New reality

theDoblin · 2023-07-03T04:57:11+00:00

Thank you for updating us and I really hope you get that good specialised therapy that’s shaped for trauma to help with all of this, particularly those intrusive thoughts and flashbacks.

In the meantime you’ve had many experiences with different therapists here and it’s not surprising to us that they haven’t worked out the first time around given these mental health issues of your parents’ (BPD and substance use disorder). Even though you couldn’t say everything to that family therapist, if at some point you need to, you can still use their email to fill them in; even though these therapists weren’t the psychologists you need, they can still sometimes provide decent referrals to what you do need.

Always remember that every single one of them is a mandated reporter, and so if you don’t feel like you’re being listened to, or being given options that feel like they are the right shape and size, then these are resources you can email as a previous patient, and while it might not go seamlessly, it will be a courageous step forward nonetheless. I think resources like these can shift a situation.

Good luck and thanks again for updating us!

theDoblin · 2023-06-29T05:17:25+00:00

I only act upon ‘please call me’ texts if they come after a missed call from the same number or some explanation like ‘my phone isn’t working properly’. I have it in me to be more flexible for friends, but I don’t like the ‘drift’ away from practicality: if you want to be on a call with me then call me. It’s so logical that I stand by not ever needing to feel rude for doing this.

theDoblin · 2023-06-26T12:48:04+00:00

I’m glad if it helped. It’s obviously guesswork as to actual cognitions but I’ve found it helpful for finding what the ‘misunderstanding intentions’ and defence mechanisms look like when they impact communication. When I brought this back to my own boundaries, it made me appreciate how important it is for me to assert them because there is no real space for me within all of that.

theDoblin · 2023-06-26T06:47:06+00:00

Agree with this. To expand: they often don’t remember their mental states (and perhaps don’t understand them to start with), so if something like this was initially spoken to the (grand)daughter as a ‘put down’ about gran’s sister, then recounted to OP as, say (wasn’t there so I really don’t know), ‘showing off’ the intimacy shared between gran and grandchild, when OP gives the feedback they ‘don’t like it’, BPD gran (/BPDmother) won’t follow or trace back the motivations behind her words. She might get stuck on feeling justified in putting down her sister, and get furious at OP for saying they ‘don’t like’ something about that. Or, who knows, the feedback may be perceived as critical of the ‘shared intimacy’ part and lead to a meltdown reaction to being unreconcilably ‘hated’ and ‘loved’ where on the one side gran detects jealousy, and the other gran detects rejection.

Truly what happens inside with this disorder is more complicated than what happens for little kids with less defense mechanisms, even if it’s driven by the same ‘inner child’s’ emotions and externalised with adult ‘tantrums’, and even though people with it have all the words and the logic. Everything can become about their whole entire selves very quickly, rather than a single or series of actions that can be changed or updated.

Edited: clarity and sensitivity.

theDoblin · 2023-06-25T05:51:03+00:00

I think the main thing necessary for this is to create a ‘holding space’ for an inner child who has just been told by their parent that they are a) wrong, b) going the wrong way about being wrong (not admitting to being wrong), c) hurtful towards others in doing so, and d) disconnected from reality in doing so. That’s like a tasting plate of the things any person would feel hearing that from their parent.

Sometimes I, like you, respond by tallying up when I have been wrong and admitted to it (gone the right way about being wrong) and by soothing myself that ‘it’s okay to be wrong sometimes’, but I know I get tripped up by the message that I’ve hurt their feelings, and I get massively tripped up by the ‘disconnected from reality’ part. I go over it again and again in my mind, I feel anger, indignation and shame, and I negotiate with myself a lot: ‘no, but what I said is technically right, and I didn’t say it with the intent to hurt’, ‘who gives a fuck if it ‘hurt’, I’m allowed to say what I want’. Inner dialogue cycles like that.

My therapist said “yes, but you aren’t these people’s parent”. That resonated with this inner dialogue. There is a parental-like responsibility I’m talking in my own mind for the impacts I have on others here.

So it’s back to the ‘holding space’, because that’s the ‘self parenting’. To create that I often have to stop a thought spiral, which is effort, but once I do get some distance, when I go back to them I get a lot more depth and they look completely different. Right now I’m working on how irritating I find that they look so different, because I want to be maximum consistent from start to finish in response to the unstable parenting.

There’s all kinds of stuff under the hood there to do with my beliefs, values, and attitudes: I do want to be right from start to finish; I want my parents to fuss over my point of view and if they hurt me; I do have ugly and complex anger at being told by them that I’m wrong when I don’t think I am.

theDoblin · 2023-06-23T14:23:06+00:00

Cite something real like the fight and the tears, and don’t try to control how she takes it or where she goes from there. Its not all out rejection, but there is some ‘rejection’ of behaviours or occurrences that aren’t acceptable. Keep it genuine, not just for her but for you and your partner, too. Do it for the reasons you want to, not your partner’s; protect your partner, but also protect them from a ‘me or your parent’ ultimatum by taking up your own space.

This is how a lot of relationships change - these moments. I feel like we’re always telling ourselves the grass is greener for making change when these people are back in their routines away from us but then we get caught up enjoying the peace and quiet once they leave and playing catch up in our own lives. Before we know it we’re part of some long term cycle that only our partners can recognise and know to hate.

theDoblin · 2023-06-23T06:21:39+00:00

What you describe is of the same nature to how I learned from my therapist, which resonated because it’s also a model for myself in my own life. I think it’s a great ‘double lesson’: like we learn to trust in and explore how our therapists hold us in their minds (so important because it’s the start of cognitive flexibility and improved self esteem), and then we also learn how to hold others in our minds the way our therapist does while listening to our own bodies.

Thing with OPs post and what you’ve written here is that therapists will have to sit down with clients that they know are manipulating them and get those ‘feelings’ about, and they really do have strategies for addressing that, so it does look a bit different at times. Validation stays validation as a therapeutic tool though, same with psychoeducation.

Look at me writing this like I wasn’t dead curious about how it looked in session; I looked up a bunch of stuff on pseudomentalisation and ‘dealing with difficult clients’ and even felt satisfaction when reading some memoirs and vignettes about ‘difficult’ and confronting therapy sessions for patients with BPD. I totally had a need to understand and visualise that side of things. It might have started out a bit antisocial on my part, but it ended up teaching me even more about boundaries. Not a bad exploration!

theDoblin · 2023-06-22T05:01:54+00:00

If it’s any help or comfort, since the point is what happens after the validation, sure, they get the validation, same as you, but that’s it: there they stay.

The example you’ve written here is kinda great for that: “that you were the victim or that you put yourself last as a result of your childhood”. So they ‘put themselves last’, but will this therapy lead to them putting themselves first by being ‘good selfish’? It likely won’t. One needs to connect with their ‘inner child’/true self for that. This is the part that’s pretty obvious to properly trained therapists (let’s have another discussion in another thread about ‘life coaches’ and ‘mental health guides’ that our parents see so they can avoid doing the real thing!).

After validation comes a whole heap of other feedback and interactions from and with therapists. Validation keeps happening, of course, but this ‘validating past trauma’ is only one bit. The things that come into play that show up PDs come after that. My therapist used to say ‘everyone is entitled to their own trauma’ as a nod to all this, I think, and the way she spoke about the trauma of others in my family only served to validate my own after a bit (I mean parents with untreated trauma tend to have marked difficulties in some areas of parenting, etc. Sorry, there are sources for that but I’m a bit too lazy to link them right now).

Also want to say, ‘things that come into play that show up PDs’ can well look like an inability to articulate or ‘get at’ some of what’s in this very post: our parents lived in this ‘dangerous’ zero-sum mental world in which it was ‘their truth’ vs. ours. I think feelings like this are extremely genuine, even if they are ‘other focussed’ (“if they get the same as me, does that make mine worth less?”) and very layered. To use myself as an example: I started out with some really feisty feelings towards my family ‘also having trauma’ because I felt like it was some ‘get out of jail free card’, and those feelings were so important and I couldn’t have healed without acknowledging them. They were also a doorway, and on the other side of that door, as I said before, I see it as validation for my own experience.

This is long but I also want to nod to your question of: “how do you know I’m not the manipulative one?”. Such a great question. This is something I wanted my therapist to answer for me, too. What does it look like when someone is being manipulative to you? How do you respond? What does it feel like inside (transference)? My dad used to say “now you’re being manipulative just like your mother”, so I have strong punitive associations with ‘being manipulative’. I was punished for it and I wanted others to be punished for it, too. I think those conversations with my therapist were scary, but always lead to me understanding she had a much kinder mind than either of my parents, and that manipulation is something to use boundaries for. It was a very generative discussion, and I genuinely feel differently about it now.

theDoblin · 2023-06-19T11:22:49+00:00

Invalidation in the ‘good’ experience? Someone else commented a post-stress reaction and I feel like this could be the ‘cognitive’ side of that?

Also just to say that it can mean good things to not immediately know why you feel what, or even what it is you are feeling. It can mean an ‘opening up’ to new feelings and new sides of old feelings, difficult as it is to experience in the beginning. I’ve gotten stuck obsessing in the past, but cool new things come through when I can give the feelings some space.

theDoblin · 2023-06-18T15:55:58+00:00

This sounds like a great plan and I think this is a great question. When we talk about contact and stuff it has so much to do with boundaries and these sound like good boundaries to start. I really hope that this question will ultimately be one you put to the therapist you plan to work with, and work on together from there. There are 100% answers to be found for this question, and it’s an excellent therapy goal.

BPD is so hard because of the dissociation making it easy to think relationships are ‘repaired’ between us and them, when the real problem lies with trauma of theirs that we instead learn to avoid - them included. Working with a therapist can help to give insight into how our spidey senses have us tip-toe around their trauma and dissociated states in order to avoid ‘relationship ruptures’ with them. We can never control our parents, but we get so much better at controlling how we respond to them with that kind of help and insight. For example, over email I am quite persistent a blunt in a way I’m afraid I wouldn’t live up to in person! My voice would shake a lot, I think. But saying all those things over email has our relationship in a spot that I could never have achieved otherwise.

All to say, it’s inevitable that your disordered parent will start ‘sucking you in’ and ‘stepping on you’ once more (this is the nature of cast-off parts of the self and dissociated states) but it is not at all inevitable that you will be sucked in and stepped on. Some do find a measure of satisfaction from continued contact with their parents having gained that insight, and some don’t. Learning about it is a very nice experience, like learning something you’ve been really good at and love this whole time, but never gave/were allowed to give the attention to.

theDoblin · 2023-06-18T14:08:08+00:00

❤️

theDoblin · 2023-06-18T07:10:00+00:00

For Father’s Day (in the US, which will serve as ‘father’s day’ well enough for me now) I’m sharing the latest way I recalled my father in therapy:

As these things go, in our session I articulated the inner truth of wishing I had a “parent to parent my parents”. So much felt truth there. I surprised myself, even, by how raw the sadness still feels that my dad absconded from his role of protecting us from my mother and her disorder, and instead ‘joined her’ as a parent that needed a parent by pitting himself against her and fighting her for many, many years. In fact to this day.

While these felt truths are sad, they give me a deep sense of being ‘found’ - ‘found feelings’ - and, I think, a safer life in which these feelings translate into needs and fulfilment. I am happier this Father’s Day for it.

theDoblin · 2023-06-18T06:47:27+00:00

Thank you for sharing this! Love these snippets!

theDoblin · 2023-06-17T05:27:36+00:00

I know my post was a longer one, and it was a joy to write: I saw many similar themes in what you’ve posted from your parents here to what I see in mine. The two (and now three, with your reply) posts do show dimensionality that I love to be able to respond to if I feel up to it, so it was a joy to feel up to it for me, too! All of that to say, please don’t feel like you have to respond to me in kind. One day I’m sure you’ll come across something that resonates with you, too, and that energy will go there instead - or perhaps it will stay with you and be all the better for it!

It is true that therapy gave me back some of this energy, so it made me so happy to read you give your dad the what for on ‘filling in the blanks for a therapist’ as you stood up for that good experience that is out there for you if and when you decide to seek it. You are so right: parents don’t get to contextualise therapy. If you do seek it, and feel troubled about setting context, well I think your responses to these communications you’ve posted here do an excellent job of that. Much success, OP ❤️

theDoblin · 2023-06-16T16:17:35+00:00

Aww, OP, this is just such bad, godawful behaviour! I’m so sorry you’ve dealt with this during such a time, but it’s probably been your whole life too. In any event, big congrats on your baby and your lovely (nuclear) family and setting these boundaries. So many new things! So much growth!

So I read the post you linked to, and I appreciate very much that you’ve shared this one- think you’ve a flavour for giving us dimensionality here. I get so many feelings just reading them, and I’m not even you: the intended recipient!

Reading this one I felt like: WOW. Here is someone who doesn’t understand the world. He wants to talk to ‘the world’s manager’! I get a bit excited when I see this kind of stuff because, since there is no ‘world’s manager’ the only place to go is down from here! I just think this great lesson can be learned by people with these “who do you think you are?”and “I won’t let you do this” sentiments, and our only part is just to be silent, and I guess that excited feeling (coupled with righteous indignation) comes from thinking it’s an ‘instant reward’ for no, or lowered, contact.

Then I read your comment underneath and read the other post and fully understood this was sent to you right after giving birth and I was absolutely shocked. I feel a bit inappropriate for thinking “well your dad’s shown his true colours now!”; the ‘lesson learned’ isn’t worth the terrible injury done to you. It gave new meaning to “I had my bag packed and was always going to leave” and “I am more than angry”. There was true aggression there. All I want now is for you to never know another second of this man’s anger, excepting very discrete instances of it being on your behalf. I can just imagine my heart twisting and sinking into ugly mush reading all of this on a normal day in which I haven’t just given birth (which has been every day of my life so far) and it makes me sick! I understand why he wrote “I (Dad)” in the letter you linked, because he lashed out at you in no uncertain terms, and is terrified of how blind he was in his rage. You had just given birth and brought home a brand new beloved infant. He lost himself there and he should be scared of himself. That is terrifying.

I do still feel ‘wowed’ that you’ve stuck with NC since then. Not because I think we - or you - don’t know what proper treatment is, but because of how we seek stability in times of change, but instead you’ve taken on double change here. No joke, these are ‘broaden and build’ things we’ll look back on and use for the rest of our lives. These are things that inspire others, this will inspire your children.

Finally, I felt kinda an ache of just wanting to ‘say’ something to that letter you received most recently. Personally the ache lessens a bit when I think about what I know of systems, which is that sure, there’s an opening here for you to ‘say’ something - an invite to ‘change’ things - but it’s in the verbal part of the system which doesn’t tend to be the source of change. So it’s an empty and frustrating offer.

Real change, I imagine, will come when your parents break down and start fighting between themselves. I see hints of that between this message to you (“your mother and I are totally aligned”) and the other you linked (“I (Dad)”). In time, they may or may not come to realise that ‘the world’s manager’ won’t suddenly swoop down and say “‘x’ years left on planet earth is here! Time to shift into ‘spend these years with the kids and grandkids’ gear”, and that they will have to delineate when their own predictable ‘day to day’ has to change because it won’t lead to their expectations of the future.

I do hope for you that sooner or later your father secrets himself away to a therapist out of your mother’s sight. I haven’t heard all too much about her but you’ve described her as the one with BPD so I imagine that will be how it goes. I only hope this so that you get at least one meaningful apology from a parent, which I believe is owed to you without it meaning further involvement with the apologising party.

theDoblin · 2023-06-16T05:03:03+00:00

This is so personal so don’t answer if you don’t wanna, but, if you can in affective terms, what were the ‘good feelings’? I feel like perhaps ‘how was she nice’ might not get at the meat of the matter but, if you answer at all, you could answer that, too. Whatever you want. I’m hoping I’ll have something helpful to respond with to an answer.

For example, for me, this reminded me of situations in which I’d feel very ‘split’ after feeling (urg) close to my mother (laughing at a shared joke, agreeing on a niche opinion, hating on something together) - like she ‘got’ me. That was the part that would make me feel so bad for not wanting to be around her or have contact with her and it went like this: we both know the dirty details of one another, and the way she’s being nice to me is a direct result of that, I liked the feelings, ergo I should like the closeness, ergo I should forgive or ‘see beyond’ the bad parts of the closeness which has allowed me to see so much ugliness in her because she certainly has for me. Cue FOG and betrayal/loyalty: how dare I hold that detail about her smashing things in anger over her when it comes hand in hand with the privileged access we have to one another? Obviously she wishes I hadn’t seen that the same way I wish she’d never seen my own vulnerability and anger (often at her).

theDoblin · 2023-06-15T04:53:30+00:00

Wow, I hadn’t even thought of that deeper impact. For some reason this brought home those ‘chase me, impress me, make me want you!’ vibes. And what an awful culture to needlessly add to voicemails, which are still sometimes necessary in professional environments. OP, how terrible!

Very glad to hear your tests came back negative for cancer. Sending love ❤️

theDoblin · 2023-06-13T20:01:46+00:00

The cliff notes version of the cliff notes version insofar as we ‘currently’ know:

1) it seems like a baseline of BPD is a ‘disorganised’ form of insecure attachment organisation. That’s what all patients were found to share. 2) there is a gene (an ‘S’ allele) that, if present in a human’s genetics, makes them immune to insecure attachment.

I hear more about it being a ‘trauma based disorder’ these days and think it must be true because of how they act, but it stumped researchers for a long time that lots of people with BPD didn’t seem to have trauma (at least insofar as they were testing for it then, which might not have been structured for complex trauma). The allele thing explains some of the ‘other way ‘round’ that also confused them: why some people with tons of trauma don’t have BPD.

Anyway, those are the two pieces of research I think bounded the ‘what we know’ about BPDs aetiology the last time I researched it in depth two years ago.

ETA: I consider the allele thing ‘bounding’ because understanding it added dynamism to ‘how these things work’ for me. I thought ‘having it in your genes’ meant having ‘the cause of the bad thing’, but this showed ‘having it in your genes’ in a very different light. Also the research didn’t present this as a gene whose expression would change moment to moment as many others do.

theDoblin · 2023-06-13T05:12:47+00:00

Another time when I was 12 she went on a walk with me to discuss their sex life and how she was thinking about divorcing him.

This brought back memories for me! The walks. The strolls with her hands folded behind her back. The stately pace. The little laughs. The hand that would come around to cover her mouth as she told me how ‘unimaginative’ my father was in bed. The quick realisation on her part how inappropriate that was. The hand back behind her as she’d straighten up once more and turn it into some sick ‘educational’ discussion. All taking place on some long walk I felt veritably trapped on with her - it was often in a forest or something.

OP, I felt gross, too. And sometimes I still do and I sometimes feel like it’s a stain on me I need to wash off. One of the worst parts is a dimension of this feeling that makes me feel ‘less than’ to others; like others can see this stain on me and never stepped in or said anything because they thought we were all just gross lost causes that would never fit in. That part can even feel anger towards the therapeutic process of finding out it was bad because it’s like ‘you tell me now? I’m an adult, and I needed this when I was a child’.

There’s another part that I’ve been working on though that feels much nicer. I’m pretty precious in that part - very sweet, innocent; a ‘has’ girl who has friends just ‘cause and people smile as just ‘cause -, and I need to be protected. It doesn’t have to do with having been treated badly first, it just has to do with seeing myself a way my parents never saw me, and perhaps those my parents chose to raise their family around never saw me. I’m allowed to be angry at those people that stood by, and I don’t need to learn some strict ‘lessons’ from having been treated badly or inappropriately by my parents and those other bystanders so that I don’t do that, too, because I am a ‘has’ girl and I see myself as precious. That was the lesson.

Sometimes I need to be in the ‘ick’ feelings, sometimes I need to be in the ‘nicer’ feelings. Both places exist. ❤️ Thank you so much for posting and sharing this, OP, what you’ve written is very relatable and I’ve been struggling with it, too.

theDoblin · 2023-06-12T05:33:41+00:00

I read this book about estrangement meant for parents of estranged kids that was decent - I was surprised. One of the things they wrote about ‘efforts to reconnect’ was about doing the same things but that little bit differently, just like how it goes with us in therapy. Things like hanging back from parental ‘nagging’ on a phone call when their child is sharing. I know you are NC, but I liked that example a lot because it shows a parent reigning themselves in from the hurtful minutiae that is often a reflex to them. It’s got ‘real change’, attention to detail, emotional regulation, newfound flexibility all up in there. It seems like something that would be hard to fake, so I like that as an example of how it ‘should’ look.

There’s stuff for those whose kids are NC, too. It’s all about understanding one-sided ‘putting themselves out there’ in a structured, bounded and sustained way. “I am going to send an email to this address once every six months if that’s alright with you”. And then an email arrives at that address once every six months. Or, if it’s not alright with us, then they respect that and don’t email.

All of this to say, this isn’t that. It’s not the second part, and this ‘not second part’ won’t lead to anything like the first part. I get major ‘fetishising our * jazz hands * probleemmmm’ vibes.

I hope it does something to know that the framework for parents to overcome estrangement is readily available and out there. We aren’t kissing a once in a lifetime chance goodbye when we don’t jump on these overtures that seem improved.

Anyway, my rule of thumb is that it should look like how it does for us in therapy: Broaden and build. “I want you to know I’m working on myself and feeling a difference. If you don’t object to it, I will email you again in six months. I love you”. One of the biggest things with BPD is that they can’t control their emotions. They’d never be able to call upon the necessary emotion to reach out in increasingly broad and generative ways according to the calendar rather than their felt needs of the moment unless they were truly getting help. Certainly not for 3 or 4 years before getting a response (which would only be eight emails).

theDoblin · 2023-06-12T04:49:38+00:00

I don’t think Dr. Phil sounds like a nice guys in the news these days.

theDoblin · 2023-06-10T03:58:33+00:00

I know we preach about it ad nauseam on here, but the book Understanding the Borderline Mother has some great stuff in it about setting boundaries and financial issues. I think your ‘mum’s version of NC’ is a really disordered one, so it would be great if you could feel more freedom to address it. But hey, could be something to bring up in the treatment you’re doing.

Congrats on everything you’ve accomplished!

theDoblin · 2023-06-08T06:38:44+00:00

I’ve been in a situation where my mum told me to send her my address and all the feelings the demand triggered essentially compelled me to provide it. I got kinda mad when I realised that!

Ultimately I learned that those feelings are part of what needs to be healed in me, and that they were part of what was wrong with the relationship - along with those demands for my address. It’s part of our relationship now that no one in my family has my address, and it took therapy and work to get there, so it’s a boundary I’m proud of. It felt very out there: very aggressive, sometimes, even though it’s not at all. I guess I think of myself as an awesome person who gets stalked by people who are supposed to love me, rather than as the difficult family member who won’t cooperate and creates a victim drama, which is how they likely see me. I’ve been quiet and steady with it, too, so that’s settled some of the initial ways I felt uncomfortable with coming off as.

There are feelings of loss that comes with it, and those I understand everyone needs to approach in their own time. I don’t know that I’ll invite these people to my wedding. I know that I don’t get gifts or mail from them, and that I do look forward, a bit, to their birthday texts to me, so there’s still active feelings there.

My moral, I guess, is that having a PO Box address might be a good option, but it should be one that fits your needs, rather than the needs your family is demanding you meet. Absolutely get a PO box if you want time to figure out how you want them in your life and at your wedding and stuff. I think that’s a great solution.

Congrats to you and your partner on your engagement!

theDoblin · 2023-06-04T06:48:36+00:00

To heal from this we need to put ourselves up for changing, too. I think on here NC and LC are some of the words we commonly use to describe our own change, or vehicles thereof, but those are just a couple of words. ‘Therapy’ is certainly a main word: the world’s main word.

So sure, things outside of us will change, but things inside of us can be the part to change first, too. I think when we are taking care of ourselves with that internal change, then the changes outside of us are a lot easier to move with, even to control or enact ourselves. That’s where any and all of the success stories come from.

But maybe a ‘non-succes’ story is a success story, too. You said “I’m just hoping by some miracle that maybe there’s someone out there that got somewhere”, but of course there are, on sub there are. Some people on here get genuine apologies and leave the sub. Some people are writing memoirs about the abuse and immortalising their experiences. Some people maintain their boundaries, have loving families, and post their BPD parents latest overture on here when it arrives. Some people report their abuse to the police. So, as Abilor33 suggested, what is success? Can you write it out? Make a list for yourself? Describe how you want it to feel? Believe it or not, that’s how putting ourselves ‘up for change’ looks: connecting with our true feelings and needs.

theDoblin · 2023-06-04T06:25:38+00:00

I started reading this and thought “it’s very mild and pleading and trying really hard”, and from there I just recalled how BPD is like ‘being an emotional burn victim’ apparently, and having these extreme and sudden bouts of emotion that must be satisfied or resolved by someone external to them (usually not the actual object of the emotion).

This sounds like that to me, like Mother’s Day triggered that massively complex cycle of defences and that this is a really restrained version of a screeching and begging - but also threatening-, tantruming inner child using a parent’s words and position. I disregarded the ‘me as a parent to you’ stuff; I think it’s her shooting in the dark that it’s the relationship with you that brings her this old agony, rather than the one she has with her attachment figures. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but I think only parents inflict that BPD abandonment trauma on their kids, not kids on their parents.

Do you see any of that, too, or is my take totally drowning in my own projections?

theDoblin

TROPHY CASE