>Mom with BPD and going no contact

[Renn]

Hi,
This is my first post here and I would like to say "be kind" but I know that's a given.

 I am a 34 year old women with a mom that suffers from BPD. The emotional roller-coaster through my childhood was endless of course, but more recently has started again.

3 years ago, after two attempted sucides and  2 stints in the hospital, she finally admitted she had something wrong. She had been medicated according,  with mood stabilizers but the last few months has been drinking more and I think she may be coming resistant to her meds. Anyways, she had one small relapse last month  which I let slide and said she needed to get help, but that turned into a fight and an even bigger episode of being belittled and accused of ruining her life and not supporting her.

 I feel like such a failure as a daughter and with my children being so close to her, I NEVER want them to feel like this. So I decided to go no contact.  Since making the decision she has also threatened legal action to see my kids , which makes no sense as my husband and i are happily married and she wouldn't have the financial means anyways. So I've made the hard decision for my children, husband and myself saftey to go no contact with both my mom and dad.

I have never done this. I've have always tried to be supportive and see things from her side and help navigate her mental health but I'm tired. I am getting closer to 40 and I don't think I will ever be the person she needs me to be.

I have started therapy (that of course isn't covered) but I just don't want to feel guilty for setting these hard boundaries right now. Father's Day just passed and I cried because my dad is such a sweet guy, but enables her (he is so emotionally controlled and manipulate by her that he doesn't know how to be his own person ) to no end and I know that if I allowed him in my life it would just make him more guilty, or worse that he would convince me to come back into there life, and I'm just not there yet.

If you have experience going through a "no contact" period I'd love some feedback. I feel like in going through a death.

Thanks,
Renn

[Notwendy]

Hi Renn- while I haven't experienced the NC exactly- I have experienced the need to have boundaries with a mother with BPD and my enabler father. I was not as informed as you are at your age and did continue contact with both my parents at that time but they didn't live close to me and so the exposure to my mother was limited to short visits. In addition, I didn't ever leave them alone with her. My parents visited together and we got together as a family. I wouldn't leave them alone with her if there was the opportunity.

I had no idea about BPD until later. In college, after telling a counselor about my mother's behavior- that counselor suggested I go NC. I still had contact with my father and as you would guess, he found ways to get me back to my mother. They were a package deal.

It was later when my kids were teens that my mother's behavior became problematic because they didn't need adult supervision and she'd try to enlist them as emotional caretakers for her. Not long after that, my father got ill and eventually passed away. I had someone watch my kids (by that time, they were teens, they didn't need much watching) and went to stay with my parents to help out. It was such an abusive situation (my mother's verbal and emotional abusive behavior) that I knew I had to have boundaries.

As you mentioned- the need to have boundaries with myself and my kids did not go well with my mother and my father aligned with her against me. So while I did maintain contact with her and tried to do my best- so that I could remain in contact with my father, the contingency for that was larger - I would have to also continue to tolerate her verbak and emotional abuse, and also not have boundaries with my children and like you, I made the only choice a parent could make- I chose the boundaries.

I didn't go NC with my mother at this point. I went "LC". A factor in this decision was that she is a widow and we kids are her next of kin. Also, my kids are now adults and have their own boundaries with her. Your mother has your father and so you can make the decision that works for your family- that is the bottom line- whatever we choose to do is the one that fits our situation best, and it's a difficult choice regardless but the one we decide is necessary.

I think a sense of grief is common and also a sense of failure. We did fail- but only at a job that was impossible to succeed at- and a job that was not ours in the first place- to make our relationship with our parents somehow "normal". We can't somehow "fix" their feelings.

[zachira]

I come from a large extended family of disordered family members some of whom have BPD. I am low contact or no contact with some of the more disordered members. Going no contact does not have to be a permanent decision and it can be one. Going no contact can allow for a period of healing, to reevaluate as needed our decisions on what kind of contact if any we want to have with disordered family members, and to work on our boundaries. One of the most challenging boundaries can be to own our feelings while not allowing ourselves to take on the projected feelings of disordered people. This boundary is especially challenging with a mother with BPD, as we are conditioned since birth to be responsible for the feelings of our mother with BPD when she is highly dysregulated and our fathers often enable the BPD mother at the children's expense.

I hear you when you say it feels like you are going through a death. You are leaving your parents behind as you put yourself and your children first in doing what you need to do for your and their wellbeing. As you continue to grow and disengage from your parents, it will likely be harder to engage with them as much as you did in the past. It is good you have a therapist to help you with this difficult transition and I hope you will feel safe reaching out to members on this site. So many members have/have had similar challenges as you do with a mother with BPD and a father who enables her. My mother with BPD and father who enabled her were very challenging for me, and I was very low contact with my mother before she passed away. It felt terrible to disengage from my mother when she was near the end of her life, and I felt I had no choice. I do not feel guilty about it now, though I am sad for the circumstances that led to the low contact with her.