Our Young Adult Daughter Is Struggling with BPD

[LakeGirl3]

Hello, I'm posting for the first time and am here to learn from other parents who have a child with BPD and to share my experience. After years of therapy, medications, and family conflict, my 22-year-old daughter is now in a DBT program for young adults. It's a huge relief, but my husband and I still have encounters with our daughter that leave us shaken because of her anger toward us and her sister. It's early in her program (4 weeks), so we are hopeful things will improve. The most upsetting encounters often start out pleasant but quickly become attacking if we say the wrong thing. My husband and I have done a parenting DBT class and really try to use the skills when we talk with her. Sometimes we feel pushed into arguments, which often revolve around hot-button issues like gender-identity, sexual orientation, race, and politics. She is bisexual and the rest of our family is straight so that is understandably hard for her. She says she doesn't feel judged or not accepted, just that we can't understand, so this is a space we need to work on. She is a musician and dropped out of a prestigious music school because of conflicts with friends and because she felt none of the professors were helping her. When she came home, we turned the room above our garage into a small apt to give her (and us) much needed space. She quit her first job after a year because she said the staff and customers were misogynistic. She left on good terms, so was able to keep things civil, and she is a hard worker. Then she was in a band but it was taking up too much of her time (even though she had no other commitments) and she didn't like the music she had to play. Now she is interning at a music studio but says they aren't teaching her much. And, she has set up her own music studio at home to produce her own music but constantly has technical issues with her equipment and has trouble focusing (also has ADHD). Thank you for "listening" - I look forward to hearing your stories.

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

[HappyChappy]

... my 22-year-old daughter is now in a DBT program for young adults. It's a huge relief, but my husband and I still have encounters with our daughter that leave us shaken because of her anger toward us and her sister.

Great news that your daughter has agreed to DBT, well done her. It take a long time to change BPD behaviour, so the trick is to focus on the small wins. Measure it every 6 months.

You may know the anger is often directed at whomever the BPD wants something from.  And they’re experts at triggering us, so I do understand how difficult this must be for you. So be sure to consider your own mental health too.

Using S.E.T. worked for us. "Support, Empathy and Truth" – even though someone with BPD may not use any of that. My daughter also found art & music very therapeutically and won prestigious award. What helped with her anger was going to martial arts, which got her into meditation and then Buddhism. She's gone from wanting to argue with anyone that disagrees to quoting Gandhi. Punk music to Enya. That took a few years.

She is a musician and dropped out of a prestigious music school because of conflicts with friends and because she felt none of the professors were helping her.

My daughter is currently at Art collage,  also has adhd traits.  I still have to organise her, but she's found a course where they see her learning difficulty (LD) as a super power and have specific systems and apps to help. There are employers that seek out theses creative superpowers and are better suited to deal with "artistic temperament" - such as Virgin, who started in the Music industry. Bill Gates etc... These places might have easier to understand tech for your daughter and more accommodating tutors / team members ?

If not expert patient groups tend to have the very latest, and given folk with adhd are good at research (and inventions) they tend to give evidenced based advise. 

In our area there aren't any BPD expert patient groups - I was told they get too combatative, Imagine that ? I've taught special Ed and no one is "neurotypical" , labels are for accessing medication - which if you daughter hasn't done yet, will be well worth exploring with an expert.

Projecting blame away and giving up easily, are considered masking behaviour. Because if people tell her "it's easy" when she struggles, that daily humiliation will causes serious anxiety issues. Avoiding isolation and encouraging my daughter to mix in non toxic settings really helped her. Hope that helps, if not forget you ever read this.

[Randi Kreger]

YOU SAID:

“Because I am trying to learn about BPD I am seeing that she probably is not doing enough therapy-for she is not doing enough to change deepset habits. How can I congratulate  her on all her efforts and also encourage her to do more in depth, so that she can confidently set up goals for her life?”

What you have described is the dialectic, probably the most important part of DBT.  

The dialectic describes how both the thesis and the antithesis of a perspective can both be true. Put another way, for every statement or interpretation, there exists an opposite. A dialectical stance holds that both of these opposites can be simultaneously true.

It is also a word that describes how both the thesis and the antithesis of a perspective (In this case how can I congratulate her on all her efforts and also encourage her to do more, so she will talk about her deepest emotions.)

Put another way, both statements are true: she is doing the best she can for right now, but she could do better. That is a basic statement of the dialectic— two opposing thoughts can both be true.

Put another way, for every statement or interpretation, there exists an opposite. A dialectical stance holds that both of these opposites can be simultaneously true.

For example, you can be very angry at something your child does, but you still love your child.

You can even go incommunicado with a child because they’re just too upsetting to have them around the family, AND you still love them and want to be around them.

You can be exhausted trying to find treatment for your child, and then they skip the first day of treatment.
However, angry, you are at them, angry,you still love them.

This is a very long answer to your question. You praise your child for the work that they’ve done (however, long ago it was ) and say something about it that you can see is different.

Tell your child you are proud of what she’s done. Then point out the benefits of putting even more effort into it. Maybe they can have the phone an extra hour each day or something.

(You should always have some thing you control that the child wants that you can take away when they’ve behaved badly.)

Try not to be a therapist. What they want is your unconditional love and acceptance even if they’re hanging out with a tough motorcycle crowd with tattoos on their face

But your praise has to be sincere. “ I’m so proud of what you accomplished. You did such and such which makes me more confident in you.

“At the same time, I’ve read the dialectical behavior therapy book for clinicians (or whatever) l and I know that if you put even more effort into it you will learn to manage your emotions so you won’t feel like you’re on a roller coaster all the time.”

So that’s kind of how you say two opposing things. Make sure that you don’t use the word “but” as in “I see that you did a lot of work, but you can do more than that.”

It’s best to use two sentences. “I I am so proud of you for what you’ve done. I know that it’s possible to achieve even more if you choose to work harder on this and this module. (know which module they are working on at the time you’re talking to them)

Anyway, that’s the dialectic. If you happen to see Marsha Linehan walking down the road, tell her that there’s so much good in DBT—AND it doesn’t address some important  things like men with BPD, the effect of physical, sexual, emotional and verbal abuse on family members which can cause complex PTSD.

I hope this helps

[LakeGirl3]

Thank you for these helpful responses! This is truly a supportive group and I will be checking in often to gain insight.