BPD Parenting

What is BPD? In a BPD Parent?

At it’s core, BPD is a pattern of overly intense emotional responses.

-One result of overly intense emotional reactions tends to be a pattern of misinterpreting situations as hurtful when they are in fact benign. The misinterpretations occur while the situation is happening, or while retelling the events later.

-They have an external locus of control, which means they tend to see their lives as out of control and their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as depending on external factors. They will often place blame on others for their own actions.

-There may be functioning in two quite different modes: attractive and highly competent at times alternating with periods of inappropriate anger, even raging, possibly narcissistic, and explicitly hurtful behavior, harmful to themselves and/or to others.

What else might you see in a mother-or a dad-with BPD?

-Most prominently, and particularly when a parent’s anger kicks in, demanding, critical, dominating, judgmental, or chaos-making interactions may replace cooperative communicating.

-Difficult parents, especially dads, may be labeled as abusive.

-Because the BPD parent has a core wound of abandonment, often stemming from a traumatic childhood event, they get left with arrested emotional development. This keeps the parent with BPD from interacting in age-appropriate ways, and creates a “parentified” child, meaning that the BPD parent counts on the non-BPD child to assu,e the adult role.

-People who grow up with raging, screaming, emotionally or physically abusive parents become conditioned early in life to totally obey, placate, and cater to their domineering parent, or risk emotional, or even physical injury to their own self.

-Children of mothers, or father, with BPD, should be considered a high-risk group.

-Given the high rate of family transmission with the disorder and associated features, children of parents with BPD may inherit genes predisposing them to a difficult temperament, emotional reactivity, and/or impulsivity.

-Children of BPD parents routinely become overly sensitive to the moods and needs of others, overbearing, quick to wound, and overly critical of themselves.

-They tend to feel severe anxiety, and as adults, report missing chunks of memory from their childhood.

-It’s confusing for a child with a BPD parent, because we get our reality in some ways from our parents, and if their reality is skewed, the child is always trying to figure out what is real and what is not real.

Traits of a child raised by a BPD parent (positive and negative)-

-For many children with a BPD parent, necessities like care and positive regard are commodities that appear on an unpredictable schedule-based not on the child’s schedule, but on the parent’s internal state of being.

-As a result, children with BPD parents tend to grow up mistrust of others.

-They have trouble with intimacy because they are constantly fearful that the other person will unpredictably turn on them.

-They also tend to struggle with feelings of shame.

-They may become very good at reading other people’s feelings and attempting to predict what they want, but are usually clueless to their own wants and feelings.

-They also often develop very strong feelings of guilt and personal responsibility for the actions and feelings of others.

Six issues frequently associated with BPD parenting-

1 difficulty separating relationships with their children from problems with others

2 inconsistent parenting

3 unpredictable love

4 feeling threatened by a child’s normal behavior

5 inability to love unconditionally

6 feeling threatened by a child’s feelings and opinions

Resilient traits of children raised by BPD parents-

-they adapt and are resilient in ways that exclude them from developing BPD

-if they accept the similarities with their BPD parent, but also clearly define the differences, it allows for the development of the child’s separate sense of self