Hello!
My first post here.. I live with my partner who has a 27 yo daughter (lives on her own) who has been diagnosed with BPD. She struggles with that and also drug addiction. I have been on the scene for the past two years, watching the cycles, the shifts, the growth, the fails. It's only recently that I feel kind of hopeless about it all.. so I'm reaching out. Today I read about the Karpman triangle. So accurate... I'd like to try and use that model (victim, rescuer, perpetrator), along with the "winning" version (vulnerable, caring, assertive) to try help our repetitive family dynamic.
The usual routine is that the daughter is the victim and my partner is the rescuer. She is aware of her BPD and goes to therapy (until she fires her therapists) but I believe her substance abuse keeps her from being able to make any actual personal progress. If you hint to her that her substance using is hindering her life (she can't keep her job, just quit college, etc) she blows up. I have witnessed many interactions as a quiet third party between her and her dad and she's pretty out there... he has learned to be incredibly neutral with his demeanor and interactions with her and she is all the more dramatic. A very calm and compassionate "honey, you can't keep doing this to yourself" from him when she comes in to work (his shop is the only place she can hold a job - basically her dad pays her to sit there so at least he knows she's not on the streets) shaking and messed up results in her screaming at him "stop being mean to me". Then she texts me later telling me a completely revised version of the situation in which he was screaming at her and slamming the door behind her. She comes to me for venting and compassion, but I know her interpretation of events is not right (in the cases where I've observed without her realizing it). If I don't buy it, she calls me brainwashed. Often what I see from her is projection.. she projects alot of her nasties on to her dad. He is pretty reasonable, but he's a hardcore rescuer and I've been trying to teach him how to back off and be caring and compassionate while maintaining healthy boundaries.
She will get help for her drug abuse sometimes.. but after observing the pattern for awhile it seems more that she is doing it for attention because her network of supporters have grown frustrated and cold.. until she announces she's cleaning up her act, then the cycle repeats: gets her attention fix from her supporters, gets bored of that and starts in on the drugs again, runs out of money, runs out of attention, publicly cleans up her act, etc... I don't think she has actually been clean in the past 2 years at least.
So I found this article:
https://www.bpdfamily.com/content/karpman-drama-triangleand it was nicely informative, but a question stands out to me. The way to success is to move in to the middle of the triangle by using a combination of sensitivity, compassion, and responsibility to indirectly show the extreme person how extreme they're being. Ok. So, how in the
do we do that?
She is so deeply the Victim that she is seeing a total fantasy version of reality. How in the world can we show her how extreme she is being?
The big power dynamic is between my partner and his daughter, but I know I have some influence. He knows that he is a Rescuer individual, but the problem is the past has really ground it in to him. When his daughter was younger, her mother took her away, taught her to use drugs, and the girl was nearly dead.. truly. It was her dad who literally rescued her. So, it's pretty hard to tell him to be less proactive and just sit back and compassionately listen for when she asks for help. She is very proud/egotistical and will pretty much die before she asks for help, but at the same time will engage you, escalate, and then threaten self-harm/suicide if you don't offer the 'right' help. And then also she gets super offended if you are proactive in any way. Even to the point where she tells me that she is a failure at life and she doesn't want to drop out of school because it is so important to her and that she's looking for help. I took that as her asking for help/advice from me and so I told her how I went through college - the old work hard play hard approach.. and told her to try something radical and only use substances on the weekends and focus her money and time on school during the work week. She came out flat and said "no I don't want to" and then told me that I was offending her and to stop acting like her mother.
So I don't know. I'm tired. I'm sad. She's a good person in there somewhere.. and it breaks my heart to see my partner's pain. And I'm afraid she'll mess my young kids up eventually. So I've got all those oogly booglys trying to motivate me to fix a situation that I can't.
