to weed her garden, and on one trip to Walmart to get food, was incensed and confused that my mom spent most of it on lawn statuary.

My mom suffered from PTSD, likely BPD, depression and anxiety. Looking back even into childhood, where we were quasi- homeless from the time i was 11 until 17, I realized that my mother survived by being in perpetual crisis she drew an odd type of strength from it. She even named a road in a California mountain county "Bootstrap Way." She lost that 25 acres in 1984 for want of a $15k note.

Members on the parents of children with BPD board often talk about how much of the help they provide to their kids, who tend to be mostly ungrateful, and how much of the help crosses into enabling such behaviors to continue if the recipients are sheltered from the consequences of their actions.

Such discussion can be uncomfortable, but it's good to discuss things to get feedback from the community who understands. Even if we disagree, that's OK. We are all here to support each other.



Turkish

[PearlsBefore]

Well the good news is that reading a rather detailed patient history, my amateur opinion is that you're not definitely facing BPD - the only two factors suggestive are the incest and her translating that into BPDish splitting on relationships.

It sounds more like she was either the codependent with your father(?) or else in a relationship similar to one I know wherein two mentally ill people convince themselves they'll withstand each other - whereas statistically I'd expect a BPD to be having more fits and likely enacting more violence herself than she did. Then again, if you were 4 - you're reliant on her tales of what happened for the most part.  But despite living homeless it seems she was able to actualise medium-term plans to keep you from sleeping rough, and serious substance abuse doesn't appear to be a major factor. Obviously there are millions of pwBPDs in the US alone so there are untold possible factors, but on the whole - it sounds like you can relax a little bit that she's not in the worst prognostic category.

Also good news pseudo-contraindicating BPD, you've got a deficiency of BPD-style self-harming behaviors or theatrical suicide attempts - they typically die down from the teens through the 30s, but you don't mention her reliving, boasting or confiding about them. Her recent "veiled threat" would be unusual for a BPD, realistically it could be something like schizoaffective but could also just be a person who has reached the end of their tether and is feeling suffocated and wants to "push back" - one thing we all do in this forum is jump to the conclusion that negative behaviors must trace back to the very apparent mental illness, but sometimes even healthy people just make bad, emotional, selfish or irrational decisions and so do unhealthy people.

I find C-PTSD, as you say, quite difficult to differentiate from so many alternatives - Cluster A and B both. A nearly impossible maze to figure out, or to isolate...at least in my limited experience.

Were I in your shoes I'd probably choose to focus on either the anxiety (even if it's GAD, it's symptomatic so you just treat the symptom not the cause) or the depression (also relatively easy fix, one of two medication types, or short-term therapist/friend to unload/datadump or a charm bracelet that lies and says she's your hero.

Fixing either one of those, hopefully in a 4-12 month timeframe, should not only improve her quality of life but also make it clearer what the next steps should be...once you're able to see what factors disappear. (For example, someone unkempt with wildly unbrushed hair or living in a ratnest could be hebephrenic...but could also just be depressed).

[beatricex]

hi again gkm93,
I suspect if you are anything like me (which I imagine someone here must be, ), you are feeling a tad bit uncomfortable discussing your eccentric Mom with your somewhat normal well-adjusted friends?

This is really the hard part, I found, of being in my teens, 20's, 30's and 40's... Wild guess, let me know if I'm way off.

I forgot to mention my Mom is also a hoarder.  Not quite the same as living in a van, but it is equally anti-social, maybe?

I used to fret I would never find someone who I could take to visit her, at the place her and my dad live.  Enter my husband.  Sometimes I think he really is a saint.  Not only did he not run after seeing the way my mom/dad lived (spiders, high potential for bed bugs?, piles of stuff in their eccentric non air tight non insulated shed), he embraced it and said "I love it."

It's so weird as she's also OCD.  I don't know how she keeps the place clean enough, The house we grew up in (they lost to foreclosure) was practically sterile.  It's like she went from one extreme to another. 

Are you still there?

b

[Resiliant]

Hey - if you are still there.

Not sure if you would be interested in the book "The Glass Castle" (2005) a memoir by Jeannette Walls.

All the best to you.

R