How to disengage from BPD daughter

[Parents! Get help here!]

We've had 18 chaotic years with our now 32 year old BPD daughter. Perhaps longer than this. Now, with a still strong marriage "forged by fire" , a healthy son and fiance, both of whom we love spending time with , the dilemmas are different. How to have a fun weekend of family time when our BPD daughter will ruin it? Do we not invite her? Isn't that excluding her? How to keep her from feeling like the unloved one? The mood is different when she's with us as she won't engage in games, fun, "chilling out" for a sustained time with any of us and we enjoy these things. How to take a short trip with son and exclude BPD daughter without hurting her feelings? Our BPD daughter also has a serious heroin/meth habbit that has caused us to set serious limits regarding her presence in our home. We love her but she can't stay with us if she is using. We don't want to cement her feelings of "otherness" but she's hard to include in many normal aspects of our lives. We are always there to help her when she needs us
but increasingly, that is our only role.

[limits]

We've had 18 chaotic years with our now 32 year old BPD daughter. Perhaps longer than this. Now, with a still strong marriage "forged by fire" , a healthy son and fiance, both of whom we love spending time with , the dilemmas are different. How to have a fun weekend of family time when our BPD daughter will ruin it? Do we not invite her? Isn't that excluding her? How to keep her from feeling like the unloved one? The mood is different when she's with us as she won't engage in games, fun, "chilling out" for a sustained time with any of us and we enjoy these things. How to take a short trip with son and exclude BPD daughter without hurting her feelings? Our BPD daughter also has a serious heroin/meth habbit that has caused us to set serious limits regarding her presence in our home. We love her but she can't stay with us if she is using. We don't want to cement her feelings of "otherness" but she's hard to include in many normal aspects of our lives. We are always there to help her when she needs us
but increasingly, that is our only role.

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

[Sancho]

This is such a dilemma! I have been sitting here thinking what would I do in your shoes - and I have been thinking for quite a time without coming to any solutions really.

I wondered how your son feels about this? Does he like to have your daughter included or at least invited?

Would it be possible for you, your husband, son and fiance to work on a plan of how this could work - ie there are some occasions when your daughter would be invited, some when you just spend time with your son and - I think this would make me feel better if I was in your situation- sometimes when you just spend time with your daughter.

I think if patterns are changed ie normally a whole family would gather for something or just to spend time together. If you change this pattern so that you spend time with different members on separate occasions, it would feel less like excluding your daughter.

Of course I don't know how possible this is. Spending any time with your daughter might be almost impossible!

Just a thought . . . .

[KBug]

I'm so sorry that you are stuck in this dilemma.  We struggle with a similar issue.  When my stepdaughter (22) comes to family events and trips, she almost always brings drama and conflict. The last time we went on vacation with the kids, she didn't think that she could handle it.  It was a wonderful and conflict free trip.  The brothers commented on how fun and peaceful the trip was and that they hadn't really experienced such a trip with their sister and mother (who also has BPD). I want to plan a trip this summer once we all have our vaccinations.  I'm afraid that the step daughter will want to come and that we will all be miserable.  I don't really have any answers for you but I wanted to let you know that you are not alone.  I am also eager to learn from other people's experiences with this dilemma.