Borderline Personality Disorder – Surviving Abuse and Living My Best Life

Blog #6 – I FINALLY REALIZED I HAD TO GO

When Randy’s job on Long Island, New York was ending and his company was transferring him to California it was a very scary time for me. I had lived on Long Island my entire life, my whole life was there, my family, friends and my job. Without a doubt, the hardest person to leave would be my youngest brother. My mother had made it impossible for me to have a relationship with him but, leaving him would be like leaving my child behind. If things were going well with my family, if I had the big happy family that I had always dreamed about, I probably would have asked Randy to look for another job before we took the transfer but, things were not going well – at all.

As I wrote in a previous blog, my mother was making my life unbearable. Even after nearly a full year of marriage, she refused to accept that I was now a married woman. She refused to visit me in my new home, when I spoke to her she was always putting me and Randy down and making me feel as if I had to choose between being his wife and being her daughter. When I was with Randy in our own cocoon, I was so incredibly happy with my life. But when she would call or when I felt that I had to visit her, which was pretty much every day, I hated my life!

Believe it or not, the scariest part of the whole move was the anticipation of having to tell my mother. Even though she didn’t seem to care that I was living so close, I knew that she wasn’t going to take the news of our moving very well. The night Randy and I were going over to my parents house to tell them, I was so nervous I was sick to my stomach. I’m not even sure if we had dinner with them that night. All I remember is sitting at the kitchen table talking about everything other than the move because I was so afraid to start the conversation. Randy and I kept making eye contact trying to decide when would be a good time.

When we finally began to tell them, my mother started screaming that she knew this was going to happen. She stood up from the table and went into the bathroom. We could hear screaming, banging and crashing sounds, I just wanted to get up and leave, she had totally lost it. My dad just sat there not saying or doing anything. My mother finally came out of the bathroom with blood all over her hands and dripping down her arms. She had punched the washing machine and dryer and pulled the sink off the wall. My dad proceeded to get up and go to the garage to get his tools to put the sink back on the wall, that was all he did! It was like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone.

My mother continued to scream horrible things at both of us. We quickly left and headed back to our house. I knew that it wasn’t going to go well but I never would have expected the insanity that went on in that house that night, it was like some crazy nightmare. When we got home I threw myself into Randy’s arms and cried. Everything that we had just experienced made it so clear to me, for the first time, that we had to leave. I don’t think I had ever experienced just how incredibly dysfunctional my parents where from an outside perspective before, it was shocking.

Within the next few weeks, Randy and I began packing and mailing our essentials to his new office location. His company said they would take care of our things until we found a place to live. Foolishly, as was my cycle, when my mother was a little nice to me I would believe that I could trust her, I asked her if she could store our personal items for me until I was able to come back and sort through them. She ended up throwing away all of our wedding pictures, my wedding dress, and all of our personal items we left in the house. She also had an Estate Sale and sold most of our furniture and belongings for significantly less than they were worth. She made sure that she got back at us for leaving or for getting married to begin with, who knows.

We ended up having to hire someone to take care of the house for us, which we should have done from the very beginning. If we had, I would have my wedding gown to pass onto my daughters and wedding pictures to show my children. Maybe one day Randy and I will renew our vows and our children will be there to see it all for themselves.

As I said, my cycle was that every single time she was nice to me I wanted so badly to believe that she had changed. I would honestly convince myself that she was finally going to be the mom that I dreamed of always having. I did this for almost 40 years of my life.

If you’re in this same situation, and your abuser isn’t seeking help, stop believing that they are going to change! They will not change until they admit they have a problem and seek help. I just wanted a mother that loved me so badly that I just couldn’t let the dream go and saw things that just weren’t there. I believe that I ended up abusing myself by putting myself in the same position over and over and over again for so many years. She was never going to say “I’m sorry”. Even when I thought I let go, I still hadn’t because when I found out that she passed away, I cried all over again for the dream that died again.

Blog #5 – YOU DON’T HAVE TO CONTINUE THE CYCLE OF ABUSE – PART II

I don’t believe it was an option for me to continue the cycle of abuse. It just seems unfathomable to me to treat the four people I love most in this world, my children, in the same horrible, heinous way I was treated as a child.

In raising my children I didn’t have role models to show me what was “normal” so I pretty much just followed my heart. I’ve definitely had to use my husband, therapists and friends to help me set the proper boundaries for a lot of things. I didn’t always know where the healthy lines were because they were never drawn for me. Things like helping them to spread their wings to grow up normal and healthy while keeping them safe. I also had a lot trouble with discipline because I never saw it given without pain and humiliation. My fear was that any discipline would be seen, in their eyes, as my love being taken away from them, it was a very emotional slope for me. I would primarily talk them through situations and put them in timeouts. My daughter, who was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder has been much more of a challenge for me because she’s always been more rebellious, I will go into that more in a future blog.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about my older brother when it comes to continuing the cycle of abuse:

At some point during 2005, my brother’s second wife got in touch with me via email and asked me to call her. I was very surprised by this email because I hadn’t talked to my family in about three years and was very concerned about what this could be about. I certainly didn’t want to be pulled back into anything having to do with my family. It had taken me so long to finally free myself from them, there was no way I was going to get back into any of it. I had three beautiful children and we had just found out that we had a fourth one on the way, life was really, really good for me.

After talking it over with my husband for a few days we decided that I should just find out what it was that she wanted because it would probably just drive me crazy not knowing. When I called her I quickly found out that she and my brother were divorced and they were in the midst of a custody battle over their two children. She said that she and the kids needed family. Knowing that they weren’t connected with my family anymore I thought it would be safe to have some communication with them.

We met with the three of them a few times when I found out that the real reason she contacted me was that my brother had continued the cycle of abuse with their children. She asked me if I could give a statement to a guardian ad litem on the children’s behalf. She wanted me to tell them about the environment my brother and I had grown up in and how he’d become quite a bit like my mother once he’d reached his teen years. When I say this I mean that he was very moody and he could be very dark, mean, and emotionally and mentally abusive. He also had a face that he put on in public so no one knew what he was really like behind closed doors.

I prayed about giving my testimony because once I did I knew there would be no turning back. Any kind of relationship with my brother or anyone else in my family would definitely be out of the question, not that I wanted one but, this would really seal the deal. It didn’t take very long for me to know that I had to do this. I could not allow their children to continue to be abused by him, especially since they would have to be alone with him when it was his turn to take them.

I made my statement and haven’t spoken to him since and never spoke to my mother again. To this day, I know that I did the right thing. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t done it. I honestly don’t understand continuing the cycle of abuse. If you didn’t like being treated that way, why would you treat the people you love most in the world that way…I just don’t get it.

#4 – YOU DON’T HAVE TO CONTINUE THE CYCLE OF ABUSE – PART I

I think I’ve been depressed most of my life. I can remember as far back as junior high school there was this boy that always called me “stoneface”. At the time I thought he was making fun of my acne. It was many years later that I came to understand that he gave me this name because I never smiled.

As a very young child, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I didn’t answer with the usual, “I want to be a doctor” or “I want to be a teacher”. I always said, “I want to be happy”.

Happy is all I ever wanted to be but keeping my mother happy was so much more important because her other moods were so scary. Her mood would change on a dime, the unpredictability was the scariest part of her illness. One minute she would be calm and the next she would be in a rage. Sometimes I could see the mood change in her face but even then, by the time it showed on her face, it was too late.

Once the physical violence began, she didn’t seem have the control to stop. She would hit until she didn’t have the energy to continue, then she would drag us upstairs by our hair or by our ears to our rooms. We would have to stay in our room until her mood changed and she would remember that she left us there. Sometimes these punishments were for the most minor infractions, something that maybe yesterday was not a big deal.

When one of my siblings was the object of her anger I would have to go outside because the screaming was so upsetting. I can remember thinking that when she would scream I could almost feel the windows shaking. When they would be crying out or laying on the floor with their legs and arms in the air trying to protect themselves from her blows it was horrible. I don’t think it ever became “as usual” for me, it was always terrifying. As I write this now, it still brings up so much emotion.

I grew up with 3 siblings but I’m not going to talk much about them because this is my story and I know we each have a different view of our childhoods. One of the reasons would be that we were all treated very differently. The boys were definitely favored over the girls and the ones that looked more like my mother were definitely favored over the ones that looked like my father. Unfortunately, I was the girl that looked like my father. Even though I was always treated the worst, I was the “lucky one” because I got away and saw the truth of what we’d been living with and began a new, healthy life.

The physical abuse is not what has stayed with me all these years. It’s the mental and emotional abuse that lingers. I’ve had to work so hard to replace all the negative things I was told about myself with positive self talk. The hardest thing of all was getting over never having the mother that I dreamed of having. I’ve had to learn to be that mother to myself and to definitely be that mother to my children.

I may not be the greatest mother in the world but, my children will never, ever wonder whether I love them or not because I have told each one of them every day of their lives how much I love them. They also know that there is nothing in this world that they could ever do or say that would make me stop loving them.

#2 – STOP WAITING FOR YOUR ABUSER TO CHANGE

Within the first year of our marriage, Randy and I were having problems, so I made us an appointment with a marriage counselor. In our very first session it didn’t take the counselor very long to tell us that the problem wasn’t with us as a couple, but it was with me. I was not only damaged from my past but, my mother was still abusing me on a daily basis.

After we were married, my mother had taken to calling me every morning before I left for work to tell me what a horrible, selfish person I was for getting married and moving out (we moved only a mile from my parents house because I insisted that we live close to them. I thought if I kept working on things with my mother I could make our relationship work). I would drive to work everyday in tears. I can remember days that felt so dark, I contemplated driving my car into oncoming traffic, I think the only thing that stopped me was the thought of hurting another person. I was a newlywed, so in love with my new husband but I had lost the love of my mother and my family because my mother refused to accept my marriage and had begun to spread horrible lies about me to my siblings and anyone else that would listen.

During this time I planned a trip for Randy and I to Rhode Island. My plan was to tell him that I wanted a divorce. I knew that the depression that I was falling deeper and deeper into was not only destroying me, and our marriage, but it was hurting Randy. I felt that it wasn’t fair to put him through this any longer. He was young, handsome, successful, sweet, and kind, he could have anyone he wanted and it was time for him to go and have a normal life. I also assumed that since I was so disposable to my family, eventually he would leave too. I was falling more in love with him everyday and the longer we were together the more it would hurt when he left.

When I told Randy I wanted a divorce, he absolutely refused. He insisted that he wasn’t going anywhere and that he was with me and committed to our marriage for the long haul. We ended up having the most amazing, romantic few days. I had been quiet and teary the whole ferry ride there and on the way back I was more in love with this amazing guy I married and thought that I was ready for anything that came my way. But then, once again, my mother was back in my life as soon as we were back.

Years later when I confronted her about calling me every morning and verbally abusing me, she denied every single call.

You might be wondering – “why did I answer the phone every morning…” because I couldn’t give up on the dream that one of those mornings her call would be the “I’m sorry” call or the “I love you” call. I needed her love and acceptance so badly it was tearing me apart. She was “supposed” to love me unconditionally. I put myself out there every day and got hurt every single day because I could not give up on the hope that tomorrow would be different, that tomorrow would be “the day”.

I wasted so many years of my life not being happy because I didn’t know how to put up boundaries to protect myself from her. If you are in the same position that I was, get into therapy and start dealing with reality. She is not going to change if she refuses to admit she even has a problem. Start living your life, get healthy now, don’t waste 40+ years hoping that she’ll will change.

#1 – I Don’t Negotiate with Emotional Terrorists

It has always been my dream to write a book but with a husband and four children, it’s been very hard to sit and read a book, no less write one.

Now that my kids are getting older I’ve been working much harder on the book in the last year or so but then a few physical issues have slowed my progress down. Also, when your children get older, it doesn’t mean they need you less, it just means they need you in different ways. When my husband, Randy and I decided 23+ years ago that I would stay home with our children, I took that job very seriously and with all my heart and soul. When they need me, I am there for them, period!

I believe in part, that I am this kind of mother because of the way I was raised. This is what my book will be about, and what I want this Blog to be about. My hope and prayer is that by writing my story I will be able to help someone else get through the pain of being raised by an abusive mother and a father who sat by and did nothing while it all happened.

It took me a very, very long time to become a healthy, strong woman because of all the abuse I endured as a child, young adult and adult. My mother was never diagnosed with any kind of mental illness or personality disorder because she would never, ever have admitted that there was a problem but as an adult I’ve done a lot of research on what I endured and I’ve come up with my own possible “diagnosis” for her. She seems to have fit Borderline Personality Disorder very nicely but, a few years ago my daughter was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder so this became a strong possibility. What I do know for sure was that she was a narcissist.

I was extremely blessed when I met my husband who was very patient with me through all the years of craziness with my family. My mother didn’t want me dating, didn’t want me doing anything that didn’t involve her in some way (this was through my entire life). She made it very difficult for me to see Randy. I stayed strong because I knew, from almost the first time I met him, that he was the man I was meant to spend the rest of my life with.

Her abuse toward me increased the more she realized she was losing me to him. The saddest part is that she never had to lose me, all she had to do was to open her arms and her family would have just gotten bigger. Instead her mental, emotional and verbal abuse toward me just got worse and worse. It was to the point that I was becoming physically ill.

There were so many times I told Randy to just go away and save himself. He is such an amazing man, he didn’t deserve to be part of the insanity he was being pulled into just because he loved me. But, he never wavered, he stayed by me through it all! I have to admit, a couple of times I thought he must be nuts.

Eventually, my mother forced me to choose between my family and Randy. I didn’t want to make this choice, I just wanted one big happy family, that’s all I ever wanted. My choice was Randy because first of all, he never asked or made me choose. Secondly, he never, ever hurt me and all she ever did was hurt me. Choosing him meant that I lost not only my mother but my entire family because she had turned everyone against me.

I have never regretted my decision.