Meltdown driving adult kids away. :(

[Chief Drizzt]

Well it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here.  Things were getting really good with my wife and last night everything blew up.  Our daughter has been home from college for a couple of weeks now and I decided it would be a good idea for us to have a family talk last night as she made a hurtful statement to my wife.  Silly me - bad idea.  The statement she made was that she was pushing her away as she did our two older sons.  It was said in frustration but there is some truth to it.

So we have this talk and my daughter proceeds to tell us a lot of hard things to hear.  She was doing it respectfully and trying to open up about how growing up in the home hasn’t been easy because of always having to walk on eggshells.  My BPD wife took it really hard and interpreted this discussion as that she is a failure as a mother.  From there everything continued to spiral downward.  She started getting really upset and crying uncontrollably and nothing I could say or do would calm her down.  In trying to talk to her she got very mad at me and is still made at me.  She doesn’t understand I’m trying to help her and thinks I’m attacking her - no matter what I said.

As this is going on my daughter got a severe nose bleed and started throwing up - a lot.  It’s the first time in 19 years I’ve seen her react this way to one of these tantrums by my wife.  I had no idea how bad this stuff has affected her until last night and as you can imagine I feel horrible.

I told her to go to her brother’s house (our other son) and she was terrified at how it might affect my wife.  Seeing her physical reaction all I cared about in that moment was getting her out of the house.  I told her she needed to go and not to worry about her mother - and that I would deal with the repercussions.  

Things are calmer today - daughter is staying with my son and his wife through the weekend. I tried to rehash things with my wife to no avail. She is not diagnosed so I tried talking to her about her out of control emotions and she needed to get help to try and manage them - that they have us all on edge.  Bad idea - she took that as another attack - I swear I can’t win with her.  She thinks we are all against her - when we really aren’t.  We’re just all scared of her emotional outburst and reactions.  

Thanks reading my vent - this is frustrating and depressing. I hate that my kids have suffered. I didn’t realize how bad it was for them….

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