The Unpredictable, Borderline Mother Can Handicap Growth

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One of the most problematic aspects of having a mother with borderline personality disorder is dealing with their emotional volatility. Moving in and out of poorly integrated ego states, it’s impossible to know what will trigger them to jump ship from, say, a caregiving persona to its opposite (and regressively childish) care-demanding demeanor.

It can feel as though you’re confronted with an endless parade—or masquerade—of discordant, incompatible facades. And more than anything else, what we all require in growing up is knowing what to expect from the parent we’re primarily dependent on. Typically, that parent is our mom.

Regrettably, however, it’s mostly a guessing game. Unable to predict which mother will show up next leaves you confused and anxious. Or, if you dare admit it to yourself, frustratedly duped and angry. You can’t know which maternal impersonation you need to get ready for.

Ironically, contrary to being the unlucky child of a parent (or parents) suffering from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), borderlines are generally quite capable of feeling genuine love for their child. But it's admittedly conditional because that parent’s own unmet needs from childhood at times compels them to regard you as potentially offering them the reassurance or unconditional love, they achingly missed while growing up.

What’s Adaptive in Living with a BPD Mother Is Maladaptive With Virtually Everybody Else

Some of the most pronounced borderline features follow. These features specifically point to the inordinate costs of having—or better, seeking to have—an intimate relationship with the person at once closest to you, yet indefinitely out of reach.

In the end, just as the BPD’s genetic endowment and environmental contingencies sabotaged their healthy development, so do their children often sabotage their non-maternal relationships because of how they felt they had to “program” themselves to fit into their own chaotically dysregulated environment.

Even after they leave home, their BPD parent has become firmly ensconced in their head. While their programming can now be safely altered, it’s become unconscious and automatic.

And it won’t change unless, as a prerequisite, they find patient, stable, and trustworthy friends. Or see a therapist who correctly identifies what they’re still saddled with and can assist them to eventually let go of it.

Here are four areas of juvenile adaptations to BPD mothers that cause children to regard themselves adversely and cast a negative spell on their personal and professional relationships later on.

Emotional Instability and Insecurity

Unable to take charge of their emotions, BPD moms could hardly be worse models for their kids. Children learn to gain control of their feelings because they’re taught how by parents who help them appreciate things from a broader, more balanced, and rational perspective.

But maturationally arrested BPDs can’t do this themselves, doubtless because of their own inherited and trauma-generated deficits.

Given their non-chosen limitations, BPDs are doing the best they can. They don’t consciously mean to harm their children, yet they’re cursed with enormous blind spots that all too easily can be passed onto their progeny.

For example, their uncontrollable mood swings and the indiscriminate intensity of their emotional reactions may be involuntary. All the same, they do a number on their offspring.

Irresponsibility in Caretaking

As already alluded to, in several ways BPDs unintentionally parentify their children. When they’ve been triggered and regressed to a childhood ego state, they can self-deludedly mistake their child for an adult.

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Consequently, they’ll insist—with the almost limitless power they hold over their offspring—that the child offer them the validation never received when they were in the custody of their own ignorantly irresponsible parents. Additionally, or alternatively, the child may be assigned parental responsibility for their younger siblings.

As a result, such children may struggle in their efforts to evolve a sense of autonomy distinct from this mutually dependent caregiving role—a role that now makes them experience a perturbing internal emptiness, though initially, it defined their very identity in the family constellation.

Inability to Validate Their Child’s Thoughts and Feelings

Desperately needing their child to confirm their perspective, rarely supported by their own parents originally, BPDs (similar to NPDs) have great difficulty validating their child’s emotions and viewpoints when they diverge from their own. And when, therefore, they’re compelled to disconfirm their offspring’s reality, they can be understood as, unawares, gaslighting their child.

The tragic outcome of their obliviousness is that the child is left afflicted with self-doubt, unable to trust the truth of their personal experience. Moreover, the child—accidentally abandoned emotionally—is left with a distorted sense of reality, reduced confidence and self-esteem, and mistrust in their own judgment.

That, in turn, can create irresolvable difficulties in comfortably asserting reasonable boundaries with others. Because their cognitions and emotions go down different paths, their boundaries don’t feel reasonable.

Modeling Dysfunctional Methods of Coping with Stress

Inasmuch as kids learn to cope with adversity through observing how their dominant parent has handled disappointments and failures, they’re also highly subject to developing mental disorders aligned to their caretakers.

Susceptible to complex PTSD, as transferred to them through the emotional turmoil prevalent in their homes, they can grow into individuals plagued by such dysphoric states as guilt, shame, anxiety, or depressive disorders; eating and other functional disturbances—and (hardly surprising) impulsiveness, aggression, obstinacy, and (alas) full-blown BPD.

Their mother’s primitive, dysregulated coping devices may well become their own.

Inevitably, just as was true earlier for their unresilient mother, they’ll wind up unconsciously manifesting retaliatory behaviors almost guaranteed to jeopardize their later attachments.

The Solution to This Enduring Dilemma Is Complicated

Seldom is there any simple solution for the widespread problems experienced by children of borderlines. If they can, non-defensively and protractedly, engage with a highly proficient therapist (ideally, one knowledgeable about dialectical behavior therapy) and receive what might best be designated “corrective re-parenting,” they may finally be able to cultivate healthier beliefs, attitudes, and communication skills untenable in their youth.

Beyond that, establishing warm, supportive, and understanding relationships—from friends in whom they can safely confide—can significantly advance positive change. That is, with a liberating growth mindset, they can grasp more fully what happened to them in childhood and begin to revise residual feelings of distrust and hyper-vigilance (so necessary growing up).

Support groups, too, can be valuable in helping them alter the no-longer-adaptive programming so deeply ingrained in the past.

Finally, as regards their current connection with their BPD mother, which can severely challenge their new-found resolve, they need to scrupulously cultivate greater emotional distance from her (that is, assuming she's not been working on herself, too).

Such increased distance will render her less likely to trigger them. And since it’s hardly likely they can “undo” their mother’s rigid personality structure, it’s generally not wise to try.

What would make sense for them is—slowly but surely—to take away the authority they earlier couldn’t help but give their parent. And to replace it with their own adult authority, so they can at last freely make choices vital to their welfare.

© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.