I've done a lot of work on myself to detach from my daughter's BPD, but there are times when I just cannot take it. I got a text at 5:45 am asking me to call when I was awake. I texted at about 8 am and she texted back that it had to do with my son and my husband. I told her it's not my problem -- to work it out with them. Apparently something happened with my son (an autistic adult who lives with us) on social media and I told her that I don't want to be involved in the drama. She then gave me an earful about how our family humiliates her and that I'm the only one she'll talk to. She then said "These are the men you surround yourself with."

That's the line that got me. She knows the buttons (she installed them) and she knows how to push them. She knows her brother is autistic and that I am stuck in this living situation because I have a special needs son that I cannot care for alone and that my husband cannot care for alone. He is a handful, but not a destructive handful. Just a logistical handful.

She knows this. She knows the sacrifices I've made for my own happiness to provide him with a home, and yet she pulls this. Add to that the fact that she's been trying to break up my marriage since she was in high school because she does not get along with her Dad. And this is the latest salvo in that war. How my husband figures into this, I don't know, other than they had a fight about the fact that she didn't send him a father's day gift (don't ask -- he's got his issues, too and I didn't involve myself in that one either).

I'm just trying to live my friggin' life as best I can with the cards I've been dealt, and not grow bitter or become the consummate victim. Life is too short to waste it on someone else's issues.

I blocked her on my phone and in email I have her messages being deleted instantly. I am looking for an Al Anon meeting nearby and there isn't one until this evening, so I'll wait. But I needed to get this off my chest here in the meantime.

My 28 year old son shows all signs of being bpd. In the past we were concerned he was bipolar and found out today he has been taking lamictal as well as wellbutrin for the past 9+ months. He has always been emotionally unpredictable and you never knew when he would go from being happy to angry/offended. 4 years ago he had a THC induced psychotic episode where he talked to himself as a woman and told me he was trans. The following day he said it was a hallucination and that he didn’t think he really was. He has continued to smoke weed, takes classes for a masters degree but is not working. Today we spoke to him about employment and informed him our financial support was ending. He stated agreement and understanding and then got angry about all of his past regrets over 10 years and every slight and things that he blamed, many of which never happened, then he told us he is trans and has been on estrogen and t blocker but we don’t know for how long, intermittently suicidal and that his childhood is to blame. We were accepting, calm and redirected the conversation back to the subject of getting a job and being on his own. The conversation ended with love on both sides. I am just so sad and scared. Do I think he is trans? Maybe but I am realizing that whether he is or not he is way more unwell than we realized.i don’t know what do do.

Hi everybody! First post to this sub. I am graduating college and unfortunately due to the economy and the recent AI bubble, finding a job has been difficult. I did everything in my power to try to find a job where I could support myself and live on my own, but unfortunately it isn’t financially viable anymore.

This means moving back in with my mother and father. Recently I started going to therapy about it 6 months ago, and it’s been awesome. Both my psychiatrist and my therapist said that a lot of my childhood trauma and my mother’s behavior can be explained by bpd. Honestly now that I know the diagnostic criteria, it makes so much sense.

I love my mom, and she deserves kindness, empathy, love, validation, and support. But it is so. Hard. To be around her. She used to tell me growing up that she was soiling the nest so that we wouldn’t come back after college, and now that I don’t want to live with her she’s been freaking out, losing it, being very aggressive and angry. Every conversation we have devolves into an argument. I don’t have any sort of other relationship where this happens, friends or family. Anything that I do that’s different from her is ‘wrong’ and she is extremely possessive over me. I was in a meeting with a professor and she began to spam text me, telling me to step out and call her, and when I told her no she said I wasn’t going to get any gas money from her to go home. Everyday is exhausting. My dad isn’t much help, either validates her every emotion or says ‘I don’t want to hear about it’ and goes to his room.

My question is, anyone who’s been in this situation, what’s the best way to survive? I plan on being out of the house as much as possible, but I worry if I don’t follow exactly what she wants I will wake up with my phone or keys taken and hidden. I am trying to find a job asap, honestly just anything, to gain some level of financial freedom and to keep me out of the house as much as possible. The other thing that sucks is because I am moving out of state I am losing my therapist as she isn’t licensed in my home state. Any advice is welcomed!!!

Does anyone else find the pwBPD in their life to be overly critical of, hateful toward or negative about other people who really are perfectly lovely? Do they always seem to have some sort of grudge against or beef with these other people when nobody else appears to?

I don’t know how to articulate it exactly, but I have noticed this a lot with my BPD older sister and can’t figure out what it is. The way she speaks about and refers to others can be extremely negative, judgmental and critical — downright disrespectful sometimes — and it’s as though she absolutely hates them. She’ll often say people gave her a “bad look” or committed some other “infraction,” which therefore makes them worthy of her scorn.

A neighbor who lives down the street from me recognized me in the grocery store parking lot a little while ago. I didn’t recognize her at first, but then I remembered who she is. She is around the same age as BPD sister and they apparently have a lot of mutual acquaintances here even though they went to different schools.

The neighbor couldn’t have been nicer and stopped to chat with me for several minutes. Really lovely, kind person and I remembered how in the past she’s always stopped to say hello when I’ve been out walking my dogs.

Were BPD sister to have run into this woman, she no doubt would have started ranting and carrying on about her afterward and painted her as some sort of awful jerk.

Anyone else noticed something similar with their pwBPD? I just don’t understand it or what that sort of behavior means.

I'll try to make this as short as possible. Dealing with my 23yo daughter who has been exhibiting signs of BPD from about age 11 but is only recently seeing a therapist who is pretty sure she is Cluster B/BPD, potentially HPD. D lives on her own and mostly supports herself, but I am paying for the therapist and will do so as long as she'll allow me to. I was encouraged by my older daughter, who is in med school and planning to land in psychiatry, to reach out to her therapist and give her some background/context, as she was concerned that the therapist likely doesn't see/hear the whole picture and that treatment style (DBT, etc.) can greatly affect outcomes. So I reached out, and her therapist then had my daughter sign a release, which I understand, but since then, she's gone NC with me. Therapist said she's definitely been suspecting BPD and that the additional information from me has been extremely helpful. In MY head, if I had been my daughter, I would have called me and said "Hey mom, what's up with this? I'm not sure I'm comfortable signing the release. Can we talk about it?". But alas...

I've seen my daughter in person once since the split and it was ~not good~.

It's only been 10 days and I've heard from her therapist twice that my daughter claims she plans to reach out to me/talk at some point. My question is, if/when that happens, how do I respond? Do I grey rock? Our last interactions were her telling me to GTFO of her place and that she was going to "kill me" because I brought the same inconvenient truth up again. I'm fine with NC, honestly. I am prioritizing my own mental health. But if she does come back and want to talk, how do I handle it? Do I tell her the way she spoke to me was unacceptable? Do I just sit there and let her talk? This is the first split I've experienced. I was the "best mom on the planet" that she was "so incredibly lucky to have" before this. I don't want to say or do the wrong thing and feed the beast. I've tried to do a lot of reading up on this since it's so new but can't seem to find an answer as to how I'm supposed to react on my end. My husband/her dad is still in contact with her so I know she's safe/ok otherwise. Thanks for listening.

My sister is ruining my mental health. Shes 4 years older than me. Growing up she was always really rude, fought with our parents and was seen as short tempered. I know she feels like a glass child but I’m tired of excusing her behaviour.

Growing up she was always really mean to me and I’m not talking sibling mean, she would make harsh comments about my body, would always scream at me and would make me look so terrible to our parents if she was in the mood. Around the time when I was 16, I started to realize that our arguing wasn’t something that we were going to outgrow because of how our relationship was. She would always make rude comments and when I reacted she would call me sensitive or say that I’m overreacting or brush it off by saying that she’s being honest. The way she spoke just had such a weird tone to it. One time she called me anorexic because of how little I weighed and when I got upset she turned it around on me because I was overreacting.

She always has something bad to say about my other sister or our parents and blames everyone around her. It’s almost as if she thinks something is wrong with everyone else and she’s always correcting it. She always confuses me because despite being so rude to me she’s always trying to get close to me. She’ll come into my room and ask me to go out with her and when I say no because I know the trip would be uncomfortable she storms off angry creating more tension. She’s been asking to go on vacation for years because she doesn’t want to go with her friends and everytime I make up an excuse but truthfully I can’t imagine spending time with her alone. She’s scary.

She’s been neglecting our dog and every time I bring it up she gets angry. She lives in a filthy room, allows the dog to eat random stuff and when she can’t get the dog to listen she comes running to tell me and expects me to do smth about it even if she knows what was gonna happen anyway. And if I don’t jump up and leave to help her with the dog she gets really angry. Everytime she ruins something my parents feel bad and say that maybe she’s depressed. As much as I understand and empathize I’m just so over it and don’t wanna be close with her anymore. But she’s always holding on, trying to hang out, be close or acting like we’re besties.

When she does something terrible and I’m not really talking to her the next day she’s like “why do you hold grudges.” She’s really unaware of her actions. She thinks she’s better than everyone else and she talks to me like I don’t know anything. She’s 23 and has no job and is living off of our parents money to pay off for her masters degree because she keeps doing more schooling hoping to know what she’ll want. She’s draining my parents financially and now I have to work 2 jobs to help my parents pay off my school bills because she’s weighing such a huge financial burden on them. I don’t know if I’m crazy but I think she’s not right in the head.

Hello, I'm new to this sub. Thanks for creating this space so people like me can talk about this freely.

My (31F) younger sister (30F) was formally diagnosed with BPD when she was 18, after many years of her being volatile and violent towards me. When she was 17 and I was 18, she hit me so hard that the cops were called, but she didn't get in trouble, and our parents got mostly mad because the cops came (they weren't home when it happened)

Now she's married, has a child, etc. I'm single and living with our mother (dad passed away years ago), and I've been struggling with my own mental health as I have OCD. My sister cannot longer hit me, so instead she plays with my mind, she calls me horrible things, makes me believe that people are talking behind my back so I get stressed and I become avoidant out of fear, which she does since she found out that I'm struggling because someone I really loved talked shit behind my back. She's mean, cruel, awful. She would tell me that she was going to take my pets from my home and take them to the shelter, etc. I've always been protective of her, and now I see that it feeds her sense that she owns me.

Today, it happened, the straw that broke the camel's back, weirdly enough, I started the argument, and I wasn't polite about it, not in any way. Cue to her texting me the most awful crap, me having an anxiety attack, crying my eyes out, etc. And I'm done, guys, I'm done.

I took 5 years of her hitting me daily, another many instances of her deliberately going missing, her making us worry for her safety, many of her suicide attempts, her getting aggressive and intoxicated. Her always leaves when someone else needs help. She will only appear if she needs something or to vent, but for happy stuff, she will only seek her friends.

And how does she "fix" this? Presents, lovebombing. I see through that.

She also likes to start arguments and then blames everyone if she gets stressed because of the crap that she has started.

Guys, I'm sick and tired of her. I'm sick of her struggles and her shit, sick of my own mental health problems worsening because of her shenanigans. I love her child, but I am not going to destroy the rest of my life to cater to her perpetual wants and needs.

Sometimes, the things that she has said or done had been so sick that I wondered if she had been misdiagnosed and she's actually a psychopath.

I can't do this anymore. I don't care if I don't see or talk to her ever again. My life is much happier when she's away. I'm going to start very low contact since it's not my mother's fault that her daughters are messed up (she got us both help, but only I took it) and I will have to see her sometimes. Other than that, I'm done.

My daughter has been in various and sundry rehabs for over 18 months. She has a BPD diagnosis and also has issues with cannabis and alcohol. The rehab system essentially allows her a free ride in life while she builds up medical debt. For the life of me, with all the thousands in copays she owes, I don't get why they still admit her. She flakes out, leaves and finds another rehab, and starts up all over again.

At any rate, I had a conversation with her yesterday that basically ended with my, once again, re-learning the lesson that this will never change. She is invested in not changing. She is invested in continuing as she has been, living an imaginary life from her bed, looking at her phone, engaging on social media, and avoiding the responsibilities that come with adulthood.

I am heartsick about this, and at the same time, just exhausted. I need joy in my life. This is nothing but pain, and I'm so tired of it.

I've been mocked and belittled every day that I'm around my BPD family member. Put down because of my health and appearance (I'm physically disabled) They suddenly and unexpectedly try to make me jump like creeping up behind me, sudden hand movements to within an inch of my face, with full knowledge that I have PTSD from some very frightening stuff that's happened to me.

I felt so down this morning I couldn't stop crying so I went on a web chat with a mental health charity. They said it's abuse. Which it IS. Although I know it's not the done thing to say about persons with bpd which makes getting help for myself really hard. The person on the helpline even suggested I contact a DV charity.

This is my almost adult child not far off 18.

Hi! I hope I’m using this subreddit right! My sibling (diagnosed BPD) has a specific behaviour during episodes (maybe not the right word) where she specifically asks leading questions to upset a person or instigate an argument. She asks someone what their opinion is on something, knowing they’ll disagree with her and starts an argument or melts down when they do. In other scenarios, she just starts conversations with sort of hurtful questions (ie. When do you think you and SO are going to break up?). This week we were talking about something when she brought up Aubrey Plaza’s pregnancy, saying it was weird considering her husband has just died. I said that I didn’t agree - and it really wasn’t our business what women we didn’t know decided to do with their bodies and lives, which turned into a whole thing. My parents have opted to just agreeing with whatever she says, but I (which totally could just be some stubborn sibling thing) don’t think that’s right - and we should be always validating her opinions, as they can often be quite mean and antisocial, just to avoid a fight. I’ve tried to remove myself from the conversation, but she reacts to that really strongly too. Is there a right way to handle this?

No one in the family likes her because she lashes out at the smallest things. She has no friends and just sits at home and works. She got me birthday gifts and since I’m apparently rude to her and nice to everyone else and I didn’t get her something for her bday last year so she took it back 2 weeks after my bday. Why do they act like this?

Hello. I hope this post is allowed here as I think this group can help more than others.

My sister has BPD, other 2 siblings major alcoholics, mother with dementia and father at the core of my lifelong intimacy and trust issues.

I'm expected at my father's 90th birthday which requires flying 4000km and putting my cat in the cattery. It's 3 weeks away and already my anxiety is through the roof.

I don't want to go.

I realise this might be the last time I see one or both parents, which would be a shame, but I have been thrust into complete overwhelm as the occasion nears.

I haven't lived in the same state as them since age 22. I have promised myself that when my parents die I will go completely NC with my siblings... in order to finally have a life without abuse.

I speak on the phone to my parents nearly every day, and while most calls trigger me, it's manageable.

But, this time, this particular visit is traumatising me.

I can't tell the truth. How could I tell two 90 year old parents that are in complete denial that the prospect of spending time with them and their other children is so terrifying to me that I'm not coming to this significant occasion?

I need a full proof and plausible excuse.

It's pathetic...I'm a grown adult. But, you know, my boundaries have never been respected and I've always been the scapegoat. Living interstate or overseas was my coping strategy.

Thanks for your advice beforehand.

I (23M) have a mother with BPD and she is insane i swear. I grew up as an only child with a single mother who was diagnosed with it when i was around the age of 10 or so. My childhood wasnt the worst, had food and a roof over my head, but it was filled with emotional turmoil, a mother who did barley anything around the house and guilt over not being enough. Firstly, my mother used me as an emotional support system since i was probably 8 or younger. When she was crying i was there, when she was worried about money or anything i was the person she told and when i left to go to school there were multiple times i was worried that she would killer herself while i was gone. She constantly talked about how she didnt want to live, especially as i got older. She always wanted another child which i also wanted a sibling but it always made me feel like i was never enough. She told me about the horrible things she experienced growing up, abuse, neglect, suicide attempts, and stated on numerous occasions about how she should have just ended her life when she was young because she hates her life now. I didnt know what do to do or how to even feel apart from sad and like she didnt even want me to exist either, afterall if she was dead then i wouldnt have even been born! She was also way to sexual with me, not in any physical way but she told me about her sex life in way to much detail, especially as i got older. Eventually she started dating someone, and this person was in and out of our lives constantly but when he was she would spend barley any time with me, instead she was always "taking naps" with her boyfriend during which i always heard what they were doing. One night i couldnt sleep because of it so i banged my head against the wall hoping they would get the message and stop, just to have my mom come to my room in nothing but a towel and grill me and even ask if i was trying to listen. I eventually got addicted to video games because i had little to no care about my life and future and my mom of course didnt seem to care or try to get me to hangout with her or do anything. Later when i was 17 i started to turn my life around and care and gaining my own life. I got a job, made friends and got a license. My mom was proud of me but our house was starting to fall apart and it gave her crippling anxiety. A few years later when i was 19 i started going to college and staying out later, i still lived with her because it was cheaper, but she gave me a curfew of 12 for staying out, constantly asked if i wanted to move out and used suicide threats to get me to stay. It got worse and worse when i started dating and after moving to an appartment. She started complaining about me not paying fair for rent when we had an agreement for it, and when our original agreement on rent so long as i was in college was already taken back. But it really came to a head when my grandpa died. My mom absolutely went nuts, drinking all the time and even hitting me on a few occasions while drunk. I decided to move out, and moved in with my current gf. My mother constantly uses this against me saying that i just left her and didnt barley even see her and that i didnt do any going away party but just left and that i must hate her or not want her in my life at all because i dont constantly see her. She threw things in my face from years ago and still throws it in my face when i told her multiple times not too. She does nothing but pushes me away and says that its me that pushed her out. She says she respects my boundaries when she has been given multiple chances to do so and never has. I have tried my best to follow through on boundaries but i still care about her and want a relationship with my mom, because even though shes nuts she was not all bad growing up, we had our good times too. But I cant do anything that doesnt end in her saying i dont care about her. Am i crazy that i still care about her? Any advice? At this point im ready to just be done but I dont know how to cope with that.

Has being the target of the pwBPD made you more sensitive or likely to feel triggered/upset when others lash out at you? Do you have less patience for those other people or are you more likely to go LC/NC with them quicker than you did with the pwBPD because you have less tolerance for abusive behavior now?

I received a text from a relative the other day that really upset me. In it, she snapped at me and said some unkind things and made some accusations that were untrue. She was really rude and the things she said and the way she spoke to me reminded me very much of how my BPD older sister has treated me.

I chose not to respond to this relative and don’t plan to contact her any further now. Am even considering blocking her number and deleting her from my social media. I understand people can have “off” days and everything, but this relative’s text really caught me off guard and hurt my feelings pretty badly. She is well aware of how my sister has treated me all of these years, so it really was a kick in the gut for her to lash out at me the way she did. It also made me wonder if I’m somehow a magnet for people like that. Like maybe they can sense that I am more passive and sensitive, therefore they target me.

For the record, this relative is not in contact with BPD sister and has nothing to do with her.

My sisters behaviour has started to really negatively impact my personal relationships. I hide a lot of her behaviour from my friends, but usually share everything with my partner of 6 years. Recently after a blowout, my partner basically expressed that he doesn’t know if he can handle being with me and seeing her treatment of me /our family have no repercussions.

I understand it’s reasonable for him to not want to be part of a volatile dynamic, but I wonder if there’s something I can do to try to keep my sister in my life and not sacrifice my own personal relationship. I hope that makes sense.

Edit: I want to preface by saying I do believe mental illness is a very real form of disability for many people and my sister does have severe mental illness that makes life very hard for her in many ways.

Ever since my family signed my sister up for disability, she leans really hard on that narrative and claims she is disabled from her mental illness but never claimed that in the past.

She was fired from jobs in the past due to being super late, skipping work and not notifying them. But she was able to work. Now she claims she can’t work because she’s disabled and always expects money from my family claiming they’re starving her if they don’t give her money.

She has ssi or SSDI I forget which, and food stamps. Is it wrong to think she can seek work if she wanted to because she has had a job in the past and that she’s convincing herself that she’s this incapable victim when in fact she is capable of working?

Doordash for example she has done in the past and you don’t need to worry about being on time. She seems to go in on this victim narrative more and more as time goes on claiming that she has autism, chronic illness etc but won’t get tested for them. She just claims them because of TikTok’s and stuff.

Obviously some people really can’t work due to disabilities and I don’t want to be an ahole about it and be like “suck it up” but I’m pretty confident this is not the case despite her qualifying for disability benefits.

She has really strongly seemed to convince herself that she’s is a helpless victim when she seems to be quite capable of functioning when it comes to going to bars or going shopping, and it this victimization just seems to get worse. Does anyone have similar experiences where their family does qualify for disability but seems to take advantage of that label?

I’ve had the worst week ever and have barely slept.

Basically, my sister (28F, not diagnosed, but suspected) broke up with her boyfriend and moved into my parents’ apartment for a while. While there, between rages, she accused my mother of molesting her as a child when they cuddled. She adds that she has thought this for a long time while going through trauma therapy and after.

My mom has her issues (she was sometimes verbally abusive under stress), but I can’t believe this of her — she was always so clear about good touches and bad touches, and I’ve never seen anything remotely sexual from her, not even once. She and my sister have had a very tempestuous relationship for many years, due to this past, and they tend to trigger one another. I’ve generally been close to both of them, toeing a careful line.

I’m struggling. My dad is struggling, too. On principle, I feel like we have to investigate this claim (though how can we? There’s no proof), but on a gut level, I feel so strongly that this isn’t true. I think what’s happening is that her poor relationship with Mom has made her distort her memory of those childhood cuddles — but that sounds so awful to even type, because we’re supposed to believe the victim, right? But I _know_ my mom. I know she wouldn’t do this.

Sister does have a history of coming to odd conclusions, often about people hating her or feeling insecurities about her that they don’t, or seeing sexual connotations where there are none. She did experience sexual assault as a teenager. Her current diagnoses are CPTSD and severe depression and anxiety.

I’m just… I’m barely eating. I know my mom is complicated, but I love her so much and I don’t believe this of her, I just don’t, and the claims don’t fit into my own childhood memories of what was going on. And I want to support my sister too — she has nothing right now, she quit her job after her breakup and is living alone and barely getting out of bed — but I can’t deal with this.

I guess. 1) Can Borderline make people _genuinely_ think they’ve suffered abuses that they haven’t? Because she’s desperate for me to validate her and has doubled down on the idea that she’s known this for years now. And 2) What the hell do I do? Has anyone else been here? I just feel like I’m floating through the world.

I don’t know what to do about this niggling doubt that maybe I could be wrong — but I really don’t think I am.

So I’ll try to explain this the best I can, My sister who is 30 has been struggling with her mental health since college. She has bipolar as well as clinical depression which causes her to constantly spiral in a never ending cycle. Her depression gets very high or her anxiety which causes her to abuse alcohol tie high he has to be sent to programs to help with it but she soon begs my parents to come and get her sometimes because she misses them and her mental health gets even lower there. She wears down my parents and they pick her up to which flounders but eventually gets better but then flounders again. This was been going on since I was 14 and I’m 23 now and while I wish I could say I’m perfectly fine and well adjusted adult, I’m not. My mental health while better than hers dips when these moments happen because it takes up all of my air mats attention leaving me all alone. I don’t know what else to say it’s just difficult and it doesn’t feel like it’s ever going to end.

I also forgot to mention she self sabotages friendships so my parents and family are her only friends now

Update: my parents decided to be firm for once and say she may need to get more care then the place she was at so she’s at a behavioral facility (which she still begged my parents she didn’t want to go there) I also realize I messed up with the diagnosis because I was tired. That is my bad but from what I understand she has bpd, bipolar and anxiety I’m sorry for the confusion.

Well here I am. My husband is on a weekend visit with my daughter and her family. I am going to mow the lawn. I’m not welcome at her house. So he goes alone and has no problem with it. She’s BPD he is her favorite person. I her target person. She is not ready to see me yet. 7 months ago I said something she didn’t like so I am not welcome. It’s such a sadness in my heart. To grieve loosing her for months or a year at a time. Such a miserable disorder. Robbing people of love and family. She has children who are in the middle. My heart goes out to all the families who love a pwBPD. Roller Coaster ride daily!

Edit: I reposted this from a while ago, I'm still emotionally fragile but I took some distance. I'm focusing more on the pattern of enmeshment and codependency in my life. There is still tension between me and my sister and we're trying to navigate it the best we can. The DEARMAN method is something I'm applying but its a learning curve. I love her, but with my resentment I've seen her in person less and talked on the phone a bit less as well. Low contact I think is a great way to exercise boundaries if you have the emotional bandwidth. Reposted this because I assume there are others in similar situations and hoped someone can feel less alone by venting and talking about tactics and techniques to either navigate these relationships or recover for yourself from said relationships

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OG Title: Therapy with sister feels like I'm being ganged up on

I'm dealing with leaving a marriage of 10 years to a man who groomed me, and moving back to my home country. I'm running low on savings, still applying to a job and living in a small room. I'm oscillating between crying and numbness and being extremely irritable. I'm in individual therapy for my issues (self-esteem, grooming, lack of boundaries). My sister is also in individual therapy.

It's just me and her in family therapy - it was supposed to help us with our communication issues, but its become more of a pile on.

I'm realizing more and more that I stayed with my groomer husband because he never yelled at me. Despite the unhealthy and fucked up way we met - he was my healthiest relationship romantic, familial, or friendship wise for a decade. My sister is no contact with the rest of our family, and I am low contact.

My sister is dating a lot, I'm happy for her, but its all she wants to talk about with me. I keep telling her I can't emotionally deal with hearing about it more than 30 minutes. After that I just shutdown.

Even when it comes to our communication issues, the only time she will admit fault is if 1-2 of her partners have also complained about the way she speaks.

When I try to tell her how her actions make me feel "I'm villianizing her" when I try to explain my thought process behind my actions "I'm justifying my poor behavior". This doesn't feel like resolving our communication it just feels like a brow beatdown. These family sessions are disregulating me more than my own situation right now.

She keeps saying I'm being a baby.

Has anyone successfully dealt with bpd sibling in therapy? This feels terrible I can't keep doing this.

2 of 3 Comments on original post - one person couldn't be reached out to:

fritoprunewhip

I’m going to be honest and say I would NEVER recommend family therapy with a pwBPD. Particularly with a therapist not involved in treating their BPD.

You don’t have a communication issue with your sister, you communicated your needs and boundaries just fine. The issue is you didn’t tell her what she wants to hear, and is now using therapy to bully you into the one sided relationship she wants.

Ask yourself if this is a healthy familial relationship, is she truly capable of a reciprocal relationship and providing emotional support during a difficult time. I think you know what the answer is.

You need to lower the contact you have with your sister to level that you are capable of handling right now. If that’s no contact (even temporarily) that’s what you need to do. It’s ok to cancel the therapy sessions and tell your sister you need to focus on rebuilding and will be limiting phone and social media interactions.

I know how hard it is want a sibling relationship with a pwBPD but they are not capable of that deep a relationship when unmedicated. You have to adjust your expectations and accept that they are only capable of a very shallow relationship.

Beneficial_Fun_4946

You are dealing with a lot. There is a lot of change going on with you. Pausing therapy with your sister is something you must do.

You must focus on you now. And that means saying no to a few things.