The impact of having a mother with Borderline Personality disorder
A mother with Borderline Personality Disorder has intense mood swings, anxiety, narcissism, impulsive behaviour and much more destructive behaviour that can have a serious impact on their children. With a BPD parent it is common for the kids to suffer from anxiety, be hypervigilant, insecure and lack self-confidence. Depression is also very common.
The impact of having a mother with Borderline Personality disorder
Traits of a BPD parent:
- Antisocial behaviour
- Insecurity
- Impulsive
- Feelings of worthlessness
- Irritable
- Lack of restraint
- Anger
- Anxiety
- Discontent
- Mood swings
- Loneliness
- Depression
- Distorted self-image
- Narcissistic
BPD: How does it affect the child?
What does this mean for their child?
The BPD parent has unpredictable raging that leads to violence and due their narcissistic believes they tend to not care about the needs of the child so in the infancy stage of a child the mother is insensitive to the child and feels high levels of intrusion and low levels of positive response to an infant’s distress. The mother tend to smile less and do not interact playfully with her child and she has a difficulty to respond appropriately to children’s emotional state. This causes the child to feel a sense of abandonment and detachment to the parent from an early age.
The mother is very manipulative, because she feels that her children should be there to serve her at all times. So she might use money, guilt, verbal abuse or any other form of manipulation to get what she wants. This control feeling is due to the fact that she has a fear of abandonment. The mother will see it as if the child owes her the world, because she gave birth to the child.
Increased Conflict at Adolescence with BPD Parents
Conflict Increase at Adolescence
In the adolescence stage the conflict can become quite intense, because the child starts to get their own perception of life. This causes the mother to feel like she is losing control over the child and causes major stress which leads to worse anger outbreaks. The child can have lots of trust issues, because the parent tends to contradict themselves. The parent can have distorted perceptions of events to protect themselves. So they can blatantly lie about situations to make them seem innocent. This is due to their narcissistic views about themselves. They can never do anything wrong.
Children of BPD Parents Find it Difficult to Express Affection
Difficulty Expressing Affection
A child growing up with a BPD parent tend to be self-sufficient from a young age. They had to take care of themselves from birth. They also tend to have difficulty to express affection due to lack of affection from the mother. For example the mother would rarely/never give the child hugs and kisses. So the child has to learn elsewhere how to show love and receive it. The child has a sense of guilt, because the parent kept on blaming everything on them.
What the child needs:
To have minimal interaction to the parent. So to start doing extracurricular activities that will keep them away from the parent as well as help them learn to interact normally with other people.
Therapy is a great place to escape, but the BPD parent doesn’t care about the child’s needs and will not likely take a child to therapy unless someone else intervenes like a teacher etc.
