BPD Mother

[daughterofkraken]

BPD mother currently living with me after a fight with my sister 8 months ago. In her mind, the world is against her and she cannot understand what she’s done to deserve all this pain and suffering. Can I force her legally to get the help she needs? She refuses to go to therapy. I don’t know what else to do.

[PearlsBefore]

Without knowing where you live, it's impossible to give a definitive answer - but most likely you'd only be able to fill in a form for a local magistrate stating you believed her to be a danger to herself or others and they'd take her on a 1-3 day psychiatric hold to determine whether that's true...they wouldn't force her into treatment. There's not a great solution for loved-one caretakers of BPD unfortunately, there's a Family Connections support group that's phenomenal in my experience (I mean they also teach DBT skills which is helpful in some cases).

One trick with which I did find moderate success to convince them to consider therapy is a "I'm thinking of going to therapy myself, you know me - I'm such a mess...but I'm intimidated and ashamed...if I went to therapy, would you go to therapy too?" and see if you can get a foot in the door that way. After all, they'd love to think YOU are finally realising what a burden YOU are to THEM ;)

Look for people with specialties in BPD though - nothing worse than getting an opportunity and it's wasted because the therapist figured this was just like Wikipedia or something.