As you examine your past experiences & gain insight into the dynamics of BPD & how they played out in your family, you begin to understand & identify many things: the roles you & other family members played; the rules by which your family functioned; perceptions, opinions, & expectations you & other family members held & maybe still hold.
Doing so lets you challenge these roles, rules & the characteristics you developed as a result.
Learning by Osmosis
Having grown up with a parent with borderline traits, some-perhaps much- of what you learned, saw & were told by your parent was influenced by his emotional temperament. Imagine your parent had diabetes & did a good job managing his illness. Your house wouldn't have had many sweets around, you would have gotten used to seeing your parent follow a strict diet, test his blood, & perhaps inject himself with insulin on a daily basis. You would have learned what signs meant his blood sugar was too low, & you would have come to learn what signs meant his sugar was too high. It would all seem normal, after a while- not good or bad, just the way things in your family are.
Similarly, you got used to having a parent with BPD traits. And these traits profoundly affect relationships. Think of the DSM-IV (APA 1994) criteria & other manifestations - inconsistency, denial, projection, black-&-white thinking, difficulty expressing anger, volatility, often feeling emotionally overwhelmed, abandoned, rejected, attacked, ignored & ashamed.
Any of these manifestations, not to mention any combination, can affect relationships and family dynamics in significant ways. And given that you were a child, your parent's temperment & challenges undoubtedly had an impact on how you interacted with others as well.
Playing Your Role~
In your family, you may have been assigned a role. You may have been the black sheep, excluded from conversations & only learning about things second hand. Or you may have been the best friend in whom your parent confided whenever there was a conflict with a relative. You might have been the ally, expected to take your parents side whenever there was a disagreement. Perhaps you were the fall guy instead, the one who stepped in to fight your parents battles & communicate her discontent with the person she deemed responsible. You may have experienced combination of these roles - or numerous others - depending on your age, the circumstances & your parents needs.
Black sheep. I feel I'm nothing like my NBM & FOO & feel like we have not a lot in common at all. Values, ideals, the way I do things different to them. I don't know my other FOO much either which seems strange to me when I think about it. I know i was also the Ally but didn't conform.
Absorbing Beliefs~
As a result of being involved in the unhealthy & unpredictable ways your parent likely related to others, you may have experienced estrangements, family fueds or heard opinions from your parent that diametrically opposed your impressions or others beliefs. You may have watched as family members worshipped or demonized, or both. You may have been told that Aunt Thelma was a loon, or that your brother was a freeloader & trouble even in utero, for instance. And after hearing these things over & over, you might have to come to believe them yourself. No, or few, questions asked. Even if your experience with Aunt Thelma & your brother told you otherwise, you may have accepted your parents beliefs in order to get his approval, or simply, because as a child & even a young adult, you think (and need to believe) that your parent knows best.
I definitely think this is the case with my FOO (sibling)
Putting the pieces together
Now as an adult, it's important to look back &, as much as possible, sift through the past to discern your own thoughts & feelings & to learn more about who the people were around you. Aunt Thelma may not have been a loon. Your impression as a child that she was a kind, warm, funny, off-beat lady may have been spot on. Your brother may have been open & generous to a fault as a youngster but grew to be rebellious & sullen as a teenager (after years of criticism & blame from your parent.) There may have been some objective truth to the things your parent believed. There may have been little. It doesn't matter. It's up to you now to make your own assessments as a somewhat detached witness who suspends judgement & deals only with the facts as much as possible.
Family Affairs~
A family is a system. It's important, as you think back, to note not only how your parent functioned, but how others around her did (your other parent, siblings, grandparents, aunt, uncles, even close family friends, & of course yourself), & what the dynamics were like among all of you.
Go to the Sources~ I've done a bit of this lately
In addition to your own memories, which may have formed quite some time ago, there are other ways of learning what life was like in your family. Talk to relatives, even distant ones who you may think don't have much to share. They might surprise you with their recollections & insight. Talk to family friends & former neighbors. If you've lost track of some of these people & want to locate them, the internet is a helpful resource.
Those with BPD-like patterns of thinking & behavior have different areas of competence & different responses to different people. They may function very well in certain situations or around particular people & less well under other circumstances. They may have idealized some people in their life & bitterly hated others. Different family members & friends will have had very different expectations with your parent, so it's important to cast your informational net as wide as possible to get a better idea of your family dynamics. It's also important to get as much input as possible because it will be difficult for you to see all aspects of your parent. As a child, & as your parent's child, you saw your parent from a particular perspective. Your view would have been quite different if you'd been an adult.
You've also felt (& may still feel) a great deal of pain because of your relationship with your parent, which may prelude your seeing or remembering some of the good. Given human survival instincts, & the strong chemical & physical reactions we have to trauma, it's far more likely for us to recall dangerous, violent or emotionally volatile situations than the calm, peaceful ones (ever heard of post-euphoric stress disorder? While much research is being done on the effects of happiness on health, pleasure doesn't seem to have the same jarring effect on us that pain does).
These experiences are registered strongly, particularly when the trauma is inflicted by a parent, close relative or caretaker - the person/people upon whom you most heavily depend on for survival.
As a result, any subsequent incident that even remotely resembles the first triggers strong emotions - anger, fear, sadness - & negative associations grow. This is not to say that your negative feelings aren't justified.; rather it's to remind you that little in life is 11 percent good or 100 percent bad (know anyone who thinks that is is?!) In thinking about her childhood experience with her mother, who would alternate between being very loving & then raging uncontrollably, Donna 42 says, "It helped me to keep in mind that my mother didn't ask to be borderline. Whether it was caused by hereditary or the environment, she didn't choose it, & she never set out to make my life miserable. In her own way, she tried her best.
What you're after ~
As you talk with people, you'll want to learn your family's history & individual members experiences with anxiety, depression, substance use/abuse, schizophrenia, BPD, childhood abuse or neglect, abusive marriages, hospitalizations (for physical or mental reasons), & so on. You'll also want to know what your parents childhoods were like, as well as how others saw you as a child. For example:
*Why did your family move from ...to...?
*Why was your sister sent to live with...?
*How come there are no pictures of ....around? Or how come....is never smiling in pictures?
*How come your mother never spoke to (or of)....?
*How come....would get so angry whenever anyone mentioned....'s name?
*What was....like? What was his/her childhood like? Others said he/she was....; why might that be?
Your role in the family drama~
Things may look very different to you now as an independently thinking adult than they did when you were a child. As you challenge some of what you previously held to be true, you may realize that judgements you made about people or things you did were unfair.
My sibling FOO. I know I have been pretty hard on her. Some for good reason, some probably not.
As with any loss, you may experience grief over a separation or conflict with a family member that resulted from the borderline-like behavior. Yes.
You may also experience frustration at not being able to reconstruct your past entirely. There may be many questions to which you can't get satisfying answers, for any number of reasons. The people involved may have died; they may wish to not have contact with you. You may hear several accounts of the same incident & not know who's version is right (chances are good there are elements of truth in them all). With some questions you have, it may just prove impossible to ever really know the answers.
So in addition to work through grief & loss you may also need to practice acceptance. Yes.
You may not like the answers you've found. You may not feel good about how things played out. You may regret things that you said or you did or that were said or done to you. But now that you are no longer a child, you have a choice about how you handle these situations from here on.
Would the real you please stand up?
Who are you? It sounds like a simple question doesn't it.
You know your name, you know where you live, you know what you do for a living, how you spend your days, whether you're a mother or a father, aunt or uncle, son, sister, friend. But who are you?
As the child of a parent with BDP &/or other emotional cognitive difficulties, it may be surprisingly difficult to answer this question. You likely didn't have much mirroring or validation,m when you were young, which babies need in order to know where they stand in the world, that their feelings & observations & perceptions are healthy & normal. Without that early mirroring, it was difficult to see yourself, to know yourself. The mask you may have worn might have been the result of other things as well. As a child, you wanted to please. If Mummy wanted a little ballerina for a daughter, you tried hard to excel in ballet class, even though you really wanted to be out playing kickball or at home reading a book. If Dad needed someone to guide him into the house, when he was being too drunk to find his way from down the garage, you probably associated being good person with downplaying your own feelings & needs.
You may have also served as a video screen of sorts when your parent projected the traits or feelings she had trouble facing in herself onto you. For example, if your Mother was frequently angry but had trouble owning it, she may have accused you of being angry. As a child, when a parent tells you you're a certain way or you have certain problems, well you usually believe it.
In dysfunctional families of all sorts, it can be easier at times to simply suppress your feelings. They're often not validated anyway, & given the chaos, the rules, the inconsistency, the hurt, anger & frustration, life may seem a whole lot simpler without feelings. In all these ways you may have lost touch with your true self. Remember the messages you received didn't have to be direct as an explicit statement. You picked up signals from how others treated you, from their body language, from what you overheard them say to others, & so on. If you got the message that you were a cold person, for instance, you may not be able to recall a specific time when someone told you that you were cold. You absorbed the message in other ways.
You're in there, Somewhere
A fundamental skill for surviving a parent with borderline traits is sifting. Think of the process of panning for gold. You scoop the pan in a stream & pull up a lot of slimy rocks & mud. Shake your pan (gently) through & the muck & pebbles fall through. You're left with hopefully nuggets of gold & other minerals (what's left may not seem like all gold to you but all minerals have valuable properties). In the past, few chapters, you've been starting to go through much the same process. Your authentic self is the gold & minerals.
The mud, muck, slime & pebbles are the guilt, blame, criticism, anger, resentment, fears, & projections you have lived with that sift out as you shake the pan. The questions & exercises that follow will help you isolate those valuable nuggets of gold & other natural resources.
The sifting process doesn't happen all at once (it's not something you can start & finish using an exercise in this, or any, book in an evening) but rather it happens, little by little, over time.
One day you might remember that you used to love pistachio ice cream, but you never ate it at home or ordered it in restaurants because your father was allergic to nuts & he'd always make some annoying remark. And so you reacquaint yourself with pistachio ice cream. A few weeks later you might cook a wonderful dinner for a few friends & realize that you are a good cook, despite how your parent used to tease you for "screwing up" a box of macaroni & cheese. Maybe you get some different cookbooks from the library to experiment.
You may find that once you are open to seeing things, yourself, in a new light, that these discoveries both mundane & weighty, pop up often & at odd times - while you're walking the dog, during coffee & a chat with a good friend, in the middle of the night, as a result of a dream .
Stop & think: Shaking the Pan for.....
The sifting process isn't one you can (or should) force. And the hardest part about it is that you may not realize what you should be sifting out & keeping in, it's so ingrained. However, you may find that once you start thinking about & even challenging long-held parts of yourself, you'll have periods of time where the insights come in quick succession. The following list includes some of the areas to consider:
*your beliefs - about spirituality, material possessions, politics, social issues
*your feelings - what makes you happy, sad, angry, frightened, anxious?
*your opinions
*your preferences
*your interests
*your priorities (& likewise, your obligations). What things do you do because you feel you should do them; which do you do because they're important to you & you want to?
*your goals
*your strengths
*your talents
*your hobbies
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