Many adult children have trouble recalling times when they just felt like fun-loving, silly kids. Some remember the chore lists they were given as
children—not a few “to do” items like making their bed, cleaning their
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Surviving a Borderline Parent
room, taking out trash, or other age-appropriate tasks, but major projects that included cleaning basements, preparing family meals, landscaping,
and doing the family laundry. They may have been expected to get jobs at
a young age or buy their own clothes with the money rattling around in
their piggy banks.
Though she was scared of dogs from the time she was bitten as a
five-year-old, Vivian, thirty, reports having been made to clean up the
yard daily after the family dog—the same one that bit her.
Though he often babysat and cleaned, Juan, twenty-eight, recalls
being commanded one day to clean the house and put up some decora-
tions for company, which turned out to be visiting for his own “surprise”
tenth birthday party.
With parents who attempted suicide or had substance abuse issues,
adult children recall literally being responsible for their parent’s life, hiding pill bottles, calling paramedics, or making sure drunken adults found their way to a couch or bed without getting hurt.
Ed, forty-three, remembers his mother asking him from the time he
was about eight years old to call her boss whenever she was too hung over to get herself to work.
The Effects: Everyone Else Comes First
Rather than act like kids, parentified children learn to take responsi-
bility for themselves and others early on. They tend to fade into the
woodwork and let others take center stage. This extends into adult-
hood—adult children may put others’ needs before their own. They may
have difficulty accepting care and attention. It’s hard for them to feel
happy and content. They may seem old before their time or like an old
soul (and probably were that way as children too). They may easily assume the role of fixer and nurturer. They’re the ones friends lean on, the ones to whom people tell their problems. Helping others gives them a sense of
purpose and worth.
Looks Are Everything
With a fragile and shifting sense of self in a borderline parent, mate-
rial items and keeping up with the Joneses are often a part of many adult children’s early experience.
Ilana reports that her mother bought a brand-new expensive car
every year on a meager salary, while the living room furniture was in dire
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35
need of replacement. Her mother continued to rack up tremendous debt,
but having that symbol of status was important to her.
Roberto’s father continually complained about not earning enough
money to pay his bills every month, yet he’d buy the latest, greatest elec-tronic equipment that seemed out of scale in the family’s modest home.
Borderline parents with an insecure sense of self may use jewelry,
clothes, and other trappings as proof of their attainment of the idealized happy family, regardless of their means. Rather than unconditional love,
nurturance, and open communication, the emphasis may have been on
how things appeared to outsiders. Thus the need for expensive cars,
respectable jobs, obedient children, well-groomed pets, a carefully land-
scaped yard.
The Effects: Materialism, Self-Denial
Adult children may have learned to focus on appearances too and to
judge others by their status, class background, possessions, where they
went to college, what car they drive, who they know. They may hold
themselves to the same high material standards as well, not feeling good
about themselves unless they have the newest, the biggest, the most expensive. Conversely, they may use material possessions to punish themselves, denying themselves new or good quality items because they don’t feel
deserving.
Carolyn says it wasn’t until her fortieth birthday last year when her
husband gave her gift certificates to a day spa and an upscale department store that she was able to spend on herself without feeling guilty. “Before then, I felt just fine wearing whatever was in my closet and shopping at
second-hand stores. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I realized that buying something nice for myself or having a massage once in a
while is okay. I never felt like I deserved that kind of treatment before.”
Keen Perception
Those with BPD may exhibit a hypersensitivity and reactivity to
external stimuli, including others’ facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. Adult children report being told they smelled bad or had
bad breath, that they need to brush their teeth, shower more often, try a new brand of anti-perspirant or stop eating garlic.
This sensitivity to their surroundings may be related to the anxiety that many with BPD feel. They’re often fearful of many things— crowds, open
spaces, being left alone even for a short time, being hurt or made to look
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Surviving a Borderline Parent
foolish, losing a job, driving. They may commonly suspect or accuse oth-
ers of conspiring against them. “You’re manipulating me” or “you don’t
want me to be happy” is not an uncommon complaint. Life for the parent
with BPD may appear to be an obstacle course of booby traps maliciously
set by those around them, against which they must always be on guard.
The Effects: Self-Consciousness, Perfectionism
Adult children may have learned to be shy and self-conscious about
their physical appearance, behavior, and emotions. They may tend toward
perfectionism since no matter what they did, it was never quite enough.
And they may feel guilty for their thoughts and feelings.
Transference
Parents with BPD may project, or transfer feelings onto children (or
others) to avoid accepting them as his or her own. Let’s say someone with BPD clips coupons and presents them to the cashier at the grocery store.
She perceives a look of annoyance or pity on the part of another shopper, a complete stranger, in the check-out line. Whether or not the other shopper was annoyed or feeling sorry for her, she feels embarrassed and guilty for holding up the line. When she gets home, she watches as her daughter
does the laundry. “Use more soap,” orders the mother. “Why are you so
stingy?” What’s really going through her subconscious mind is, “I feel
stingy, but it’s easier for me to believe it’s you than to accept those feelings about myself.”
A father with BPD continually told his teenage son, Bo, he’d make a
lousy father one day and that he should stay a bachelor all his life. It wasn’t until Bo was in his mid-thirties, had fallen in love, and planned to
marry that he and his wife-to-be discussed plans for a family. At first he said he never wanted children, but she pointed out to him that he was
good with kids and seemed to enjoy them. He cherished the time he spent
with his nieces and nephews; he coached soccer, and he assisted with the
youth group at his church. The more he thought about it, he realized he’d always liked being around kids, but it was the tape from his father that
looped in his head. Bo came to realize, “It was my father who wasn’t
meant for this; he’s the one who never should have had kids.”
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The Effects: Anger,
Weak Sense of Self
Adult children who served as the screen for their parents’ projec-
tions may feel intense anger at their parent for continually overriding their thoughts and beliefs. They may lack a well-defined sense of self, because it’s hard to know who you really are when someone is superimposing their
views onto you, telling you it’s really what you believe or want.
What We Know
Numerous studies have been conducted to ascertain the impact of having
an alcoholic, depressed, or generally mentally ill parent, but very few studies have focused on BPD specifically. The one study we located, published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry in 1996, was conducted with twenty-one children of mothers with BPD and twenty-three children of
nonborderline mothers. It found that the former group had more psychiat-
ric diagnoses, more impulse control disorders, and a higher risk of BPD
themselves (Weiss et. al. 1996).
Certainly many of the effects of family-of-origin dysfunction on
adult children are thought by researchers to be similar (Rubio-Stipec et al.
1991). These effects include
7 increased risk of depression
7 suicide attempts
7 poor self-esteem
7 social anxiety
7 issues related to intimacy.
Just as singing children all fall down in the game “Ring around the
Rosie,” adult children feel like they too fell down, like they failed as children and are flawed or “defective,” a word used by several people in interviews. The way they felt as children continues into adulthood.
Others talk of a fundamental sense of shame and dogged perfection-
ism, regardless of their accomplishments or relationships. Maryanne’s eyes welled up during an interview as she wondered if she’d ever be able to
have a truly emotionally intimate relationship, or even feel entitled to
“breathing room on the planet.”
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Surviving a Borderline Parent
Patterns of Attachment
The lasting effects on children raised by a parent with BPD can be related to what psychiatrist John Bowlby (1969) and others have referred to as
insecure attachment patterns, formed before children are even able to speak or comprehend language, making the consequences all the more difficult to articulate later in life. Patterns of attachment to parents or caretakers continue to develop through late adolescence, affecting lifelong
relationships.
When children are raised by families responsive to their need for
affection, they develop confidence in their ability to form relationships with others; they learn that they deserve comfort and kindness, that others are there to support them. They learn trust; they learn how to ask for help in times of need; and they learn to articulate their desire for and to seek affection. They possess a sense of optimism about difficult situations.
Insecure Attachment
Insecure attachments are typical of children raised by parents who
are inconsistent or abusive, emotionally preoccupied by their own needs
and insecurities. Children have little confidence in an available safety net, and therefore they deny their need for support and care from others.
They’ve parented themselves, and often their siblings, from early on, and they learn not to get close to or trust others.
Insecure parental attachment patterns lead to children sec-
ond-guessing themselves, wondering whether it’s safe to assert themselves, make a particular choice, treat themselves in a positive way, and/or reach out to others. As adults, the inconsistency and insecurity experienced in parental relationships gets overlaid onto adult relationships with relatives, coworkers, friends, and intimate partners, rendering adult children dis-trustful of others’ motives, on guard against hidden agendas and unsure of their own identities, judgment, and their worthiness of being unconditionally accepted and loved.
Blind Acceptance
Much of the adult child’s second-guessing may have become so
ingrained that she may not consciously realize she’s engaging in it. Even when called to her attention, she may not readily identify her childhood
experience as a possible reason why. For most people, their family of origin is the only reality they’ve known, so it seems perfectly normal to
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39
them, it’s the standard by which they measure other relationships and
interactions. And even if they realize it wasn’t completely “normal,” or
that they weren’t happy as children—or adults—they may not have much
concept of how things could have been different.
The Ideal Relationship
Children want—need—to believe that their parents will provide pro-
tection. The alternative—that a parent is incapable of taking care of
them—is unthinkable to a child. Children need to believe that what a par-
ent says is logical, honest, and for their own good. Many adult children
say they felt very close to their parent with BPD and that they had a
healthy relationship. Some recall stretches of “good years” and now, looking back, realize they’d idealized their relationship.
That’s not to say the good years didn’t happen. Perhaps they were
the result of the child, even the adult child, not setting boundaries with the parent so the parent didn’t feel threatened or rejected. The idealized relationship may also be the result of what John Bradshaw refers to as a
trance-like state in his book Creating Love: “What we grow up with is what we come to view as normal. Our childhood is like the air we
breathe—we take it for granted” (1992, p. 24).
Often people don’t even realize they can question their family rela-
tionships or the role they played within the familial structure. Bradshaw explains how, as a social system, all families need the structure that roles provide. In functional families, roles are flexible; they shift in understandable and somewhat predictable ways according to circumstances, external
demands, and family members’ needs. In dysfunctional families, roles tend to be rigid and unpredictable. Still, they often go unchallenged or
unexamined.
Six Seeds to Grow a Healthy Child
There’s no question that raising a child is an immensely difficult, yet
rewarding, undertaking. No parent is perfect; all run short of patience at times, react before thinking, and on occasion wish in hindsight they could have handled a particular situation differently. In healthy families, these moments are relatively few and far between, and when they occur, parents
are able to address and discuss them, even apologize to their children for them. What was a negative event can be used as a mechanism to model
positive family dynamics for children.
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Surviving a Borderline Parent
For parents with traits of BPD, however, it’s a challenge to consis-
tently sow these seeds in offspring. They likely didn’t receive them or have them modeled by their own parents when they were children, so they didn’t have an appropriate, healthy point of reference. And with a fragile
sense of self, they may not have been able to ask for help or accept their own shortcomings.
Without minimizing the challenges of parenting, the fundamentals of
raising a healthy, confident, well-adjusted child are in fact quite straight-forward. Children need support, respect and acceptance, voice, uncondi-
tional love and affection, consistency, and security.
Support
Children need to know a parent or caretaker is behind them, cheer-
ing them on emotionally and believing in their ability to succeed. Children should not be expected to provide similar or reciproc
al support to parents, or to be treated as an equal, an adult, or their parent’s closest ally or friend.
Respect and Acceptance
Children need to know that they have intrinsic worth, that they have
the right to occupy physical, mental, and emotional space in the universe and that they can expect that space to be safe, acknowledged, and not
tread upon.
Voice
Children need a sense of agency, of autonomy that instills confi-
dence that they’ll be heard and therefore that they have some level of control over their environment. Parents who foster agency, voice, in children value their opinions and needs and are able to demonstrate empathy with
children’s feelings. They validate; they enter the child’s world, rather than expecting the child to enter theirs (Grossman, 2003).
Unconditional Love and Affection
Children need to know they’re loved and will be cared for regardless
of who they are, what they do, how they behave, dress, what their physi-
cal appearance and mental abilities are, or how much others like or love
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41
them. They also need affection, including being hugged and held and told
they’re loved.
Consistency
One of the most important seeds for a healthy child is consistency.
Children who are parented with consistency learn confidence and security; they feel safe in knowing that there is some order in their world, that
commitments are kept and rules followed. What a parent permits on
Monday a child shouldn’t then be reprimanded for on Tuesday or Thurs-
day or Sunday, or if Mother is tired or in a bad mood, for example.
Security
Children need to feel safe and secure that they will be provided for
in terms of food, clothing, shelter, emotional support, and love. Children develop their sense of security as a result of consistency.
STOP AND THINK: Six Seeds
Think of two or three incidents where your parent provided any one of
the six seeds (support, respect and acceptance, voice, security, uncondi-
tional love and affection, consistency). Write them down, including the
circumstances, the emotions you felt, and what you took away or gleaned
about yourself.
Now think of two or three incidents where any one of these six
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