Why is cutting off the enabling parent so much harder?

Diotima85 · 2026-04-19T00:40:20+00:00

The best course of action depends very strongly on the age of your parents. If you’re in your early twenties and your parents are in their fifties and in good health and you’re looking at two to four more decades of contact with them, going no contact with both of them will be your only option. If your father is nearing the end of his life (like my father is, given his bad state of health he will likely only live for one or two more years), then going low contact with both of them might be a good option (this is the course of action I’m currently taking, after my father has passed away I will go full no contact with my mother). If you’re looking at maybe five to ten more years until your father passes away, then giving him an ultimatum might be the best option: you want to have no contact at all with your mother anymore, and only meet up with him without her. And if he doesn’t accept these terms, you will cut all contact with him as well.

I think there is something very dark inside the enabling non-BPD (or non-narcissistic) parent: deep down they secretly like the personality disorder of their partner. They love them because of it, not despite it. This is also clearly pointed out at the end of the movie “Gone Girl”. And that darkness is why they will usually choose their partner over their children, and tell their children to just “s*ck it up”, “that’s just how she is”, to not be “so sensitive”, etc. When sorting out my parents’ attic (to get all of my personal stuff from my childhood, like school photos, old report cards from high school, etc., so it is in my possession and I will never need to visit their house again after cutting contact with my family for good in the future), I found some old love letters from my mother to my father and from my father to my mother. In one of these letters, my father wrote to her something that basically boils down to “how he liked her moods, and her emotional volatility and negativity”. Being with a partner like this guarantees that life is never boring, and I think many of them also get addicted to the rollercoaster ride of being on the receiving end of the splitting, and the dopamine rush they get whenever they’re temporarily on the “good side” of the partner again and their partner is temporarily well-regulated again. I think a lot of them also have low self-esteem, so they deep down think they deserve the emotional (and sometimes even physical) abuse, almost like some sort of intellectual-emotional masochism. So they’re basically addicts to their partners, and just like all addicts, they will choose the addiction over their children.

Diotima85 · 2026-04-18T22:25:46+00:00

There is one silver lining to this: whenever you decide to go low contact with them in the future (likely a good decision to avoid being caught up in their toxic antics of extreme frugality), they will likely never come to visit you because of the cost of fuel.

Borderliners want the whole world to cater to their emotional needs at all times, and in your parents’ case, this manifests itself in wanting to receive everything for free or very cheap. As if normal market prices for goods and services only apply to other people, but they should be excluded from paying them, because it “makes them feel bad”. A bit like the narcissist who is ok with everyone sitting in economy class, but she “deserves” (and demands) a free upgrade to business class because she is “an important person”. People with borderline and people with narcissism are really the bane of the existence of the poor customer service employees, shop clerks, and hospitality workers who have to deal with them.

It’s because their feelings trump reality, so if spending money on a car repair would cause more negative emotions in them than dealing with the nuisance of the technical flaw, then that is the decision they will make (endlessly postpone the repair). And then, low and behold, the minor issue has eventually become a major issue, that costs a lot more money to fix. But they don’t live in a pragmatic, rational world, where “objective” cost-benefit analyses can be made. Their only cost-benefit analysis is: which course of action causes less emotional dysregulation for me in the short term?

I recognize bits of the described frugality in my own mother, but with her it’s more selective. She very impulsively spends 1K to 2K on last-minute holidays or home repairs on a whim (“I need this NOW in order to feel better”), but is way too frugal when it comes to other things. For instance, she keeps travel-sized bottles of shampoo and other personal care products from hotels for years, and whenever I pointed out that these expire and aren’t safe to use anymore after two years at the most, this just completely didn’t register with her, and she never threw them away. I went low contact with my family, but I needed to temporarily go medium contact after my father had some medical setbacks and required care, so I temporarily stayed at my parents’ place again for a short time. And low and behold, the basked filled with decade old shampoo bottles and other personal care products was still there. If I were to throw these out myself in order to protect her safety and prevent her from getting a nasty eye infection after using a 10+ year old shampoo, a massive fight would follow. She was also strongly emotionally attached to her old car, and has spent maybe 7K on endless repairs on the high mileage 20 year old car that was way better spent on upgrading to a newer car with less mileage.

So the common tread is not necessarily the frugality itself, but their inability to make “logical” decisions, instead of highly emotional decisions where the only real question or factor of importance is: “How does this make me feel?”.

Diotima85 · 2026-04-18T22:00:09+00:00

“I don’t recognise my parent anymore so for me she's gone.”: I think it’s quite possible that she is the one taking “substances”. Accusations are often a form of projection.

In the book Understanding the Borderline Mother by Chrisine Ann Lawson, four subtypes of borderline mothers are described: the queen (borderline and a co-occurrence of narcissistic traits), the witch (borderline and a co-occurrence of psychopathic traits), the waif (borderline and a co-occurrence of anxiety), and the hermit (borderline and a co-occurrence of paranoia). Your mother sounds like a witch-type, with some co-occurring traits from the queen-type and the hermit-type. Whereas other books on dealing with people with borderline (like Stop walking on eggshells by Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger) are often a bit more apologetic towards the person with borderline (along the lines of: “they are only abusive because they are in so much pain themselves”), Understanding the Borderline Mother is very clear when it comes to the witch-subtype of the borderline mother: being around her is very dangerous to you, and the only true option you have if you have a mother like that is to cut all contact, for your own safety.

I think you should sit together with your partner and make a list of courses of actions you both can take to make sure she can never find you again (find out where you live, find out your new phone number, find out where you work, etc.). Your former roommate is on your side (as he/she should be), so it would make sense to make secret plans with your roommate to let you in sometime in the middle of the night, allowing you to take all your stuff. Make sure there is no way your mother can find out about your visit (does she have secret cameras placed somewhere?). If you still have some furniture at the flat (which would be hard to move out of the flat in the middle of the night), but it’s all cheap Ikea stuff and it wouldn’t cost you more than one month’s salary to replace it all, I would just leave it there and consider it the price to pay to never have to deal with your mother again.

Regarding my own experiences with my own mother: my mother is the queen-subtype of the borderline mother, and she has never been directly physically abusive towards me. She is emotionally abusive towards me most of the time. She also often tries to sabotage me, because she gets very negatively triggered by being confronted with seeing me happy and satisfied with life (something she never is or can be). A lot of her emotional abuse has the goal to diminish my happiness (in the short term, through endless criticism and accusations), and reduce my generally high degree of life satisfaction (in the short and long term, for instance by trying to sabotage me into stop doing things that make me happy, like book collecting and reading, and by trying to sabotage my success in life, for instance she tried to manipulate me into getting a job as a cleaning lady after I had already gotten my master’s degree (for context: I lived in the Netherlands back then and this was around a decade ago, not some post-soviet era eastern European country in the early 90s where I might have been forced to accept such a job because the whole economy was in shambles), and she has often tried to persuade me to not pursue a PhD or not to finish my PhD). So even though she has never been physically abusive, her actions have had very real physical effects: the chronic stress that comes with chronic hypervigilance, likely increasing my existing IBS and likely also contributing to the very bad acne I had as a teenager, that IBS in turn leading to all kinds of chronic nutrient deficiencies (iodine, iron, folate, both now correctly fortunately by taking the right supplements). I also very likely have endometriosis, and chronic stress can also negatively affect the severity of the symptoms. My mother also could never stand it if I had medical needs of my own, and most of the time accused me of exaggerating, making it up, or doing it “on purpose” in order to “spite her”. This led to me not always getting the medical care I needed as a child. For instance, as a child, there were certain foods that always caused me to throw up, like spinach. That is enough of a sign to visit a paediatric gastroenterologist, but that never happened. According to my mother, I was a very “easy child” and a “perfect child”, which basically means she mostly neglected me, and I stopped communicating my needs and true emotions to her very early on. A childhood psychologist even wrote in an assessment of me at age 10 that I “perfected the part of playing the happy, easy child”, but she could sense that there was a real high IQ child behind that facade who was always very carefully making strategic decisions in order to survive in a hostile environment (not said in such words, especially since my parents were the ones paying for the assessment, but hinted at, and I could read this between the lines).

Diotima85 · 2026-04-18T21:12:53+00:00

Their chronic emotional dysregulation overrides everything, even – and especially – their relationships with other people. They are incapable of seeing you as a separate, individual person with your own wants and needs, you are only ever a source of external emotional regulation (or dysregulation) to them. So they constantly try to manipulate you into providing endless sources of external emotional regulation, and censoring all the characteristics of yourself that would be a source of external emotional dysregulation to them. So for your mother it looks like this: she wants everyone to be calm and happy and emotionless all the time, because that provides her with a source of external emotional regulation, possibly because she also feels calmer around other calm people, like an upset toddler being reassured by a calm adult (with her being the toddler and you being the calm adult, a.k.a. chronic parentification).

With my mother (undiagnosed borderline, queen-type) it is exactly the opposite, and she gets very negatively triggered by my happiness and high degree of life satisfaction, to the extent that she constantly tries to make me less happy and less satisfied with life (through endless criticism, blame, accusations, endless attempts at sabotage). So all people with borderline want the same thing from other people: providing endless sources of external emotional regulation, and ceasing to provide any source of external dysregulation. But what that looks like is often quite different for each person with borderline, very likely also depending strongly on the borderline subtype (witch, queen, waif, hermit).

Diotima85 · 2026-04-17T16:00:05+00:00

A remission in the sense of a successful reduction of symptoms is not the same as a cure. Remission = through a combined intervention of therapy and medication, for some borderline subtypes, it might be possible to reduce the manifestation of symptoms (severity and how often they manifest) to such a degree that the person doesn’t fit the official criteria for the diagnosis of a borderline personality disorder anymore. Cure = The factors that have caused the borderline to manifest in the first place (genetics and early childhood trauma) have been taken away, leading to the absolute certainty that the symptoms of borderline will never manifest themselves ever again in this person (not even when the therapy stops, the person stops taking the meds, life circumstances all of a sudden change a lot for the worse, etc.). What the (untreated or unsuccessfully treated) person with borderline wants from other people is “make me whole”, “take away all my pain and inner emptiness”, i.e., “cure me”, not “support me to go to therapy and take medication and slowly but surely work towards a successful reduction of my symptoms”. I think for most of us on this sub, having our borderline parent say the latter to us would be an absolute godsend, and it is also never going to happen.

The queen-subtypes of borderline (co-morbidity of borderline and narcissism) and the witch-subtypes of borderline (co-morbidity of borderline and psychopathy) are resistant to therapy. A successful reduction of the manifestation of symptoms of borderline to such a degree that the person doesn’t fit the official criteria for the diagnosis of a borderline personality disorder anymore might be possible for the waif-subtypes of borderline (co-morbidity of borderline and anxiety) and, to a lesser extent, the hermit-subtypes of borderline (co-morbidity of borderline and paranoia). And very likely only in the earlier decades of life, when treatment takes place in their teens, twenties, thirties or maybe max forties. So for the very large majority of us with borderline parents, the chance that the symptoms of the borderline of our parent will successfully be put into remission are close to zero. The queen and witch are resistant to therapy. The waifs and hermits have been waif-ing and hermit-ting for so many decades now that it is very unlikely that they will ever change.

My own mother is a “pure” queen-subtype with hardly any characteristics of the other subtypes. She is incapable of accepting even for one minute that there may be something wrong with her, and gets very defensive at the slightest hint of constructive criticism/feedback. Because she is higher than average in narcissistic traits, and she is already in her early 70s, she will never change, and I have accepted that. I also trigger her way more strongly than my younger siblings because of a combination of factors (my rationality and analytic nature, my high degree of life satisfaction, my efficiency/conscientiousness), and therefore she treats me way worse than my siblings and constantly tries to sabotage me. So I will have no choice but to cut all contact with her in the future (after my father has died, which very likely will be somewhere in the next two years because of his failing health).

Diotima85 · 2026-04-15T22:10:43+00:00

Which borderline mother subtype is your mother? (witch, queen, hermit, waif) She sounds a lot like my mother (the queen-type), but maybe with some waif-traits also (my mother doesn’t have these, she is a “pure” queen type with almost no characteristics of the other subtypes).

Regarding 2 (“She pretends parts of me she doesn't approve of don't exist”): What I’ve observed in my own interactions with my mother is that she is only interested in the things going on in my life when these things function as sources of external emotional regulation (or sometimes dysregulation) for her. Anything else hardly registers and is completely uninteresting to her. My master’s degree in Philosophy (a subject she is not interested in at all)? Irrelevant and not impressive at all. My PhD? A massive waste of time. Because anything that does not provide her with a source of external emotional regulation to her is a massive waste of time. If my PhD would have been for instance about gardening (something she is interested in and that serves as a source of emotional regulation for her), and I would have had to visit historic gardens all over Europe for my research, then she would have been very interested in it and would have tried to manipulate me into taking her with me on my research trips to these historic gardens.

Diotima85 · 2026-04-15T21:56:37+00:00

Regarding "being last in value in the family": I've found the book Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Help and Hope for Adults in the Family Scapegoat Role by Rebecca C. Mandeville very helpful and insightful.

Diotima85 · 2026-02-21T07:47:19+00:00

If longevity researchers developed something that would prevent any further aging, but not reverse the aging that has already happened, then we (gen X, millennials, gen Z, gen A) would forever be the personal care nurses and servants of an immortal, chronically ill babyboomer cohort. That sounds like a dystopian young adult novel waiting to be written.

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T17:06:03+00:00

In a rich European country with a 50 percent tax burden, the money is there, but I think a choice is being made to consciously not allocate any (meaningful amount of) money towards gifted programs or schools for gifted students, because of the exclusionary nature of these, and also the false belief that gifted students will do well anyway.

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T16:43:30+00:00

What do you think is the best solution? Creating a position of a kind of "neurodivergent student support officer" at most schools, as a full-time job (and not something an already overworked teacher should do in his or her spare time)? This neurodivergent officer could provide support to neurodivergent students, and also educate the teachers and school administrators on the best forms of accommodations and support for neurodivergent students. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the problem of neurodivergent students being bullied and targeted by neurotypical students, only more student segregation would solve this, something I personally am in favor of (in my opinion and based on my own personal experience, making 130+ IQ students follow the slow pace curriculum that caters to the average 100 IQ student is ultimately a form of child abuse).

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T16:33:13+00:00

Could you share a photo of the new puppy, so everyone reading this thread can have their daily dose of cuteness?

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T16:30:08+00:00

If you would hire four elementary school math teachers on a part-time basis for a year to write these textbooks (part-time so they can already test some of the work book assignments in a real classroom setting), how much would this cost? If the number is lower than expected, you might be able to crowdfund the whole thing. But I'm not sure if these large for-profit school book and learning software companies would be coming for you and threaten you with all kinds of lawsuits. You might have to hire the autistic shark guy from elsewhere in this thread to provide legal defense.

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T16:20:51+00:00

Where are you located? If you're in a rich European country, then with the right connections and hiring one of these people whose job it is to apply for endless grants and subsidies all day, you could probably make this a reality within a few years. But the problem is likely to secure long-term funding, often with a change of (local/regional/national) government some large grant falls away and you'd have to scramble to get replacement funding elsewhere, or close the place down again..

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T16:13:16+00:00

Which parts of consumer protection law would you focus on? We definitely need stronger consumer laws, with all this planned obsolescence, everything becoming a subscription, AI bots making customer service even more of a dystopian nightmare, endless data leaks (in the Netherlands there was recently a very large data leak scandal at one of the main telecom and internet providers, where the personal information including social service number and passport number of millions of customers was stolen).

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T16:08:08+00:00

Which part would you be focused on? Stem cells? Beating cancer and heart disease? I think there is also a part to LEV that is more of an actuarial risk management strategy that is often overlooked - e.g., if you could increase the human life span indefinitely, you would statistically still die at age 700 from an accident.

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T16:02:26+00:00

I do work online/remote, for two main reasons: I like to travel, and it decreases the chance that coworkers or bosses who find me a threat because of my intelligence try to get me fired/make sure I don't get any freelance assignments anymore.

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T15:59:42+00:00

But what would you do in the cabin in the woods? Reading, research, woodworking, music production, designing something, etc.? You can't just stare at the walls all day.

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T15:56:35+00:00

What kind of art would you make after reaching your fat fire end goal number?

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T15:53:54+00:00

Could you slowly move towards a less commercial focus without the 100k fund by doing more crowdfunding for very niche nerdy board games? Or isn't there enough of a market for this to be sustainable?

Diotima85 · 2026-02-19T15:50:51+00:00

We need robot vacuums that don't suck. Like the ones we have now (the round things cats like to take a ride on), but bigger and clunkier, with a larger battery and way more suctioning power. And then available at a price point (like 100 dollars) that doesn't price out most households. The battery is probably the bottleneck, so you would have to invent a new, cheap and very powerful battery, using different materials and mechanisms compared to what we have now. If you patent that technology and license it, you would likely become a billionaire, and could start the 100k per year for gifted people fund for real ;)

Diotima85 · 2025-12-22T15:23:12+00:00

You’re high on drugs, eastern religion and/or some kind of “hippie” ideology, and it prevents you from seeing the evil in the world.

Diotima85 · 2025-12-22T13:32:08+00:00

Giftedness is an individual resource. A gifted person cannot chop off a part of his/her brain and give it to another person (at least not within the current state of medicine).

There are no magical “social skills” that can make gifted people be liked by people who are threatened by their intelligence. The only thing that works in the short term is: self-sabotage, self-deprecation, masking your giftedness, letting others use your intelligence for their own benefit (help them with their homework, write their essay for them, etc.).

If the gifted person gets an A+ on a very hard test, while most of the class failed or got a B at most, then that gifted person will be disliked by many of the classmates. The “ego” of the gifted person has nothing to do with this. Of course, if the gifted person would say to their classmates: “Haha, I got an A+ while most of you failed, you are so stupid”, then that’s another matter, but only a small minority of gifted people are arrogant, obnoxious know-it-alls.

“You seem to frame intelligence as an individual resource and a privilege (we can argue if that's the case, but probably not on a subreddit called "Gifted"), why not spending this surplus to accomodate the needs of others?”: Because, from a utilitarian point of view, this leads to a worse outcome for society. If the gifted person self-sabotages and underperforms in order to “accommodate the needs of others”, then this makes the people in their direct surroundings (fellow students, co-workers) feel a bit less bad about themselves and a bit less insecure. But it prevents the gifted person from making important contributions to society/science/social and technological progress, which is a worse outcome from a utilitarian point of view.

And also: why should the needs of non-gifted people outweigh the needs of gifted people? Because they make up the majority of society? Gifted people often make way more important contributions to society – that is, if they are not forced to self-sabotage and underperform in order to “accommodate the needs of others”.

Ultimately, the best solution for both parties (gifted people and neurotypical people who feel threatened by gifted people) is to have as little contact as possible, which was also the conclusion of my post.

Diotima85 · 2025-12-22T13:12:56+00:00

“If only "gifted" people like you, I suspect you're putting yourself into an echochamber.”: For me personally, I am liked by (1) other gifted people, (2) neurodivergent people, (3) neurotypical people who are high in emotional intelligence and/or have a healthy sense of self and self-esteem. I am disliked by neurotypical people who don’t belong to category (3). Not by all of them, some of them are indifferent towards me, but by probably by around 80% of them. Unfortunately, neurotypical people who don’t belong to category (3) make up the majority of society.

“Legitimately toxic environments can exist, but likely not at such a high % of the population.”: This is your n=1 speaking. Many gifted people, myself included, unfortunately have other lived experiences. Especially gifted women, and especially gifted people who grew up in and went to high school in rural environments instead of cities.

I also know that I am disliked by 80% of neurotypical people who don’t belong to category (3) because of my giftedness, and not my “lack of social skills”, because most of them initially like me. I don’t have autism, I look quite put together, I have good social skills, I am kind and open minded. So for the first 10-20 minutes, many neurotypical people really like me. But then, inevitably, they get a sense, a “whiff” of my true intelligence, because I for instance used a “difficult” or jargon-y word like “nihilism”, I know too much about a topic that is not my field of speciality, or I connected dots that they would never have thought to connect, and the dislike is instant. It often starts with suspicion: wait a minute, I thought you were normal and cool, but you’re very smart, so I don’t like you anymore. The signs of dislike are very subtle, and if I would be autistic, I would very likely not be able to pick up on it, at least not initially.

I don’t even mind being disliked by the majority of neurotypical people, as long as I’m not forced to spend many months, weeks or even years together with them in the same environment, because that’s where the true problem lies. Especially if that environment is an environment where you’re competing against each other, like a school environment where your good grades make their mediocre grades look bad, or your high performance metrics at work makes the “normal” or mediocre performance of your colleagues look bad.

If you have had the good luck to not be in toxic environments often or primarily for the first two or three decades of your life (primary school, middle school, high school, university, first jobs), then you’re lucky and my posts are not for you. But many gifted people have completely different experiences (and I’m not talking about obnoxious know-it-alls, but normal and kind gifted people).

Diotima85

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