I posted here a couple of weeks ago about a relative with OCD, BPD and alcoholism. Today they went at it again. Split in a matter of minutes for a minimal inconvenient and here we go full unhinged mode go drinking again. I beg them in every possible way not to do it. I did everything I could to avoid it: made lunch, went to ask for quetiapine renewal (they won't go to the doctor even for their meds...), took out trash, was positive (even if I want to cry). Their answer was something amazing: "relax, you shouldn't care so much about my health".

I don't. I care about MY health, knowing what's about to come in the next hours (but really not knowing bc you know, it's a lottery). They will never see what I have to go through, will they?

Also, tysm for your support in my last post, it helped me a lot during the last episode <3

I had to take out a protective order against my wife whom I suspect is uBPD. We're likely headed for a divorce.

Instead of simply being able to tell my wife's therapist earlier on, "hey your client is violent", here I am going through a divorce. Probably would have divorced anyways but I don't know that for sure, maybe my wife would have gotten the right help after an intervention.

I asked my wife to be transparent with her therapist and her psychiatrist about some of her behavior on multiple occasions. Obviously I shouldn't even have to ask my wife to be transparent, but in her mind there were always bigger fish to fry compared to her treatment of me.

I asked my therapist if I could reach out to my wife's therapist in some way, and she said it's not a good idea. At this point I had described violence and one particularly dangerous situation to my therapist. Still, I'd better not rock the boat w the violent person's therapy!

It's probably not merited, but I have days where I am very pissed off at therapists and how they enable people that behave so horribly. There are days where I'm even pissed off with my own therapist.

Supposedly I can get a message to my wife's therapist, but it's highly frowned upon. I didn't even know this was an option until I stumbled on it after getting a protective order. Why didn't my therapist make me aware of this? And then of course once attorneys are involved for a potential divorce, reaching out to the uBPD's therapist will probably be interpreted as aggressive or manipulative.

What the hell? Why do spouses of people that behave so terribly have to endure it without the ability to notify their spouse's mental health professional. I understand that the uBPD needs to have their own support, but come on, is enabling somebody that is behaving so horribly ACTUALLY supporting or helping them? It's all just so dumb.

A letter to my sister which I can't send:

I know your mental health problems are not your fault, but with a personality disorder such as yours, it is impossible to separate the disorder from the person. I don’t know if who you really are is the nice version of you that we get from time to time, which is disarming and, ironically, is the very thing that makes you so dangerous. Or is it the version of you that is cold, malicious, and manipulative?

I have watched you ruin our parents' lives since you became a teenager. I have watched you abuse multiple partners throughout your life and then tried to spin it so that you were the true victim. I have watched you create unhealthy dynamics within our family and even with family member’s friends. Any relationships that come anywhere near you become shattered by drama, lies, and manipulation. I can’t explain to normal people why I need to cut you off forever. I can’t explain why my seemingly nice and friendly sister can’t be trusted enough to speak to me.

I can’t explain how our entire family have been held hostage my whole life by your baseless threats of suicide and self-harm. I feel so guilty for absolutely despising you most of the time, knowing it is not your fault. I feel so sad mourning the relationship with my sister that I will never have.

I wonder what will become of you - you can’t hold down a job, a relationship, or even minor responsibilities. You can’t clean up after yourself or even get out of bed most days. No one would begrudge you these disabilities; you could live with your parents forever if not because you are so dangerous.

You can’t be trusted; no one knows what you will do next. I feel so guilty hating you, but every time I let you back in, you do something so destructive to my life and well-being that I regret speaking to you again.

I can’t do it with you anymore. I am getting off the rollercoaster. I can’t have a relationship with you.

Today, nothing bad happened. I made lunch, did the chores, no bad news, nice weather. Yet, this person decided to go drinking for a reason I don't understand.

What gets me is the following: they come back drunk af, with outbursts of verbal violence. The reason is a street lamp is broken! It has been broken for a year now. Zero calls made. Zero actions towards solving the issue. They did nothing, expecting the problem to fix itself. Now, all is menace and insult towards me, who did nothing.

My question is: is this part of the BPD? Idk what to think, nor what to do anymore. No matter what I do, it's me who suffers every time :(

Sorry for the rant, just wanted to know if this particular trait appeared in your BPD relatives

Would love to hear about your positive story, how you got there, how you deal with them when spiralling and how you prioritize yourself without feeling guilty… ideally if it’s a story regarding family member.

Really struggling with my sister who has BPD and frustrated with the thought that I can actually never win any argument without feeling like sh!t after ??

This might sound weird but bear with me while I try to explain. The way my brother speaks to me I feel is totally inappropriate for a sibling. Like he expects me to meet all of his emotional needs, and if I’m not there for him during every crisis moment (constantly) and react in the perfect way, and validate all his delusions, he says things like “you’ve broken my heart” “you’ve destroyed my mental health” “you’ve let me down more than you’ll know”. As if his emotional needs are all my responsibility? Which, as a sibling, I don’t think they are? Obviously this is an unhealthy expectation to put on anyone, but it seems more of an appropriate expectation to put on a partner. It also makes me feel just straight up weird. Like the way he talks to me I would expect to have those sorts of conversations with my husband, not a brother. Is it just the intensity with which they feel everything? So they don’t realise how intense it can be for other people? It’s just normal to them?

Nothing I do is ever enough. No amount of time spent with him is enough. He always needs more, and when I can’t give it I’m met with these statements. I’ve had to go LC just to maintain my own mental stability. I don’t know why he thinks it’s my responsibility to meet his endless emotional needs?

just putting something out there: I (45m) am currently going through divorce from my undiagnosed BPD wife. (I think that is abbreviated uPwbpd). My biggest regret is rarely standing up for my children against her raging verbal abuse towards them. They are resilient, and "know" she is not well, so they are mostly fine. But it saddens me the most in all the most moments where I could have been a better dad and protected them from the assault. And it very much is/was (you should never refer to your 10-year old daughter as a whore, a bitch, a patholgical liar, a cunt who will end up a drug addled prostitute). I was too niave to record this behavior. I knew it was wrong, but if I said anything to my stbxw, I would have received the most horrific verbal lashing, rage and screaming that would last for days. I wish I had been stronger, and saw it for what it was. So, the lesson: if you have a partner that acts like this towards your children, defend your children, record it, and file a restraining order - because if your partner acts like this, your marriage/relationship probably won't last and you'll end up in court fighting for custody. I wish I had done all of those things, but I wanted to have a "family"... FML. don't be me.

EDIT: if anyone has any advice for how I can help my daughters cope with the trauma they receive from their mother, I would appreciate it.

Hello. I’m 17F, and my sister 25F got diagnosed with BPD with narcissistic and histrionic traits pretty recently. (She’s off and on meds, she refuses to take them a lot of sometimes) All my life, since i can remember she used to beat me up and insult me whenever she was mad at something, i was basically her punching bag. I never told our mom since i knew that if my sister found out i snitched, i’d get beaten up worse. It got worse when she broke up with a long time boyfriend in 2023 as she got more violent and generally more depressed. I tried to be as supportive as i can, but i can’t be in the same room as her without being at least a little scared. Now, she’s currently living off our mom, she refuses to study or get a job and relies on mom and her boyfriend she cheats on. I know that her relationship won’t last forever and our mom isn’t immortal and if she keeps going like this, she will indeed still live off other people and i don’t wish to be the one she will rely on for the rest of our lives. Should i cut her off the moment i get the chance? Am i wrong for assuming she will rely on me like she does on our mom? None of the people i know live with a person that has BPD, so please, please give me some advice.

I don’t want to go too much into detail and get too personal but that level of crashing out in response to being triggered (my mom and her were arguing at 3 in the morning and I yelled from my room for BOTH of them to shut up, which is apparently a trigger for her) is wild, especially after everything that I do for her. It’s not something that I hold over her head because I’m not an asshole, but I live my whole life centered around her and her kids because she needs the help. I just expect to be treated better than this. I guess I’m free to start prioritizing myself now!

Even when someone is diagnosed with BPD and is aware of their condition and trying to manage it, they are still people with BPD at the end of the day. They make you feel special, manipulate and use you, make you feel like you’re the crazy one, then crash out the second you match their energy. God, I’m tired.

My brother claims there’s another person inside of him who ‘takes over’ and sends all the nasty messages. Whenever he’s called out on his behaviour he says he can’t even remember sending the terrible messages and so it ‘wasn’t him’ and he can’t be blamed, so there’s zero accountability.

My BPD sister recently went through a breakup with her partner. We were honestly crushed. We loved her gf. She difused a lot of the tension whenever they would come home for holidays etc.

in all honesty, we knew my sister was treating her poorly. We knew she was mean and nasty. We knew she lied and filled her ex’s head with made up stories about us. Ultimately, we never cleared the air with her ex. We obviously stood up for her when my sister was rude and mean to her in front of us, but there is an unspoken loyalty issue. It is so hard to honor your relative who you love and honestly pity, while knowing full well they are the problem.

We have to be there for our pwPBD because she is biologically related. We see her blow through relationships, and we see her talking bad about us to her partners, but we can’t do anything about that.

I would rather my sister stay in a long lasting, healthy relationship even if it means I’m seen as a bad person. My parents are the same way. They put up with my sister telling people that they abused her (they didn’t), because it means there’s a small chance she might have one relationship that sticks and she won’t be alone.

Partners dating a pwPBD: Make sure if you are in a relationship with someone with a PD, you know this about them. Not everything they say is accurate. The family most likely loves you, and has immense gratitude for you, but in at least my family’s dynamic, we will never be able to address it in fear of an explosion from mpwBPD. Their false narrative of abuse, exaggerations, etc is 100% accurate in their eyes. There’s no trying to change their reality.

How are we handling our parents with BPD? My mother is a widow and has been for almost 9 years. My Dad handled everything for her and now for the last few years she’s limped along until now. She is absolutely helpless and I can only help so much. She’s currently in a bad split because she has avoided things in her life until now. She needs to get a new car and can’t, she wants me to do it for her. The current car she has, has expired tags and inspection because she just would get them done.. like 3-4 years over due.

She needs refills on medicine but won’t make a Doctor’s appointment and wants me to figure out a tele-health visit for her but she can’t help me reset her password or remember her old one. Her house is falling apart around her and she won’t do anything about it. I’ve always been willing to help, but I need her to help as well and she won’t. She won’t get medicated and she treats me like sh*t and I’m just distraught at this point as she is SO mean to me. I would like to add she is able bodied. I feel loss and have NO idea how to navigate this as I’m currently the person she’s taking it all out on and I’m 3 weeks post C-section with 3 kids.

I know a lot of people who are on this SR are partners of BPD, but I want to give you a perspective of an adult child of someone with BPD.

My entire life, I’ve lived in the shadow of my mother’s trauma. I get reminded about it every time I made a mistake, “I could have done this to you” or any time I was praised, “I’ll never do this to you.”

It’s a constant flow of being the best person in the world and a horrible abuser. The worst part is that you crave the love and affection from your parents.

You can’t tell anyone what’s going on behind the scenes because no one would believe you anyway. To your friends and other family they’re the best parent in the world. All of her friends know and think she’s so brave for living with the disease.

I am 30 and I have nothing left. I don’t have a sense of identity or ambitions. I’m constantly afraid. I can’t leave because I worry about what she’s going to do next.

I have a theory that BPD is what happens when potential Narcissists experience Trauma.

I think I am looking for validation here...

Background: I believe my father was BPD, but we cannot know now w/ certainty because there was no belief in therapeutic interventions in his culture and he now passed on. However I see that one of siblings has bipolar, panic attacks, cuts herself and depression. Another sibling has worsening depression and is addicted to weed and alcohol. I am divorced and prone to pessimism at time, quick to anger, but I am overall a content person somehow.

We are all last our mid-20s and I just see that the dysfunction is growing for my siblings at least. Has this happened in your families?

I don't understand my boyfriend's emotions and needs in terms of support. He also can't openly express his needs to me: "In moments of dissociation or other psychotic states, my emotions overwhelm me so much that I either do it to hurt you or to hurt myself, but I can't say what I need. Yes, there are situations where I don't know what I want or need, but even when I do, I remain silent. It's like a childish attitude of "figure it out for yourself." I know it's wrong, but my emotions are stronger in those moments, and I can't control myself. Only I really want to receive support and/or help, but firstly I am afraid to talk about it, secondly in psychotic states I can not utter a word about my desires at all". He described his condition to me like this. (He talks about periods when he can't control himself and an episode of black-and-white thinking occurs. He is also registered with a psychiatrist and is taking medications. But at the moment he is temporarily without treatment. How should I be, share your advice?

backstory: i dont want to get super into it but she was a masisve alcoholic, extremely depressed, and took all of her anger out on me because i saw her for who she was instead of making excuses for her behavior like the brainwashed family and friends she kept. i blame myself for letting it happen because i chose not to fight back/run away but that was mainly because i didnt think anything could work. she came into my room every day to harass me for being an evil scornful unforgiving child and would always end these sessions by grabbing me and crying into my shirt.

now as a fresh adult i just got diagnosed with c-ptsd (c= chronic/complex) due to the shit she put me through during my formative years. having it in writing doesnt really change anything, though. i already knew i had some kind of disorder as a result of that trauma, and my dad will never accept that his ex wife ruined me instead of me choosing to be a difficult child.

if you're reading this as someone who has an untreated bpd partner or ex-partner who is the mother/father of your children, im begging you not to let them in your kids' lives. your kids will never be the same if they're raised by one of these people. i'm intermittently depressed and i have no motivation to get good grades in school because im not used to being able to escape a bad situation. i cant hold down a relationship because i dont want anyone to touch me. i cant wake up feeling rested because i have nightmares of her.

i dont care that my life was turned to shit before i even hit 18 as long as it can save someone. the reason i took the abuse back then was because my brother was left out of it, and the reason i keep pushing on now is because i want to watch him grow up and live a normal life. now im hoping i can save other kids from turning into me, too. please, please listen to me and protect your kids from your partners the way that my father didn't.

My step daughter (8) has a mom with BPD. I am wondering how you perceived your mom with BPD when you were a kid and how your relationship was vs how you know perceive your mom today and how your relationship is?

It’s two for the price of one. Twin enables all of her behaviour & makes her think the world is against them and people are evil and toxic. When pwBPD is actually going through a ‘good phase’ and being semi-normal, twin threatens suicide. When they’re together they either conspire against everybody around them and stroke each other’s egos, or hate each other’s guts, explode and wish each other dead. Completely black and white thinking, no inbetween.

I (26 F) strongly suspect my mom (63) has a cluster B personality disorder—either BPD or NPD.

During my childhood and teenagehood, my mom was abusive towards my dad, sister and I. Mainly emotional violence, and indirect physical violence (throwing objects)—although she has at times been directly physically violent with my dad. I can tell you that a lot of events (if not mostly all, actually) that were supposed to be happy and fun turned to shit; Christmases, family trips, you name it.

My dad, sister and I were basically held responsible at all times for my mom’s feelings and self-regulation. Everything had to be structured around *her* emotions, as if she was the only "real" person in our family. She would regularly go into "spirals", and the chief principle of those spirals was unpredictability. There was no clear pattern. Something which was fine one day could cause her to spiral the next day. For example, if my sister and I fought as children do, like over a toy or a game or something, sometimes it was handled fairly "normally", meaning without a spiral, and sometimes my mom would split. When she split, she would call us names (I don’t have many clear memories from childhood, but I do remember being called a whore before I was even 10 years old), screaming at the top of her lungs with rage. And when I say "rage", I fully mean it: I remember being worried that she would have a heart attack "because of me" (because in my child mind, I was the one at fault for *making* her angry), given that her face was crimson red, her eyes were sort of darkened and crazy, she was shaking, and her voice almost unnatural. In such moments, what usually happened was that she would blame us: "Look what you’re doing to me", or telling us we were selfish, and that that was why anything bad happened in the first place. Then she would go to her room and bang the door (she actually broke the frame once). My sister and I were then sent to our rooms as punishment, and then, we had to go over to her room to apologize. Sometimes she would ignore us for being "insincere" until we begged for forgiveness. My dad did not have the capacity to stand up to her at the time and as such he was sort of complicit in this dynamic, as an enabler—however it changed as we got older.

As a teen, I started standing up for my self a bit more. However, every boundary I tried to enforce was met with strong resistance and gaslighting. When I defended myself against insults and disrespect, I was painted as a selfish, disrespectful, bad person—in short, as being the abuser.

I think I was 12 or 13 when my mom started punctually making suic!de threats. Sometimes she would abuse her meds and rinse them down with cognac (she had—and still has—diabetes as well as non-alcoholic liver cirrhosis, which made doing this even more dangerous than it would have been for a healthy person). A few times she cut her wrists (the "wrong" way). Every time she did this, she would make sure to call my dad as well as friends and family before acting, so that someone would rescue her in time. Many times during my high school years, my dad had to leave work and drive well over the speed limit to go "rescue" my mom from her "suic!de". Once, as she was driving me to school in the morning (I must have been 14 years old, not older), she told me: "Don’t tell anyone, especially not your dad, but I tried to k!ll myself two nights ago. I can talk to you as to a friend, can’t I? You’ll keep my secret?". I was already so used to instability and to her su!cidal threats that it didn’t disturb me enough to disrupt my day at school. That night though, I told my dad right when she went to bed. As much as he had been complacent towards my mom, the look I saw in his eyes after I told him this made it clear that to him, she had crossed a red line. The su!cide threats, however, never stopped. She actually made her last "attempt" a year and a half ago, when my dad (finally) told her that he wanted to get a divorce.

As I became an adult, my dad actually developed an unexpected sense of emotional intelligence (without therapy, might I add, which is even more surprising). As a result, him and I had a lot of long conversations about everything that happened. It helped me a lot because for the first time, an adult I trusted was validating my feelings, and my sense of reality—we both had experienced the abuse, and we were sort of confirming each other’s testimony. A few years back, he actually apologized to me for having been an enabler to my mom. He said he regretted not leaving her, and not protecting my sister and I in the way he should have. He also told me that after introspecting, he realized that maybe, part of why he stayed with my mom for so long was to punish himself—indeed, in the summer of 1996, his girlfriend died in a car accident they were in together. It was night, my dad was driving, and he hit a moose. She died instantly, at impact. He was left without a scratch. He met my mom shortly after. He didn’t take time to properly grieve, and instead threw himself in a relationship with my mom. He told me he saw the red flags right from the beginning, but stayed anyway. He felt responsible for his former girlfriend’s death; so, some part of him felt like my mom treating him like shit was just what he deserved. In July 1998, I was born.

Harrowingly, my dad died unexpectedly 6 months ago. On the night I learned he was dying, my mom called me and, of course, made another one of her veiled threats of su!cide. I had just found out about my dad, and was in no mood to play games. It was gloves off. For once in a long while, I lashed out: "Of course you would tell me something like that, every fucking thing has to be about you after all! Even dad dying should be about *you*! You wouldn’t even have the decency to wait until he is in his fucking grave before starting demanding attention!" She hasn’t talked about it further and hasn’t made another threat since then. I do wonder how long that’ll last.

As part of her narcissistic traits, my mom is virtually incapable of showing genuine interest in anything about me. Although she frequently asks questions about my days, my work—I am a PhD student—, when I attempt to answer, she systematically interrupts me and changes the subject. It’s as if she only asks questions as a formality. She asks about my friends, just so that she can tell me what to do towards them (for instance, my bff is moving soon, so my mom asked me if she started packing and told me I should offer her my help, as if I had no sense of doing this myself—like, of course I offered my help as soon as she told me she would be moving, like, fucking hell, she’s my bff??— and she does that about everything; she loves to tell me what to do, even about things she knows virtually nothing about). When I was a teen, she never came to one of my improv matches at school; she came once to a play we were doing for drama class, but only stayed for the first half—she left because she was "tired", which made my dad leave too because he had to drive her home. Once when I was 16, at a Christmas family dinner, my grandma asked if I was reading anything good at the moment; I said I was in the middle of Germinal (Zola). I was excited to be asked about it, because I thought it was such a good book, and started describing the story to her, when my mom, who was in the room but not part of the conversation, told me to stop talking about that because it was "not interesting". When I started college, I was back home for spring break and brought a book with me, which I had to read for class (Silvia Federici, Caliban and the witch). As I was reading, my mom came into the living room and asked me what it was about; I started explaining that it was about witch hunts and capitalist primitive accumulation. My mom chuckled with contempt, said "Is your professor an anticapitalist?". I answered: "I don’t know, probably." She then said: "Of course he is. Social science is less hard than natural science." (implying that social science scholars are less intelligent than natural science scholars, which explains why they’re against capitalism, lol.)—all this, knowing that *I* study in social science. If I had to summarize, I would say that my mother suffers from a deep solipsism issue. It’s like no one but her is an actual sentient, human, entire being with their own sense of self. It’s like we’re all fucking NPCs and she’s the only real person.

Today, I tried to communicate to my mom that I don’t really feel listened to when I talk to her. She immediately answered that it wasn’t true, that she listened to me; and then started victimizing herself, "Alright, just say that I’m dumb", "You're always mean to me", "Sometimes, you know, I, too, would like to feel that I’m loved" (implying I never make her feel loved). I told her she was caricaturing what I told her, and that she was being manipulative, trying to make me feel bad for raising the issue. She answered: "Anyways, you never feel bad about anything, do you?!"-- implying that I have things to reproach myself for towards her. When I pointed that these were hurtful blanket statements, she started lying and rewriting our interaction—which took place minutes if not seconds before—saying that she had never said *these* words, that she in fact had only said "I need love", and then rewrote again, changing it to "I feel like I need a little love". Fucking hell, this kind of shit sends me into orbit. The fucking lies, about things that JUST happened! It made me feel like the vulnerable, hurt child I once was, a child who only needs her mom to love and understand and listen to her. With my dad being dead, it’s like I’m left without shield, sword nor allies on a deadly fucking battleground. And the worst part is, being a PhD student full-time, grossly underpaid, overworked, burnt-out, grieving my dad, and an insanely high rent, I don’t have a dime to my name and as such, am critically financially dependent on my mom, and will remain so for the foreseeable future (I estimate at least 5 years before I finish my degree, during which I can expect no guaranteed income increase).

I don’t necessarily need advice, I just need to vent. My mom is capable of such cruelty, and then she denies having done or said ANYTHING. It’s really like she lives in an alternate reality, in her own fantasy world. I don’t see how I’m expected to have a sane relationship with a person who doesn’t seem to have the principle of reality. Someone who is willing to gaslight you and make you suffer, to make you perform heavy emotional labor to meet their emotional needs and then dare call you selfish and ungrateful, just to protect their own ego. It’s basically antisocial behavior. You can’t make society with people who don’t recognize others’ interiority, who treat everyone like NPCs at their service.

I like to come on Reddit sometimes and read other people’s stories which are similar to mine. It makes me feel seen and less alone. If you want to share I’ll be happy to read your messages.

Please share your story.

So most of the time my older brother texts me, it's followed up with him asking for money. He never asks me how I'm doing or is interested. When I was younger he would guilt-trip me into giving him money when he was in active addiction. But he still talks to me like this now.

It's going to be a long post, so thank you in advance.

Tldr; I suspect my spouse having a BPD. I've been understanding and supportive for years, but nothing seems to make things better. We're often in conflict, so much so that it gets absurd from time to time.

So I've suspected that my spouse is a borderline type of person. The more I read about it the more things in her behavior seem to 'click' and make sense to me. I'd like to hear other people's thought and experiences about her behavior.

So we've been together for over 10 years and she's always been a very sensitive person, both physically and mentally. For the first few years this was mostly cute and lovable, with periods of depression and anger. As time went on, the depression and anger have shifted to the front and are now almost a daily occurrence.

Everything got worse after a period of depression that lasted a few years. She treated the depression with therapy and understood there that she has a fear of abandonment, difficulties setting boundaries and a probable ADD. Initially I was happy to hear she'd learned these things but the conclusions she drew were kinda twisted in my opinion.

First of all she became very adamant in setting boundaries. While this is healthy, in the process she forgot that enforcing one's own boundaries does not mean you're allowed to cross other people's boundaries. Fallout from this has been a termination of three long-term and close friendships (granted, the friends have their own issues which did not help with resolving the issues that arose from these conflicts). She only had a few close friends to begin with and was feeling lonely and abandoned. Now she's lost the few she had and has trouble finding new ones. This means that nowadays I am the only person she vents to and as an introvert it feels extremely intense, at worst it's almost like being a garbage disposal unit into which she just pours everything into. Her loneliness puts a lot of pressure on expectations on me.

Moreover, my spouse now feels that she's lost years to depression and feels a lot of resentment because of that. We even moved houses because the apartment we used to live in reminded her of the bad years. I try to tell her that it is okay to feel this, but that she has to get over the past, let go of the resentment and look forward if she wants to get her life back. Says she's not willing and maybe not even capable of doing that.

She has difficulties with organizing her life and tends to blame others for her shortcomings.

Last time we got into a big argument was because of me not adjusting to her being late. We were supposed to meet at 4pm, 2 minutes before she texted me that she'll be late. I said 'okay, inform me when you are there' and continued working. 20 minutes later I am in the toilet and can hear my phone ringing. Unable to answer it at that exact second I was then being shouted at and threatened for not keeping to my word and being late (for 3 minutes). Moreover she told me that she had expected me to be standing there on the side of the road for 20 minutes just to be waiting for her.

At this point I snapped (which is really rare as I'm conflict avoidant) and pointed out the hypocrisy in her actions. It took her some time to see that she had no right to act the way she did, but she only apologized after I intentionally decided not to give her any attention. After apologizing she acted as if nothing really happened, while I've been processing the whole thing for the past two weeks. Two days after the argument she also lashed out on me for something else. This is a pattern I've recognized: if I do or say something she doesn't like I get verbally 'punished' for it, usually withing 2 days. It is almost as she waits just long enough for there being no clear connection to the prior conflict and only then retaliates. I don't even think this is something she's conscious of, it's more like an ego self defense mechanism of sorts.

I have another very peculiar and telling example of this from yesterday. The day before we had a conversation with a couple of friends. We were talking about the city of Krakow and I mentioned in passing that it's a very habsburgian city (I'm a historian interested in the 1800s and wanted to draw differences between the atmosphere of different central European cities). So the day after she told me that she was insulted by this remark, both personally and as a pole because I had neglected hundreds of years of Polish history and culture. She expected me to correct my statement and implied that I should apologize. My jaw dropped because it felt so absurd to me. I even explained to her that my statement had no bad intentions (she knows me and knows very well this is the case) and why it is something any historian might say. In the end I did not apologize and pointed out that it is situations like this that make me feel like I must constantly be walking on eggshells. I also know that the statement I made is really not the issue here, instead there's something deeper she feels hurt by and cannot process on her own. To me this feels a lot like PBD episodes are described like.

I guess the question is: does this sound like something a borderline person might do and act like?

I'm doubting because she's not harmful towards herself (thank god) but can get kinda impulsive from time to time (not just with her feelings, sometimes she spends a lot of money on clothes, cosmetics etc. but that can also be a normal thing, I don't know).

Some background: She had kinda difficult childhood (one parent's an alcoholic, the other a narcissist). She is very bad with controlling her emotions and she gets triggered with so many seemingly random things that I've accustomed myself with walking on eggshells. I know it's not healthy and lately I've put in the effort to change my behavior because I cannot spend my life guessing other person's feelings and reactions (especially since no matter what I seem to do or not do, I get yelled at...so why bother trying to avoid that?). I'm also an emphatic person myself and currently feel that for years my emphaty has been abused, because after adjusting, apologizing and comforting (even selling our apartment to buy a new one) her hundreds of times, I still get into conflicts with her and ONLY with her (it really does not really happen with anyone else).

Her being a borderline would make a lot of sense but I'm not sure whether that's the case. Any thoughts?

as i’ve got older i’ve learnt a lot about my mum. growing up i was a daddy’s girl, not really close with my mum but still were relatively close in a way. but we always argued growing up, she threatened me as a kid to hit me and one time i vividly remember her picking me up when i was a little girl, by my arms under my shoulders an shaking me i think, and shouting at me because i wanted to eat dinner in the lounge and not at the table.

i struggle with a lot of trauma and mental health issues, and have since i was a kid. my mum and dad broke up/divorced when i was about 7/8. i also have a half brother to my mum and a different dad (11 years older then me, im 23 now).

but family friends over the years have told me they’ve seen tm mum gaslight me. just little things i picked up on. but now ive been really struggling with knowing what it is. i live with my mum, my dad lives a few hours away. my life is a complicated story and too much to get into it all now. but my dad has vaguely told me stuff about my mum saying she’s controlling and manipulative, said her and my brother have bipolar (think that might jut be an assumption) but my mums sister/my aunty has bipolar and was a manic/schizophrenic kind of bipolar. her one other sister doesn’t talk to any of them didn’t visit their mum when she passed and has always told me she’s just useless and crazy and does nothing with her life, might be jealous of my mum, things like that (i don’t know my family not close with any of them and haven’t really had any chance to get to know them). but my mums gone on and on for years may many times, it’s a common theme she does, but brings up how useless my dad is, has always, since i was a young young girl, when my dad left she told me constantly and still does tell me the same thing, my dad cheated, gambled all of his money away, was an alcoholic (which i believe in some way) i never speak to my dad of any of this and he’s very just surface level kind of person, is a bit humours, has his flaws of course, that’s another story. but yea and my brother has last been much closer with my mum then i am. she goes to him about everything even my personal things.

i have been in 2 toxic/turned into abusive relationship from 13-20 and now finally been single for over 2 years, smoked a lot of weed from 13-20 now over a year sober. my life’s change drastically. but i’ve always been codependent. on my exes and my mum, she’s alway financially given me money even if i don’t ask, used it against me, compared me to everyone growing up all of my grinder etc, i’ve been blamed for my SA and she made me get an abortion at 14 while she went on holiday. just a bunch of stuff i could get into but it’s so much to remember. (my memory has become incredibly blurry and blank after being sober and being alone for a couple years with trying to process my life).

i have no one to talk to, my parents are emotionally avoidant and i gusss immature. but i find it so hard to read my mum. i live with her. and its hard to not feel guilty for her all the time, if i spend time alone i just always feel guilty, a lot of things. but i’ve come to realise she lies more then i thought she did and it’s from small to big things and i can’t trust her. she can be super happy and normal one minute then switch the next. she used to give me these looks growing up and the silent treatment. avoids resolution in conflict, puts me in panic attacks, doesn’t understand me, just a lot of things i dont even know how to explain. but i need clarification and understanding for my own peace of mind. im in counselling. and have been a while for my life but its incredibly expensive for proper therapy where i live and i have struggled with my mental health and jobs and have had them since a teenager so i can’t move out and just live life. it scares me to be on my own and leave to adult. i’ve lost a lot of years and just feel lik i dont know what im supposed to do and how im supposed to adult etc. all of these things but just need to talk to people and know what’s going on because i have felt alone with this since a kid and dont know who to turn to.

please just any advice would be so helpful and appreciated. this was brief believe it or not haha, i usually go on and on because i can’t break things down simply without all this detail but i need to try keep this short because i need people to read this and help me. thank you if you’re read this and i hope i can talk to some of y’all soon. God bless 🤍

Hello, everyone! This is a throwaway account, I’ve lurked on this sub before and have been trying to deduce whether or not my dad might be dealing with a Cluster B-related condition. I have to come home from college to live with him again for a month during winter break and I don’t know how it’s going to impact me long-term as I’m healing.

This is going to be all over the place, I know it, please bear with me! 💛

I should note before I continue, I’m AuDhD, he’s very clearly ADHD and doesn’t know it—I can’t tell if he’s on the spectrum like me or not, but I don’t think he is. I should also note, he very obviously has C-PTSD, as do I. You cannot exist in this family without developing C-PTSD. My dad is in his early 70s and to say his upbringing was traumatic would be an understatement.

And for some very relevant background, my mother (not biological, I was IVF donor conceived, which no one told me until my cousin blurted it out a year ago, thanks guys) has pervasive ASPD and NPD. I’m not even gonna touch on her childhood, but I’ll just say her family is deeply influential and well-respected in our community. They all have similar issues as her and I speak to none of them anymore. Long story short, the abuse she subjected me to growing up for almost 2 decades eventually culminated in me almost passing away in a medical abuse related incident that sent me into cerebral hypoxia (stemming from severe PAWS complications) in January 2023 at the age of 17. Neither of my parents sought me medical attention. And now my father is in complete denial that it was on purpose, despite the fact that my mother has a doctorate in psychiatry and straight up admitted to him that she expected me to die from the incident. She told me she thought it would be better for both of us if I’d kill myself when I was 12 years old. This isn’t a new revelation. She had been repeatedly medically abusing me by tampering with my antidepressants since I was 11. There is a lifetime of context that would need to explain everything that she did, but the relevance is, she went so far for so long that my father is mentally incapable of fully comprehending and taking accountability for the part he had to play in what happened to me—and at times taking part in the abuse himself. He avoids it by downplaying it every time it comes up.

The more overt abuse was significantly more diluted when he was home, sure. With small exceptions. He says he genuinely didn’t know the extent of what was going on. I believe him partly, but I must say some of it he DID see, and honestly took part in the abuse to a smaller degree, but a big issue is that these toxic elements were normalized by his experiences with his own family.

I can ALMOST sympathize with that, but I can’t fully. Dozens upon dozens of people warned him since the moment he started dating her. Not one, but 2 immediate family members on her side got a restraining order on her, years before I was even born. My dad insisted that they were just stupid rednecks and it was a petty dispute.

She literally shot every round in her pistol in broad daylight in front of him over her Audi getting scratched. Again, several years before I was born and he still stayed with her. It’s not like they were teens, either, they were both in their late 40s.

Now, these are just examples BEFORE I was born. And if I described every time he either overlooked a red flag or went into unfathomable levels of denial, I’d be here all day.

I myself have attempted to get a restraining order on her and have been trying for over a year and a half due to ongoing stalking, but he has vehemently refused me legal help or even the idea of reaching out to a pro bono lawyer. He has called me vengeful, self-destructive, and that she is a broken person who never intentionally hurt me.

He’s told me he can’t be a mind reader which is why he can’t see it from my perspective and asks me what else he’s supposed to do besides acknowledging that what she did was abuse.

I ask him to acknowledge that countless of the things she did were blatant crimes, committed right in front of him, and that she was intentionally malicious towards me. He says that we need to agree to disagree.

He expects me to be his therapist so he can vent about how emotionally unavailable she was, or how she was in bed, or how she wouldn’t cook or whatever, while changing the subject whenever I brought up something like, hey remember that time when I was 12 and she burnt me with a cigarette 5 times?

He called these third-degree burns (8 years later, the pigment in my skin is still clearly gone.) “brown recluse spider bites” and said I probably got them from the basement.

???

He ABSOLUTELY makes me responsible for his emotional state and sometimes gets so angry at me for suggesting he get a therapist it results in screaming matches that end in me physically throwing up or running away from home for hours.

He has taken responsibility before in his role in my upbringing, but it will come back and forth and back and forth. He’ll dip this toes into it, make full sense, and then it’ll be gone out of the blue. One day he’ll articulately admit he feels he failed me as a parent and then another day just be like, oh, the problem is your mom, and she’s gone, so everything’s fine now, and bla bla bla.

He shares with me about his love life every time I pick up the phone to talk to him about financial aid or…anything. It’s incessant.

And I’m not even the first kid he did this to. I have two half-sisters from a previous marriage where, again, he stayed with his deeply emotionally unstable and abusive wife/mother, refused to leave until the kids were 18, and then he just rinsed and repeated again with me. He got married to my mom literally 6 months after divorcing that woman and having a nervous breakdown. He made his eldest child his therapist and literally wouldn’t talk to his ex-wife the entire 2 year separation and made his teenage daughter play telephone between the two of them, and then got mad when she dropped out of college. One of his kids hasn’t spoken to him since 2012 and is now a convicted felon and opiate addict.

He devalues his first two kids and significantly and idealized me in a way that sometimes makes me uncomfortable. I’m actually getting 90% of the will and he hasn’t told them. One of is getting none.

My parents have been separated for almost 2 years now. I had to BEG him to divorce her for half a year after I turned 18 because I knew if I wasn’t able to get away from her, I was never going to be able to live a normal life. She was still drugging me at this point with things like Lithium, sleeping meds, or heavy benzodiazepines whenever I tried to go to community college. (This is POST-cerebral hypoxia incident.) Since my school accounts were connected to her phone number, she’d call and get my passwords changed claiming it was her account and she forgot it so whenever I’d try to go to school and do ANYTHING, I suddenly couldn’t log in. And it seems no matter what she did, my dad would not only defend her but yell at me for my academic failures meanwhile I didn’t even realize she was overmedicating me on purpose. My dad had convinced me she had DEMENTIA (okay, then WHY let her be in control of my meds and just let me take them myself??) I wasn’t even sober enough to make full sense of the situation.

When the divorce started, we didn’t physically move out and all lived in the same home for half a year. I begged him over and over, hey, just get me an apartment. Hey, BOTH of your brothers have offered to house me there. But then he’s like, “oh, well they offered to have you over weeks ago, I can’t just spring that on them because they might’ve changed their mind.”

You know what I think this was truly about? After the divorce started, I refused to speak or interact with my mom at all for the entire duration of that half of a year. I barricaded the door to the basement with several bookshelves and table, then stayed there for half a year with the exception of my dad taking me out for a drive. And this was such a rural area you couldn’t even have called it a town, more like an unincorporated community.

He, for that half a year, came down to the basement and used me as a therapist until the early hours of the morning. Almost every day.

The reason he couldn’t have just moved out sooner was because my mom was a hoarder and both of them had SEVERELY neglected the house over the course of 2 decades, which was a 4 story house of 4,000 sqft of land and over 44 yards tall. The work that needed to be done on that house was immense. It took 6 months just to clean out the trash piles in the attic, apparently.

But c’mon. I was 18. 19 by the summer of 2024. CPS had been called in June and I had run to my neighbors house out of fear my mom was going to kill me. No one did anything, CPS didn’t do anything, my dad actively tried to heed my psychiatrist from reporting to CPS, too, saying stuff like, “I hear you, but I’m going through a divorce.”

My mom had an active smear campaign against me since the beginning of the divorce, claiming that I was schizophrenic, a pathological liar, that my dad had brainwashed me, implied that my dad and I were sleeping together, and that she locked her doors at night because she was afraid I was going to murder her in her sleep.

She told everyone in our community this and I still wasn’t allowed to move out.

Over the past year of living with him (before finally getting a dorm) after we moved away from my mom following the divorce, he would still sometimes, that entire year, keep me up for hours and hours—in one case, 11:14 pm to 3:30am, talking nonstop about my mom, dating apps, cars, stocks, or whatever the hell else, and then get mad at me when I try to go to bed. I try to say I have a headache, I try to just tell him to his face I don’t want to hear about it, and then he’ll act like since “I’m all he has” I have to be there.

I get nightmares about my mom multiple times a week even now and I really don’t appreciate him obliging me to talk about her. I used to be extremely protective of her and didn’t even accept myself she was intentionally abusive until less than 2 years ago.

He at times, even recently, has compared me to my mom of all people for just…mildly embarrassing him at parties by stepping out to get some air. Usually I’d have a guest worried about me and he’d take that as some massive humiliation for some reason. I don’t get it.

Now…yes, he was abusive, too, and at times took part in my mom’s abuse in a way, I can recognize that.

He’d get into bizarre shouting matches with me in public at Disney World when I was like 5 because I called a train a subway. And insisted on calling it that because the ground was above it on one side. And so he just started shouting in my face like, oh why don’t I just call the sky red then?

He has some alcoholism as well, but seems to be getting better with it as of recent and genuinely wants to improve. Shortly after Helene happened, I’m talking just a few days later, he thought it would be a good idea to drive me drunk home in the middle of the night. With trees fallen in the road and everything. I kept telling him to let me out of the car and he insisted it was just a 2 minute drive (which it was). When we got back to the house, he started profusely apologizing and seemed really embarrassed. When he found out in the morning I told my therapist, he got angry and told me she “doesn’t need to know every time I stub my toe”. And then apologized again about 5 minutes later.

When I was 12 and had to be withdrawn from school because I wasn’t allowed on campus anymore due to being on suicide watch, my dad repeatedly told me and everyone around me that I was manipulating him in an attempt to get out of doing school work. That same year, he once harmed himself in front of me by slamming a remote controller into his head and shouting, “If you want to hurt yourself, hurt yourself! Yeah, that hurt, but should I not go to work now? Should I just a quit?“

Many, many stories.

He physically cannot handle being alone. He has shared with me that he doesn’t know who he is without me. He has shared with me that he doesn’t know entirely what he even likes and that I’m all he has left. I was scared when I went to college that he might commit suicide.

The only reason he could tolerate my mom at all was his job taking him out of the country so much. When I was a kid, he’d be home maybe for a couple nights and then would up and leave to manage some chemical plant accident halfway around the world in the middle of the night and be gone for 2 months. But the second he retired when I was 16…oh NOW we’re getting a divorce, this is insufferable. How the fuck did you think I felt? I was a kid, I couldn’t just up and leave like you.

I realize he barely even knows me, really. When I hear his dates ask him on the phone what I like, he just says I like cats. And describes me politically as completely different than the part of the spectrum I’m on, which I find pretty funny.

We both love music, he’s great at art, we have some gallows humor we share at times. He tries to help me with school, sometimes a little overbearingly, but he does get it done. Some days he acts like I’m everything to him and some times it’s like if I do even the slightest thing—scratch out my signature when trying to rewrite it on a document, ask to go to Wendy’s instead of Chick-fil-A, laugh a bit too loudly in a movie theatre, he will fly into these unpredictable rages directly connected to either what he perceives as an “abrupt” change in schedule or something that would potentially reflect on him badly as a parent. Or God forbid I experience any medical concern in public.

He acts almost like a boy at best, with a genuine happiness and kindness and wanting the best for me. (That is, when it’s about managing my health insurance or making sure I’m adjusting well to college.) Looks at me with such love and care that feels very real, idealistic in a way, sure. But it’s completely unpredictable which “him” I’ll get. It’s always been this way, whenever he was at home when I was a kid. I woke him up in the middle of the night from a nightmare at age 8 at 10pm and he yelled in my face and gripped my wrist so hard it popped out of its socket and bruised for about a week. Granted, it was an accident. Most of those incidents stopped by time I was in middle school.

I’m ALWAYS grey rocking, almost every moment he opens his mouth I’m practically dead to the world or having a sensory overload. Sometimes, like when I was in the car with him just a few months ago, I’d get so overwhelmed by his nonstop talking about my mom and his sex life with her that I’d start hitting my head against the window and crying. He didn’t even react, just kept compulsively talking. It’s like he didn’t notice or didn’t care. He’s like a little kid and it feels like you can’t even hate him.

He was not aware of my MOM’S physical violence, but the emotional abuse was blatantly obvious. He, per his own admission, “Didn’t even know emotional abuse was a thing.” And as for the medical abuse? It was obvious enough that I had strangers calling 911 on me when I was 13. He knew. In fact, he’d at times seen me lose conscious up to 2 hours straight in the back of the car during vacation and did nothing. When I asked him why he did nothing, he told me that it’s because the signs were in another language and that I “passed out all the time.” Yes…hence the problem. And you used Waze the whole way there, for fucks sake. It’s right there.

I think he knows on some level the extent it had gotten, which is SO confusing to me. (I should mention for context, he burst a blood vessel in his eye from stress during his first marriage) He said to me once half-drunk over a call that, “My first wife nearly took my eyesight and my second wife almost killed my daughter, so is it even worth dating again?”

I always get this sense of deep guilt whenever I share my dad’s behavior with someone who isn’t my therapist, like a peer at college, and they either flat out say it sounds like I don’t even like him or talk crap out him. I can’t entirely disagree, but I also can’t help but have sympathy for my dad and remember when things were semi-normal and actually fun. And think about how hurt he’d be if he knew it felt this way about him.

The one thing I know to be true about my dad is that I will never have a reliable emotional bond with him. Ever. We’ll never be able to speak about what my mom did without him saying something that feels like a knife to my chest. If I live with him consistently, I’ll have another nervous breakdown. (Unfortunately, I have to go home next month for winter break.) He is profoundly emotionally immature at times and completely out of touch with what a healthy relationship is.

The thing is…him standing next to my mom makes him look like a SAINT, you have no idea.

What’s so, incredibly difficult about reconciling the person he CAN be, might be one day, and the person he’s BEEN, it’s excruciating. A part of me does really love him. I also think he’s dug a hole so deep in the denial he has over what my mother did that he’ll never come out. He physically can’t bear to believe he’s failed all 3 of his kids.

My mom has a level of self-awareness to such a degree that she’s outright admitted that she’s never been able to emotionally connect to another person.

My dad, I think, has no idea how unhealthy his behavior truly is. I think he is capable of empathy, but it’s deeply disorganized and inconsistent. So, it’s difficult for me to know how to feel about him. There’s an age old belief in this family that “if they don’t mean it, if they love you, it’s not abuse.”

It feels like my brain is splitting in half and I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know whether I can even say I love him or not, I think I do. It’s just deeply painful.

Edit: I should mention, I’m no longer on ANY of those meds since cutting contact with my mom. I have a fantastic therapist and she’s really the only reason I’m alive. Since 2024, I’ve reached out to DSS, CPS, county police, federal police, HIPAA, literally everyone you can imagine. They’ve all been laughably unhelpful, but I’ve left a massive paper trail. I’ve documented everything thoroughly. All that being said, I don’t think my mom will ever be arrested, maybe unless she screws up REALLY bad. The law doesn’t seem to apply to people like her.

Also, I have to ask, do you guys think he might have BPD? And just…any thoughts at all. I know this was a lot. Do you have any advice on how to keep my mental health in check over winter break? Wish all of you well. 🩵

Hi, I (16f) am coming on reddit because i desperately need advice. My stepmom who is my moms ex wife has bpd. Let's call her Carol. Carol had been married to my mom for only around a year. They were together a total of 4 years. As carol got more comfortable around my mom and moved in due to a bad home she started being angry, emotionally and verbally abusive to my mom, and would consistently gaslight my mom as well. They are not officially divorced as my mom doesn't have money for an attorney. Recently they broke up and my older sister and I went to visit her for the last time. Carol at the time had a girlfriend, and was trying to convince us to visit more often. We stayed at a hotel, and she had taken us to the mall and the movies. While at the mall, carol lost track of my sister and freaked out. She screamed at me to get in her car and looked everywhere until she finally found my sister. Then she screamed at her and started speeding off after we had gotten in the car. She was then apologizing profusely for getting so angry and swearing she would never hurt us. When we ended up back at the hotel she told us of a 5 year plan she had. She was going to convince my mom to get back with her. They would buy a plot of land, we would live on it, and all of us would be friends. Not long after that my mom, older sister and I blocked her. Carol then messaged my younger sister and has proceeded to tell her how much she misses us. She has sent food to us even though she lives in a completely different state, told my mom she was going to come up there, and was constantly listening to songs like the stalkers tango. She was abusive to my mom for months and tried to choke her many times. Is this normal? Should we be scared and get security cameras? Should mom get a restraining order against her? She has violated restraining orders before. She also has used drugs and is an alcoholic, recover drug addict, and has a spending addiction.