Borderline Personality Disorder -- Real disease or lazy, catch-all diagnosis?

In My Humble Opinion
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No. The name itself provides the reason why: it’s a personality disorder. Thus, the person has to have a set personality for it to be viable as a diagnosis. Indeed, the criteria states “beginning by early adulthood” which is accepted as being 18-20.

One can say (and I see it a good bit at work, since I’m with the under-18 set) “displays characteristics consistent with a diagnosis of…” or “BP traits” but I would be very wary of any professional who pegged anyone under the age of 20 or so with any of the personality disorders, and I don’t see that changing any time in the future (the latest clash is over the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children, and I think that’ll keep folks busy for a while).

For those who don’t have a handy-dandy DSM, or who don’t want to go poking around, here is the criteria for a BPD patient:

  1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment (do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in criterion 5).

  2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.

  3. Identity disturbance; markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

  4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). (do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in criterion 5)

  5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.

  6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).

  7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.

  8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).

  9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

For a proper diagnosis, they must present with five or more of the above issues, and those things MUST result in a “pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affect, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.” So if someone does just fine at work and church and school and all other public outings, no problems, everyone loves them, etc., but their home life is a shambles, they’re likely not borderline.

Now, I’m one of the folks who can’t stand borderlines. I think people above have really nailed why, but I’ll just toss my .02 in anyway. It’s the black, sucking, never-ending, vortex of NEEEEEEEED that these patients typically embody. The sudden complete regression when you tell them how well they’re doing. The constantly shifting perception of you, sometimes several times in the same session (YOU’RE THE BEST THERAPIST EVER YOU FUCKING SHITHEAD WHY DO YOU HATE ME??). Making the same dumbass mistakes over and over and over and over and over and over, and never taking any responsibility for it (woke up next to some random guy in a crackhouse? with no sign of your clothes? no idea what or who you did in the past 36 hours? really? and it’s the 6th time in the past two months? well, good for you! :rolleyes: ). The threats, the suicide attempts (I’m going to take 2 aspirin and drink this bottle of wine, but before I’m done I’ll call 911 so they find me in plenty of time!), the bouts of anger that lead to throwing and breaking things (which leads to buying more things- yay for shopping with money I don’t have!!). And the lies. Good god, the lies.

Personality disorders are tough to treat with medication; the majority of the issues they present with are actually traits, which have to be treated by replacing the negative behavior with positive behavior. The symptoms can typically be treated medicinally- anxiety, depression, things like that- but you have to couple it with behavioral therapy. Most folks respond well to this… BPDs almost never. The dialectical therapy does seem to be having some success- more than most things I’ve seen in the past, at least. So perhaps there’s still some hope.

My sister in law (brother’s wife) is BPD from hell, and has made my entire family miserable for the past 15 years. Her next court date is Tuesday, where she faces charges for shoplifting and four (count 'em!) outstanding probations. We’re hoping she actually goes to jail this time, but I have a sneaking suspicion she’s going to attempt suicide again beforehand (this will be her fourth attempt that I know of). My mother in law (rest her soul) was also BPD- she decided to off herself 12 hours after her husband of 54 years had a double bypass, because god forbid someone should get more attention than her. My husband and I drew straws to see who was going to go to the hospital and break the news to my father in law.

Side note: I think the problem people are encountering with self-mutilation and mental health workers is that the population has changed so radically in the past few years. Back when I first started in the field, self-mutilation was a completely hidden thing- you’d almost never know that someone was a cutter unless they confessed it to you, and the chances of someone getting pegged with a BPD diagnosis because of it was almost non-existent. Now you have folks going on Youtube showing themselves cutting, burning, whatever, and walking around in halter tops showing off their scars. This is what’ll get you a BPD label- if you’re self-mutilating and proud of it, or self-mutilating and making sure that everyone knows your pain. A lot of the folks in MH now are used to the latter type of cutter, and as a result that’s the example they go by when doing their evaluation.

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Having read that page, I’m confused too now.

The author of that blog says that a borderline personality is like an actress in a movie, playing whatever role is dictated by the star of her show, the person she’s attached to. She lacks a stable identity, and conforms to the expectations of whomever she perceives is the center of her universe. The center of the universe is usually a narcissist, who invents his own identity and forces others to conform to it.

This does not seem to jibe with what many people have described, and what I’ve experienced, wherein borderlines do not construct identities that are “suitable.” They become VERY angry and abusive if you don’t go along with what they want, and sometimes if you do. If they fear abandonment so much, why are they so horrible to people who love them? Why do they provoke and precipitate crises all the time? If they conform to whatever the dominant person in their lives dictates, why are they always in conflict with everyone? Is it that they just haven’t met the right narcissist yet, to provide a stable enough identity and enforce it?

I can understand how someone who uses cutting or suicide threats to manipulate others might be borderline, but what about the people described in this thread who attack family members with false accusations, or make up lies to use against people, or who threaten abandonment of loved ones? The ones who scream, break things, and make a scene? Are they acting as borderlines, or are these symptoms of a different mental illness altogether?

Based on the description from the website Breccia posted, I have a different friend who fits the bill. She alters her identity depending on the man she’s with, right down to the music she listens to, the hair style, where she hangs out, etc. If you ask her, she’s always been whichever way she’s claiming to be at the moment, despite the fact that you knew her when she was in a different phase. She has a drinking problem, had drug problems in HS, is promiscuous, and has been anorexic and self-mutilating (once she was hospitalized for it). She does become frantic if she thinks her man is going to dump her, but usually has someone else lined up to soften the blow. Her romantic life is chaotic and messy. HOWEVER, she isn’t a pathological liar, she is not verbally or physically abusive to anyone, and she has managed to get 2 Bachelors, a Masters, and is working on her PhD, and eventually, I believe she will get her MD, if her drinking doesn’t kill her first. Her friends, including me, love her. I wouldn’t say she’s happy person, but most of the time, she’s a functional person, with some instances of decompensation, and she’s always been a great friend. Is she a borderline?

Yeah, now I’m confused. Can someone explain?

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With my ex-wife, it was taking 4 Trazadone (100mg, normally taking 25mg to help her sleep) and then going to bed, waking up the next morning bright and early to check herself into a mental hospital for three days because of how mean I was being to her. :rolleyes: Blaming me because I didn’t count the number of pills that she had taken. After the fact, I asked if I should be counting her pill supply and she became very upset at how I didn’t trust her. :dubious:

For the record, maximum outpatient dosage of Trazadone is 400mg per day, inpatient is 600mg per day, in divided doses. So she wasn’t taking anything near a dangerous dose.

As per bobkitty’s description, these are not genuine suicide attempts, but merely melodramatic calls for more attention.

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Well, maybe that’s the thing that makes it a disorder–it’s completely illogical and scary. I spent most of the night reading that blog, trying to get a fill of the writer and his view point. He seems to be very interested in narcissists, and his discussion of borderlines is really only there to help clarify his definition of narcissism–which, I guess is appropriate, given how he defines borderlines.

For a long time, I’ve thought that my mother must have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But now reading this thread, and the links, I’m beginning to wonder if she’s a Borderline. I’ll never know for sure, because we’ll never get her to a therapist. Once, we tried to figure out a way to get her to visit one on her own, but that idea was immediately scrapped. Even if we could talk her into doing it–and we might have had some success–she would only go so she could convince the therapist of her victimhood. Maybe the therapist would see through her, but we felt the chances are much, much better that the cops would be knocking on our door because she convinced everybody we beat her or something.

So many of the things mentioned in this thread sound familiar to me. And she meets at least 7 of the criteria listed by bobkitty. I can actually handle all of that except the Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights). We were visiting for Christmas, and we got snowed in (I thought we were going to have a “Shining” situation on our hands) and it was the most trying experience. I can’t believe that I lived with her, day in and out, for nineteen years. Anyway, everything we did set her off. If we made dinner, she was angry because we made a mess in the kitchen. If we cleaned the kitchen, she was angry we did it wrong. She punched my sister right in the tit because my sister indicated she didn’t want to spend next Christmas in that mad house. She almost smacked her upside the head because my sister made gravy quickly and easily. And it goes on and on. And then she falls all over herself thanking us for visiting her and spending time with her.

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I guess I feel that his definition of borderlines does not match the DSM IV. In my (admittedly limited) experience, and based on what others have said here, many borderlines seem very angry, hostile, and provocative. It seems like Dr. Benway does not take into account criteria #8: “Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).”

Now, if Dr. Benway is right, and they define themselves by others, and only want to conform to what is expected of them, then how is it that they are so unable to conform with any sort of social norms? I don’t see the conformity at all. I see lots of anger and challenging behavior, mood swings that go to anger and sometimes violence very quickly.

My friend, described in my last post, is much closer to Dr. Benway’s description. However, she lacks the violence and aggressive rage. When she has her mood swings, she reacts by hurting herself, not others. Sometimes she freaks out, but not unprovoked IMO. So, which is the borderline: the one whose rage is directed outward, or the one who directs it inward?

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Borderlines do define themselves by others, but not in a rational way. And because their perception is not accurate, their definition of themselves is equally skewed. For example, my mother defines herself by her family. She is not a woman in her own right - she is only a mother or a wife. But she’s a skewed and incomplete character of a mother or a wife. She doesn’t have a healthy view of herself, so she cannot have a healthy understanding of the needs of other people and cannot relate in a healthy way. If anything threatens that definition of her as a mother or wife (such as my brother and I growing up and going about our own adult lives, or my dad’s family trying to spend time with him) she becomes incredibly angry and defensive.

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My god that is awful. I appreciate your insight bobkitty.

I just wanted to add something. While it’s true that a lot of Borderline Personalities engage in attention-getting, drama-creating behavior like announcing they are going to kill themselves, it all comes from a core of deep pain. Maybe that is why I could never really hate my Mom. She used to lock herself in her room and cry for hours because she was so miserable. Sometimes she was seized by extreme anxiety, would often wake up with a gasp in the middle of the night. She didn’t attempt suicide out of some malevolent attention-whore ploy, but because she was a desperately hurting individual and she was trying to draw attention to the hurt that she felt. Just because she was melodramatic didn’t make her tears any less real. If I told you the story of her life you’d be absolutely heartbroken, as I am every day when I think about what she’s been through.

I’m not saying you have to develop these patterns if you experience a series of traumas–obviously I never did anything nearly as cruel as my Mom did and my situation was at least as difficult. But some people cope better than others. Knowing the things I know about her, knowing the core of her pain in a way that few people do, I have a very difficult time judging her. When she is not caught up in her mental illness, she is smart, funny, and interesting to be around. I see so clearly this person she could have been, the strengths she never built upon, the strong and fierce and caring person she is underneath all that sickness. She is also capable of great acts of love, many of which I remember just as vividly as the acts of the abuse. I think this made things even more confusing for me as a kid, but as an adult it enables me to see her as a whole person, not just a caricature of someone who is mentally ill.

While I completely agree there must be an emotional distance with people this disturbed, and in some cases better not to have to deal with them at all, I do not agree that they are wastes of flesh and oxygen, beyond redeeming value or without hope. You can’t look at a list of disturbing behaviors and draw immediate conclusions about the value of that person. For sure she built up in me just as much as she tore down. It’s ironic, but after I legally emancipated from her, I doubt I would have had the strength to finish high school with straight As and go onto college if it weren’t for her example of getting a degree in mechanical engineering as a single parent. We were in almost the exact same place emotionally at age 17–we just chose different futures.

On preview: Rubystreak, the blog reads as a little biased to me, possibly written by someone with Borderline trying to romanticize the illness. At the same time, it could describe the way my Mom was with men. Her personality did change quite dramatically. She’s been everything from a sophisticated engineer to a trailer park mama. Her fourth husband was profoundly narcissistic and when she married him everything changed–her interests, her lifestyle, her manner of dress, her beliefs about the right and wrong ways to raise children. It’s weird but she took his strict, ‘‘children have no rights’’ attitude and ran with it in a way that extended above and beyond his own philosophy. I went from being a spoiled brat to living in a strict authoritarian household pretty much overnight. He might be the one who believed children should be seen and not heard but she would be the one who would fuck you up to enforce his beliefs. She was married to that one for 12 years, so I began to think of her as a stable personality, but as I noted previously, now that she is divorced her personality is all over the place and I am afraid for her.

Your question–

This, I think, is the crux of the madness of living with someone like this. Remember, the famous book is called, ‘‘I hate you! Don’t leave me!’’ My mother attempted to throw me out of the house more than once, but when I actually left on my own accord, legally emancipated, gave her the not-so-proverbial ‘‘fuck you,’’ she was absolutely * devastated.* She is still not over it 8 years later.

When I was 22 I cut her out of my life and did not speak to her for over a year, because she could not respect my boundaries and kept pushing her abusive husband onto me. She contacted me twice during this period, and it would always go the same way. She would act like she had something innocuous (like a package to deliver of old stuff she dug up) and then as soon as I started interacting with her she would announce that I was clearly desperate to have a relationship with her again and it was tough shit for me because I didn’t respect her enough for the privilege. It was constantly a push and pull, a power struggle, she was always trying to wrench the control back. She is constantly going on about ‘‘my relationship with so-and-so’’ in our family when they haven’t wanted anything to do with her for years. She obsesses about her relationship with her fiancé, with her father, with her brother, with her sister, with me. She gets in these mental ruts and she can’t get out. If she has any kind of minor conflict with you, she has to decide whether you are a good person or a bad person. She may spend days calling other people up on the phone trying to figure out what she should do about her relationship with you. She gets increasingly more panicked until she finally explodes.

She will also get completely bent out of shape about YOUR relationship with other people. Wobetide you if you have some sort of minor conflict with someone else she’s feeling particularly possessive of. The day my Uncle J died earlier this year was a complete disaster. She stirred up as much shit as she could over imagined slights to her father that day, screamed at my Aunt, later at me, and overall made things about a thousand times more shitty than they had to be. The horrible, disrespectful thing we did? We came to my bereaved Grandparents’ house at the request of my Grandmother and helped her clean and take care of my young, grieving cousins. I guess Grandpa didn’t want us there because he was embarrassed by the mess. Too bad he never told us. :rolleyes:

It’s all about control. When she’s doing the rejecting, she has the upper hand, she can dictate and she can also clearly see the emotional power she has over someone. But when they walk out on her, she is helpless and abandoned. It’s like she’s constantly playing out this cycle of perpetrator/victim. My Mom didn’t self-injure, but she once admitted that losing her temper with me was like a high she became addicted to that helped her purge her pain. She’s admitted a lot of things to me when her guard was down.

Keep in mind my Mom has no official diagnosis of BPD. To everyone who knows and loves her, she’s just crazy.

It’s not necessarily an either/or proposition, I don’t think. Borderlines do both, which is why, at least for me, they evoke not just outrage, but also pity. I agree with pepperlandgirl–it’s illogical and scary.

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ISTM, and IANAD (enough acronyms for ya?), that borderlines don’t do anything that’s not for attention. If they are directing their rage “inward,” they’d cut or self-mutilate in secret, and they’d try to kill themselves without making a spectacle of it. It seems like, whenever they hurt themselves, they do it to show everyone just how much pain they’re in, so you will feel bad for them.

XJETGIRLX’s explanation helps: BPD’s experience rage when their identity is threatened, and lash out at anyone who threatens it. How does this jibe with a fear of abandonment? It seems like a self-fulfilling prophesy. Or are the lashing out and subsequent groveling apologies all a way of testing a person’s commitment?

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I really have to thank all who have contributed to this thread for making my holiday visit with Mom being the most bearable in years. It took a long time to realize her , um, tendencies, fit the BP diagnosis. Still no official diagnosis, but, like Pepperland, in her above post, it’s gonna be really hard to get her to go for any therapy. When someone is the main star in their movie, it’s hard to get them to go off their script.

What I did utilize in having read this thread, and links, before my visit, was the understanding that a BP is terrified from an ego perspective. I’m dealing with it in an older person, Mom…She is a very smart and creative person, but, in personal interaction, just a shambles, because she can’t view others as anything complete outside her own mental tentacles, as a cartoon. The diatribe is always , Them, vs ME, with all in life. All talk is a litany of negativity and jousting for some odd superior status, with a bare sprig of victory, yet, the yelling nasty was at least some kind of energy and existence.

It never has made much sense to me, and has done a lot to make crazy on the visits. I ended up feeling stabbed and attacked, and sucked dry emotionally. This time, I understood more about that personality glitch, foible, sad grasping, whatever… and dealt with it as with a child, because that is where that Borderline personality is, a sad undeveloped ego, damaged , and not developing to maturity. I realized that I wasn’t going to get what I needed as a daughter; yep nurturing would be nice, but, ain’t gonna happen. I had the choice of ignoring, or looking at that situation, and helping someone. It was hard to look at that, and deciding to try to help someone who had harmed me by past actions. Tremendous thought process, and painful.

What I came up with was to try to try to give her all attention and love, and not be upset by her inability to connect; she’s damaged, so, just gave up needing a Mom, and helping the damaged person. In giving that attention, she was better. Still, lots of freaky passive aggressive weird shit. Too tired to tell it.

Where does that immense need of ego that corrupts to a “borderline personality” come from? Is it a social construct gone wrong, or a traumatic experience?

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Part of this, and this is from my own personal experience and not dealing with others except in looking at my own behavior, is a basic underlying path;

Powerlessness —> Fear —> Anger

Going backwards, you come to realize that a great amount of anger is actually created and driven by fear, which is created and driven by a feeling of being powerless in regards to the situation or at large. The Anger is merely an attempt to create power in a situation where one lacks power.

I can see then that this too is part of the underlying BPD path. The melodramatics and the behavior are attempts to control the outside world, which is in itself a reaction to feeling powerless over our own world. Not realizing or internalizing that we’re powerless over other individuals because they want/need/desire to have power over themselves. It is that ‘not being able to make everyone else do what I want’ that is the center of the powerlessness/fear/anger path, and thus causes quite a bit of the other behavior, although not in the more “positive” path of the Dale Carnegy person, the social maven, or the confidence artist.

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Thank you. The situation can be hard to explain. I don’t talk about it much, especially in “real life.”

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Oooh, I didn’t know ISTM yet. New acronym!

Well, I think it’s more complicated than that. The wiki on BPD says

While it might not manifest itself as rage directed inward per se, there’s a core of pain that is real–these are people who really and truly suffer from anxiety, depression, feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred–and often don’t realize how they perpetuate their own suffering. My mother’s fear of abandonment is incredibly real and perhaps that is why she rejects people so viciously–to avoid being abandoned. No, it doesn’t make sense, and yes, it is self-fulfilling, which just makes it all the more tragic. The saddest thing to me is the fundamental lack of self-awareness.

Sometimes I think self-awareness is the fundamental difference between my Mom and me. We’ve both had our shit to deal with in life but I’ve always been straight with myself.

As far the groveling apologizes go, I’ve never gotten one of those in my life so I couldn’t speculate as to the function those serve. My mother reconciles with people not by apologizing but by pretending nothing ever happened. It’s worth noting that Borderline Personality Disorder, for all the literature on it, is actually one of the disorders for which the least amount of actual research exists.

It is such a maddening, confusing experience to live with someone like this, it’s difficult to separate the actual characteristics of BPD with my own feelings. It’s been suggested more than once that I am sympathetic toward my Mom to an unhealthy extreme, possibly because it gave me a sense of control over the situation growing up. I always felt responsible for her happiness from a young age and convinced myself early on I would do anything to preserve it. Sometimes I think if I can just keep loving her even after everyone else gives up, eventually she will find her way through. I truly believe that her suffering is real and even though I’ve established pretty firm boundaries and a certain emotional distance, I love her unconditionally. It took me a long time to be able to talk about the things she did without feeling like I was betraying her.

And honestly I have to say this has been an incredibly therapeutic thread. It’s informative to read about the experiences of mental health professionals and get a clearer grip on what that means from a clinical standpoint. It’s comforting to read about the experiences of Chimera and pepperlandgirl and elelle and momofgirls and everyone and feel certain that I’m not crazy, there really are people this warped and troubled and it does hurt to have to live with them. In my opinion this is the best the Dope has to offer.

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Thank you as well. After going through this for so many years, I’ve come to believe that there’s no such thing as unconditional love, except in pets and very young children. I know that sounds harsh, but after years of dealing with so much crap and getting constantly knocked down emotionally, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I’ve given so much to my daughter and gotten nothing but emotional abuse and lies back that I am tapped out.

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I know that it isn’t diagnosed until at least 18 years old; however, I’ve known there was something wrong with my daughter from a very young age. She’s been lying almost since she learned to talk, disruptive in class since kindergarden (even threw a chalkboard eraser at her kindergarden teacher), has had trouble making and keeping friends, etc. She was diagnosed as ADHD and put on meds, but they never worked.

I always hoped she’d mature and life would get easier at she got older, but it’s just kept getting worse over the years. I don’t have a lot of optimism that things will ever improve.

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And you put what our family has gone through far more succinctly than I did!

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The way I look at it, your daughter is an adult now, therefore her relationships, with you or anyone else, should be held to the same standard of ethics as any other adult relationship would be. You aren’t obligated to carry on with someone who treats you and other loved ones that way. She’s made her choices and while I’m not exactly advocating slamming the door in her face forever, she does have to live with the repercussions of those choices. Even if these people cannot be swayed by rationality or concern for others, they can be swayed by clear boundaries and direct consequences for their actions. Maybe it’s a self-interested behavior change but it’s still a behavior change.

I drew the line with my Mom and eventually she got it. She treats me quite well, now. I thought that meant she was all better but I realized later she still treats everyone else like shit. It’s kind of ironic because a lot of people in my family laid the guilt on pretty thick when I stood up to my mother. They could bitch about her behind her back ad nauseum but none of them ever had the guts to tell her to her face that she was wrong. It took me a long time to really get it, it damn near killed me before I got it, but eventually I laid it all out for her. I wrote her a six-page letter detailing the abuse she’d put me through and explaining the terms of having a relationship with me going forward. I didn’t have a relationship with her until she was willing to meet those terms. Funny how others in my family are still letting themselves get kicked around but she walks the straight and narrow with me.
bobkitty, I have a clinical practice question for you. You mention the throwing and breaking things. Do you mean these people are throwing and breaking things in your office? This for me, given my history, would cross a huge boundary. If someone starts pitching a fit like this my instinct is to walk out of the room. I don’t tolerate temper tantrums because they make me feel unsafe.

What I’m wondering is, is it unrealistic to expect a client not to break your stuff? Or is this something I would have to deal with as a counselor? I’m not talking about accepting the risk that it might happen one time, I’m talking about whether or not there would be a professional expectation for me to continue working with someone who was prone to these kind of violent outbursts and showed no intention of changing the behavior. At what point is a clinician permitted to draw the line, or to refuse to see someone?

I think if I had to stuff my feelings and deal with it, I could. I’m just curious because it raises an interesting question about boundaries between therapist and client.

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I’m really curious about how this worked. I’m trying to imagine writing my mother a similar letter, and I can’t think of a single scenario where the results are actually good. There would be the “I know you never loved. You hate me. I should just kill myself now” accusations. And then there would be the “You were always an awful person” diatribe. And then she would tell my sisters, my grandparents, her coworkers, and anybody else that would listen what a horrible person I am. But at no point would she change herself. How could she? She doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong. I’ve considered different ways to sort of “punish” her like you would punish a dog–have negative consequences for unwanted behavior until that behavior changes. But I honestly believe she is incapable of making those connections.

Over Christmas, my mom and both my sisters got new Verizon phones. My youngest sister, L, was tasked with activating the phones and setting them up–because both my mom and my other sister cultivate a sort of learned helplessness. Unfortunately, there was a problem with my mom’s phone. So L stayed on hold for like 40 minutes and worked out the situation, but then she discovered there was another, unrelated problem. She reasonably told my mom that Mom could do it herself or wait until after the holiday weekend. This started World War 3. Mom barreled into the kitchen, yelling and screaming about how she never wanted “the fucking phone”, how stupid L was, how L was ruining Christmas, etc. L is only 19 and she doesn’t have the best emotional control. So she fought back. Things almost came to blows, and we had to literally lock them in different rooms. We stood in front of the door and blocked mom from chasing L into the laundry room to “finish what she started.” Not five minutes later, Mom rolled her eyes, shook her head, and said “Can you believe how that girl treats me? I can’t believe she started yelling at me for no reason. I just wanted to talk to her.”

How do you reason with that?

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I completely agree with what you wrote. I’ve told my daughter so many times that you get what you give, but it makes no difference.

My daughter can treat people nice - as long as she gets something out of it. She practically fawns on my parents, especially my mom, because she can usually get money out of them, and they’ve let her move in for a few weeks. My daughter knows she will never get money from us, nor will we ever let her move back in, so she doesn’t care how she treats us.

It’s been relatively quiet with her for the past month or so. Our last interaction was when she called my husband an asshole who has never done anything for her, and she still has yet to apologize (not that it would mean anything at this point). She goes in cycles of calm then major drama, and I’m anticipating a drama cycle very soon, especially since she recently broke up with her boyfriend and has been drinking a lot (according to her Facebook, anyway).

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This is, in fact, exactly what happened. She spent a year doing that and getting nowhere, stirring up drama with other family members about it whenever she could. She disowned my Aunt for maintaining a relationship with me, but my Aunt is my best friend and has been completely fed up with Mom since I was about 12, so she frankly didn’t care. Basically Mom did everything she could to take the control back and used every guilt tactic in the book. I did not relent. I wasn’t making the decision in order to try to get her to ‘‘behave,’’ I was making it because I didn’t feel I had a choice. I was prepared to live without my mother for the rest of my life if necessary. I had accepted that might be a consequence, but it had gotten to the point where I could not psychologically handle my relationship with her. I had reached a breaking point where things got so bad that I had to withdraw from school and focus exclusively on learning how to function again… this was not an idle line in the sand, it was the act of a person desperately trying to save herself.

This wasn’t easy–I put together a mix CD of songs about learning to live without abusive people, and I bolstered myself with as much support as possible. I felt tremendous guilt and worry, but I knew what I had to do or else I was probably going to end up dead or something. I cried a lot in the first few months. It was hard; not gonna lie. I started getting healthier almost right away, though, and I realized how much of my identity and self-worth had been invested in her. I discovered not only could I live without her, I was much better off without her. I was 22 years old before I broke free of the hold she had over me. I began to see all the little ways she’d undermined my autonomy, and quite frankly, I blossomed.

After about a year of Mom tormenting everyone else but me, I got a card in the mail informing me she was getting a divorce. This was one of the major things keeping us apart at that time, because she could not stop pushing her husband onto me no matter how many times I told her I wanted nothing to do with him. My letter to her had explicitly stated that as long as she was married I could not have a relationship with her. That wasn’t intended as an ultimatum, it was just a simple fact because we’d had the conversation so many times and she continually, consistently disregarded my feelings about him.

So I guess what I want to make clear is that I didn’t expect anything out of her–didn’t expect her to change or divorce or any of that. All I was doing was establishing my own boundaries, what I needed to be safe and healthy. And at that point I actually believed that I was probably never going to talk to her again.

I think boundaries are a huge part of learning to deal with these kinds of behaviors, but I don’t suggest it’s easy or that it always works. I don’t know why my Mom decided to change the way she treated me. Perhaps living without me for a while made her appreciate me more. Maybe she was afraid of being alone. She has actually since thanked me for standing up to her. She said she raised me the way she was raised, and she didn’t realize it was wrong until I told her so and drew a clear boundary. This gives her the ability to mourn her own childhood and set her own boundaries. She drunk dialed me recently and confessed that I have always been more mature and wise than her and she admires me greatly. As I said, my Mom tells me a lot of things when her guard is down.

It took me a long time to trust that she really was treating me different. I was deeply paranoid at first and quite afraid of setting her off. But for some reason that trigger just doesn’t exist for her anymore, at least not with me. I’ve heard that she’s had some problems with her boyfriend and losing her temper and he’s rather emphatically encouraging her to get some medication, which she has taken under consideration. I do hope it leads to progress for her. It’s a long road from, ‘‘Do you think I might benefit from medication?’’ to, ‘‘Holy shit, I am a fucking mess,’’ but you never know.

Not to be overblunt, but you can’t reason with that at all. This is exactly the sort of behavior I will not longer tolerate in my mother. We’ve been speaking again for about 2 years and so far she’s been reasonable and likable in my presence. But if she ever did anything like this in front of me, I would be out the door in a heartbeat. I think she knows that.

I don’t suggest it’s easy or even the best option to separate yourself from a parent. I guess it all depends on how much this hurts you, and how much it interferes with your day-to-day life. In my case I was suicidal, so depressed I was bed-ridden, missing so much class I had to withdraw from school and consumed by near-constant anxiety. I really had reached the point where I didn’t have a choice anymore. I had to let go or let her take me down with her.

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The drama makes me think BPD, but honestly a lot of these behaviors sound like anti-social personality disorder. The lies and lack of remorse for hurting others, lacking empathy, manipulating others strictly for personal gain… if that’s the case, you truly have my sympathy (well either way you have my sympathy, but antisocial personality disorder is tragic on a completely different level.)

Is there anyway you can convince this girl to get in and see a doctor? If she is unhappy about something, prone to depression and anxiety, maybe you can use this bit of suffering as a motivating factor to see someone. The trick is to convince her it’s in her own best interest.