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Surviving a Borderline Parent
It’s a long list, and one that’s likely painful to read through as you
identify aspects within yourself today that you may not be especially
proud of or happy with. And you might simultaneously be sighing with
relief as you read—from the recognition that you weren’t, and aren’t,
alone; that a private, personal experience is indeed shared by others. Take a deep breath and rest assured that understanding the disorder and its fall-out is the first step toward recognizing your authentic self and building a positive and healthy future.
CHAPTER 2
All Grown Up
In this chapter, we’ll discuss some of the conditions children with a parent with BPD may live with and the common effects on adult children. We’ll
also talk about positive childhood experiences you may have had, the
effect of adult role models, and the development of inner resilience and
resources.
Keep in mind that the purpose of this book is not to blame a parent
with BPD or its traits but to identify patterns that affect your life today.
With a better understanding of how they may have developed, envisioning
and working toward change will come more readily.
What You Experienced
You may recognize some of the conditions and experiences described
below, including chaos, abuse and neglect, boundary violations, and invalidation, or you may have had a somewhat different or opposing experi-
ence. Use your own circumstances to consider the thoughts, beliefs,
feelings, and behaviors you may have learned growing up and how they
shaped who you are today.
Chaos
Since they don’t have a strong sense of identity, people with BPD
may simultaneously fear abandonment and engulfment, hence the I Hate
You-Don’t Leave Me title of a seminal book on the disorder (Kreisman and
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Surviving a Borderline Parent
Straus 1991). In the interviews we conducted, adult children tell of growing up in a confusing and unpredictable world. They rarely knew what to
expect—whether they’d be praised or berated, hugged or brushed off,
smothered or neglected. Some wondered from hour to hour what they
should be thinking or doing to gain their parent’s approval. One day the
parent might be having a “lucid moment,” which several adult children
called the period of time where their parent seemed to be relating to others in a healthy way, actually present rather than dissociating, denying, or projecting. During these times, the parent might encourage the child to
develop his or her self but then later on be outright angry that the child did just that. Or the discouragement might be more subtle, as in sabotage or silent treatment for no apparent reason.
Mary, now in her fifties, recalls her mother sometimes encouraging
her to be more outgoing. “Why don’t you have any friends?” her mother
would ask cruelly. “You need to make more of an effort.” At about fifteen or sixteen years old, she got to know a small group of girls at her high
school. Whenever she’d spend the night at one of their homes, her mother
would accuse her of lying, of saying she was sleeping over so that she and
“those sluts you’ve been spending so much time with” could stay out late
with boys. Her mother also refused to give her rides to her girlfriends’
houses or to pick her up from places they’d go. “Since they like you so
much, let them chauffeur you around.”
Mary still can’t reconcile her mother’s contradictory behavior:
“You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. I wish she’d kept her
mouth shut about the whole issue of friends; she really didn’t want me to have them; she saw them as a threat to my relationship with her, even
though at times she knew a ‘good mother’ should encourage me. But criti-
cizing me and then making those relationships nearly impossible was cruel.
I know about BPD on an intellectual level, but as her daughter,
thirty-something years later, I still don’t understand.”
People with BPD traits appear to move from one crisis to the next.
They may be disorganized; their living quarters may be sloppy, even dirty, or the extreme opposite. Adult children often recall that crises were
common, and when life didn’t provide one naturally, they could count on
their parent to create or seek one out, whether picking a fight in order to rage, entering into an unhealthy relationship, or abandoning an existing
partner (but then very likely seeking a quick reconciliation).
Because of BPD’s cognitive distortions, or perceiving a reality altered
by their own idealizations and projections, parents with BPD see themselves differently than they actually are. They may see themselves as caring and nurturing when they have been indifferent or cruel; they may see themselves as
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29
the perfect parent, homemaker, or provider; they may not have an inkling as to how their actual behavior is affecting those around them—or how confusing and chaotic those distortions are for their children.
The Effects: Escape from Reality
As a result of the unpredictability, children of parents with BPD
often find a physical or psychic place to retreat—their bedroom, a closet, or rich imaginary worlds they create. Adult children report missing chunks of memory; they look back and wonder what they did with their time.
They may (and may continue to) dissociate, or zone out, for periods of
time ranging from a few seconds to even hours.
One woman raised by a mother with BPD, who alternated between
being “all loving” and “a yelling, screaming, bitter, angry, rageful per-
son—like someone carrying a hand grenade; you never knew when she
was about to pull the pin,” says her dissociation is a repercussion of growing up in constant fear of her mother’s explosions. “I froze my emotions; I didn’t allow myself to feel. My major way of coping was saying, ‘This just isn’t where I am.’ I did it to such an extent that I missed a lot of what happened in school. A large part of my childhood is just blank.”
Today, she is more mindful of where she is and what she’s doing,
not living as much in her head as she used to. Yet her dissociating is a continual source of contention between her and her husband, who gets frus-
trated that she often misplaces items and forgets to do things around the house, that despite her physical proximity, she’s not always present.
Adult children may get lost in fantasies and/or daydreams, having
the tendency to idealize situations and people. They may see a fairy-tale, whitewashed version of reality rather than what’s actually in front of
them. In some cases, they see what they’d wished their home and family
relationships would have been like when they were children. Or they may
see what their parent with BPD idealized and projected (“This is the kind of family you should have . . .”). As adults, this idealization may be manifest in unrealistic demands on others, including friends, sons and daugh-
ters, and partners, and unrealistic expectations of relationships. They
expect perfection and as a result are ultimately disappointed since nothing and no one is perfect.
Abuse and Neglect
Some adult children speak of living with emotional cruelty, severe
physical violence, and/or neglect. Roslyn, fifty-two, describes herself as a
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Surviving a Borderline Parent
“feral child,” improperly fed, denied medi
cal care, clothed with one out-
fit—worn until it was in tatters—for her four years of high school, raged at, and beaten at random. Others recall severe beratings seemingly triggered by something as inconsequential as not setting the table properly,
oversleeping, or vomiting. They experienced outright hatred or resent-
ment, and even as children wondered why their parents ever had them.
Given that substance abuse and other self-harming and impulsive
behaviors occur frequently in BPD, drinking, doing drugs, sexual addic-
tions, stealing, or gambling may have taken precedence over parenting
responsibilities. Evelyn, forty-one, remembers making a suicide attempt
when she was a teenager. She was lying on the floor in her room, groggy
from the pills she’d taken, when her mother rushed in, furious that her
Valium was missing.
Furthermore, given the deep fears of abandonment and lack of a
well-defined sense of self, parents with BPD are often attracted to emo-
tionally immature mates. Some adult children describe a second parent (or stepparent) who was extremely codependent and didn’t often stand up to
the person with BPD. Others describe a parent who was extremely narcis-
sistic, or otherwise unavailable. Children of these couples are in effect emotionally abandoned by not one but two parents who are limited by
their own emotional needs.
The Effects: Post-Traumatic Stress and
Long-Term Illness
As a result of living with verbal, emotional, physical or sexual abuse,
adult children may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) even years after leaving their family of origin.
Moira, a thirty-three-year-old woman, now married and an archi-
tect, was raised by a mother with BPD and a father who wasn’t present
very much. When he was, he often acquiesced to her demands and
deferred to her on issues relating to their three children. Moira’s therapist diagnosed her with PTSD when Moira was in her late twenties. She’d been
having troubling nightmares about her family where she’d wake up
screaming, usually at her mother. Though she hadn’t lived at home since
she was eighteen, she says she was still feeling the rage that had been pent up, but stifled by her mother, for so many years. In addition to having
nightmares, Moira felt numb, completely out of touch with her emotions,
and she was hyperaroused, or constantly watching for the tiniest clues and signals in others that would indicate a pending “attack”—physical, mental, or emotional. Moira says she was unable to trust anyone then, even the
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31
man who is now her husband; she startled easily and would jump at sud-
den noises or movements. “Even though I wasn’t ever physically abused as
a child, as an adult, I was tense almost all the time. Rick would come up behind me to hug or kiss me, and I’d stiffen or jump. I knew he was trying to be affectionate, but I hated it. Any kind of physical touch was difficult.
Forget about our sex life.”
Some adult children who lived with physical and/or emotional abuse
from a parent also report that the abuse manifests in physical illnesses, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia, asthma, migraines, and other autoimmune and stress-related disorders.
Boundary Violations
Those with BPD have a hard time negotiating the boundaries
between themselves and others. Each time a child knowingly or unknow-
ingly asserts him- or herself or calls attention to the boundary between self and parent, it may trigger feelings of rejection and abandonment in someone with BPD.
Boundary violations include any type of physical or sexual abuse;
any infringement upon personal space, such as walking into the bathroom
or bedroom without knocking; and not respecting a child’s right to pri-
vacy or ownership (for example, reading a child’s diary or giving away the child’s possessions without asking). Boundaries defining a child’s emotional space may be violated as well when a parent asks detailed personal questions or demands that children share information they haven’t
volunteered.
Catherine, twenty-three, recalled her mother treating her more like a
friend than a daughter, sharing inappropriate details of her sex life and an extra-marital affair, which she expected Catherine to keep secret from her father.
Michael, thirty-four, remembers his mother asking him “way too
many” questions about his father and his father’s new wife whenever he
got home from a visit with them. When he was older, she asked too many
questions when he’d come home from a date.
Enmeshment
Because the parent has such a blurred sense of self in relation to oth-
ers, enmeshment, or emotional entanglement, is common. Borderline par-
ents may treat their children as an extension of themselves, almost like
one of their limbs, expecting them to wear the same style clothes, hold the
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Surviving a Borderline Parent
same opinions, or to side with them in disagreements with a spouse or
other family members.
The parent may be jealous of the child’s relationships with the other
parent, grandparents, brothers and sisters, friends, even pets. Nancy,
twenty-two, recalls her mother telling her, “Go ahead, go up to your room and cry to that mangy dog of yours.” Kim, thirty-two, recalls the repeated accusation against her and her sister: “You’re ganging up on me.” For
someone with BPD, life is a zero-sum game, particularly when it comes to
love—it seems like there’s not enough to go around. The thought process
appears to be, “If you love your father, you must not love me,” or, “If you want to spend time with someone else, you’re abandoning me. If you have a relationship with someone else, you’re disloyal to me.”
Lisa, the thirty-four-year-old daughter of a woman with BPD, recalls
the difficulty she had trying to separate from her mother. “With all her
wacky schemes, Mother was like a square peg trying to fit in a round hole.
For my entire life, she tried to put me in the round hole with her. I
wanted to say, ‘But I’m not a square peg!’ My main goal was to make sure
she was happy. And I was her; there was no separation.” When Lisa’s
mother divorced her father and then her stepfather, she would say, “We
divorced,” rather than, “I divorced,” Lisa recalls. That was one of numerous examples. “It robbed me of my self-esteem, my identity. I existed for her. Whenever I tried to exist for myself, she blew up at me.”
Macy, thirty-seven, recalls the look of surprise on her father’s face
when as a teenager she burst into tears at her grandmother’s funeral. He
seemed dumbfounded that she was grieving, that she had and was express-
ing her own emotions at a moment when he was composed.
The Effects: Walking on Eggshells
Children learn to tiptoe around, to limit the activities that seem to
trigger a parent’s upset, and to minimize contact with others so that the parent isn’t threatened by those relationships. Some children may rebel,
spending long periods of time out of the house, engaging in promiscuous
or other impulsive behaviors.
From the enmeshment they experienced as children and often into
adulthood, sons and daughters may feel that they can’t live life independently while maintaining a relationship with their parent. They report
ongoing blowups and meltdowns when the everyday t
hings they do trigger
parents’ fears and insecurities. If adult children get married, make a commitment to a partner, or have children, for instance, they fear—or based
on their experience, they know—their parent will interfere in some way.
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Nita, fifty, puts it in strikingly simple terms: “Sometimes the guilt
makes me feel like a monster, but I’ll admit there are times I’ve wished for
[my mother’s] death. It’s the only way I think I’ll ever feel truly free.”
Because of the boundary violations they may have experienced while
growing up, adult children report difficulty navigating boundaries and setting appropriate limits with others.
Invalidation
Children of parents with BPD may experience implicit or explicit
invalidation. Their feelings got downplayed or ignored, or they are taught that their perceptions are wrong. Some adults recall being interrupted
when they tried to express their feelings or repeatedly asked things such as, “Well, what did you do to make this happen?” implying that whatever happened was their fault. They may recall being asked a question and,
when they replied, having their parent rage at them for an apparently
wrong answer.
Adult children remember other common responses when they dis-
closed information or tried to share their feelings: “You’re making it out to be worse than it really is,” “You just don’t understand,” “You don’t
know what it’s like,” “You don’t appreciate…,” “Girls/boys your age don’t feel [sad, scared, angry, etc.].”
The Effects: Second-Guessing
Children, and later, adults, learn to distrust their own judgment.
They second-guess their decisions and wonder if they’ve neglected to
think of something. Since they were repeatedly told they were misinter-
preting things, they may have difficulty identifying their own feelings.
They may feel tremendously guilty for feeling their own emotions, think-
ing their own thoughts and doing what they want to do since, from a
young age, they may have been admonished for not considering their par-
ent’s needs before their own.
Role Reversals
Children of parents with BPD are often parentified; that is, they
learn to act as caretaker, perhaps for their siblings or for their parent(s).
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