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.

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Loved ones of those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) – non borderlines – can benefit from A.J. Mahari’s Emotional Mastery Life Coaching. Relating to someone with BPD, and how he or she relates to you is a painful experience that can leave you emotionally off-balance. Loved ones need to understand as much as they can about BPD and the borderline but they also need to know much more than that in order to protect their own emotional and physical health.

Dilemma on the Other Side of BPD Can Borderlines Love? Do Borderlines Feel Love? Ebook
Overcoming Denial about BPD and Love Audio
Inside the Borderline Mind

Punishment & Revenge in BPD – What Loved Ones Need To Know
Can You Rescue a Borderline Loved One?
The Puzzle and Mystery of Hope on the other side of BPD.

Emotional mastery skills and the process that it entails is a journey that can free non borderlines from the dysfunctional and painful dance that is the relational dynamic in relation to someone with BPD. A.J. Mahari has been in your shoes and knows what it takes to Break Free From the BPD Maze on the other side of BPD.

© A.J. Mahari, December 24, 2009 – All rights reserved.

Parents of a teen or adult-child who has been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder often feel guilty. There are cases where there has been neglect, abandonment, or abuse, and then there are cases where someone who did the best they could and did not abuse a child ends up with a teen or young adult-child who is diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Parents often feel such a responsibility to help their borderline children no matter how toxic and/or abusive a situation becomes.

Georgie, a mother of a 20 year old daughter with BPD writes:

“I really am at my wits end with this child of mine. I love you so much. I have done everything – absolutely everything I can for this kid and to no avail. She just refuses to admit she has problems. She continues us, her family, hostage. She won’t go to school. She hasn’t graduated from high school. She won’t help with household chores. She won’t get a job. She doesn’t pay rent. What on earth is going to happen to her? What are we supposed to do with her?

We did finally get her briefly to a psychiatrist. She was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. It was such a shock to us because she has not been abused or anything like that. All of our other four children are fine, thriving, healthy and functional. When she saw the psychiatrist – a total of five times in all – she was put on medication. Of course, she doesn’t want to take the medication.

She had been difficult to next to impossible to cope with or deal with or even have a conversation with. Now she is getting angrier. We don’t know why. She is starting to scare us. We are lost. We don’t know what to do? Are we going to have to kick her out of our house – what next, out of our lives? God, I can’t do that. But, I am also very aware that she is having a very negative effect on her younger brothers and sisters.

Thanks for all the work you do A.J., and I hope that maybe by posting this someone will comment or someone else will be moved to share their experience if they think they have some advice for us at all.”

Perhaps one of the most difficult and painful realities in the life of any family member with BPD is that you just can’t rescue them. You can’t make them go to therapy and stick with it. You can’t make them take the medication. And, people like Georgie and her family can’t very well support or continue to be held hostage to the borderline in their family. What are parents to do? Difficult choices for sure.

© A.J. Mahari (with the exception of what Georgie wrote) August 31, 2008.

Are you the parent of a teen or adult-child with BPD? Would you like to share some of your experience here to help others like yourself? If you would, please email bpdinsideout@yahoo.ca

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A.J. Mahari has 5 years experience as life coach working primarily with family members, loved ones, ex and relationship partners of people with Borderline Personality Disorder as well as those who have BPD.

Why would a love one – a non borderline – of someone who has BPD want or need or benefit from life coaching?

To read more about my experience and the issues of adult-children of a parent who has, or parents who have Borderline Personality Disorder please visit my latest blog BPD Family Members

You can also watch my first two-part video about my experience as the adult-child of 2 parents with Borderline Personality Disorder on YouTube.

&copy A.J. Mahari – All Rights Reserved.

If you have a family member who has Borderline Personality Disorder chances are you have, at some point, tried to rescue them. Perhaps you are still trying to rescue them. The notion that we can rescue a family member with BPD is really an illusion. A painful illusion.

Most people who have a family member or loved one with Borderline Personality Disorder know the pain of being on The Other Side of BPD. Borderline Personality Disorder does not just affect those who are diagnosed with it. BPD effects anyone who is close to them as well.

If you have a family member with Borderline Personality Disorder you certainly don’t need me to tell you that it can be a very painful and challenging situation in your life. It can leave you feeling alienated from the family member who had BPD. It can leave you feeling helpless in the face of the self-destruction that many with Borderline Personality Disorder engage in.

One of the most difficult things to cope with when a family member has BPD is how to get out of the rescuer role. How to ensure that you have some quality in your life that isn’t negatively affected by an untreated borderline.

There is so much pain involved in loving and caring about someone who has BPD and who won’t acknowledge that there is a problem and who won’t get into therapy with a professional. It is a powerless place to be. The natural thing, it seems, to want to do is rescue that loved one, that family member.

However, the idea that one can rescue another from Borderline Personality Disorder is really an illusion. A painful illusion as I talk about in my video Non Borderline Illusions of Rescuing A Borderline

© A.J. Mahari, August 31, 2008 – All rights reserved.

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From the adult-child of 2 borderline parents to being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) to recovering from BPD at the age of 38 to the non borderline role in a relationship with someone with BPD. I have extensive experience with the pain of both side of BPD. Six years after I had recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) myself, I ended up in a relationship with someone who had BPD and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. What a mess. Paradoxically a mess that would make sense and order in my life in ways that I could not have ever imagined.

As I have written about in my ebook, Full Circle – Lesson For Non Borderlines, I too have had a relationship with a partner with Borderline Personality Disorder. It taught me so much more about BPD generally. Specifically this relationship I had taught me a tremendous more about the reality of the need for non borderlines to overcome denial about borderline love. It taught me about the pain and agony of the non borderline and it also taught me a lot about Borderline Personality Disorder and the reality of addiction.

My borderline/narcissist ex-partner was also addicted to alcohol. She was an alcoholic. As if these types of relationship aren’t impossible enough already. Addiction only adds to the likelihood that the borderline will lack the necessary self-awareness (even in the absence of a known self) to be able to see just how much they need help.

Many a relationship partner of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (and those with BPD and NPD) get caught up in the codependent and enmeshed need to rescue those with BPD. I know I did. I got caught up in this feeling and desire to rescue my borderline/narcissist ex from herself because I loved and cared about her and also because her personality disorders and her alcohol addiction were so familiar to me since I had 2 parents with BPD who were also alcoholics. Even though I thought I was beyond it all back then, I had not worked out enough of the remaining issues with my parents in terms of how I couldn’t rescue them so I tried, I think, not only to rescue my borderline ex but to rescue my un-rescued parents through her.

• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES packaged together with or without audio.
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together with or without audio.
• Those with BPD and/or Non Borderlines can purchase A.J. Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks packaged together with or without audio.

It was a crazy-making situation of epic proportions to be sure. Not only can we not rescue a borderline and anyone with BPD that also has NPD has an even more complicated road to journey but when addiction sits in the middle of what is already a very toxic relational dynamic there can be no hope short of the person with BPD/NPD and the alcohol addiction getting treatment and sticking with it.

In my experience with my alcohol-addicted borderline/narcissist ex each individual problem within this formidable triad of pathology blocked my efforts, the efforts of therapists, and even her best efforts to attempt to gain awareness. If she would become partially aware of a borderline issue her narcissistic defenses and needs would often block that. If she would become temporarily partially aware of any combination of her borderline/narcissistic pathology she would run to the alcohol and literally obliterate any memory of any conversation we had or therapy session she had wherein there was a slight light of a new awareness or of the responsibility she needed to take for the way that she devastated her career, her relationships, and her physical and emotional health.

I tried to rescue her. I tried to help her. I tried to give her the benefit of my own experience from my own borderline years but nothing could permeate her triad of pathology and dysfunctional defense mechanisms in any lasting way. In fact, in the time I knew her, things only kept getting worse.

With each turn for the worse she took, I in my non borderline enmeshed glory, felt increasing guilt and increasing helplessness that sometimes led me to try even harder – way too hard to rescue her to the point where I was no doubt stepping into an over-controlling relational style out of sheer desperation. It was not only about our relationship or if it would or could work out. It was not only about my unresolved past of attempting to rescue my parents from BPD and addiction. It was about the fact that this person I had loved and did care for and about was slowly killing herself.

As someone who has recovered from BPD, my survivor guilt really went through the roof. I didn’t know how to cope with that for a while. My survivor guilt didn’t just apply to my relationship with my borderline/narcissist ex it stemmed all the way back to the reality that both my parents remained untreated and unrecovered borderlines. It took me really working to disengage the codependent enmeshment that had been so familiar in many relationship in my life for me to begin to get clarity about just how unhealthy, toxic, and impossible this relationship was and why.

Many with Borderline Personality Disorder also have addictions. Addictions only fuel the borderline false self in ways that keep the borderline investing in everything toxically borderline.

I learned first-hand, as a recovered borderline, who is now a non borderline, that it really isn’t healthy to try or even possible to rescue someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (especially with NPD and an addiction) from his or her self – or from his or her lack of self.

• 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

I know that I have now figured out what my unresolved issues were that led, in part to this most abusive and toxic relationship. I say in part because it is a rather complicated story which I outline in my ebook, Full Circle – Lesson For Non Borderlines.

In my triad of experience with Borderline Personality Disorder, among all the many things I have been blessed to learn, is the reality that there truly is no way to take responsibility for the choices of another human being. There is nothing healthy about toxic relationship dynamics. The non borderline cannot change the borderline or the toxic nature of the relational dynamic, he or she can only work to make healthy changes for him or herself.

It is not possible to rescue someone with just Borderline Personality Disorder. It is even more unlikely one could ever rescue someone with both BPD and NPD. It is even more futile to try to rescue someone with BPD/NPD and addiction issues. The choice to bang your head on this wall of futility is really, for the non borderline, a choice to avoid your own pain. I know, I tried it, I live it, I avoided some of my remaining pain. The relief only came when I ended the relationship – went no contact – and faced my own issues and pain.

Non borderlines cannot change borderlines. Only those who have been diagnosed with BPD can take the personal responsibility that is central to even having a chance to get on the road to recovery. Only those with BPD can rescue themselves.

© A.J. Mahari, July 20, 2008 – All rights reserved.

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