That Old Time Validation

I watched a DVD on Friday ( big surprise for those that know me) that was made for the express purpose of educating the public about BPD and what the sufferer goes thru. I’m all for educating the public about what BPD is and isn’t. I love it that more treatments are becoming available; that someday, somehow this awful disorder will be treatable like diabetes.

What bothers me the most about these videos and the big name books, like Stop Walking on Eggshells or the DBT workbook, is how the non, in my case a child of a Borderline parent, is expected to validate their Borderline parents verbal abuse. We’re told in books that we need to validate what a person with BPD is feeling. They grew up lacking that validation and they need it, the experts say. Find something to validate, anything, that lets them know they are being heard. Validate validate validate! Say it like you mean it, dammit.

Sure, I’ll get right on that. Listen more to mom, lock away all the hurts she has inflicted on me. Must….validate……mom’s rages…………..check……must….lose myself……CHECK!

How’s this? “Oh mom I can see you are having a really hard time right now. It must be so frustrating to have a dtr that would do anything for you and yet I never get it right. I’m really proud of you for letting me know how you feel.” What the hell kind of treatment is that? Somehow the worse my mom treats me, the better she gets? Huh? People pay $$$ for this?

I won’t validate my mother when she is telling me what a bastard my father is (he isn’t, btw). I won’t validate her feelings as she verbally rips me to shreds. I won’t validate a person makes me stand at attention while she screams in my face. I won’t validate that. Why is it that I am expected to make nice about that?

What the hell kind of sense does it make to validate abuse? It makes no sense whatsoever for professionals to encourage a child (adult or minor) to validate that crap. That isn’t treatment, it’s promoting child abuse. For some reason it has become accepted that the children of Borderlines are no more than collateral damage. We’ve become expendable. It isn’t enough that we are taught from birth how we aren’t really a separate person from our parent but just tangible extensions of their emotions. No, the professionals themselves have now given us that added reinforcement of feeling less than human.

Why are the children of Borderline parents expected to be both their parent’s child and therapist? It’s not like we get bonus pay or extra TV privileges for doing both. We do learn how to delegate and how to become crackerjack hostage negotiators but last time I looked hostage negotiators aren’t in big demand. Especially is you are under 10. The HR people tend to get a little weird about someone under 18. Child labor laws and all that.

People who can delegate are in demand tho!. After a lifetime of managing a borderline parent I can delegate/manage so well that I have few friends yet a lot of human projects, if you catch my drift. Friends? Who needs friends! I’m my mothers bestest friend!

Say that on a playground when you’re 8 or 9 (or pay a kid to do it for you-I’ve found $20 works) and then watch what happens. Yep, you’re now the recess entertainment. Live action and all, baby. Just remember to duck.

So I say screw you to the people who tell me to validate my mother. In no way shape or form will I say it’s OK for her to verbally bash me. It’s not OK that I and other kids are taught to put our parents abusive needs before our own. Validation isn’t treatment, not at all. It might work in a therapeutic setting, sure, but otherwise it’s misguided at best and dangerous at worst to encourage people to abuse. How about we go back to the drawing board and get the priorities straight for once?

Children first and foremost. Treatments that take the responsibility out of a child’s hands and put it where it belongs-in the hands of the person with BPD.

I watched a DVD on Friday ( big surprise for those that know me) that was made for the express purpose of educating the public about BPD and what the sufferer goes thru. I’m all for educating the public about what BPD is and isn’t. I love it that more treatments are becoming available; that someday, somehow this awful disorder will be treatable like diabetes.

What bothers me the most about these videos and the big name books, like Stop Walking on Eggshells or the DBT workbook, is how the non, in my case a child of a Borderline parent, is expected to validate their Borderline parents verbal abuse. We’re told in books that we need to validate what a person with BPD is feeling. They grew up lacking that validation and they need it, the experts say. Find something to validate, anything, that lets them know they are being heard. Validate validate validate! Say it like you mean it, dammit.

Sure, I’ll get right on that. Listen more to mom, lock away all the hurts she has inflicted on me. Must….validate……mom’s rages…………..check……must….lose myself……CHECK!

How’s this? “Oh mom I can see you are having a really hard time right now. It must be so frustrating to have a dtr that would do anything for you and yet I never get it right. I’m really proud of you for letting me know how you feel.” What the hell kind of treatment is that? Somehow the worse my mom treats me, the better she gets? Huh? People pay $$$ for this?

I won’t validate my mother when she is telling me what a bastard my father is (he isn’t, btw). I won’t validate her feelings as she verbally rips me to shreds. I won’t validate a person makes me stand at attention while she screams in my face. I won’t validate that. Why is it that I am expected to make nice about that?

What the hell kind of sense does it make to validate abuse? It makes no sense whatsoever for professionals to encourage a child (adult or minor) to validate that crap. That isn’t treatment, it’s promoting child abuse. For some reason it has become accepted that the children of Borderlines are no more than collateral damage. We’ve become expendable. It isn’t enough that we are taught from birth how we aren’t really a separate person from our parent but just tangible extensions of their emotions. No, the professionals themselves have now given us that added reinforcement of feeling less than human.

Why are the children of Borderline parents expected to be both their parent’s child and therapist? It’s not like we get bonus pay or extra TV privileges for doing both. We do learn how to delegate and how to become crackerjack hostage negotiators but last time I looked hostage negotiators aren’t in big demand. Especially is you are under 10. The HR people tend to get a little weird about someone under 18. Child labor laws and all that.

People who can delegate are in demand tho!. After a lifetime of managing a borderline parent I can delegate/manage so well that I have few friends yet a lot of human projects, if you catch my drift. Friends? Who needs friends! I’m my mothers bestest friend!

Say that on a playground when you’re 8 or 9 (or pay a kid to do it for you-I’ve found $20 works) and then watch what happens. Yep, you’re now the recess entertainment. Live action and all, baby. Just remember to duck.

So I say screw you to the people who tell me to validate my mother. In no way shape or form will I say it’s OK for her to verbally bash me. It’s not OK that I and other kids are taught to put our parents abusive needs before our own. Validation isn’t treatment, not at all. It might work in a therapeutic setting, sure, but otherwise it’s misguided at best and dangerous at worst to encourage people to abuse. How about we go back to the drawing board and get the priorities straight for once?

Children first and foremost. Treatments that take the responsibility out of a child’s hands and put it where it belongs-in the hands of the person with BPD.

2 year anniversary

2 years ago today I told you, mom, that I could no longer have you in my life. You cried so hard I thought you were going to hyperventilate. Your 3 kids told you that we couldn’t take it anymore-the rages, the playing favorites or outright ignoring your dtrs when your son was around, the revolving door admissions to the psych unit.

How does that song go? Something about wanting a person to stay gone……I’m better when you’re gone, mom. I’m sorry to say that yet it’s true. I can’t be a dtr and your friend/appt maker/prescription picker upper/rescuer that calls 911 when you try to kill yourself. It isn’t even so much that I can’t do it mom but that I won’t anymore. You have a use for me when there’s a crisis because you taught me well that I was the one that needed to save you. If I could just keep saving you then surely one of those times you’d know how much I loved you. I just had to prove it! How much I wanted to know without any doubts or conditions that you loved me. Each time I picked up the pieces for you I prayed that this would be the time it all changed, that this time you really would stick with DBT and recover. That this time I would finally have a mother. That this time I had proven myself worthy of you.

I will never forget walking into your house to find you passed out on the bed and your suicide note on the kitchen counter. You put me in the position of playing God. I had the option to not call 911 and to be honest mom, I hesitated to call. My first thought was how I could get out of the house and leave no trace I had been there. I wanted to let you die. It wasn’t just for my sake-I still wonder today if it wouldn’t have been better for you.

I’m sorry you are so miserable, mom. I know you are. I saw it growing up, how you bought more and more clothes as if those expensive pieces of fabric somehow made you a better person. I saw it when you tried to tell me my father, your husband, was worthless. It was all transparent, mom. What you accused dad of were things you yourself had done. YOU had the affair, YOU hid $$$ while bills went unpaid, YOU gave all your attention to work instead of to your children. YOU were the bottomless pit that would never be filled, not me.

So much projection, mom. While I know a lot of it has to do with having BPD that doesn’t give you a free pass. The very things you hate about/bitch about in others are present in you. You passed on your own allegedly miserable childhood to your children. Treatment was repeatedly turned down by you. It was easier to make me the scapegoat, wasn’t it? I see that now. Unable to face and/or take responsibility for the pain you felt and afflicted on others, you tried to use your own child to absolve yourself. It’s as if you somehow thought if you could make me crazier than you, then it justified your treatment of me.

I don’t think you will ever know the full extent of your abusive parenting. What you did was a systematic annihilation of me. I liked a green blazer? You bought a red one for me because it looked better. This was constant as I grew up. It didn't matter what I liked or disliked, everything was decided by you. The unspoken message was that I wasn’t even capable of making minor decisions. I wanted to go to a performing arts high school? It was a lot of work, you said, and did I really think I had some sort of talent? I didn’t send in the application and when you found out I hadn't sent it in I was given a stern lecture about shaping up and following thru on things. When I lost 40 lbs and dad told me I looked great you fled the room in tears. No one could console you as you sobbed over and over that no one paid attention to you. Well GOD FORBID the attention not focus on you every second of every day.

I gained my weight back after that. I thought I had done something wrong, showed you up or something. That was your hold on me-the constant belittling, the whispered criticisms, all that crap from you destroyed any sense of self I had. I thought I owed you something. I thought you would love me if I showed you that realized I was an inferior person to you. Somehow I had come to relate my captor. I saw myself as you did, well actually
I saw myself as you saw yourself.

I never really existed for you, did I? I know that now. I was a convenient target for you. Even now, as you try to turn relatives and family friends against your kids, I can see that it isn’t your children you miss. It’s the things you thought we were. You miss an easy target on which to blame your own crappy life. You want back your golden child because that child’s accomplishments mean that YOU are worth something. Not one thought was ever given to my brother, it was all about what he can do for you, how good he can make you look.

You worked so hard to keep us apart. He was the good one, I was the bad one, little sister was the spare target whenever bro or I wasn’t around. And that, mom, is what I give you on our 2^nd anniversary. I give you the gift of knowledge that your children have grown wiser and closer in these past 2 years. We have discovered the lies you told about us to the other. We have each refuted the lies you told and we now treat the other with only honesty, trust and respect.

I’m glad you’re gone. Please stay that way.

For all the trolls out there taking my posts from here and posting it at other sites WITHOUT MY PERMISSION/WITHOUT CREDIT listen up-I will have every one of my posts that I do not authorize to appear anywhere but here taken down by the sites admin. If you want to use it ask. If you don't all bets are off and you're fair game for whatever I can legally do to you.
You've been warned.

Stubs

My mother is horribly abusive. It took me until I was 25 years old to admit this, and even then I felt like a traitor. I grew up in an environment where abuse was considered affection. When I was 6 my mother ripped the sheets off my bed, threw them at me (nearly knocking me over with the weight of a heavey bedspread) and had me make the bed over and over, until I got it the way she wanted, because she loved me-so she said. I had to learn to do things “right.” Therapists and my father told me that my mother pushed me so hard/stomped on my soul because she loved me……because I was such a forgetful child……because I was a messy child……because I was so disorganized…….because I was me. I was punished for being me. The essential parts of being a child, of being carefree and more interested about worms in the dirt than how mom got the dirt out of my clothes, were seen as deliberate affronts to mom.

I can't tell you how or whenI knew I had to lock away a part of myself far, far away from the reality of what I lived. My mother annihilated what was left of my soul. Whne I try to describe to others what was like to have a mother with BPD, some people think I am a whiny, bratty drama queen when I tell them of the things my mother has done to me. I wish I could impress upon these same people that what they se as minor annoyances or basic teeanage rebellion were actually the bricks of the wall mom built around me. The constant displays of her disgust with me wore my spirit down and built her wall even faster. What they saw as something normal between a mother and a child was so much more…..taken as an isolated incident they are trivial; when the puzzle is put together it’s astounding what my mother got away with. Her hatred for herself, for the knowledge of her own madness, took form by my mom shoving me down the well of her own despair and self hatred. The well had no bottom. I rubbed my fingers raw in that well as I slowly climbed out. My fingertips and nails are gone. The remaining stubs are raw from climbing out of that well. I use those stubs, what is left after a childhood with a Borderline mother, to navigate my life. .

One stub used to hold me back from setting goals. I have slowly healed that over and marvel at the new pink flesh. It’s tender flesh and cuts easily but it’s there. I’m a 1/3 done with my college degree and am a High Honors student. Right now I want to quit because I am quite sure at some point in the near future I will screw this up yet I press on. Another stub still smarts daily. I know that stub will not heal completely for a long time just as my trust in the mental health community will take a long time to form.

Professionals who put an abusive person’s well being before that person’s children have a lot to answer for.

Other stubs are no longer pink but blend into my skin tone. The only give away is the shininess of the new skin. I give myself away when I try too hard with a new friend. The newness of friendship is so obvious to others that I am quite sure some people think I am off my rocker. My shiny earnestness can be uncomfortable for those who don’t know the reason for it yet I am finding that the same shininess attracts others like me. The unspoken understanding I share with these people is beyond description…..to belong in a world and a place where I hid in plain view for so long is uncomfortable. The skin of that stub, the need to belong somewhere, is the furthest along. It itches and feels tight but I know scratching it will only open the wound. So I leave it alone, gritting my teeth as it heals, grinning and bearing it in life when the only thing I want to do is run back to the well where it is dark and cold yet familiar.

What do you think of when I say the words mental illnes? Do you picture a homeless person that wanders the streets, talking to themselves or imaginary people? Or maybe you think of the cat ladies that have been in the press recently. You know the ones-they have over 20 or so cats that they can’t care for, their house if overun and close to being (or already is) condemned.

Where do you think their children are? Did you think of that? Many people don’t. In fact, almost no one does. The children of the mentally ill are an invisible community. We are expected to somehow take in our homeless parent and make them whole. Society turns away from us when we can’t do our supposed duty of making sure our mother doesn’t have more pets than she can take care of. The parent that raised us in chaos and heartache is put above our own life.

I’m not just throwing this out for the hell of it, I’ve been through it. My mother handed me over to the family child molester when I was 4 because she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be in the center of a family drama. I forever after that heard about her pain of having one her children abused yet if I said one word about the pain I went thru I was immediately told I just couldn’t understand what she was going thru.She forced me to stay in my bedroom for a day at a time, leaving food by the door and requiring that I ask permission to use the bathroom just down the hall. It didn’t matter that she fell asleep on the couch and didn’t hear me, I either asked permission or I paid for my transgressions against her.

One particular instance of this stands out. It was a Sunday and as I stayed in my room, I could hear the laughter of Sunday dinner downstairs. I heard my mother’s unspoken message loud and clear-I was expendable from the family. After this I tried frantically to show my worth to her but it never worked. The harder I proved myself the higher the hurdles were placed.

Growing up with a mother that has BPD is like being a living, breathing war zone. When I see pictures of bombed homes in Bosnia or Iraq I see my heart. I had no way to defend myself against her. She used covert tactics. My mother is extremely proficient at psychological black ops. The neighbors couldn’t put their finger on it……teachers were pulled in by her masterful BS, and my siblings and I launched whatever insurgent attacks we could.

So much of what I endured was visible. People saw her berate me in public. They knew I was hospitalized (twice) for wanting to kill myself when I was the tender age of 12. Even that wasn’t enough for professionals to realize that something was drastically wrong with my home life. Yelling , insulting, and generally using your children like cattle evidently just isn’t sexy enough for the pros to give a damn. Show them bruises or broken bones and they are all over it. A broken heart and a bruised soul don’t matter.

Time and again my other would charm these professionals. I would sit in therapy amazed at the way mom was able to blame a child for causing their own depression. I was even more amazed when these same people would listen and believe her, despite what I and my sibs told them. A mother knows best, right? Mothers don’t abuse. To acknowledge that would shatter all they knew, all the money they spent on their expensive educations. Better to ignore the children and buy the lady’s BS rather than take the time to help her kids.

The US has a skewed view of domestic violence. Domestic violence in the US is seen as a woman abused by her husband or boyfriend, leaving in the middle of night to seek help at a women’s shelter. There this woman will get safety, support, help, and so many other things to put her life back together. No excuses are made for a man that abuses his wife or kids.

But……if a woman is abusive, her children can’t leave. Very few places will take a man and his children fleeing an abusive wife/mother. Excuses are repeatedly made for a mom that abuses….she’s mentally ill (ya think?), she needs help (wow, that’s a brilliant deduction!) and on and on……..

When you are an adult that breaks free from a mentally ill, abusive parent, in my case my mother, you are reviled by society. How dare I think that my own well being matter more than making sure mom hasn’t tried to kill herself again. I am selfish for wanting to put an end to her tearful phones telling me how awful my father is (he isn’t, btw).

What was I thinking, to treat my mother as an adult that needs take responsibility for her illness and subsequent treatment? How dare I treat an adult as an adult!