I think my Mom suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder

Post Reply New Topic

As I have stated a few times before I have had a troubled relationship with my own mother who was often abusive to me and everyone close to her. While I am not a psychologist and can't make an official diagnosis, I have learned about a personality disorder that seems to describe my Mom exactly: Borderline Personality Disorder.

I first found out about this disorder when watching a few episodes of a show called Deadly Women where a couple of female killers had the condition. I'm not saying I think it means my Mom will become a killer some day, but I started looking up about the condition on the internet and was amazed at how many of the traits and symptoms describe my Mom. Here is one of the websites I browsed:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001931/

Borderline Personality Disorder seems to be a condition where an individual lives in a world of extremes (as described on the show Deadly Women) and they have unstable emotions about themselves and others. Here are some of the things I read about the condition that sound exactly like my mother:

* They are usually female.

* They usually come from abusive or unstable families like my Mom did.

* They are sometimes victims of sexual abusive (I have recently learned my Mom was raped by the man who eventually murdered her sister)

* Their values and feelings for people are always changing drastically. For example my Mom will often change her values from wanting to be a good mother and wife to her current husbands to wanting to be a fun-having party girl who hangs out with younger people. My Mom will also constantly change from thinking so greatly of a person one moment to absolutely despising them the next, and she expects everybody around her (especially her kids) to agree with her without question.

* They often display inappropriate anger in public places. My Mom has been known to explode on people in public places like at her job or in a grocery store. She really doesn't care about what the people think of her, in fact it's almost like she enjoys it because it makes her "feel good" to be seen talking down to a person in front of an audiance.

* They often have very bad and chaotic relationships. My Mom has had an endless parade of looser boyfriends and husbands in her life for as long as I can remember. Many of them are jobless with drug and alchohol problems, and some were barely older than me. She's a very attractive woman who could easily find herself a really good man to be her husband and a father figure for her children, but she simply doesn't want that because, as she has said it, it is "boring" to her. Yet when she is in these relationships that usually last about 2 or 3 years, she puts all the blame of her problems on these men instead of accepting responsability for things that are obviously her fault. She often gets into violent fights with them, but after she throws them out the house she sweet-talks them into coming back to her.

There are other traits and symptoms too, but these are the ones I know for a fact about my Mom and I think they prove she most likely has this condition. Even if it's not this one exactly something is obviously wrong with. However the problem is there's nothing I can really do about it, she refuses to accept that anything is wrong with her behavior and always makes it seem like everybody else in the world is crazy except her. If I were to show her this and tell her I thought something was wrong then most likely she would get violent with me and maybe even threaten to throw me out the house, which I simply can't let happen because I have nowhere to go and can't really take care of myself. I think the only thing I can do is be patient and wait, I''m sure some day she will be out of my life forever and I will never have to deal with her hysterics again.

But anyways to those who are experts on personality disorders like this, do you think I may be right?

It could be but upon reading the points you highlighted another thought occurred me too. Undiscovered ADHD can be mistaken for BPD and because interaction with someone with either ADHD or BPD (can be co-morbid, of course) can be quite different I think it is important to point out this possibility.

* Chaotic thoughts/behaviour that a middle-aged person perhaps even tries to contain with sometimes excessive tidiness can show in rapidly changing priorities, opinions and values,
* trying to cope and failing with pretending to be normal since early childhood can result in excessive, uncharacteristic displays of ADHD behaviours being way exaggerated that they end in aggression/depression/unexpected behaviours that don't fit with that person's personality (much like autistic meltdowns),
* trying to meet expectations to be a "normal adult", failing every now and then and reacting with exhaustion, anger, embarrassment, fear and self-hatred (having been told "you're normal, you're just lazy/stupid" in childhood and feeling they need but can't prove otherwise even as adults),
* impulsivity that showed in insulting classmates or running away in childhood naturally changes for most people in adulthood too and can show in impulsive like/dislike for people and going back and forth between emotions and opinion, as well as overall impulsive decision-making.

I guess it is possible that she could have ADHD because two of my sibilings were both diagnosed with it as kids. The thing is I do love my Mom, but I find her a bit unbarable to be around because I get tired of feeling like I have to walk on egg shells around her, and I get tired of the way she invites trouble into our lives when she should really know better. You'd think after the last marriage where her soon-to-be ex husband lied and stole money from her to support his crack addiction that she would have learned her lesson, but she is now dating his 22 year old son of all people. I mean you'd have to be a complete idiot to not see what's messed up with that.

I just don't know how much more of her quirks I can take, and I feel really trapped because I have nobody in my life that I can turn to for help and I can't just walk away from her.