When your are criticised and accused unfairly

[CopperLeaves]

Hello,
This is my first time here. I'm coming after many years of struggling with my daughter whilst trying my best to support her. I have realised with much pain that she has been manipulating me, attempting to sabotage my marriage, and her behaviour has become very damaging to the mental wellbeing of everyone in our household.
She no longer lives with us, and is quite erratic and unstable.
When she was little we were strict, but loving and always did our best for her. She has never experienced abuse or poverty, and I fought for support for her in education, healthcare and every aspect of life I could.
But now everything I (or her sibling or Dad) say gets twisted and given a new meaning. If we say something nice it's changed to doing it 'for show'. If we give advice we're being controlling. If we don't give advice we're not supporting her. If we ask about her life we're judging her. If we don't we're neglectful. If she calls us in a bad mental state and we arrange to go see her, and she changes her mind, she accuses us of overstepping her boundaries if we say we're worried and would like to come. In one week she can be loving and huggy, then suddenly saying she hates us.
The splitting is unbearable for me and I've felt like a failure for many years. After she left home my mental health lifted immensely and I've been able to reduce my anti anxiety meds.

I know she is unwell (and has other problems/ conditions), so I try not to judge to harshly, and realise I have excused or overlooked things over the years because I want to be a loving and supportive mum and help her as best I can.

But now that feeling is fading, because my defenses are up. She has thrown so many criticisms at me over the past year. She's told me how she will be a better mum and will improve the family after all the generations before her who have got everything wrong. She gets godlike complexes where she thinks she is better than everyone, then she crashes and self-harms. It's a roller coaster.

She has episodes of psychotic delusions, and then reads meaning into them that must mean bad things about her family.

One thing that hurts so much I don't know what to do - and I REALLY need help to handle this - is she rewrites history. She changes details, dates, conversations, everything and presents an entirely new scenario. I don't know how much she believes and how much is manipulation or cruelty. I do think she believes a good part of it. If we try to defend or challenge a false narrative she accuses us of gaslighting. If we say she's hurting us she says it's not about us.
It's hard to say this, but she has accused us of abuse. She has episodes of fixation on things and develops narratives that she adopts (knowingly or not - I don't know, but I do think she convinces herself so it's not all malicious). This has resulted in her making allegations of abuse, resulting in police and social services coming into our home with our younger children here. It left us traumatised for years. The police and SS concluded quickly there was no case and left it. However, she lied to us about what had happened and told us the person she'd reported the abuse to had coerced her into doing it!

I don't feel emotionally safe in any way around her and have withdrawn for my own sanity. But I can't stop caring about her and wanting to be her Mum. It just hurts so much.

I'm not trying to tear her to pieces here - she has many lovely qualities and talents too, and I love her. I'm saying all this because it hurts and I need help.

How do you cope when someone you love accuses you of horrible things and tells you you have failed as a parent?

Thank you

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

[CC43]

Copper,

Your story overlaps with mine in many ways.  It must feel hard to be the object of so much fury and false allegations.  My diagnosed stepdaughter, who has many talents, also has a talent for twisting facts and re-casting history to make herself out to be a victim.  She tested out claims of sexual abuse by her father, but she eventually gave up that particular narrative because it was too serious and blatantly false.  Instead, she'll often hint at abuse, being vague about when or where it happened, to keep others guessing.  At first I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but now I see that it's all fabrication designed to re-direct pain and blame onto others.  I'm not sure if she even believes the stories herself.  Maybe she's vague because she thinks something bad must have happened to make her feel so terrible.  She certainly believes the pain behind the trauma, and she repeatedly acts out that pain.  Her stories are all emotion, not logic.

And yes, she's like a Miranda warning:  everything we say can and will be used against us.  Innocuous questions about how her day went are interpreted as judgmental, hostile or prying.  If we let her take the conversational lead, we're ignoring her.  If we offer any help, she thinks it's intrusive, or that we think she's incapable, or that we're being condescending.  She went ballistic once when a relative offered her some water, and ever since that relative stays away from my stepdaughter out of fear.  Now spending holidays with the entire family is out of the question.

I see this behavior as a "trauma" response.  I put trauma in quotations because to a "normal" person, there was no trauma.  But my stepdaughter feels like she's experienced multiple traumas.  When she feels a little stress, she's primed for a fight-or-flight response.  A fight response might be hurling vicious venom towards her family members, and a flight response might be cutting everyone off for a few weeks.

This site recommends empathy and JADE.  Empathy in understanding your daughter's genuine pain, even if she hasn't identified correctly the source of that pain.  JADE means don't justify, argue, defend or explain when she accuses you of whatever.  When she's accusing you of outrageous things, her logical brain has shut down, and her emotional brain has taken over.  Any attempts to justify or explain yourself will make her even angrier, because she feels misunderstood, and that her emotions aren't being acknowledged by her loved ones.

This site also urges you to remember the three Cs:  You didn't cause it, you can't control it and you can't cure it.  I know it's hard not to take your daughter's dysfunction and accusations to heart, but you did your best! 

I think it's also important to give your other children attention.  The dysregulated child seems to suck up parental resources, energy and concern.  I worry the other children will feel resentful of that.

[livednlearned]

Hi Copper, welcome and hello 

Rewriting history is so hard, especially when it impacts you and your family. Actually, in my family, the impact of the revision is lessening because everyone has been on the receiving end at some point and knows SD26 is loose with the truth. It's when SD26 says it about someone else (her ex BF being physically abusive, for example) that's tough. Is he hitting her? Or is this the same as her saying I locked her out of the house (she tried to use the wrong key to get into our home).

How old is your daughter? Does she live nearby? Is she receptive to a BPD diagnosis and has she had any treatment?

People here understand what it's like to love someone with destructive tendencies. You probably know better than anyone how many wonderful strengths your daughter has -- my stepdaughter is one of the most remarkable women. She can learn languages with no trouble, she's a gifted poet, she picked up a guitar and learned to play it quickly, she works with kids who have special needs and is so patient and attuned. Interpersonally, though, it's exhausting to spend time with her because she's experiencing such a different reality. We all think we're on the ground and she's on an emotional roller coaster flying at breakneck speed.

I would categorize the history revisions. Ones that are relatively harmless, ones that are harmful to herself, ones that are harmful to you but not consequential, ones that are harmful and consequential.

For example, SD26 changes jobs a lot. You would think she has worked for some of the most cruel people in the world who regularly do things that are fireable offenses. We treat these different than, say, SD26 accusing her ex BF of hurting her. Both impact her but in the first example, she's changing jobs, moving to a new apartment, and while it seems unnecessarily chaotic to us, she seems to almost need it. When she accused her ex BF of hurting her, we waded in carefully -- her mother has BPD and they escalated things to a degree that made things worse.

When it's more personal and closer to home, I try to leverage the validating environment I've worked hard to build with her. I'm not her biological mother so I have the luxury of having emotional distance. My biological child is autistic and I experience different challenges because my emotions about seeing him suffer can feel almost unbearable, making change harder than, say, with SD26. With SD26, it is easier for me to focus on "where do we go from here?" Her instincts drive her toward victimhood so focusing on solutions she has to come up with engage the adult part of her, even though her reactions are often more childlike.

With something serious like engaging social services, that's deep breath territory. She's what Bill Eddy refers to as a high-conflict personality (HCP). An HCP is someone who has a target of blame, recruits negative advocates, is a persuasive blamer, and has a PD. Not all people with BPD are HCP (SD26 showed a tendency when she alleged her BF was abusing her).

To me, having her say you're a bad parent is different than calling police to investigate you.

They both engage boundaries but with the latter she's demonstrated a degree of harm that makes your safety the priority.

[CopperLeaves]

Thank you both for your replies. It has taken me a while to respond as I haven't had the emotional energy. I'm so sorry to hear what you have gone through.

Sexual abuse allegations - wow. It's so scary that pwBPD can do that! I'm so sorry! This sort of behaviour keeps me living in a constant state of anxiety, wondering what our DD(24) will say next. She badmouths her family to everyone and always compares us.

I'm do down just now - with no energy. She has cut contact with us, and made her partner do the same. She has also told his family they can't contact me, and they won't because they know she will make their son cut contact with them. He does whatever she tells him to do. She fakes and exaggerates symptoms to make him need to care for her all the time. he stopped working to care for her. Now he does whatever she says because she is pregnant. She knows we care and I think she is using the pregnancy as a weapon to punish me for some imagined slight, knowing that it has more impact. She faked severe pregnancy sickness to get her partner completely tied to her.
I fear for the baby and that she will hurt it and get jealous when her partner's attention is on the baby.
Having no contact is so hurtful. I know she likes to punish and gets a small amount of pleasure from control. It's so toxic and demoralising. I can't believe my child is like this. I wish I could cut her out of my heart and forget about her, but obviously I can't.
I think telling her partner's parents they aren't allowed to contact me about the pregnancy is so extreme and out of line. It screams abuse, coercion, toxic control to me. Everyone is doing what they can to not upset HER, while in the meantime she's dishing out hurt like a storm. And I know that she will be intolerant of the damage she's caused and expect us to welcome her with open arms when she deems us worthy to talk to again. But I won't this time. I've had enough.
I don't even want to bond with the baby because she will weaponise it and use it to hurt us. It hurts to know we will love it from afar. And heartbreaking to know we may need to get social services involved as we know what she's like when she's manic. She says she's moving far away from us and I hope she goes because then we won't feel like we 'should' be doing more to support her. The distance will be its own barrier to her getting what she wants from us.

Sorry - I just needed to vent! It all poured out. I'm so down at the moment and wish she had a partner with some backbone who would say no to her, or fight to get her into therapy. Instead he does whatever she says, no matter the consequences.

thank you for reading x

[CopperLeaves]

Thank you also for your insights into this. They are really helpful, and you both taking the time to share your stories and insights is greatly appreciated.

Sending sincere wishes that things get easier for you too x