TLDR: Mum clearly has bpd, should I avoid contact in order to help myself? 


Hi gang. I dip in and out of subscribing to this sub cos I feel like there’s quite a lot of negging in the responses to requests for advice. Certainly there has been to me in the past and as we know, people negging on you can be catastrophic. 

I started proper therapy last year for BPD and my mum kept coming up in the chats. I live a few hundred miles away from her now, but am visiting. 

I know she’s a difficult woman and has some BPD like traits but it was only this evening, during a frank and really quite relieving conversation with my brother and his partner (who’ve been living with my parents) about her, and the way she’s been treating them, that I realised she’s most definitely got it. 

She’s been really pass agg, manipulative and up-and-down with them, without going into detail she’s been displaying very clear signs of bpd, ones I recognise in myself but even stronger. (For background she worked in psychiatry all her life and retired 2 years ago). 

I usually only see her twice or thrice a year and we communicate by text and phone calls a couple of times a week. However, she has been really mean about people this visit and trying to coerce me into doing so too. I never used to mind and found it quite cathartic when it was about nameless people in call centres, or companies we’ve dealt with or whatever. But this visit she’s been absolutely awful about friends and family. When I refused to join in earlier she had a go at me about being ‘overly reasonable’, almost as if she was angry I didn’t fit this mini-me mould. 

I now feel exhausted and sad and quite anxious being here in her house. My partner suggested talking to her about her possibly having bpd but she would never talk to me again and ban my father from doing so. 

My question is, should I distance myself from her; stop visiting, reduce the texts and phone calls and stay in my home town at Christmastimes? It’s for my own good, as I’m making a huge effort to regulate my emotions. And she clearly isn’t, and she is being very negative and quite manipulative to us all. 

Yes, I cry to myself... however having suffered with the same thing for years, would it send her under too? 

