One of our worst fears is becoming our parents. This is really a nightmare when the parent has BPD. My mom was worried about this, and she would tell my husband to "watch out for me." She seriously thought I might emotionally and physically abuse him the way my dad abused us.
To my mom's credit, there are often things I find myself doing that remind me of my dad.
Indecision - mulling over a decision for hours, and then seconding guessing oneself after making a decision. I wrote a blog about this previously.
Intense emotional reaction - I hate surprises. I hate being thrown for a loop in any negative way. So does my dad. When he rages, it's like a tornado or a tsunami. I have learned that I can do this too, so while I don't know how to control my immediate feelings, I can control what I do with these emotions. I know that I need time to stop and think before going into a frenzy.
Paranoia - My dad has always been paranoid, but I think with age and the onset of dementia, he is experiencing more paranoia. Anytime he can't find anything, he thinks someone took it. Seriously. When he was "supervising" the moving of his furniture back into his house, he accused the movers of stealing the dirty old couch cushions before they had even finished unloading. When my sisters and I went to visit, he said people had taken photos. He also said his whole photo album of a trip to Europe was gone. When I showed him one, he said it was another, when I showed him the other, he said that wasn't it either.
I too, find myself having paranoid thoughts. I had been at work thinking I was going to be fired. Well, that wasn't too far from the truth, but I don't believe there were intentions quite as evil as I imagined. I felt that every move my bosses made was a calculated move with ulterior motives. Sometimes that was probably the case. Other times, probably not. I know they couldn't have spent that much energy focused on me.
I feel like spending too much time obsessing over something, and too much time alone can feed paranoia. My dad spends 95% of his time alone in his house. Plenty of time to think paranoid thoughts.
Not working, and consequently, not earning income, I too have been keeping to myself in our apartment. I do have my husband most of the day, and the cats, so I have more company than my dad, but still less companionship than a normal human being craves.
Splitting - this is viewing someone as either perfect and moral, or defective and evil. Once someone would do something to shatter my dad's image of them, that would be it. He would no longer trust them, ask them to help him or even acknowledge them. On the other hand, if someone else would surface to do something for him, then they would be the one virtuous and intelligent person. When my mom was in the hospital, my childhood friend came to visit. She is a few years older than me, and she is a physician. She has experience speaking with patients who are hard of hearing, so she was able to speak to my dad, and he could understand her.
No one, NO ONE had ever told me up until that point, not to yell at him when trying to communicate. All I had ever heard was, I can't hear you. I didn't know that the pitch of my voice, coincidentally, is out of my dad's range of hearing. If I want to be able to talk to him, I have to learn to lower the register of my voice. I have a very shrill voice, so this is no easy task.
So getting back to my childhood friend - my dad could not say enough positive things about her, as an insult to me. By extolling her virtues, her ease with which she could communicate with him, he was also pointing out my lack of communication skills. By saying she was a successful doctor, that was showing how I was a disappointing failure of a daughter who would never fulfill the potential he thought I had. I'm not jealous of my friend. I'm happy for her, and she has a great family. I don't think I could have ever had the stability of mind to become a physician when I was younger. I wouldn't have been ready for it. I could have done things different with my life along the way, but I wouldn't have ever taken the path my friend took. And for that, my dad hates me. My "failure" is his failure.
When I was working at my last job, I felt like I was playing wack a mole. If one person wasn't calling off work, coming in late, or fucking up in some other way, then someone else was. So the cook who fucked up last week might become my favorite this week. Because I knew this about myself, I tried to not work too closely with any one cook for too long. They would play this game with me, talking shit about each other and trying to be the favorite. Boy, did we function like a family.
Abandonment - I always felt so alone as a child, and really even still now. When I started having boyfriends, which was before I started officially dating, since I wasn't allowed to date before I turned 18, the relationship was always so intense. I had a long distance letter writing relationship with my band camp boyfriend. We wrote each other at least two thick letters a week. We poured our hearts out to one another, we explained the details of our daily lives to each other (except for when he started dating girls in his town). I needed those letters and the trinkets he sent me as constant reminders of him.
In college, when I met my now husband, we took it fairly slow the first six months. We went on dates a couple times a week, and we met with our friends at clubs. We made a point not to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend for six months. And during those six months we never fought. Then, one night, something happened. Our first fight ensued. And that might have been when we became official. We started spending more and more time together. We invaded each other's apartments, and our roommates felt like they had another roommate against their will.
It was difficult being a quiet, socially awkward, non jock, non drinking girlfriend of a hot jock. Whenever he went out with friends, girls were always hitting on him. And college girls can be so forward. I was jealous and had no self esteem, and clingy. I would start fights. If he was pissed off at me at a club, it was easy for him to find a girl eager to talk to him. I was always sure we would get in one fight too many over my abandonment issues and he would get fed up and leave me. For whatever reason he didn't. As I grew out of my sheltered childhood issues, I grew out of the jealousy and clingyness to a certain extent. Well, we both grew together.
I really don't know if I would be diagnosed with BPD, or if having grown up with someone who suffers from it made me react or mirror the disorder. I do know, that I see the ugliness in myself, and when I catch myself in a moment, I try to correct my actions or thinking. It is difficult to correct one's feelings, but it is possible to rationalize through them to feel a different way.
I still go to back out of a parking space and find myself leaning my elbow against the back of the passenger side chair, turning my whole body back to make sure the path is clear. This really pisses me off, because my dad always did this. It was such an obnoxious way of over driving. When I find myself with my elbow all propped up, I stop, I lower it, and I calmly back out of the space.
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