HomeāForumsāEmotional MasteryāSelf Trust and More
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January 9, 2020 at 12:55 pm #332335
Cali ChicaParticipantDear Anita,
is your connection back on? And stay inside! No outdoor falls for any of us! Health for 2020!
reply if your connection is back
January 9, 2020 at 1:04 pm #332337
AnonymousGuestThank you, no outdoor (or indoor) falls for either one of us! I am back on, it’s back on.
anita
January 9, 2020 at 1:17 pm #332339Cali ChicaParticipantGreat!
i was about to post about the second half of your post in regards to BPD. SO SO SO much I have to say about this. Not really my opinions about what you said per se but more so the fact that it is confirmatory. To be quite honest I know a lot about Borderline personality disorder, not just from my education and patienTs I have come across come off but also MANY MANY personal encounters. you recall a week or so I mentioned the term, but is soon as I wrote it on the computer, I felt guilty for calling my sister this. It was almost like I heard my mother saying the same thing, how dare you judge me, look at all the problems that you have. How dare you call your sister borderline. Look at yourself!!!!! Soo What did I do as soon as I put the term borderline and my sister in the same sentence???? I started to think about myself. I started to think of all of the things that I used to do in my 20s that were erratic behavior, and could I be the same. . In a way I looked at ways to humble myself to not judge my sister. Saying oh sheās not so bad I was the same. , I validated my sisters behaviors by thinking back to my old self. See how I did this? I invalidated my strengths or not strengths per se (but increases stability – better adjustment for lack of a better term) by bringing myself down.
this is what it is Anita.
Their anger and roars bring me down and make me stick to their level. As when I am above or different I am not relatable to them. It causes anger. They donāt want to believe they are flawed or defective alone. They want to know that cc is no better. Ha look at CC and all her issues! She doesnāt know anything. Look at her blaming us!-
This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by
Cali Chica.
January 9, 2020 at 1:27 pm #332343AnonymousGuestDear Cali Chica:
Your mother brought you down, your father did too. As a result, you replay their message. Your sister gives you the same message. Now what?
anita
January 9, 2020 at 2:09 pm #332351AnonymousGuestDear Cali Chica:
I read through your posts of today, and I realize that in my recent two posts to you I rushed you. I was impatient. It was so because so much of what you wrote awakened my own experiences with my bpd mother (a combination of histrionic and borderline), and it is clear to me now that I need to rest and return to your thread tomorrow morning. What an intense day, for me, here on your thread!
I will reply further to your today posts tomorrow, Friday morning. If you want to post more today, please do. I will post a short reply if you do, most will be in the morning.
anita
January 9, 2020 at 3:09 pm #332357Cali ChicaParticipantDear Anita,
Donāt worry you did not rush me, this is actually what you did. Quite the contrary. Oh how excited I am to explain this to you!
You became triggered/impassioned by the concept of borderline personality disorder. It Reminded you of your own mother, and erratic behavior iin your own past life in your own self even! It made you have a bad feeling in your stomach, you thought to yourself, get away, get away CC My dear friend on the journey. You care for me and so you thought to yourself, get away from these borderline people who only drag you down. Oh gosh they drag you down. Even your sister does ah what a revelation!!!
This is what happened, and this is how I would react as well if it were you. This is because you care about me. But thereās something else….After all was said and done after all we decided today, after all we realized. You sent one last message, saying that you rushed me. 800 and vulnerable message is full of honesty, feeling that you did not want to come off this way. Oh Anita this is it!!
this is how I know that you are not a borderline person, and that is how I know I am not. WE communicate like this. WE DO. This is why WE work. This is why we do not work with mother sister etc etc.
you have understanding of how you come off to other people, you have empathy, you have curiosity, and most of all, you have awareness. None of the following people would have sent the following message to me, my sister, my mother, or your mother, or either of us in the past.We would have been so caught up in our emotional brains, the hysteria, our worlds buzzing around, so self focused. Unable to look outside of oneself because sooo bogged down by ones own distress.
This is not a judgment of any of these behaviors of anyone in the entire world. It is fact. It is pathology and it is fact.this is how I know you are on the other side Anita.
and so am I. We can not relate to borderline people and they will only harm us.oh dear Anita. We can conquer anything you and I. Oh yes we can my dear friend.
January 9, 2020 at 3:42 pm #332365AnonymousGuestDear Cali Chica:
I am about to take my walk and read just a bit of your post, the beginning of it and I am so touched, I am so grateful that you do understand, you do! It brings a tear to my eyes, some sort of emotion, touched, affectionateĀ toward you.
Better get on my walk.
anita
January 10, 2020 at 4:20 am #332427Cali ChicaParticipantDear Anita,
Good morning. I too felt that affection after your last post. I think itās best for me to let you catch up on all we wrote yesterday. Reply when ready and we can take it from there š
January 10, 2020 at 6:20 am #332445AnonymousGuestDear Cali Chica:
Good morning. I will give you my first reply of this Friday morning based only on your post of this morning. I read: “I too felt that affection after your last post”, when I started to read the next sentence: “I think it’s best”, my mind continued your sentence: I think it’s best that we don’t talk anymore, something like that, I think it’sĀ best we end it here. I don’t have the words because well, that’s how those neuropathway run, so quickly.
My point is, as a product of a borderline personality disorder mother, a bpd mother, you can’t trust a positive expression, an affection because you know something very negative and threatening will be happening next, an expression of hate, of aggression. So you are prepared. Often angry, because it is both fear and anger that result from perceived danger, for all animals. Scared and ready to fight. As a teenager I remember feeling a lot of anger toward her.
I will next read previous few posts and reply again.
anita
January 10, 2020 at 6:51 am #332463AnonymousGuestDear Cali Chica:
Your words, including capitalizations: “so is SHE creating problems for me/ my marriage? INDEED YES”.
This sentence stands by itself. It is a factual statement. Regardless of what I will post next, this sentence has an undeniable value.
Thinking about it, I don’t want to add anything to this post, so to not take away from this one.
anita
January 10, 2020 at 7:26 am #332465Cali ChicaParticipantDear Anita,
When I wrote that sentence above that you just pasted I paused as well. It was myself asking a question out loud, and then the question quickly became rhetorical. First – This person – my sister, continues to say, why is she blaming me for all her problems. First of all no one should be blaming anyone for all anything. The use of the term all is inappropriate, and juvenile.
Next, I ask myself out loud, is this person throwing dust into my eyes? Yes. Does this dust make it harder for me to see? Yes. Does this dust make it harder for me to breathe? Yes. Does this dust make it harder period. Yes.
Do āregularā people run around the world with dust in their eyes? Ā No.
Dust is being thrown at me by this individual, and so therefore this individual is making my life more difficult. This person kicks and screams and says how dare you blame me for your problems. But she is in fact the dust drawer, the only one remaining Dust is being thrown at me by this individual, and so therefore this individual is making my life more difficult. This person kicks and screams and says how dare you blame me for your problems. But she is in fact the dust thrower, the only one remaining one. THE dust thrower.
it is her.-
This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Cali Chica.
January 10, 2020 at 9:48 am #332495AnonymousGuestDear Cali Chica:
For an hour and a half I’ve been looking for something you posted long ago and finally found it:
November 10, 2016, three years and two months ago, to the day, you wrote: “When I close my eyes I think of my mom as a damaged soul, a sad and abused (so to speak) fragile puppy that is now coming out in the world with a big bark. This feeling about her makes it quite difficult to ‘hate her’ or to feel I should attempt to have ‘power over her’ in a way it simply just makes me fee soo soo bad for her”.
Three years and two months later, you wrote: “I think of my sister as a wounded child”.
Seeing your mother at the time as a fragile puppy made it difficult for you to fully assert yourself with her, at the time, and seeing your sister as a wounded child makes it difficult for you to do the same. (What it means to fully assert yourself, to be discussed later).
As I was looking for the above quote I found other things:
February 3, 2018, almost two years ago, you wrote: “the thesis is that no matter what I do or don’t do, what I say or don’t say, who I’m with or not with, what I feel or don’t feel- she will always be the same. She will continue to go up and down, curse me then cry to me, be happy, be miserable, fee like she’s losing her mind, be ecstatic with glee- all of which has nothing at all to do with my actions. Maybe I am smallĀ minded to think that I still have any Role in this.”. You wrote thisĀ about your mother, but other than the part of her cursing you, it reads to me a lot like this paragraph could be about your sister.
Continued quote from above: “By accommodating her and giving into such things as contact and keeping in touch during vacation (or anything at all) I still feed the beast and allow it to be quelled at least momentarily (or so I think!). By thinking that- I essentially feel that I may have some power to prevent this beast from becoming aĀ monster. But this beast is by nature a monster! Whether you feed it or whether you let it starve whether you tranquilize it for a day or provoke it, it is all the same. The monster is a monster at the end of the day. Now and forever”.
– I hope this doesn’t all parallel your sister, I hope it is not Now “and forever”, but maybe it is.
February 5, 2018, you wrote: “I do this with my mom and sister. In different ways but similar. Actions based on ‘oh well I can relate so I need to allow her to express and be, I shouldn’t be harsh’. Or actions based n ‘well who am I to put my foot down and not accommodate it- for it’s not like I’m so above And enlightened”- same thinking that you expressed most recently regarding your sister.
A very important long, longĀ quote is next because it has to do with California where you may be moving to, leaving your sister behind in nyc, and keeping in mind that she may be thinking of following you there:
March 26, 2018: “I am away in California this week, I am here for all sorts of work interviews and meetings, my husband joined me this weekend.. to look at some potential homes and see if this is a place that we would really like to relocate to… Given that it is 2 physician jobs it is a huge decision career wise and of course personally. I had not seen my sister since the wedding, in September, so I thought it would be nice if she joined us this weekend too. So she came in on Friday.. I was excited to see her, and the hour that she was there before my husband arrived was really fun like old times, fun sister silliness. But what happened next I will try my best to explain… We are all at the hotel lobby hanging out and then proceed to walk around to get dinner.. Now what happens next is kind of a blur. We end up settling down on a pizza place, and all of a sudden I start feeling like it is not good enough.. we must eat elsewhere. The pizza place is blah.. A few minutes later, out of nowhere like I can not control it I say out loud ‘wow isn’t this place depressing’… I then proceed to say ‘well I’m not sure but I don’t know I don’t think this is going to be fun for her’.. It ends up being a huge, huge debacle. I end up having another meltdown… I felt overwhelmed and I felt burdened… I start getting really upset and crying and feeling just overwhelmed, I start saying things that are really inappropriate, I start saying things such as I can’t take it anymore between my mom and you I just feel so drained, I just don’t have anything left. My sister of course gets upset and said well you invited me this weekend and where is this coming from.. now you’re doing this? .. it does sound crazy. Like I am unraveling at a pizza parlor out of nowhere. I was. Then all these things start coming to me, I think about how she was so up-and-down about whether she wants to quit work or not before that week of my vacation.. I saw that my sister is a lot like my mother, and constantly giving into her was accommodating, it wasn’t going to even hep her get better… my sister had really put me through the ringer with going up and down about whether she wanted to be a part of her program or not. Which was so draining, I had told her that week away that I couldn’t speak to her. I needed space… not to say that this is the only way my sister functions… The root of it all is our mother, who has created a negative an abusive environment our whole life, so as you see it trickles down… However I made a huge step a month ago to cut off contact with my parents, so my threshold for dealing with negativity has become very low…My husband and sister stepped out for a moment then because he wanted to calm her down. During this time .. I said to my friend, I think I just can’t take it anymore. I can’t be a caregiver to her. He said well this is just her coming here and trying to have fun she hasn’t done anything wrong. I said yes, but I think I have a lot of anger and built-up resentment and just frankly an overwhelming feeling around her. The moment she came here I felt like I regressed and went backwards, kind of the way I do when I pick up the phone with my mom I automatically start feeling anxious and depressed… soon as my sister arrived I felt that same anxious depressed feeling. The kind that I would feel when I would be around my mom.. it was merely her presence. She had mentioned this at the pizza parlor before we left, she said to me ‘doĀ you know how horrible it is to say to someone that just your presence makes me upset and uneasy.’ She is right it is horrible. But I think it’s true… yes her mere presence makes me anxious and uneasy.. she does have qualities of my mother that can be draining.. it is also some PTSD of going up and down with her over the last few months, and so unfortunately even if she doesn’t do anything wrong per se, I still feel that around her. It was my first time seeing her over the last seven months but we speak all the time”
You continued to share that the next day you and your husband were busy and you were worried about your sister being alone. You wrote: “if the person is a mentally healthy individual that is independent.. you don’t really worry about them while you’re at work.. But on the flipside if the person that is staying at home while you’re at work is lonely and not very stable, you worry the whole time.. are they bored? Are they lonely? I wonder what they’re doing.. Now the latter person will say well I didn’t really ask you to worry about me so you shouldn’t be. But the truth of the matter is that this person doesn’t have to ask for me to worry.. just their presence is going to cause anxiety while you’re at work because of the baseline kind of person who they are. Just because of the baseline kind of person they are.
This is quite interesting. One may say well that’s on me, my sister is fine and perhaps I am hypersensitive and feeling uneasy because I am thinking that I have to always help her when in reaity she’s fine… And of course she mentions how she has made a lot of progress.. However.. I don’t all of a sudden say OK great.. my sister is 100% fine and she is no longer someone to have to worry about woo hoo!
Also, I am not just absorbing this energy out of nowhere. The energy has to be coming from her too.. it’s the baseline person she is, that will cause me to feel like that in almost any situation..
I also noticed.. my entire demeanor changes. I become someone I don’t really like around my sister, someone who is on edge, someone who is talking too much and overcompensating… Just two days ago I wrote to you a post that you felt was book worthy. And I agree. But yet when my sister arrived I felt like that old uneasy ball of stress..
My husband noticed that I changed as soon as she arrives.. He felt that he was more drained and run down the whole time because my sister was there… By the time that the weekend ended and I dropped both of them off at the airport, (I am staying here a few extra days) I saw that my husband was truly drained- the same face I’ve seen after a weekend with my mom… He mentioned how he feels that just my sister being around feels like the energy is down. It’s kind of like being around a person where you have to walk on egg shells even if you’re not doing anything or saying anything. .. I said to him well isn’t this interesting even if she was to say nothing, just her presence makes us feel that way. And we both agreed yes. For example if in the future she lived locally and we saw her more regularly I can see myself feeling extremely drained just like I did with my mother.
..And- she herself has some qualities of my mother… like prior to that vacation of mine when she was up-and-down with her residency program.
..He mentioned something that is very true.. I have stopped talking to my parents and we are going in theĀ right direction. But it felt like a weekend with my sister was a step backwards. Because of that feeling of anxiety and depression that came back again and also the energy
.. So as a result I think that I will just have to have some better boundaries with her. Looking back this was a very important weekend for my husband and I, with the dinner and the meetings and just soaking in the energy of this new place. It probably would have been better if she wasn’t there because the energy of the weekend was based on her, not really about the surroundings. We both felt really bad admitting that to ourselves.”
End of quote. There’s a whole lot here, and I have a few things to state following retyping the above. But I’ll give you some time with this. If you want we can both respond to this post before reading each other’s response, and then compare. Do you want to do that?
anita
January 10, 2020 at 9:59 am #332501Cali ChicaParticipantDear Anita,
wow just wow. First of all I must say I am impressed with my writing! As in my communication about my feelings. This was all during a time in which I was much more frenzied and someways, yet I was able to adequately describe my feelings, it gives me a pat on the back about the progress that I have had on my journey. I donāt usually like to give myself such credit, but today, this morning I will. I think it is warranted. I want to say I look forward to what you end up writing about āfully assertingā Ā You did a great job explaining why I had difficulty fully asserting myself with my mother, and now with my sister. I wonder whatās more
Next, I would like to hear what else you have to say about this or to add on/retypeā and then respond fully. the reason is that I want to take some time to think about it before writing anything more. there are a few different thoughts rolling around in my head. Iām going to take a 15 minute walk and let those thoughts settle, and come back and start typing my response. I will then read your response whenever it is, and then continue in mine. Ensuring that I jot stuff down now first as well – first initial thoughts on paper. How about that?
January 10, 2020 at 10:02 am #332505AnonymousGuest* After I submitted the above, I read your whole message from yesterday, the one that ends with: “We can conquer anything you and I. Oh yes we can my dear friend”-
– I think that this is the most beautiful post, the most beautiful message. I have no words.
anita
Edit: just read your recent post- fine with me. I will take a short break and post again then.
January 10, 2020 at 11:49 am #332549AnonymousGuestDear Cali Chica:
I am impressed by your writing as well. And I want to join you in that pat on the back that you gave yourself for the progress you made on your journey. Very impressive!
More of your writing then, a quote I forgot to include earlier-
April 15, 2018: “I needed some space from my sister, every time I speak to her I feel like there is an explosion of distress that is coming out of every pore, she doesn’t have to say anything at all, she doesn’t even have to say oh I am stressed out- I just get this energy from her. Perhaps this is ingrained in me, or perhaps it is reality.”
And a recent quote, January 2020: “I think of my sister as a wounded child that does NOT LOOK up to her sister with innocent eyes and for help- but instead.. has a twisted face and kicks and screams.. dishing out crap.. she thinks black and white.. She has zero credibility to comment on long term serious relationships.. She also doesn’t understand that annoyances with friends does not equal hatred.. obsession.. She absolutely CONSTANTLY for her whole life only has negative things to say about her friends. ALL THE TIME.. I actually have VALUE for the people in my life.. which she SEVERELY, SEVERELY LACKS. She’s soĀ busy blaming others… She doesn’t leave room for growth and getting to know these people.. has a lot of jealousy.. resentment.. Seeing herself as very worthy, but yet terribly insecure at the same time.. she has jealousy of me, and thinking that things are seemingly easy and seamless for me.. filled with annoyance and anger over and over. JUST LIKE MY MOTHER.”
And now my thoughts and suggestions beginning with what is most clear to me, the no-brainer input:
1. If you do move to California, do not have your sister follow you there to live. You can’t ban her from California, of course, but do all that you can to discourage her from following you there. The two of you need to live in different parts of the country.
You predicted, March 2018: “if in the future she lived locally and we see her more regularly I can see myself feeling extremely drained just like I did with my mother”. Your prediction came true when she joined you in nyc. And it will come true again if you move to SoCal and she joins you there.
2. It is useless to figure: I will have her living with me, or close to me, but it will be okay this time because I will be enforcing boundaries (“I will just have to have some better boundaries with her”, 3/26/2018) because it is her presence alone that distresses you. What boundary can possibly protect you from her presence, other than ā¦ her absence.
3. I had a personal experience with your sister, I too delighted and enjoyed the delightful little girl in her, but that little girl (as is true to people fitting severe personality disorder diagnoses) is stuck in a monster. So you get to delight in the presence of the monster for as long as you can ā¦ forget that you are in the presence of a monster. But the moment you get a glimpse of that monster, or a memory of that monster, you feel that terrible unease.
That “fragile puppy” you saw in your mother is stuck in a monster, and the “wounded child” you see in your sister, is stuck in a monster.
You did not create either one of these two monsters. What makes them monsters? A combination of mental illness, rage and an inability or an unwillingness to accept the concept that they should correct their distorted thinking and change their dysfunctional behavior.
If you love the monster, be it your mother or your sister,Ā and try to point to this or that distorted thinking on her part, or this or that dysfunctional behavior that she does, the monster does not consider your input. She doesn’t have that humility or sensibility. What she does, is she attacks you for bringing it up. She will injure you so to protect her illness.
She will create your illness (your mother did that) or maintain your illness (your sister did that), so to protect her own illness.
“no matter what I do or don’t do, what I say or don’t say.. she will always be the same”- this is what happens with people who exhibit severe personality disorders. This is why they are not open to therapy and why therapists who have tried are extremely reluctant to have a client with a severe personality disorder.
“The monster is a monster at the end of the day. Now and forever”- you can pretty much count on it, this is the prognosis for severe personality disordered people.
It is within the core definition of a borderline personality disorder that the person can’t form or maintain a healthy relationship with anyone. This means that a healthy relationship with a bpd person is impossible. To make it very specific: you can’t possibly have a healthy relationship with your sister.
So what is it that you can have with her? My answer: damage to you and to your husband. Less so if you live away and be in occasional phone contact with her; more if you live in the same geographical area as she does and interact with her often. But damage in any case.
You can’t separate the delightful little girl in her from the monster, it is the monster that gives you that unease in her presence. We are uneasy in the presence of monsters.
In cartoons, monsters look like monsters, menacing, threatening, evil. In real life, you get to see that innocent, loving, joyful child that used to be there and is still there, stuck in each and every human monster. True, your sister is not the kind of monster that collects bodies in her basement, but she is the kind of a monster that will continue to make your life miserable. So you don’t end up dead in a basement, you end up perhaps dead from a stress related disease, or dead from a stress related accident, or ..just miserable. And at the end of your life, you wonder: what went wrong?
I studied hard, I was an excellent physician, I married an excellent physician, and an excellent husband, and yet.. I kept my sister in my life because I love her so much. But now.. all that love for her led me nowhere and .. and she is still the same, there sheĀ is saying: Cali Chica, you are doing this again, you are blaming me for your failed life!
anita
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This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by
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Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 