Having a BPD Father

[HealingTee]

Hi everybody.

I’m curious to hear the experiences of other people in this forum who have a BPD father. What was it like growing up & what was the relationship like with you BPD father? Did you experience many splitting episodes, idealization to devaluation, by your BPD parent?

Thank you

[pursuingJoy]

Great question, HealingTea. I'm curious to see what responses you get on this one. From what I've read, women are more likely to be diagnosed (are they more likely to see help?) while men are more likely to exhibit antisocial/aggressive behaviors. I'm not sure I've seen other threads here that discuss how BPD manifests differently in men and women. The way it manifests is likely tied to socialization.

[MyDadHasBPD]

My dad has never been diagnosed with BPD. I’ve always suspected he has it since reading the book, Stop Walking on Eggshells, when I was in high school. Anyway, to answer your question… my whole life my dad was volatile. He’d have long stretches of normal and then he’d fight with my mom and spend three or four days brooding. I didn’t know what was going on when I was really little. The first fight of theirs that I remembers happened when I was four or five years old. There was yelling and my dad went into another room and put these big headphones on and I was told not to bother him. I very innocently and cutely told my mom that “daddy just needs to hear a good joke and then he’d be better”. My mom agreed but she let him brood for what seemed like a whole day. Then she went over and he took the headphones off and she told him what I’d said. He came to dinner after that. I could do nothing wrong with my dad at that time in my life.

My sister is six and a half years older than me. She did a lot wrong and my mom too. When I was about six, my parents argued and screamed and my dad told my mom to leave and never come back. Don’t even call the kids ever again he screamed as she cried on all fours in the wet grass in front of our house. And I watched that feeling pretty detached. I loved my dad. I was “daddy’s little girl” and I knew that I was his favorite.

Life continued on pretty well for me while my sister was at home. My dad went hot and cold mostly on my sister and he was mostly cold. She was a book worm and really just liked to read and swing on our swing set even into her teen years. She never had a boyfriend, never got in trouble, never did much of anything. But she would make my dad really mad sometimes because she didn’t do chores or who knows what to set him off. But it was never me that my dad was mean to and so I didn’t pay too much attention. This is why now I guess I can’t fault my mom too much for not intervening. It was easy to be on my dad’s good side. Why would you want to risk that by standing up for someone else?

My sister went to college in 1992 and never really returned home. I was 12 at the time. It seemed like puberty made me a bit foreign to my dad. Our relationship started to degrade and with my sister gone, I was the one that got the emotional abuse when my dad’s mood turned. He would get upset about something inconsequential and we always knew that there was nothing to prevent a blowup but we’d still try to do everything right so that maybe it would pass without him getting so upset. I don’t remember the first time it was directed at me. I remember the insults. Stupid. Good for nothing. On Christmas Eve when I was a teenager he told me that I should leave home and never come back. I guess that was a recurring theme.

When he wasn’t angry or having an episode, my dad couldn’t give me high enough praise. I could do no wrong. I was the best of everything. Beautiful. So smart and funny. And I would cherish that and internalize it always knowing that it was going to turn and I’d do something to make him change his mind.

In the spring of 2000, my dad had an accident at work and got a concussion. Things were very bad for years after that. He was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and cortical atrophy. The doctors said he had the brain of an 80 year old man. He was 50. My dad was so mean almost constantly. He didn’t really have many good days. He’d still swing to telling me I was great and perfect but in a subdued way. He lost his sense of smell and his sense of humor.

I got married and moved out in 2002 at the age of 22. My relationship with my dad immediately improved. I didn’t hear about his fights with my mother. I let myself think that they didn’t happen anymore.

I had a mental health crisis after my daughter was born in 2005. I had euphoria and delusions of grandeur and the whole deal. Postpartum psychosis or bipolar or who knows because after I recovered (which took years) I’ve been off of medication and have never had another episode. I became more empathetic of mental health issues and open to talking about my own mental illness. My parents did not.

I visited my parents every Saturday for the better part of 16 years. I only stopped when my daughter got old enough to have her own activities and really didn’t want to visit her grandparents every week anymore. Our Saturday visits were almost all good. Almost.

We took a road trip to Madison Wisconsin together when my daughter was little, maybe 8, and on the way home my dad and I fought. He woke us all up at 4 am to drive home on the last day of the trip. We were about an hour from home, exhausted and he said he wanted to stop at Dairy Queen. I said I’d rather just go home and he could stop at Dairy Queen after dropping me and my daughter off at our house. My dad thought that was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard. He stopped at a rest area Dairy Queen and took my daughter inside and basically force fed her an ice cream cone. When he got back in the car and started riffing about how stupid I was, I told him “don’t talk to me that way in front of my daughter.” The rest of the drive was angry silence and he dropped me and my daughter at our house and drove away without speaking. I didn’t talk to him for a long time after that. I told my mother I wouldn’t visit again until he apologized. “You know I love you,” he eventually said on the phone. And I went back to visiting again.

My dad started to pick on my daughter when she was about 12. And by this time, I was taking none of it from him. My daughter is hard of hearing, wears hearing aids. So one day, we were visiting my parents and I could tell my dad was in a mood. He asked my daughter something and she said, “huh?” “Huh, huh?” He said back at her. “Are you deaf? ARE YOU DEAF?” “I am deaf actually,” my daughter said. And I went off, “you do not talk to her like that,” I said. My dad left the room and wouldn’t come out for the rest of our visit.

We stopped visiting my parents regularly after that. And then with the pandemic, we stopped visiting at all. I don’t miss them.

My mom and I used to talk on the phone every night at 7pm for about 90 seconds to tell each other that we’re both alive and that we love each other. We did that all through the first year of the pandemic. “Everything’s okay here,” we’d say, “I love you.” I rarely spoke to my father. In the spring of 2021, my mom called in the afternoon and told me to sit down because she had tough news. She proceeded to tell me that my dad was having memory issues. He was getting lost when driving. He couldn’t remember stories from a few years ago. He got angry and knew he couldn’t remember or was angry from forgetting. My mom said their family doctor prescribed an Alzheimer’s medication that didn’t help and that she’d made an appointment at the Cleveland Clinic but didn’t know how they’d get there because driving made my dad so upset. My dad is 71 at this point and my mom is worried because of the cortical brain atrophy diagnosed when he was 50.

My husband and I convinced my parents to let us drive them. We drove an hour to pick them up and then three hours to Cleveland. We dropped my parents, so old and worried and frail looking at the Cleveland Clinic and went to spend the day on our own. My mom didn’t want me at the appointments. We picked my parents up before dinner time and my mom whispered to me as she got in the car, “it’s not dementia. Depression and anxiety.” She wouldn’t say the mental health words in front of my dad but in the way home they told us there was no sign of the cortical brain atrophy on my dad’s MRI and he scored very high on all of the functional tests.

I call my mom about once a week now. I still do text her every day. She says my father “slips away a little more very day” and that it “doesn’t matter that it’s not dementia.” They’re not seeking any treatment from what I can tell. Apparently they were looking for a pill to fix him. Cognitive behavioral therapy isn’t something they’re going to pursue. I went to visit them once after the Cleveland Clinic trip. It was guarded and weird and we didn’t share anything about our lives with each other.

I don’t really know why I felt the need to write this tonight and share it with the internet. Like I said, I don’t know if it’s BPD but I’ve always thought his black and white thinking and push people away just to pull them close behavior matches up with accounts I’ve read. I’m angry now. I’m angry that my mom never stood up for me. I’m angry that my daughter ever was treated badly even for a moment. I feel guilty that for all the love and good times I had that I can’t get over this. I don’t feel like I can make time for my parents anymore. I don’t feel like I have anymore emotional energy to give them. And that feels selfish because they really have given me so much, but growing up with a BPD father took quite a toll.