I Just Found Out My Fiance Didn't Get Me A V Day Card Even Though He Had Plenty Of Time

[ms spock]

Still can't believe it. Yet I read here BPD should have been treatable and I just despair why couldn't she heal? she had a whole team of mental health professionals.

This is best left to the professionals, only that didn't work with my sister, probably because she just refused to listen, it was too embedded in her. She was 31 when she died.

Sorry I'm still trying to work it out and I never can.

I don't think it is one of those things that can be worked out.

Some people make it through the child abuse and have lives.

Some people make it through the child abuse and are abused in their adult lives.

Some people make it through the child abuse and hang on for grim life.

Some people don't make it through.

It is very, very sad but I don't think it can be worked out.

 

[Queen Boudica]

Well I think her case was complicated by the fact that she was initially misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and drugged up like a zombie, stuck in an adult mental health ward and abused by the mental health system when she was just 17, when what she should have got was a proper diagnosis and therapy. And then she went home to my sadistic, BPD, mother who she was co-dependent on, so my mother just never let her talons off my sister and put her down and ensured the mental health got a skewered idea of what had gone on, and didn't realise what a monster my mother had been in our childhoods.

 

[ms spock]

@Lizio those complications, at the very least, would make it so challenging to deal with her issues, if not completely impossible, the fact that she never got away from her/your mother meant she really didn't have a chance. You can't heal from abuse if you are still in the thick of it. And there is some abuse put in so young that is very hard or virtually impossible to heal from. Or it takes a very, very long time.

There was never a moment of respite that she had to think clearly about the situation.

It does make you wonder though if she had had adequate treatment when she was 17, what would her life looked like then? If she hadn't been sent back to her/your mother? She didn't catch a break. She really didn't.

Sending abused "kids" home to abusive families is not ideal and all still too common.

 

[ms spock]

My psychiatrist said to me in forty years of practice she has had three clients with good families.

So I am thinking early childhood intervention from 0-5 like the Canadians are doing is the way to go.

 

[Queen Boudica]

Yes I agree, one of reasons I am doing the masters of teaching 0-5. Early intervention is most important. But it has to be funded. Can't see that happening in this country

 

[Queen Boudica]

Anyway, this is about the first time I have really understood what BPD is and how it affects the sufferer and the people close to them and that there is hope. My sister had it, my mother had it, but I was too close and suffering the effects of it and I never understood, even though I watched the self-destruction and chaos in my family because of it. And ll thought it was a silly post but actually it helped break it down to the simplest form. I always said I could never believe my mother and her behaviour it was indescribable it didn't make any sense. I've never met someone who could cause so much chaos yet come out unscathed herself. Don't think she could even comprehend that she was really sick, it was everyone else was to blame. So if you can't see anything is wrong you can't be fixed. Both my mother and sister were like that.

 

[ms spock]

And it does show what causes Borderline Personality Disorder - it is a rugged one because of the stigma, because of how hard it is for people to be around the BPD person, because they are people that have missed some significant developmental milestones. Look at how hard your sister had it. What an awful way of living through life and death.

But now with DBT people can recover, and that is pretty amazing.

Your sister didn't get a break, and there was nothing you could do for her because the system got it so wrong. If those people had half a brain they should have been able to suss your mother out, or at least talk to you about what the family life is like. Not good enough. She should never have been sent home back to your mother.

 

[ms spock]

I have participated in this thread going off topic, and I know that is not good. But I don't feel concerned enough about it to stop posting.

I didn't manage well with a BPD woman that was a friend @Lizio. I didn't manage her well at all and her suicidal email posting and I stuffed up in a fit of angry/exhaustion/stress by forwarding her emails to the friendship network - I should have just rung the police or the mental health team.

I have been reading Laurence Heller lately, just a few paragraphs a day. And there is much there to ponder.

 

[Queen Boudica]

Yes you are right, they missed developmental milestones, but my mother mirrored crazy behaviour, that at that early developmental stage was what we thought as normal. My sister was so clingy when she was a child and she never wanted to be grown up. There is this child-like behaviour, but it can develop into nightmare behaviour because, you are supposed to grow out of the toddler stage. And adult toddler is terrifying. They should call it adult toddler syndrome.

 

[ms spock]

Your sister had no connection - she had nothing to hold on to go from being a child to and adult, from my limited understanding. How does someone with so much emotional deprivation recover from so much not getting enough to see them through? I would imagine that she never wanted to grow up and be an adult because she didn't want to be like your mother? She couldn't accept that she had missed out on so much? She thought being a child would get some of her needs met? Was it conscious at all anyway? That level of extreme abuse is so hard to unpick. I am not a professional and there is much I don't know.

But I think compassion - and ongoing practice of compassion of you to yourself, and you to your sister could be the way to go. You were both too little, and both with so many deficits how could you have done better than you did? I don't think it is possible, myself.

 

[Queen Boudica]

Oh I think suicidal BPD is a tough one. You can't be expected to handle that. You did the best you could. My sister did loads of suicide attempts. I could say a lot about them, the professionals thought most of them were about attention seeking and I know she said some of them were. I don't know. I just know one day she succeeded and she was very down and alone. But she used her own meds, over-prescribed a months supply when they knew she was abusing them and had attempted suicide multiple times. Just a disaster.

 

[sun seeker]

There is this child-like behaviour, but it can develop into nightmare behaviour because, you are supposed to grow out of the toddler stage. And adult toddler is terrifying.

My mother would throw tantrums like a two year old throughout my childhood. Sometimes she was fine, but you never knew what was going to set her off. Yes, it was terrifying, and I grew up with such shame not understanding where my anxiety and rage came from. She's better now, but it seems like she's either in denial or too ashamed to admit how bad it was and what an effect it had, and is still having, on her children, especially me because I went through the worst of it. She's willing to go to family therapy and work on it, though.