Surviving the Borderline Parent Read online

  just weren’t able to please, no matter how hard you tried? Did you feel

  responsible for your parent’s happiness and guilty if you felt happy yourself? Did you feel damned if you did and damned if you didn’t, that what-

  ever you did or said was the wrong thing (and boy would you pay for it)?

  Were you accused of things you hadn’t done? Did you feel manipulated at

  times? Feel appreciated one minute and attacked the next? Thought you

  must be “crazy” because a parent’s actions or reactions didn’t make any

  sense? Question your own intuition, judgment, or memory, believing you

  must have missed or misinterpreted something? Did you feel on guard all

  the time, that life with your parent was never predictable?

  You weren’t crazy. Not then, and not now, though it may still feel

  that way. What felt crazy-making to you may well have been being

  parented by someone who had traits of borderline personality disorder.

  Though relatively common, borderline personality disorder is often

  overlooked or misdiagnosed by therapists and clinicians and denied by those who suffer from it. It’s a confusing, complex disorder that’s extremely difficult for all involved: for the person with BPD, for the clinicians trying to understand and help their client, and perhaps most of all, for the children who have to endure its unpredictable effects.

  No one chooses their parents and, as young children, once you’re

  brought into this world, you’re not in a position to opt out of your relationship with them. In fact, you desperately need them—to provide food

  and shelter, to prompt you to learn, to model ways to interact in society,

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  Surviving a Borderline Parent

  to nurture you, to show you affection, and to provide unconditional love.

  A parent with BPD, however, may not have been able to consistently pro-

  vide all of these things to you, through no fault or deficit of yours. They may not have received that kind of care themselves. It may seem ironic,

  but your parent may actually have consciously or unconsciously reinforced you as the caretaker to meet his or her needs, to be the nurturer and provider of emotional support, even though you were a young child.

  Does This Sound Familiar?

  Which of the following match your experience with a parent or other

  caretaker growing up?

  Your parent teased you, often cruelly, about physical attrib-

  utes, mental abilities, intelligence, habits, or other personal

  characteristics.

  You remember sequences of events and conversations differ-

  ently from your parent.

  Your parent confided in you, perhaps with inappropriate details,

  and expected you to keep his secret or to side with her.

  You were treated like a little adult instead of a child, expected

  to consistently assume responsibilities parents should, such as

  emotionally comforting or reassuring your parent, frequently

  cooking, cleaning, caring for siblings, and other responsibilities.

  Your feelings were discounted, denied, criticized, or ignored.

  You weren’t permitted to express strong emotions, particularly

  anger.

  You didn’t receive much physical or emotional affection—

  hugs, kisses, or being told you were loved.

  You were held to extremely high, often unattainable standards,

  and those standards shifted so you had a hard time knowing

  what was expected of you.

  You were given mixed messages about your appearance or

  your behavior.

  You weren’t encouraged to explore, experiment, or develop

  your own opinions.

  Your privacy and/or your belongings weren’t respected.

  Introduction

  3

  While you were growing up, did you feel

  scared?

  confused?

  angry?

  guilty?

  responsible?

  far older than your age and your peers?

  listless?

  invisible?

  unlovable?

  Now as an adult, do you

  find yourself in abusive, unfulfilling, or unhealthy relationships?

  feel unable to trust others and let your guard down?

  expect the worst from others—family, friends, and strangers?

  feel responsible for others’ moods, feelings, and actions?

  put others’ needs ahead of your own?

  have a hard time knowing what you want?

  tend not to trust your own feelings and reactions?

  feel uneasy with success or have difficulty simply enjoying life?

  get highly anxious in social settings or new situations?

  fear taking risks, especially where relationships are concerned?

  hold yourself to standards nearing perfection?

  feel worthless, hopeless, or depressed?

  If you relate to many of these experiences, chances are you may

  have been raised by a parent with BPD or BPD-like traits. Chances are

  also good that the effects are still with you, in subtle, and likely fundamental, ways. They probably have affected and continue to affect who you

  are, as well as your relationships with others—how you choose and who

  you choose to spend time with, to befriend, to partner with, to love.

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  Surviving a Borderline Parent

  A New Reality

  This isn’t another book focused on family dysfunction or about terrible

  mothers (though BPD is diagnosed in women three times as often as in

  men, for a variety of reasons we’ll cover shortly). It’s not about blame or wallowing either—you are all molded by so much more than a dysfunctional past, and you must ultimately take responsibility for creating the life you want. Certainly, it’s important to acknowledge and identify the effects of BPD on your life. It’s equally important to realize that it neither dictates who you are nor fixes your destiny.

  This book is really about just two things: understanding and change.

  We hope it will help validate your experience as a child of a borderline

  parent, help you identify the impact it had and continues to have on you, regardless of whether your parent is still alive, and that it will lead you to more positive alternatives to the negative thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors you may have learned. We also hope reading this book will help

  you envision—and cultivate—the you you want to be and begin to build the future you want to live. It may sound like a cliché, but it’s true: you deserve to be happy.

  As an adult child of someone with BPD, you’ve likely been cultivat-

  ing and honing certain beliefs and behaviors since infancy. Though you

  may not remember, as a baby, you viscerally sensed anger, frustration, and despair through your parents’ touch, voice, and breathing rhythm; you felt tension tightening the air. Growing up in continual response to erratic and intense emotions has taught you reflexive responses, which come as

  instantly as your leg jerks when the doctor taps your knee with a rubber

  mallet or you spin around when someone calls your name. Well- and

  long-ingrained, what you learned may have helped you protect yourself

  physically, mentally, and emotionally from your borderline parent, but it’s probably not serving you well now—in fact, it may be keeping you from

  fully understanding and accepting yourself, and from connecting with oth-

  ers. The catch is, your coping mechanisms and ways of relating to your

  self and to others are so much a part of your emotional repertoire, you

  rarely stop to question them. They define your worldview, like the tint
of glass lenses, and therefore dictate how you see and interact with the

  world.

  This book assumes that you’re thinking about making some positive

  changes in your life. It presupposes that you have an inkling that there’s more to life than what you’ve long thought, been told, or have been living with in your family of origin. It presupposes that you want to pursue that sense of possibility, frightening though it may be. Regardless of where

  Introduction

  5

  you’re at emotionally, this book assumes potential and your willingness—

  and courage—to reach for it.

  How do you begin to take a hard look at your life, without the tint

  of your old lenses? How can you come to know and trust yourself and dis-

  mantle the defenses that may surround you? How do you begin to con-

  ceive of a new and better life? How do you learn to see the good in

  people, to feel deserving of healthy relationships and a full, rewarding

  life? This book will help you start to explore the many ways. You’ll make the changes you choose to make at your own pace. The rewards—though

  they come slowly and quietly—are great.

  In the past few years, there have been several excellent books writ-

  ten about BPD. A trip to your local library or bookstore today yields an

  armful of titles that weren’t available even ten years ago to both individuals with the disorder and their loved ones. There are also numerous Web

  sites, chat rooms, listservs and other online resources available. Other than giving some history and an overview of BPD in the first chapter, we don’t repeat work that’s already been done, but rather have tried to use all

  that’s come before as a springboard for further exploration.

  How to Use This Book

  If this is the first time you’re hearing of borderline personality disorder or you’ve heard the term and want to know more, chapter 1 spells out the

  signs and symptoms of the disorder and explains how those behaviors can

  affect children.

  If you’re familiar with the traits and behaviors of BPD and recognize

  one or more of your parents, stepparents, or caretakers as having had the disorder, you may want to just scan chapter 1. Then move on to chapter 2

  to see how the messages you received as a child may still be influencing

  you now. If you’re a partner, friend, or family member of someone whose

  parent has or had BPD, this book will provide insight into the experiences that shaped the person you know today.

  Throughout the book, we’ll use the term adult child to refer to adult children of a parent with borderline personality disorder. For ease of reading, we sometimes use the term borderline parent to refer to someone with BPD traits. The term parent may refer to stepparents, grandparents, or

  any other adult with primary child care responsibility.

  You’ll see many places throughout the book to “Stop and Think.”

  These exercises are designed to help you apply the concepts in the text to

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  Surviving a Borderline Parent

  your own particular circumstances and experiences. You may want to use

  a notebook or journal to record your responses and reactions. So you can

  measure your progress down the road, be sure to date all of your entries.

  It’s Not All in a Name

  As you read, you may wonder if your parent really has BPD, if he or

  she has never been diagnosed by a professional. Your parent may have

  been diagnosed with another disorder such as major depression, schizo-

  phrenia, bipolar disorder (manic depression), or something else. Your parent may have substance abuse issues as well. BPD doesn’t occur in a

  vacuum; it may exist alongside and together with other diagnoses. Fur-

  thermore, BPD is not always diagnosed since those with these traits may

  not seek help or, if they do seek help, clinicians may miss or misdiagnose the disorder. The bottom line is, you don’t have to be a credentialed clinician to recognize troublesome and unhealthy behaviors. The label or diag-

  nosis isn’t the issue. If what you read resonates with your experience, and the exercises get you thinking about new ways to handle vexing belief systems and behaviors, we think you’ll benefit, regardless of a formal diagnosis (or lack of one).

  The stories you’ll read in this book are based upon interviews and

  clinical experience with adult children and other family members. In talking with adult children, we found their experiences to be strikingly similar. Symptoms of BPD can ricochet between extremes—raging or being

  unable to express anger, idealization or devaluation of others—making the disorder especially tricky for clinicians to diagnose. Still, adult children find that they share nearly identical experiences at times, and can in fact identify very typical borderline behavior.

  The remarkable similarities in how the behaviors are observed, expe-

  rienced, and remembered have allowed us to create composite stories. We

  have also changed the names and specific identifying traits and circum-

  stances of individuals, to protect the privacy of those interviewed and

  their families, while not compromising the power of their accounts.

  PART 1

  The Past

  CHAPTER 1

  I Never Knew It

  Had a Name

  “Yes, but what is it?” people often ask upon hearing the term borderline personality disorder. Characterized in large part by the inability to regulate, or manage, emotions and a deep-seated fear of abandonment, the disorder

  is one of the least researched and understood, though that is beginning to change, thanks to increased awareness, the birth of several advocacy organizations, and increased funding opportunities for clinical research.

  Those three little letters—B-P-D—often elicit a roll of the eyes

  among practitioners. Because of its heterogeneous symptoms and wide

  spectrum of severity, many have trouble diagnosing BPD. Once they do,

  some aren’t sure how to treat it, and given the disorder’s complexity,

  many are hesitant to.

  The Silent Treatment

  We don’t see or hear much about BPD in the media, which is surprising

  given the number of Americans who suffer from the disorder—and a

  source of continual frustration to family members in search of information and validation of their experience. Borderline personality disorder afflicts about 2 percent of the population, or some six million people (Swartz et

  al. 1990). When you tally the partners and children, parents and siblings, and friends and coworkers, the number who are affected on a daily basis

  quickly rises to thirty million or more. Still, women’s magazines bombard

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  Surviving a Borderline Parent

  us with tips for everything from firm breasts to fluffy soufflés, raising smart kids to dressing for success, and men’s magazines proffer analogous advice for maintaining a tumescent member, parenting, accessing your

  true feelings, even cooking. But no one says much about BPD.

  Perhaps one reason for the silence around BPD is there’s no wonder

  drug or quick fix, making it a long, winding road to recovery and to a

  potentially happy ending. It’s difficult to explain BPD in snappy headlines and sound bites to a restless audience wont to channel surf.

  “Even when I speak to groups of clinicians, it takes me thirty min-

  utes to describe what BPD is so that they understand. You just can’t do

  that on television,” says Randi Kreger (2001). And no celebrity has

  stepped forward to tell of their personal struggle with the disorder. In

  fact, most of the celebrities th
at have been associated with BPD generally live in infamy: Joan Crawford (a.k.a. Mommie Dearest), Marilyn Monroe,

  and Vincent Van Gogh. It’s probably safe to say it’s not a highly sought

  claim to fame.

  As a result of the silence around BPD, adult children are frequently

  relieved to the point of tears upon reading a detailed description of the disorder for the first time. It gives their confusing and contradictory childhood experience a name, an explanation, and most importantly, valida-

  tion. “I thought I was crazy”; “I always knew something wasn’t right, but I had no idea what it was”; “It was all I knew, so it seemed normal”; “As

  kids, we walked on eggshells, but I didn’t know that others didn’t” are

  some common reactions.

  People with borderline personality disorder can act in incongruous

  and inconsistent ways, yet, at times, appear so perfectly normal, reason-

  able, rational, and sure of themselves in the process that those around

  them are left to wonder at their own sanity and perception of reality.

  Likewise, when people with BPD “act out” or rage, they can be so con-

  vinced of the appropriateness of and justification for the outburst that

  loved ones again question their take on reality, and what they must have

  done to set the spiral in motion. What a sense of relief to learn there was an explanation, and it wasn’t something you caused!

  Gender Inequity

  BPD is often mentioned as a consequence of sexual abuse, which histori-

  cally seemed to explain why women were diagnosed more often than men.

  There is certainly a correlation, according to many studies, but a simple and direct association is an oversimplification, and does not take into

  I Never Knew It Had a Name

  11

  account factors such as the nature and severity of abuse; other types of

  trauma and neglect also enter into the picture.

  In addition, in Stop Walking on Eggshells, Kreger and Mason (1998) list additional reasons why the incidence of BPD may be higher among

  women, including women receive more invalidating and inconsistent mes-

  sages in this society than men, and women are socialized to be more

  dependent on others and therefore are more sensitive to rejection. Kreger and Mason also point out that the number of men with BPD may be