I Am the Child of a Borderline Parent
My adopted mother is unquestionably suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I am trying to cope with feelings of rage over my family and the medical community's unflinching support for my BPD mother.
I am adopted. At the age of 3 months I was admitted into the hospital with a hernia. At that time, the medical community diagnosed me with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). This is somewhat kindly referred to as a mismatch between infant and caregiver. They wanted to take me away from my demonic (but strongly motivated) mother, but for some reason were swayed.
The result is about 18 years of hellish treatment, being characterized as the cause of the problem with my mother's behavior. Her submissive husband essentially sacrificed me on her alter. He unflinching supported her and her outrageous emotional reactions to ordinary events, and my relatives also supported her, telling me to just accept "who she was." Even my adopted brother and sister sympathize with my mother, believing that I (and my Dad, who didn't participate in the emotional abuse) were the bad guys.
Recreating what went wrong, my (adopted mother) would intentionally agitate me as a baby by overstimulating me with touch (she admits it "made her feel guilty" how worked up I would get). This basically shorted out the neural connections between my inner emotional brain and my outer control portion of my brain (i.e. affect regulation system). I can only guess that she wanted me to experience the overwhelming emotions that she felt.
In relation to emotionally intolerable invasive psychological maltreatment that causes discomfort which exceeds the child's growing internal resources, affect regulation skills are retarded. The abuse victim becomes expert at more powerful (but generally more primitive) disassociation, thought suppression, distraction, and other avoidance strategies that allow continued functioning in the face of otherwise potentially overwhelming distress.
In other words, my mother set me up to fail, because now I was formed to ignore her emotional outbursts and extreme emotional needs, which only further maddened her. Furthermore, I was then a social retard, causing me to be a loner. Finally, this caused a dynamic to be set in motion where I assumed the role of a "negator," who drew the majority of my mother's emotional fire to shelter the other two children, and somewhat stabilized her emotions toward them.
I have, since leaving that hellish environment, disassociated myself from all those who unflinchingly supported my mother, but I was drawn in again recently when my mother re-established relations because my dad was dying. Her symptoms have gotten worse, and after a brief reconciliation I had to again disassociate myself from them - resulting in the last words to my father before he died being rejection.
As a result of that I have sobered up (having self-medicated myself for more than three decades trying to avoid confronting my childhood demons) and am intensely examining my childhood. I tried a couple times before, but was told that I was "not an appropriate candidate for talk therapy," and another time "to avoid mental health professionals because I would be misunderstood."
In the absence of sufficient internal affect regulations skills, the individual may respond to painful affect and activated negative cognition with external behaviors that distract, sooth, numb, or otherwise reduce painful internal states, such as substance abuse, aggression, bingeing, or even self-injury.
I obviously have poor affect regulation, and the rage I feel at being abandoned by the medical profession and my relatives screams out to be expressed sideways. How could they have made the terrible mistake of placing any children with that sick woman, or watched as she continually emotionally abused me? My brother (a lifelong alcoholic, morbidly obese, and with chronic untreated high blood pressure resulting in dehabilitating strokes) was murdered while living homeless in Texas, but my sister continues to unflinching support my mother - in fact my mother idolizes her husband ("splitting" or all good/all bad is a characteristic of this personality disorder)! How irritating.
Thank you for listening.
I am adopted. At the age of 3 months I was admitted into the hospital with a hernia. At that time, the medical community diagnosed me with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). This is somewhat kindly referred to as a mismatch between infant and caregiver. They wanted to take me away from my demonic (but strongly motivated) mother, but for some reason were swayed.
The result is about 18 years of hellish treatment, being characterized as the cause of the problem with my mother's behavior. Her submissive husband essentially sacrificed me on her alter. He unflinching supported her and her outrageous emotional reactions to ordinary events, and my relatives also supported her, telling me to just accept "who she was." Even my adopted brother and sister sympathize with my mother, believing that I (and my Dad, who didn't participate in the emotional abuse) were the bad guys.
Recreating what went wrong, my (adopted mother) would intentionally agitate me as a baby by overstimulating me with touch (she admits it "made her feel guilty" how worked up I would get). This basically shorted out the neural connections between my inner emotional brain and my outer control portion of my brain (i.e. affect regulation system). I can only guess that she wanted me to experience the overwhelming emotions that she felt.
In relation to emotionally intolerable invasive psychological maltreatment that causes discomfort which exceeds the child's growing internal resources, affect regulation skills are retarded. The abuse victim becomes expert at more powerful (but generally more primitive) disassociation, thought suppression, distraction, and other avoidance strategies that allow continued functioning in the face of otherwise potentially overwhelming distress.
In other words, my mother set me up to fail, because now I was formed to ignore her emotional outbursts and extreme emotional needs, which only further maddened her. Furthermore, I was then a social retard, causing me to be a loner. Finally, this caused a dynamic to be set in motion where I assumed the role of a "negator," who drew the majority of my mother's emotional fire to shelter the other two children, and somewhat stabilized her emotions toward them.
I have, since leaving that hellish environment, disassociated myself from all those who unflinchingly supported my mother, but I was drawn in again recently when my mother re-established relations because my dad was dying. Her symptoms have gotten worse, and after a brief reconciliation I had to again disassociate myself from them - resulting in the last words to my father before he died being rejection.
As a result of that I have sobered up (having self-medicated myself for more than three decades trying to avoid confronting my childhood demons) and am intensely examining my childhood. I tried a couple times before, but was told that I was "not an appropriate candidate for talk therapy," and another time "to avoid mental health professionals because I would be misunderstood."
In the absence of sufficient internal affect regulations skills, the individual may respond to painful affect and activated negative cognition with external behaviors that distract, sooth, numb, or otherwise reduce painful internal states, such as substance abuse, aggression, bingeing, or even self-injury.
I obviously have poor affect regulation, and the rage I feel at being abandoned by the medical profession and my relatives screams out to be expressed sideways. How could they have made the terrible mistake of placing any children with that sick woman, or watched as she continually emotionally abused me? My brother (a lifelong alcoholic, morbidly obese, and with chronic untreated high blood pressure resulting in dehabilitating strokes) was murdered while living homeless in Texas, but my sister continues to unflinching support my mother - in fact my mother idolizes her husband ("splitting" or all good/all bad is a characteristic of this personality disorder)! How irritating.
Thank you for listening.
By:
dobermanmacleod
Age:
51-55
,
Male
