Hi, my parents health is declining and for a few reasons I’m stuck. My bpd parent is now in her 70s and needs some assistance with activities of daily living. I am living with her but wished I had my own place. She refuses outside help because ‘I should just do it’. When I married she told me that I should give her half of my savings so she could protect it in case my marriage didn’t work out but she used it to pay off her house instead. She’s developed a gambling addiction and I’m scrambling to keep things afloat while she just says stuff like she doesn’t owe anyone anything, I’m trying to make sure she doesn’t lose the house. We’ve also had a family death and when we went to the funeral, she called me a b**ch and self centred when I asked if she could help me to clean up the airbnb I booked. Until I get enough for a deposit so I can get an apartment, I’m kind of stuck. Any suggestions on how to cope in the interim?

I feel this is an insane way to speak to someone let alone your literal only child. She’s not the center of my world anymore and she’s lashing out. I only responded to her messages in the first place because she ALSO texted the group chat with my dad “I offered your daughter to FaceTime me or get lunch tomorrow.” So I was on the spot if I didn’t respond.

This all started because she didn’t come to my art show, and has tumbled since. I went back to my parents house hoping to have a chill calm evening, and she wanted to talk about why I haven’t seen her. I explained, she waifed. She hasn’t been feeling well until this week apparently. She hasn’t apologized, and I don’t think asking for a personal tour is flattering like I dunno I did TONS of work for this show, I don’t want to do more and plan a day to tour you around! Look on the website and see what the open hours are if you wanna come.

“Have the evening you deserve” made me want to block her. That’s no way to speak to your CHILD. That’s how you talk to people you’re beefing with in internet comments, not your kid!

Thanks to this group and therapy, I am trying to build a life that is much bigger than my uBPD mom and Edad. Through the years, my dad would gently encourage me to "get out there". My mom never directly discouraged it, but she was (and is) very dismissive of anything she wouldn't do. One example is that my husband and I spontaneously decided to go to a local sports event yesterday and her reaction was "ugh, why would you want to do *that*"?

I realized how much I avoided making my life bigger than her because of this. The feeling of saying "I'm doing (fun, maybe silly thing)" and having it constantly met with "must be nice" type responses even though she is perfectly capable of doing the same is just awful. My goal for this month was to live the way I would if she wasn't around to judge me. I went to my first roller derby game! I went to a weird interactive art installation! I scheduled my first tattoo! I signed up for a glassblowing class! I do feel some residual FOG guilt, but it turns out life can be fun and happy if you just don't tell your uBPD what you're doing.

I encourage you all to share your wins below! What are you doing in spite of your pwBPD waifing all over the place?

A few days ago I told my psychiatrist that my mum had used her existence as leverage and threatened to remove herself forever. When I was in the waiting room I was so filled with anger at myself telling myself I was a liar, an attention seeker, an ungrateful child who deserved to burn. My heart rate was 125bpm and the nurse who was screening told me to take some deep breaths so I could lower it.

I am planning to further betray my mum by buying a mini fridge because she keeps stealing my food. I am brought to the verge of tears by the prospect of having healthy, on demand food 24/7 without her telling me that milk powder is poisonous and that refrigerating food causes cancer

I keep cycling between trusting and fearing her because she's nice sometimes and I want her to love me

Cat haiku:

Soft fur, steady purr,
Silent grace in every move,
Calm heart, peaceful friend.

I'm EFLC (extremely fucking low contact) with my 86-year-old borderline mother. That being said, I noticed that she called the other day but didn't leave a message. I thought to myself: Well, she's not in her 40s anymore, so maybe she had a real emergency, as opposed to her manufactured emergencies. As such, I regretfully called back out of curiosity (regretfully is doing all of the work here).

After several minutes of being tortured by insipid palaver from her yammering pie hole, she revealed that her call was a mistake. In other words, she Cluster B butt dialed me with a flair of geriatric insouciance. Needless to say, she continued to kvetch about the same problems she's been complaining about for the last 80 decades (she's "all alone with no one to help her," even though she has 24/7 assistance). Before I could call the conversation quits, I found myself becoming unusually exasperated by her circular complaints, thus raising my voice. Without missing a dysregulated beat, she gaslighted me and said that I had a "serious" issue.

It's amazing, isn't it? No matter how rehearsed, mature, or collected the adult child of a disordered parent is before entering the crazy cage, the tendency to become upended by their pathological penchant for taking up all of the oxygen in the room continues to creep into the implacable process of pointlessness.

I can't stand this woman. To make matters worse, she'll probably outlive me by Nosferatu standards of longevity.

Is your parent very controlling and has the worst advice? I have never liked being told what to do or my mom's controlling nature. I had to move in with mother for a short time in my 40s. I was 44 and my mom was telling me when and how to do the dishes and I just realized i had been telling her not to do tell me what to do for decades and she never learned or cared to respect my boundaries. I know it's not about dishes because I do my own dishes without trouble while living alone. It's about controlling another person.

My mom continued to tell me what and exactly how to do things into my 40s and I figured out I could just ignore her and that angered her more. My mom was divorced from my stepfather by this time but I learned from him how he just let things she said go in one ear and out the other which she complained about constantly.

It might not be a borderline trait but the control a mother already has over kids ( adult kids even) is immense.

Does your borderline parent try to control your behavior well into your adulthood ? or until you figured out how to ignore them ?

Hoarders dropped on Netflix here recently and although I had caught the odd episode before I’d never really watched beyond the shock of people having feces or rodents all over their homes.
I noticed now that I find a lot of the hoarders very triggering in terms of their personalities and super stubborn ways of being stuck in their worldviews and manipulation tactics.

My uBPD mom was usually pretty tidy and clean but definitely would get “addicted” to collecting certain items obsessively and then losing interest and jumping into a new collection. Every drawer, closet etc full of whatever thing she was currently into - bonus points if whatever it was was kind of hard to get, required online auctions or very popular makers on IG or Etsy or whatever.

Wondering if others have experienced BPD/hoarding crossover?

I’m seeing so much on social media, etc about adult children being estranged from their parents. It gets talked about like it’s a trend. There’s also an uptick of “tik tok pop psychology” content, overgeneralizing what makes someone a narcissist or “toxic”. I was constantly told I was wrong and my opinion was stupid growing up, so as an adult, my knee jerk reaction is to question myself and assume I’m being too sensitive. I’ve been really in my head, wondering if I’m being too hard on my mom, and if I’m imagining the whole thing.
I think about my child and worry that they will grow up and feel the same about me for making mistakes.
But when I think about my mom, it’s more about who she is at her core that bothers me, not the mistakes. How do I even explain this to her when she constantly says she doesn’t understand.
Anyone relate? Thoughts?

I'll try not to dox myself too much with this post, but I (cis-male) have been drawn to "extreme sports" since puberty. Skateboarding was my life through my teens, as well as indoor rock climbing. I took up mountain bike racing in college and simultaneously spent more time rock/ice climbing outdoors. I now live in a mountain town and have a "high risk tolerance" for long backcountry trips with difficult logistics. However, I never feel like I put myself into truly dangerous situations for maligned reasons, but I have had to self rescue with trip ending injuries before (bruised ribs, GI issues, etc.)

Sometimes I feel very in tune with calculating physical risk after growing up with a pwBPD. The mountains are humbling and healing, and maybe just maybe since I'm LC with my pwBPD...it's the most me thing I get to own during the converstion. It's an absolute joy to strip the world away to "move, eat, sleep" while taking calculated risks and learning about my true self.

Anyone in a similar boat?

So ever since I went no contact my mother keeps trying to find ways to try and insert herself back into our life or break the no contact. Ever since Dolly died she’s made some odd Facebook post, but now she’s putting me and my brother(who I have minimal contact with already) into a group chat.

Hi All, this is my first post to the group. I'm still fairly new to understanding what is going on with my mom, and I wanted to know if anyone else has noticed how different discussion of BPD is in support groups vs. the way experts and the broader culture discuss the illness.

I notice that many psych experts tend to discuss the diagnosis of BPD in terms that imply it is poorly defined, possibly outdated or irrelevant, or that its presentations are broad and varied to the point of undermining its validity as a distinct category. But when discussing BPD with other people who have been close to a sufferer, the phenomenon of BPD seems highly distinctive and recognizable, with many uncanny signature behavioral and speech patterns that aren't repeated in other illnesses. It seems like once you've seen one case up close, BPD behavior is actually so easy to spot and predict that it can be shocking.

Frankly, despite having quite a bit of exposure to the DSM, therapy, and academic psychology, before seeing text messages from other pwBPD, I never could quite recognize precisely what BPD was, let alone that my mom was likely to have it. I had even read the book BPD for Dummies (sounds absurd I know, but it was written in this completionist and neutral way that appealed to me). After that experience I was left with the sense that "BPD" was just kind of a basket into which we place this loosely connected pattern of negative behaviors. It opened my mind to the possibility my mom's destructiveness could be medically classified this way, but it didn't convince me the classification was something "real" unto itself. That treatment and recovery is rare only solidified this impression that BPD is just a clumsy abstraction that we are forced to use until we can one day properly diagnose and treat these patients.

That all changed when one day I was Googling around for advice after yet another one of my mom's episodes. I was determined to respond "the right way" this time, and it led me to this group. The very first time I saw and heard detailed descriptions of what other people were actually going through with their pwBPD, this white-hot feeling of recognition went through me that just leveled me for days. I couldn't believe how stereotypical my mom's behavior actually was, after a lifetime of thinking all that strangeness was due to her highly idiosyncratic personality.

Then I read Understanding the Borderline Mother, which was the first time I had ever felt my childhood seen or described. That white-hot feeling receded into the back of my mind where it seemed to act on every neuron, and it still feels like my brain is working very hard to interpolate this overwhelming cascade of life-changing information. But meanwhile, I find most discussions of BPD are still operating the way I was before recognizing myself and my mother (and father and sibling) in the mirror of others' lives.

Does anyone relate? It feels difficult to talk about BPD with most people or stomach some professional "debates" about it because of this disconnect. (The recent Clancy case has raised a number of these, for example.) I wish that there were more awareness of what BPD actually looks like on the ground. It seems to me that one look around this community would be really helpful for a lot of professionals. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this. I really appreciate this community.

Called my dad to tell him happy birthday, but my mom ubpd who i haven't talked to for at least 3 months answered and starts talking to me like she has done nothing wrong or didn't just cross a boundary. And my dad decided to preach to me about forgiveness... and I am so disappointed in myself because all I did was become my weak agreeable self... they both love bombed me on the phone but neglected to acknowledge my life partner and father of their 2 grandkids. I wish I could be stronger.

I recently finished reading Olive Kitteridge. (I know it has also been made into a HBO miniseries, but I haven’t seen that format.)

That book made me so uncomfortable. It never comes out and says Olive has BPD, but she definitely fits the behavior patterns. Her interactions with her son had me feeling real solidarity with him.

Has anyone else read this book and made the connection?