<p>Hey we’re all in this together. Part my reason for posting is to keep myself honest as well, so on the days when I forget this message I can go back and re-read this myself :)</p>
<p>So happy to hear you are taking good care of yourself and finding a support network through al-anon that helps you. I’m not so familiar with the 12 step program but it seems they have a lot of valuable points to remember. One I particularly find helpful is " don’t do for someone what they can do for themselves". It helps me keep the balance between supporting vs enabling.</p>
<p>I am not a new member, but rather a member who’s been around for a while but created a new username to protect my privacy, as people here often do when they post about very very sensitive topics.</p>
<p>I am not a parent of a high school or college student, but I have some input to share here… because I have borderline personality, or rather am in remission from it. I am in my early twenties, btw, to give some perspective.</p>
<p>I see where everyone in this thread is coming from. Both all the people saying “cut her off” and caymandriver.</p>
<p>I suspect my mother had borderline personality disorder (she is much better now, partly because of a mood stabilizer and partly because BPD can often wane with age). She did a lot of damage to me. She was sick, but it also made her incapable of being a non-abusive parent. Someone can be BOTH very sick and very abusive. I fully believe that people who are mentally ill deserve as much help as anyone with, say, cancer, but they also often refuse help, which puts people who have to put up with their abuse in a tight spot.</p>
<p>I remember my mother splitting on me. One moment she would be lovey dovey and telling me I was her best friend (and this was when I was five, not even a teenager) and the next she’d be screaming and telling me I wasn’t her good little girl anymore because I’d forgotten to put my bowl in the sink.</p>
<p>I realized I needed help about four years ago.</p>
<p>Someone said earlier in the thread that people with BPD don’t have much depth of feeling. That’s literally the opposite of what clinicians recognize as being the case. People with BPD may not have learned to understand what the people around them are experiencing, but their own feelings are quick changing and EXTREME. People with BPD are often described as emotional burn victims. There is really no way I can describe borderline despair. It feels like every cell in your body is shrieking with pain, your soul is being ground up, you are an animal stuck in a claw trap gnawing your own leg off to get free… I could go on and on but nothing I could say would cover it.</p>
<p>I don’t remember who said it, but I heard this quote the other day: “Hatred is a failure of imagination.” I know nobody here is saying they hate BPD people, but they also cannot imagine being borderline any more than someone in the midst of BPD can imagine being healthy. When I was very sick, contemplating the way a healthy mind worked was like trying to contemplate the experience of whatever consciousness a beetle has. It seemed that unlike what was happening in my own mind.</p>
<p>Borderline is influenced both by biology and experience. In some people it’s more one than the other. But keep in mind that temperament is largely biological. (I’m sorry I don’t have any studies, but this has been repeated in a lot of my psychology classes, and I’m sure anyone who raised two children in the same way and yet saw them be COMPLETELY different by nature will know this is true.) The fact that borderlines have higher highs and lower lows, which is ultimately the root of their behavior, is something they are born with. I also, before I was medicated, had psychotic episodes in which I suffered from delusions, experienced extreme dissociation, and so forth. My brain, not my character, was broken.</p>
<p>Now I live a normal life because of DBT (and CBT but that’s another story), which creates many new neural pathways. I’m also properly medicated. I’ve worked really, really hard. It’s been a battle. And yet I feel thankful that I even had the presence of mind to (eventually) recognize that I needed help. Not everyone has that.</p>
<p>I’m not saying Momma-three shouldn’t protect herself. I’m not saying anything about what she ought to do because I know every situation is different, some people are not able to be helped, some people are able to be helped, some people are capable of giving that help and some people are not (no value judgment here), and so on and so forth… I certainly have my ideas of what might help, but I also recognize that my ideas could be totally off since I just am not there in that situation. And ultimately no human being should have to torture themselves in order to pull someone else out of their own torture.</p>
<p>I just hope it will be some sort of comfort to know that the awful borderline behaviors stem from pain and not hatred.</p>
<p>Oh, also – McLean is fantastic. They do treat a range. I may be biased since that’s the first place I got adequate help, but they’re really among the best imo.</p>
<p>BPD - thank you for insightful post from the other side of BPD. For 2 years, my daughter dated a boy that I am 99.9999% was BPD and it was a nightmare.The “splitting” you describe about your Mom is so exactly what happened with him all the time. I am so glad you recognized you had a problem and were able to seek and get help. My daughter’s ex did not, and still does not as far as I know, recognize that he had a problem - he thought everyone else was the problem. I have to confess my feelings toward him are still extremely negative, and I find it hard to find any kindness in my heart toward him after what he put her through. I don’t hate BPD, but I do hate him - and I am not a person that “hates”. Maybe, in time, your perspective can help me deal with that. Best of luck to you, and keep up the good work.</p>
<p>swimcatsmom, I understand how you could certainly hate a specific individual with BPD for their terrible behavior. When someone is sick in a way that makes them behave in a way that is awful and abusive, a lot of compassion isn’t really a response that can reasonably be expected even if it would be great in an ideal world.</p>
<p>I hated, yes, hated, my mom for a while. I don’t anymore. I forgive her, partly because I have just let go of those feelings and partly because she is such a different person now. I also hated my first boyfriend, who had been diagnosed with BPD, for a long time. The fact that he was the first person I shared my body with makes me want to bleach my brain since it was with HIM. I still feel disgusted when I think about him to be honest… even if I try not to. I can imagine it’s even more impossible not to feel very negative feelings about someone who’s hurt your kid.</p>
<p>There seem to be two types of BPD – the “Everyone else is at fault for everything” type, and the “I am at fault for everything and am a disgusting excuse for a human being” (even stuff that clearly isn’t their fault) type. I was occasionally the former but generally the latter, which possibly helped in my realization that I needed help.</p>
<p>I also want to point out that I am not asking anyone to be so understanding as to excuse everyone with BPD of everything they do. I’ve apologized to the people I’ve hurt when it has been possible to do so, but I recognize that if they do not accept the apology or cannot let go of whatever anger they have, that’s their right… it’s not their responsibility to understand what I went through even if I’d really like them to. Rather, I view it as great that I have learned how to use tools that will allow ME to see what THEY were put through (even if I wasn’t trying to put them through it).</p>
<p>BPDgirl- Thanks you for both your time and insight. It can’t have been easy for you to read some of the comments people have made on this and other threads, and I want to acknowledge the tremendous courage it must surely have taken to put yourself out there. Open yourself up to strangers without knowing what they might say. </p>
<p>Oddly having an “insider” contribute I think helps humanise things, helps remind us all that we’re all just humans, trying to do the best we can. In search of love and acceptance. To be accepted for who we are. Given support when we need it, given the space to be compentent independent, people in our lives, to the extent possible. It’s sometimes not easy to show love and compassion, thank you for reminding us all.</p>
<p>Thanks for coming forward BPDgirl. It truly helps not only to hear from someone with this disorder but from someone who is doing better. So often the news is not good. Can I ask if DBT was the first therapy you tried? You mentioned liking Mclean. How long were you there? And if you don’t mind me asking, how long did you do DBT before things started to get better? And what kind of meds are you taking? I’m so sorry if i"m being really intrusive, I would just love to have some hope to cling to. We have had a rough couple of days and it is during those times that it is hardest to look at the long-term and maintain hope.</p>
<p>Caymen…Thankyou for posting because in doing so you have provided an opportunity for posters like BPDgirl and others to bring the other side of this illness to the thread. It is not easy to deal with as a parent, but you know that. In fact it is even harder than when your child has medical issues. I am just numb right now, and that is why I have not responded to PM’s or any of the above posts. I am just processing what has been going on with my daughter, and hoping to climb out of this storm. I have been living in my daughters chaotic world for a few years, and I have started to loose site as to what our old life was like. I keep remembering a world of four happy little kids that played outside while my biggest concern was figuring out how to get kid 1 to this, or kid two 2 to that, or kid3 to band, while kid 4 had dance class. I am still processing that life was so good and yet it went so wrong. I think these last few days hit me hard and I am still trying to find some energy to do something other than stare at the walls and walk aimlessly in circles. </p>
<p>Thankyou for providing the information. At some point if my daughter wants help I will come back to it. Right now she is in her own world and I can’t do anything for her.</p>
<p>When I read BPDgirl’s post, my first thought was that I hope someday your daughter is well enough to write something like that.</p>
<p>While your memories of your four happy kids are bittersweet, please cherish them and find comfort in them. You were a good family, you were a good mom.</p>
<p>worknprogress…Thankyou
I have hoped for a long time that my daughter would see for herself what her life was like but right now she is in a self destuctive mode that is taking her so far down that she is not capable of seeing anything beyond what she wants at the moment. I have not seen her and I doubt that I will for a very long time…so when I think back to the years when all of the kids were young; I still find this so hard to accept. She is not that little girl with the easy smile or desire to talk to anyone. She is lost in her world of fooling everyone to get what she wants until she doesn’t need what they have anymore. I don’t know if she has what it takes to make the turn around as BPDgirl did. Right now it just doesn’t seem at all likely.</p>
<p>Well, this is WAAAAY more than what you asked for, but…</p>
<p>The FIRST thing I did when I realized I needed help was talk therapy. When that hadn’t helped a year and a half later, I did a suicide attempt… which ended up both not working and also not requiring me to go to the hospital even though I should have (long story) and yet this knocked sense into me that something had to change, though since I did not know WHAT had to change, all that happened was that I was prescribed an antidepressant. So I floundered on that for about a year. I did AWFUL things, both illegal and not, that I simply will not go into here, but rest assured that whatever stuff your borderline kids have done, I have done the same or worse… </p>
<p>At the end of the year floundering on the AD, I called a suicide hotline. At the end of the call they got my email and sent me a LONG list of partial hospitalization/intensive day programs in the area. I asked my boyfriend if he’d heard of any of them and he said the McLean one had to be good since it’s a famous hospital, so I had my therapist refer me to their day program.</p>
<p>On intake for the program, they asked me a bazillion questions that nobody had ever asked me. Do you ever feel like you are not real or as though the world itself is not real? Do you ever feel as though you are riding along in your body and somebody else is the one doing things? etc. You all know the symptoms. It was determined that I had borderline and possibly bipolar. Yep, you can have both at once, though they are often misdiagnosed as each other. I will describe it like this: the bipolar is like the seasons, and the borderline is like having bizarre weather on one particular day.</p>
<p>I was in the program for three weeks. They do take insurance for the day program, or at least they take MassHealth (our Medicaid) which I was on at the time. It was from 8 AM to 5 every day if I remember correctly… so that was a total of over 100 hours of group and individual therapy in three weeks. They introduced me to the basics of DBT and CBT. I thought both were quite helpful, though many people with BPD feel too “accused” by CBT and do not respond to it well.</p>
<p>I feel the three weeks gave me a solid grounding in the basics of these things, and I also did some CBT with my talk therapist (a different one than before) through the last year. (It was a little over a year ago I went to McLean). I am not sure how this is the case, but McLean basically instantly improved my life A LOT. I realized what I had never before realized, which was that in addition to what I had known I should have been doing better about (my own moods), I had also been the one in control of a lot of interpersonal conflict. I’d been interpreting everything anyone said to me as their way of saying they hated me. So when I did the CBT forms where you think of alternate thoughts to mind reading, that helped soooo much.</p>
<p>At McLean, another thing that basically helped right away: meds. They got me on two new meds and took me off the AD. I was put on:
-Risperdal: atypical anti-psychotic that can prevent both bipolar mania and borderline psychosis
-Lamictal: mood stabilizer used both for bipolar and borderline; also happens to be an anti-seizure medication, which is interesting since some temporal lobe seizures present as bipolar or borderline… just thought I’d throw that out there.</p>
<p>My therapist also happens to be a psychiatrist, so she’s been able to adjust my meds throughout the past year. I am on 2mg risperdal, which works great against both the mania and the borderline psychosis. I think I’ve only felt dissociated a few days in the past year and I was only mania for about 2 days once. I will warn you though, at 4mg it actually MADE me dissociated VERY BADLY and it also made me short of breath. So it’s important to get the right dosage.</p>
<p>My lamictal, I am on 400mg, which I guess is slightly high for someone who has a mood disorder rather than seizures. It is the right dose for me though. I have (<em>crosses fingers, God willing things don’t change</em>) not had any depression since it was brought up to 400 mg in February. Going that long without it is basically unheard of for me.</p>
<p>As for the DBT… I regret to say I didn’t get any formal DBT until about three months ago, and even then it’s not traditional (I’ll explain below). The DBT programs around here basically are not things anyone who has a life could do. They are meant for people who have no ability to function and so they have to go to the DBT for several hours in the middle of the day every day, so clearly nobody who has a job or goes to school at normal hours could do that. Anyway, I felt pretty stranded. I only had a workbook to work from (Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook) but d***it I was determined. </p>
<p>I think I have read every page of that work book at least twenty times. I keep one of two little cards with me at all times reminding me of things to do to self-soothe (one card for when I’m out, one for when I’m at home). I have a list on a wall at home of things to do to distract myself before my pain gets out of hand, if possible. I repeat radical acceptance phrases and coping phrases to myself. I do 12 to 15 minutes of mindfulness exercises every night and make an effort to try and be mindful of the moment at all times, though of course that’s impossible and I often am not able to.</p>
<p>I have to admit it didn’t always work. Sometimes I’d end up in screaming fits with people I loved, sometimes I would self-harm, sometimes I would sob uncontrollably for hours, sometimes I would just be insensible to all reason. </p>
<p>About three months ago I finally got some DBT that wasn’t just from a workbook… someone here I message with gave me a link to a web site that does online DBT. I know it sounds crazy, but it had great reviews from several BPD experts at McLean, so I figured it had to be at least somewhat good. I did several individual coaching sessions while I was waiting for the class to start, and WOW. It was like the massive change of McLean all over again. I believe it is because I practice all the skills a lot, the same way someone who wants to be a great violinist practices all the time. That’s something that’s so important. Practice. A LOT OF PRACTICE. The people I know who’ve practiced A LOT also improved A LOT faster. </p>
<p>Now the class has been going for a little while, and that helps, but the improvement has slowed down after the huge change of the beginning of the coaching sessions. I would link you to the site, but the two people running the program both went on maternity leave at once, and now the person doing the class, my original coach, has broken off to start her own company, and I can’t find her web site at the moment. PM me if you want me to send you her contact info. Of course in-person stuff is ideal.</p>
<p>In the last three months I only had one crying insensible moment where I wanted to hurt myself… and I hate to admit it, but I did hurt myself (but not cutting… it was relatively minor, more upsetting because of the principle of the thing than because of physical harm). Aside from that, I have had normal bickering and some arguments that seem to me to be the sort of things that occur between “normal” people. I have averted many more arguments though. I was feeling hurt by a friend the other day and I managed to express my experience of sadness in the conversation without accusing him of anything, and he was very receptive and changed how he was saying what he was saying. He even noticed I was better at it and congratulated me.</p>
<p>I also think part of the big change was that the coach focused on interpersonal skills first. I had always kind of ignored them in the workbook in favor of the other skills. What I have realized was that interpersonal issues were a huge source of my bad emotions, and so averting interpersonal disasters made the need for the other skills come up less often. </p>
<p>So to summarize: It’s been a year since I first got help. There was a big improvement in the very beginning followed by very slow improvement throughout the year because my treatment was not ideal – talk therapy, CBT (which works for slow emotions but not the explosive sudden ones), and a DBT workbook that I used like crazy. Then three months ago I started getting structured DBT (if not traditional, then let’s just say DBT-based) and had another huge improvement because it focused on interpersonal skills. </p>
<p>Any other questions, feel free to ask or PM me.</p>
<p>momma-three,
When you start feeling that way…that she will never be better…think about all of the times in life that you have looked back on a bad situation and thought “I can’t believe how far we’ve come” or “I can’t believe how much things have changed since then”. I know that you are doing that now and are stunned at how badly things have changed since you had those normal everyday worries about your kids. As much as you could never have imagined, at the time, being here in this dark place, the opposite is possible, too. </p>
<p>Something that sometimes helps me is to imagine a picture in my mind of a positive outcome (I’m not suggesting that you imagine your daughter “cured”, but rather, happy, productive and participating in family relationships). Keep that picture in your mind and hang onto it. As some of the posters here have revealed, it can happen and it can happen for your family. In the meantime, keep taking care of yourself and your other relationships and know that you have support here. It may be anonymous but it is genuine.</p>
<p>BPDgirl…I just want to say thankyou for sharing your situation. You are amazingly strong and determined to make your life a better and more fulfilled one. I am curious how old are you? You don’t need to reveal any details that would give your identity away…but are you college age or mid age? It seems like you went down a very hard road so I am assuming you must be older than college age. When did your BPD show it itself? Did you always know that something was different in the way you saw things? My daughter has said that I should have known a long time ago because she always knew that she “was different”… …Those are her words not mine. In the past few months my husband and I could not go anywhere and I mean anywhere because she would call us within minutes to see where we went and that would be followed by 20 or 30 calls and texts messages until we got back quickly. Than we would get home and find her in our driveway. She leave as our car pulled in “because someone called her to go get something to eat.” We wouldn’t see her for days on end. She would come back unshowered, wearing the same clothes, and look like she had not eaten. Her once beautiful skin is all broken out and her color is awful. She yells, curses, and makes up lies to anyone who will still look at her and believe what she is saying. I have received messages from some people who know her and it is clear that she has blamed me for everything including “throwing” her out of the house. This behavior all started when she entered college and was away for the first time. I have learned alot about what went on that year and sadly she was in the beginning of a crisis that was being diagnosed as depression and ADHD. The whole last three years have been nothing short of a roller coaster of highs and lows with mainly my wanting to believe that her highs or good days were her getting better. Again, I am just wondering at what point you sought help for yourself because my daughter is so very young for almost being 21. She functions more like a 13 or 14 year old who is going through a very bad rebellious face. I can’t even say that a typical 13 or 14 year old displays this type of behavior. I just don’t see the maturity that it would require for her to actually want help. Right now is her choice to blame me for somethings, boyfriends for others, girlfriends for others, and whoever else got in her way of something.</p>
<p>BPD girl, you’ve written some of most insightful descriptions I’ve ever read on your disorder. I hope you will continue to contribute to this thread.</p>
<p>BPD girl, that was incredibly enlightening. Thank you and congratulations on your success, which is clearly a result of both finding the right people to help you and your hard work and determination.</p>