The adult child of a borderline parent or parents also knows the pain of unresolved abandonment. He or she also knows a profound emotional suffering, often on the other side of Borderline Personality Disorder. And, often in a dualistic way, as someone with BPD him or herself, and as someone experiencing the brokenness of trying to relate to someone else with BPD. Not all adult children (who were a child) of a borderline parent develop Borderline Personality Disorder themselves. However, many do. Forgiveness is part of what it takes to actually heal.

• 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 For Loved Ones of BPD © A.J. Mahari

I am an adult child of not one, but two parents, with Borderline Personality Disorder. I learned in my journey of my own recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder (my memoir is coming out in the fall of 2010) that forgiveness is the way forward. That forgiveness is the pathway to emotional peace and freedom. I had worked to hard to free myself from my own experience of having Borderline Personality Disorder to allow myself to remain in the clutches of the emotional pain and suffering that one lives with when one is the adult child of a borderline parent – or parents.

In a video recorded in 2008, A.J. Mahari, talks about her experience as an adult child of two borderline parents and how she knows that forgiveness is necessary for healing and recovery.

• 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

If you want to heal you need to do whatever you can to get the help you may need to actually get on the road to finding this forgiveness. Even in the face of unresolved issues with a borderline parent. Even in the face of a life-time of wanting a meaningful healthy connection with that parent - a connection that you haven’t been able to establish, may still yearn for, but that you need to learn to radically accept is something that you won’t be able to have. Even when there can be no closure with that parent.

It is only through the surrender to that loss that each one of us, as an adult child or a borderline parent or parent(s), can find our own recovery. Holding on or staying involved in the chaos of a borderline parent isn’t going to give you what you long for. It is only going to hurt you more. Trying to get what you’ve never been able to get, emotionally, from your borderline parent, only keeps you stuck in the pain of that most profound unresolved abandonment and loss.

Having a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder often means a legacy of codependence in your life that can mean you may well be or have been in a series of unhealthy relationships in your adulthood – all in a subconscious search for the bond that you long for from your borderline parent. Toxic relationship patterns often have their roots in the pain of your unresolved abandonment The adult child of a borderline parent, whether or not you developed BPD yourself, needs to resolve the pain of that abandonment – of the unmet needs and of the lack of a healthy and meaningful bond.

It is only by radically acccepting that loss and the pain of that loss, facing it, feeling it, grieving it, and letting it go, that the adult child can truly take his or her life back and find emotional peace and freedom.

© A.J. Mahari, May 7, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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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.

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As a Life Coach, BPD Coach and Mental Health Coach, A.J. Mahari talks with clients every day who are in the on-going experience of having their footsteps from the past obstruct their here-and-now in ways that mean unidentified and unreached goals and dreams. Footsteps from the past do not have to continue to obstruct your here-and-now. Mahari knows first-hand that the first step in creating a here-and-now unfolding authenticity in your life journey – to reach your promise and potential and unleash your passion –  is to awaken to the awareness that you are looking back more than you are living now and more than you can look ahead with any confidence.

The more you live with, in, from, and through unresolved past issues in your life, the more you are and will remain disconnected from who the Self in you really is today – from who you really are. Footsteps of unresolved emotions from the past cast a long shadow that effects people knowing who they really are and negatively impacts relationships.

Footsteps from the past obstruct, if not utterly obliterate the here-and-now. What is experienced repeatedly in the lives of those carrying the unresolved and unrelenting painful and negative experience of childhood (or parts of childhood) is the experience of a young and wounded child – not the experience of an emotionally mature adult.

How can you see where you are, let alone where you might be going, or want to go, if you are looking back. Back at the trail of footsteps that was a journey already taken? How can you know who you are when you are essentially still who you were?

If you are still living through unresolved childhood psychological and emotional woundedness you cannot fully experience the here-and-now as it is actually unfolding because you will be triggered back to re-experiencing what you have not yet worked through, accepted, and/or resolved.

To read the rest of this article (free) please visit Dialectic Magazine

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Those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and their family members, relationship partners – non borderlines – have intersecting reality where common ground is encountered. This common ground, however, is not experienced in the same way by the borderline and the non borderline. Thus, even when common ground is recognized, more often than not, it is common ground that stems from facets of unhealthy relating, to varying degrees, that need to be addressed in order for growth, change, healing, and recovery on both sides of Bordeline Personality Disorder.

At first glance, one might assume that it is just the people diagnosed with BPD that need to grow, change, heal, and to recover. This is not the case, however. Most, if not all, non borderlines, who have been in close relationship to someone with BPD (family member, partner or ex-partner) also need to quest after their own understanding, their own disengagement, and their own recovery.

• 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.

There are several areas where those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and those who are non borderline or non-personality disordered do meet if you will and find common ground. I will be exploring some of those "meeting places" in up-coming blogs.

The first common ground reality between those with BPD and non borderlines I want to illuminate here is the need for change and the fear of that needed and/or wanted change.

Both those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and those who know and/or love (or have loved them) referred to as non borderlines will find common ground, though in their own individual ways, when it comes to the need for and the fear of change.

Those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and those who are non borderline struggle with mindfully radically accepting the awareness that tries to rise from within. While the defense mechanisms employed against this awareness that tries to make itself known aren’t the same, the results can often be similar for both the borderline and the non borderline.

Both those with BPD and those who are non borderline, when they come together in relationships that are often toxic and dysfunctional need to create change in order to take care of themselves, separately, whether the relationships remain intact or not.

A.J. has an audio program, available now on the subject of CHANGE – Healing and Recovery ($10.99) that will be of benefit to those with BPD and Non Borderlines.

This audio program is an enlightening examination about the ins and outs of change. The reality is that change is a part of all of our lives. It is more challenging for some people than others in various ways. However, the challenge of the newness of any change is often what inhibits our ability to achieve much-desired and/or much-needed change. This is the challenge for anyone, whether they have BPD or not.

The truth is that much of what each individual needs and wants to know about the questions and the sought after answers desired in his or her own experience in life are really housed deep within each individual. Why is it that, often, these answers seem or actually are so elusive?

Simply put the awareness that you need to tap into that does exist within you is blocked by your efforts to defend against it.

No one really absolutely consciously sets out to defend against their own inner-wisdom. This often happens though. This internal battle, whether you have BPD, or are a non borderline, is powerful for so many reasons. It is powerful because people tend to believe their own illusions.

It is powerful because old habits truly do die hard. Old patterned and habitual ways of relating, for both those with BPD and non borderlines can date back to unresolved issues from childhood.

It is powerful because those with BPD are unaware of their own cognitive distortions. It is powerful for non borderlines because they believe (at least for a time) the stories that they tell themselves about what is unfolding in relationship to those with BPD that are designed to prevent loss. Non borderlines, being human, struggle in many ways with and against loss as well. Many non borderlines find it especially difficult and puzzling really when it comes to the lack of resolution when a relationship isn’t working or has to end or has ended with someone with BPD. Non borderlines often block the very change that they most need by over-focusing on the person with BPD. Non borderlines need to address this and can Break Free of The Borderline Maze and find the change that will be their process of healing and recovery.

Those who have BPD often struggle even harder and more profoundly against loss because experiencing any loss re-ignites some awareness of the abandonment trauma and pain that you are so desperately trying to outrun. It is also loss that leaves borderlines so emotionally dysregulated that they often try to control others because they do not know how to control themselves – and they often are not aware enough of the ways in which they tend to psychologically live through "other" due to the absence of a known self.

Recognizing Both The Need To Change and The Fear of Change

The need for change, however you might define that change in your life, whether you have BPD or not, will make itself known to you when you are in pain and when things aren’t working either in your life or in your relationship(s).

The fear of change might not be the first thing that you realize about your own experience. There are many human and compelling reasons why people continue to do what they know better than. That is what old habits and patterns are. And old habits and patterns are sometimes all one knows at a given time. That is why they say, when you know better, you will do better.

The need for change is often recognized by a common motivator – pain. Pain can sometimes be expressed as anger or rage before the borderline is in touch with the fact that they are actually in pain. The need for change is often realized when negatives begin to far-outweigh positives. The need for change arises when the borderline fears abandonment and when the non borderline fears the loss of him or herself. The need for change, generally, arises when we are out of balance and when we are not meeting, or not able to meet our own needs.

For the borderline fear of change is a staple of the borderline false self. It is a threat to existence as one knows it or to whatever extent one knows, feels, and/or experiences it. For the borderline fear of change is often an unconscious feeling that lies under the borderline’s conscious awareness because change requires both choice and the taking of personal responsibility – two things that many with BPD do not have the emotional maturity or psychological inter-personal skills to cope effectively with.

Change threatens the borderlines polarized ideas about right and wrong and about fair and unfair among many other polarized and distorted beliefs about what should be versus what is and what needs to be.

Non borderlines are often shell-shocked by many of the things that they experience on the other side of BPD and it can take time to come to terms with catching up to what is actually happening. For non borderlines loss can be formidable. Unlike, those with BPD, however, most non borderlines have the coping skills to deal with loss. This notwithstanding, however, non borderlines often fear change and loss because they will then have to look at themselves as well.

The need for change will keep pulling on your psyche and be brought to your attention over and over again, whether you are borderline or non borderline until you start to heed its message and explore what it is that you actually need to address.

A.J. has an audio program for non borderlines who need to find their own way to change, growth, healing and recovery as the result of having been in a relationship with someone with BPD. Breaking Free of The Borderline Maze Recovery For Non Borderlines

Recognizing the need for change and the fear you may well have of that change is the gateway toward opening up to the awareness inside of you that seeks to get your attention whether you are someone with BPD or a non borderline who loves (loved) or cares (cared) about someone with BPD.

In my audio program, CHANGE – Healing and Recovery (for those with BPD and/or Non borderlines) I talk about why change is so important. I talk about the significance of self-concept (or lack thereof) in the process of change along with the reality that the foundation of all change is choice. I outline common obstacles to change and the wonderful gifts that we can be blessed with when we enter a process of change and remain dedicated to it in ways that respect and celebrate our own unique needs and personal growth.

A great deal of the work that I do with people who are borderlines or non borderlines that I work with as a life coach revolves around the need to address the paradox of the need for change and the fear of change.

Change Is a Journey and a Process

Change is a journey and a process that can only begin when you make an active choice to pursue it. You can only make an active choice to pursue it when you are aware of what you need and want.

• 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.

Mindful radical acceptance of what is will slowly, over time, as you practise this skill create the space from which new awareness can arise. It is this new awareness, especially for those with BPD, that will provide an impetus to explore what is behind both the need for change and the fear of what one needs.

There are many obstacles to change. Many of those obstacles are individual ones. The primary obstacles to change are born out of what it is that we actually think and believe. This is true for both those with BPD and for non borderlines.

Emotions are a major obstacle to change. Why? Because they often will lead both the borderline and the non borderline away from rising awareness and lead to reactionary patterned responses that don’t create or even leave room for change.

What and how you think, whether you are borderline or non borderline, is also a formidable obstacle to change.

"What you resist, will continue to persist

Begin today by asking yourself questions about what you feel and what is going on in your life that may not be working or meeting your needs. It is only from asking honest questions that one can even begin to understand what exactly one needs to know in order to create change. The answers to the questions that you begin to pose will reveal to you the change that you most need in your life.

For those who have Borderline Personality Disorder there is an inherent cognitive split that must be overcome between the need for change and the fear of change that is the false self protection against change that blocks the awareness so needed to create the change necessary to get on the road to recovery.

If you have BPD you likely fear change because change is a process that has to out the ghosts of your core wound of abandonment. It is a process that will insist upon actively choosing to work to resolve your unresolved abandonment trauma and pain.

If you are a non borderline, you too may have some fear of change. Change brings with it, for all of us, some degree or other of the unknown. Most people prefer the comfort of the known – even when it hurts like hell.

The pain of what is known must be experienced and re-experienced enough times until one, whether borderline or non borderline, gets to the point where the pain of what is out-weighs the pain and fear associated with that unknown, whatever that unknown is to you in your life.

Borderlines and non borderlines, though having much in experience, thought, perception, and emotional experience that is different do have common struggles, each in their own way, when it comes to the need for change and the co-existence of the fear of that most needed change simultaneously. This is the case because underneath the labels and the reality of those labels – personality-disordered or non-personality disordered, borderline, or non borderline is the commonality of being human.

© A.J. Mahari – July 6, 2008

A.J. Mahari is a Life Coach who, among other things, specializes in working with those with BPD and non borderlines. A.J., is a woman who has recovered from BPD, had 2 parents with BPD and had a relationship (6 years after her own recovery) with someone with BPD and has also walked many a mile on the non borderline side of BPD since her recovery. A.J. has 5 years experience as a life coach and has worked with hundreds of clients from all over the world.