Loved Ones of BPD

Archive for the ‘Codependence’ Category

Loved ones, family members, partners or ex-partners of those with Borderline Personality Disorder are often confused, in pain, and struggling to cope with a loved one with BPD. Life Coach, BPD and Mental Health Coach A.J. Mahari was interviewed on the healthyplace.com Mental Health TV Show on the subject of BPD Loved ones and Coping with someone in your life with BPD. This interview has been broken up into three parts to fit on youtube. You can watch the there excerpts of this interview below or by going to my YouTube Channel

• The Puzzle and Mystery of Hope on the Other Side of BPDli>
• Inside The Borderline Mind
• The Shame of Abandonment In BPD
• Breaking Free of The Borderline Maze – Recovery For Nons
• Facing the Facts of BPD – On The Other Side For Nons
• Overcoming Denial About BPD and Love

Audio Programs For Loved Ones of BPD © A.J. Mahari

• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES or 3 Non Borderline Ebooks packaged together with audio.
• Purchase all 5 Core Wound of Abandonment in BPD ebooks
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together without audio or 6 ebooks bundled together with 2 audio programs 6 ebooks packaged together with 2 audio programs
• Those with BPD and/or Non Borderlines can purchase A.J. Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks or Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks with From False Self To Authentic Self In BPD – The Inner Chid Audio Program

• The Shame of Abandonment in BPD
• From False Self To Authentic Self In BPD – Getting In Touch With Your Inner Child
• BPD and Abandonment
• Finding Hope From the Polarized Reality of BPD
• Preparing For Recovery From BPD
• Emotion Dysregulation in BPD
• Rage Addiction in Borderline Personality Disorder

Audio Programs © A.J. Mahari

Please be sure to visit healthyplace.com where they now feature blogs including one written by someone with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Loved ones – non borderlines – of people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) need boundaries. Without healthy boundaries what results is codependent, enmeshed, enabling, relating. Relationships between those with BPD and non borderlines contain a toxic dynamic. It is a dilemma and a dance wherein those with BPD need too much but what you give can’t ever be enough for them. It can’t be enough because you can’t be the borderline for the borderline. The borderline needs to find him or herself and learn, emotionally, how to be who he or she really is. Borderlines, not having a stable sense of self or identity try to live through you. What does that mean for you?

In the relationship between the non borderline and the borderline there is also a dance wherein loved ones – non borderlines – often end up sacrificing the Self inside – losing themselves to the losteness and neediness of the people with BPD in their lives. What’s the alternative? Is there another way? How can you maintain your sanity in an insane situation? How can you maintain your mental health in a toxic relational dynamic? Can you?

A.J.’s Emotional Mastery Coaching For Loved One of BPD

Boundaries and limits implemented, communicated, and up-held by loved ones of those with BPD are truly gifts that you can give the person with BPD in your life today. Your boundaries – boundaries that you have every right to and need for your own well-being will plant seeds that each borderline has the opportunity to grow from if and when he or she chooses to. Boundaries are gifts that you can give yourself and the person with BPD in your life. That person may not appreciate your boundaries or what they could mean for them too but you can’t let that stop you from having the boundaries you need or you will be living from a codependent enmeshed and enabling dilemma that will, sooner or later, demand that you save yourself. It is a very painful way and place to live. It is choosing to suffer emotionally when you really do not have to.

© A.J. Mahari, January 5, 2010 – All rights reserved.

The difference between helping and enabling is explored. Life Coach and BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari talks about how this applies to those with Borderline Personality Disorder and often their loved ones as well. Enabling is a feature of co-dependence. Codependence is at the heart of much of the toxic dynamic that often unfolds in relationships for those with Borderline Personality Disorder and the non borderlines in their lives.

“I’ve been trying to help a friend of mine but I think I’m making matters worse instead of better – since I still don’t understand co-dependency maybe you can help me? Can you explain, to me, the difference between enabling and helping somebody?

This problem I’m having really messes with my own self-esteem. I beat myself up when things go badly for others. If I have anything to do with their hardship I’m especially hard on myself. Then I neglect my own needs and I start coming apart.” — Brooks

This is a very good question. I believe from my own past experience and what I’ve read that many who have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) also have many co-dependent issues to work through. What Brooks is describing above sounds familiar to me. In the past, when I had no boundaries, and the only kind of relationships or friendships I understood were enmeshed ones, I too, at that time, 15 years ago or more in my life now, did not understand the difference between enabling and helping others, or when someone else was helping me versus enabling me. There is often also this dynamic of pulling to be rescued on the part of people with BPD. It is not something that people with BPD are consciously aware of. Just as a borderline will pull for you to meet his or her needs, enable and/or rescue them – which really cannot be done anyway, so too will he or she push you away at every turn. This makes for a crazy-making experience for the non borderline.

The core root of the problem of enabling rests with one’s own inability and or refusal to help him/herself. When one is not helping oneself often he/she may get over-involved in someone else’s problems in what they believe is an attempt to help the other person. More often than not, when one is co-dependent and not able to meet his/her own (emotional needs), what appears to be helping is not only enabling it is also using. It is using because what many are seeking to do in the “helping” of someone else is to avoid their own problems, issues and or avoid meeting their own needs. This is a pattern that often develops from being raised in a co-dependent and or dysfunctional family. A family whose system of relating wasn’t healthy. Rather than support healthy individuation dysfunctional family dynamics support enmeshed styles of relating that are quite painful and that lack boundaries.

Ebooks © A.J. Mahari

• The Abandoned Pain of BPD Ebook
• The Legacy of Abandonment in BPD Ebook
• The Shadows and Echoes of Self – False Self In BPD Ebook
• BPD and Rage Ebook
• Loneliness Ebook
• The Other Side of BPD – Mindfulness and Radical Acceptance for Non Borderlines
• Non Borderline Dilemma – Can Borderlines Love? Do they feel love?
• Full Circle – Lessons for Non Borderlines
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together with or without audio.
• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES packaged together with or without audio.

• The Puzzle and Mystery of Hope on the Other Side of BPD
• Inside The Borderline Mind
• The Shame of Abandonment In BPD
• Breaking Free of The Borderline Maze – Recovery For Nons
  
• Facing the Facts of BPD – On The Other Side For Nons
• Overcoming Denial About BPD and Love

Audio Programs © A.J. Mahari

So firstly, it is important to make sure that you are meeting your own needs and taking personal responsibility for yourself. In order to meet your own needs and to be responsible for yourself you will need to develop boundaries. As you one begins to develop boundaries and a healthy sense of the difference between self and others then and only then can one begin to truly learn the difference between “helping” and “enabling”.

There are many different definitions of what enabling means. What I have come to understand through my own recovery is that enabling refers to doing anything for someone else that they “should” be able to do (and need to do) for themselves.

For example, if someone suffers from agoraphobia, and or anxiety attacks, and has difficulty or feels unable to go to the store – a friend may think that going to the store for this person is “helping” them out. Truthfully, this is an example of enabling because when you go to the store for your friend (something that he/she “should” be able to do for themselves and really need to do for themselves) you are helping them only in so far as you are enabling them to stay stuck in maladaptive coping mechanisms which are not healthy for them. Someone who can’t go to the store on his/her own (who is otherwise physically healthy) due to anxiety or fear, is not able to meet his/her own needs. If you continue to try to meet this need for someone, for example, you only continue to reinforce his/her sense and or feelings of (and belief in) helplessness. After a time, it is also likley that the person going to the store for the one that feels they cannot go for themselves will, over time, get angry.

Enabling plays itself out even more subtly in the emotional arena. If someone has emotional difficulties, a personality disorder and so forth and you try to control them, direct them, tell them how to be, act, or what to do (no matter how well intentioned) chances are much of what you say will apply to what you, yourself, need. It will largely be projection. It will serve the purpose of you avoiding yourself and your own issues and pain and it will simulate some false sense of safety or security to the person who is not yet able to be there and to take care of themselves. This is also a situation, which over time will end up with both parties quite angry with each other. The person who is enabling, “trying to help” will end up being too controlling and the person that is being “enabled” – “helped” will feel controlled and told what to do. No one can change anyone but themselves. The reason and the way we can get so wrapped up in others has all to do with how much we refuse to know ourselves. So, in effect then, for all intents and purposes, the result of enabling is manipulating dishonesty on the part of both the person being enabled and the person who is enabling.

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Herein lies the enmeshment. If you are in this situation with someone else you do not have healthy boundaries, nor does the person you are in any enmeshment with. This is a recipe for a lot of pain as two people try to live through each other instead of living their own lives.

Enmeshment is a painful and complicated tangling of identities, wants and needs that is not healthy for anyone. Enabling is providing an atmosphere within which another person does not have to take personal responsibility – it is parenting someone who is old enough to parent themselves and who is not a child of yours anyway. It is an over-stepping of what would be considered healthy boundaries. It is a lack of boundaries to be more the point.

Helping someone, on the other hand, consists of giving assistance or lending an ear, after having been asked and doing so without giving direction or advice and without having any stakes in the outcome of the choices a person makes. Helping someone is rendering assistance after having been asked. For example, your friend has to work very late unexpectedly and asks you if you could feed his cat that evening. When someone asks for help they do so allowing and prepared to respond in a healthy and mature manner to being told “NO”. It is always alright to ask for help but asking for help and not being able to hear no likley means that you are really asking for someone to enable you and not to help you at all.

Those with BPD (until they recover significantly) often have not matured emotionally to a point where they have healthy boundaries. There is an almost natural tendency to enmesh with others due to the reality that having BPD usually means that you don’t know who you really are. It is also not uncommon for borderlines to need someone else to give them a sense of safety, security and or well-being. It is equally common with those who have BPD for them to not know how to take personal responsibility and so often they will attempt to shift this to others out of their own sense of helplessness and victimization. Those who allow these borderline needs to be shifted to them are somewhat co-dependent themselves and will be enabling the borderline – not helping them.

In response to what Brooks describes regarding beating himself up if he feels at all that the hardship of someone else has anything to do with him, this is an area where one must carefully assess not only co-dependence, and enabling but also his/her own narcissism. Often, when narcissistic defenses are being used one can feel more responsible for the pain or conflict of others when truthfully, the other person’s experience has nothing whatsoever to do with you.

As Brooks describes neglecting his own needs and the toll this takes on his self-esteem he is insightful to realize the connection there. The questions that Brooks, or anyone in a similar situation (co-dependent, enmeshed, enabling and without healthy boundaries) will benefit from asking themselves are:

• What is it that I really need now that is leading me to do what I am doing with so and so?
• What am I getting out of this?
  What do I want to get out of this?
• What about what I need?
• How can I take care of my own needs instead of transferring them on to so and so and then believing that I am really caring about so and so’s needs?

When borderlines learn to distinguish themselves from others, achieve a very real sense of who they are, find their own identities and establish healthy boundaries it then becomes painfully clear just what the enabling was really all about. Once one knows who they are and where his/her boundaries are and the difference between self and others this is the place at which one will realize that no matter how much you care for someone else your own needs have to come first. And no matter how much you care for someone else his/her pain, misfortune, etc etc, while you may feel sad about it, is not something that will change your over-all mood in your own life.

Learning to distinguish between helping someone out and enabling can be a long, difficult and painful process. I have been down that road. I have climbed that mountain. I can tell you that all of the hard and painful work it took was well worth it.

Asking the questions that Brooks has asked here means that he is at least half-way down that road. Keep walking down the road to the real you, Brooks. Keep walking down the road to the you that you want to be and need to find. When you get there you will no longer feel the need to enable anyone else or to be enabled by anyone else either. This is a central part of the work required in recoverying from Borderline Personality Disorder.

© A.J. Mahari – January 10, 2001 with additions February 6, 2010 – All rights reserved.