Guest guest Posted March 27, 2012 Report Share Posted March 27, 2012 OK it’s my turn to vent.  I have given my two cents with my comments on others’ posts here in a supportive way and now it’s my turn to express myself.  Below I will be describing BPD behavior which is diagnostic for the syndrome and which another contributor has neatly synthesized for us in a recent post.   I first figured out my nada was BPD years ago. This was when I tripped across the BPD diagnosis in a matter I was working on and so I looked up BPD in the DSM-IV. My nada had/has more than the 5 out of 9 DSM-IV diagnostic criteria. I realize BPD's resist therapy and that they think they're sane and we're all crazy, but I cannot fathom why my family did not try harder to intervene or  get me out of that domestic situation, given one or more opportunities to do so. I can only think it was Denial and shame at work, given the times and the stigma that goes with mental health issues.  It was only recently that I stumbled on SWOE and I read it three times. Yikes, it’s as though it were written about her, akin to the way Adult Children of alcoholic parents also rings true in my FOO. Phooey! SWOE identified additional behaviors that pretty much nail down what was going on. Some kind of emotional or mental instability in her own family growing up and alienated from her parents and her brother, perhaps compounded by her being a first generation born in North America to European immigrant parents who clinged to the old ways from Eastern Europe. Estranged, her parents did not attend her wedding to my father. I never understood and felt it odd even as a little kid that her family was not in the wedding photos and that a family friend gave her away. But everything seemed to get explained away even if not satisfactorily; somehow I picked up on that I mustn’t ask as it’d be impertinent of me to do so, it was just they didn’t come to the wedding.  Later, there was something in her history about employment not going well for her; she did not seem to work or want to work later other than to do the bookkeeping for a time for my father’s business. After that she felt entitled to not have to work. One day as a teenager, I brought home with me, briefly, a school mate from the boys’ school I attended . I introduced him to my mom. By happenstance, he was the son of the man my nada had worked for where the job had not gone well for her when I’d been very little. She told me never to let on exactly who she was, as she’d worked for his father. I took that as intended to protect me too, she was perhaps status conscious and all that. But perhaps there was something more embarrassing and more ominous about the whole thing. I never got the straight story about that or about much of anything else.  She was certainly highly impulsive, not always empathic but sometimes a whiff of sympathy (which I inadvertently learned to seek as love and approval which was conditional, subject to her black-white impulsive thinking). Do we categorize her ordering me as an underage child (about age 7-8 onwards) to illegally go buy her cigarettes at the convenience stores as abusive,  pathological self-absorption, treating me like an object/appendage or as a convenient source of exploitation? No matter what I was doing or with whom, I’d be ordered to drop whatever I was doing ( out playing with playmates, etc.) and march right over to the store, and, without fail, buy a package of cigarettes, going through the exercise of persuading the storekeeper they really were for my mom, not for me (at age 7-8!).  If no luck, try again at a different store, don't come back empty-handed. Sometimes the same clerk would or wouldn’t make the transaction. This was repeated hundreds of times when I was a minor child. I felt so preyed upon.  I don’t smoke, so I have her to thank for that, I suppose.  She had breaks with reality under stress (paranoia and delusional thinking), and cognitive distortion (unable to perceive incoming emotional information accurately). One time, I was about age 10, she had me accompany her to a Notary Public to witness her Will. She was convinced if she made up her own Will and sent it to Switzerland it’d be valid and wouldn’t need a lawyer. The hapless Notary kept looking at me as though I were responsible for her (yet another variation on the theme of KO of BPD mom as the child- parent?) and she was trying to tell ME my mom can’t do this and needs to get legal advice.   Do we call it exploitive behavior or fear of abandonment when on a school night at age 8 or 9 she yanked me out of my bed and ordered me, still in my PJ’s, to accompany her in a taxi to an apartment to confront a  barfly who'd been having some kind of sexual relations with my father?  I had no idea what was happening of course, was terrified, and couldn’t understand why my father would be going to sleep in a bed with a strange woman. The woman and her own boyfriend and my mom ultimately all agreed it was very late and I needed to go home and back to bed after I kept peering under the woman’s bed looking for my dad…      When I was about 11, nada dressed to the nines and confronted a cocktail hostess over my father in an upscale bar located at the arena where the NHL hockey teams played, then she came in to the arena to confront my father at the arena seats. Suffice it to say this was back when going to the NHL hockey game was a classy event and people dressed nicely, so a well-dressed woman assaulting her husband at the rink side seats after handing the cocktail waitress his undershorts (to clean for him) made the local newspapers. The cocktail waitress was fired from her job for consorting with a patron. For some reason my paternal grandmother thought the newspaper story was a great bit of fun and she didn’t care that I felt humiliated and put upon (my over-developed sense of responsibility as a KO of an undiagnosed BPD), as though I had anything to do with it.  Oh, those are the highlights.  We have boundary issues as well.  When I was in high school and I finally got to try out for the swim team, I made the team. Rather than my dad requiring me to try and then fail at school hockey team try-outs each year, I chose to stay warm that winter and swim, inside. (I couldn’t skate, but he’d been a hockey star and after all, this saga took place in Canada where hockey is the national sport.)  So, no good deed going unpunished, my nada ruined my swim team uniform in the laundry. Shrunk the sweatshirt so I couldn’t use it but she could still wear it. Did this to me, twice, and then there were no more " SWIM TEAM " sweatshirts to be had. She did look odd wearing a boys’ school athletic team sweatshirt in public, and to boot she wore it backwards to draw attention. I was so embarrassed by her.  When I was about 15, we had a repeat of folks evidently thinking I was my mom’s parent and responsible for her: friends of my father, formerly friends of both parents, seemed to think I needed to take my mom out and get her a job. Again, I’m just a kid at the time!   Oh, and she gave away my things without asking, sometimes in a way that was embarrassing to me, and, she gave away my cat, and she gave away my dog (once I left for college).  The dog vanished, perhaps as her revenge for my abandoning her?   Let’s add that when I got the opportunity to attend professional school across the continent here in the USA, and I departed, she made off with my accumulated life savings at the time. Gone, absconded with it. I was told she felt bad about that but that I could make it all back myself later. Do we attribute that to a boundary violation, a complete lack of understanding as to what “a trustee†means? Or is making off with your kid’s own accumulated savings by age 22  revenge behavior with blaming, projecting, a sense of entitlement, pathological lying, pathological self-absorption, chronic feelings of emptiness, unstable sense of self, treating other people like objects/exploitative behavior, having breaks with reality under the stress of not knowing how to cope with money or holding it in a trust? SWOE tells us a BPD may try to get rid of money they can’t handle the stress of holding onto once they get it.  Finally, at my wedding she thought that the best opportune time to teach me valuable verbally and physically abusive lessons in not letting people “get your goat†as she put it. Do we see this as feared abandonment by the one she cannot exploit or abuse anymore? (I was getting married with a family life and career and home of my own 2000 miles away from her.) Or is this a highly impulsive lack of empathy, hair-trigger temper/violence/chronic irritability, with rapid mood swings? My now former wife later confided in me she was terrified of nada and was fearful of having a child because nada had said nada’d be out on the first plane here once we were having kids. Nada has always had this thing about trying to move here and resents that I’m here and she’s there.  No point in the exercise of trying to establish boundaries here, like many other BPD’s she just sees limits and boundaries as a challenge “to drive a truck through.†Suffice it say I am NC. I spoke to her about 3 years ago. She cut off e-mail contact. She has a PO Box address for me if she wants to use it.  There are third-party means to get a hold of me if there is a genuine need. I have to live my own life and deal with the old KO issues like shame, guilt, the long-term ingrained sense of over-responsibility toward the abusive BPD parent, and associated issues that crossover with folks who are adult children of alcoholics. Things like the aftermath of what we call c-PTSD, fears of success and failure and of loss and rejection, all of which in a Law of Attraction nightmare have manifested.  For now, it has to be self-improvement and self-healing as the means for a therapist are just not doable right now. Past efforts with therapy got close but did not reveal what’s clear to me now about where I fumbled, fell, stalled and failed in life before, despite what was going for me.  Thanks for this opportunity here to vent, to share, to cry out; to say that the truth can set me free but boy do I hurt with what I do know now. I thank you for being supportive.   Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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