Therapy today...my borderline experience

[Guest guest]

Thank you for all the welcome's. I have been reading through some of your

posts and I must say that I have to stop myself from responding to every

single one. It is nice to have some validation and ---- I don't

know...company.

I had therapy today and am feeling brave, so I'll write a little. Hope not

to bore anyone.

My mother was a severe borderline....I didn't know this is what she had

until my therapist told me I was raised by a mother with BPD. I escaped it,

thankfully, but not unscathed. I have a dissociative disorder and I have

PTSD. I am working through those issues, though. For awhile I was

convinced I had BPD too, but after reading Understanding the Borderline Mother

and

my therapist DRILLING it into my head that I didn't have it, I feel at ease

that perhaps I do not. She also told me that rarely do those with BPD

admit they have it and certainly don't worry about it.

With that said, I do go to therapy twice a week and I am going for my

third trip to a trauma hospital on May 11th in New Orleans.

My mother died in 2007. I never really got a chance to confront her, but

she had been ill for about 5 years...so the opportunity, once I got brave

enough to confront her, never arose.

She would have dismissed me anyway. She would have invalidated and in

every way she could have successfully turned my feelings into some way to be

the victim herself and I would have felt guilty. She always did.

I had to move away from my mother (5 hours) to truly escape her, even as a

married adult. And even then, she manipulated me with suicide threats and

guilt trips. Up until the very last minute.

Now that she's gone, I can't honestly say I MISS her. I miss what I never

had....a real mother. I miss that now that she is gone, that chance

(though it was slim when she was alive) of having a real mother is completely

gone forever.

I have always been on the " mother-search. " Even when I was a little girl,

I got painfully attached to other little girls' mothers. As a young

adult, it brought me a lot of heartache. I am 39 now and have come to terms

with it for the most part....I can have older friends that " mother age " (55 on

up) and not feel an unnatural attachment to them. I have been in therapy

for about 8 months and it's helping a lot.

Do all of you attend therapy and if so, is it working for you?

My mother was many things that Lawson describes in her book...

The waif, the hermit, the queen.

She was phobic and childlike one minute and rabidly controlling the next.

She was manipulative and whiney with my father and mean and spiteful to

him at the same time.

Her control over me, my sister, my dad...the family...was just

unbelievable. When she died, she had run off ever person who had ever tried to

befriend her. Her own brother didn't speak to her.

And it makes me sad that she never got any help and lived so unhappily.

I could tell you stories that would blow your mind.

Maybe yours are similar.

I swear...sometimes I think she wrote the book on " How to Ensure Your

Child Grows Up Psychotic. "

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