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I
appreciated your article on Borderline Personality
Disorder. I have been dealing with a mother with Borderline Personality Disorder
for a long time. She has not been diagnosed by a professional, but I have
talked with professionals who have said she probably has that. I have also
been diagnosed with tendencies towards Dependent Personality Disorder. I
have been working hard to maintain a relationship with my mother, however
I sometimes feel emotionally abused by her. I understand much better where
she is coming from after reading your article. I have . . . attempted
to set
boundaries
and be less attached and to not take things personally from her. It is very
frustrating to me that she can say whatever she wants to me without any regard
for my feelings but when I try to tell her she’s hurting my feelings
she basically tells me I deserve it and that she has a right to talk to me
however she wants. I have been a very good daughter to her. I want to love
her without enabling her and have been trying to set boundaries for many
years, but struggle with enforcing boundaries because I don’t want her
to view me badly. I struggle with the knowledge that everyone is entitled
to their own opinions and freedom of speech but her speech hurts me. I understand
I can’t change her and that I have to tell her what I will accept but
when I try that, she tells me that if I wouldn’t have done this, that,
or the other thing, she wouldn’t be acting the way she is and never
acknowledges that she is hurting my feelings and always makes an excuse for
it. How do I maintain a relationship with her without allowing myself to
be emotionally abused? How do I allow her to have her opinion but still express
mine? Also, I am getting married [soon] and a lot of her anger is
directed toward my husband. How do I protect my marriage?
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 hroughout the
Bible, we are told to “honor your father and
your mother” as a reminder of one of the Ten Commandments (see Exodus
20: 1-17). Many domineering parents, however, try to use this commandment
to demand a child’s obedience to their every whim, and many children
blindly and obediently try to follow this commandment without understanding
the implicit meaning behind it.
Therefore, let’s look at
the psychology of it all.
Honoring
Love
What is the purpose of honoring
our fathers and mothers? Well, by honoring them we make it possible to learn
from them, so as to acquire their wisdom and their love for God. This therefore
shows that the assumption made in the commandment about honoring parents is that
fathers and mothers love God, are living holy lives, and care
for their children and want their good—and are therefore engaged in patiently
and gently teaching their children to love God rather than criticizing them and
controlling them so as to make them serve their parents. Hence, to honor your
father and your mother is to honor their love for God.
When Parents
are Enemies of Love
So what happens when parents
don’t really want the good of their children? What happens when parents
constantly criticize their children, abuse them, and essentially stifle any
good that the children could achieve? In short, what happens in
dysfunctional families when parents don’t
really love their children but manipulate and control them?
Well, parents such as this don’t love their children because they don’t
love God either. These parents have broken the first commandment, and, to their
children that makes them enemies, not parents worthy of being honored.
Trying to honor parents such
as this amounts to trying to carry out a fraud. After all, how can you honor
your enemies?
Praying for
Enemies
Nevertheless, even though it
is foolishness to honor our enemies, we still have to pray for them. Christ
told us to pray for our enemies, and, through His own behavior, He showed
us how not to do it.
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Praying for your
enemies does not mean accepting everything they do. |
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Praying for your
enemies does not mean ignoring the danger they cause to you and to
others. |
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Praying for your
enemies does not mean forgetting the harm they have caused. |
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Praying for your
enemies does not mean that they will escape divine
justice. |
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Praying for your enemies, as
Christ made perfectly clear right from the Cross, means that you care about
their salvation and wish for their
repentance. Even as He was being crucified, Christ
was not plotting revenge on His enemies; instead, with a broken heart flowing
with mercy, He yearned for their
repentance.
A Relationship
of Truth
Consequently, considering what
you have said about your mother’s treatment of you, the only
“relationship” you can have with your mother is a relationship
of truth. See the truth, then: understand that she does not love you. See
it clearly.
If you don’t see it, you
will be endlessly trying to appease her, to do something to make her love
you. You will be dependent on your hope for her love. You will be
like a dog begging for scraps and dying of hunger because the scraps are
not real food.
If you do see the truth, you
will realize that making her love you is impossible. She will never
love you unless she changes psychologically; she will never love you unless
she sees the truth of her own brokenness
and wants to be healed.
You can’t make her change,
and you can’t heal her yourself, but you can stop encouraging her to
remain the same. So how do you stop encouraging her? Stop being
nice.
Stop Being
Nice
Christ wasn’t “nice”
either. He loved us—He spoke the truth—He was the truth—but
He wasn’t nice. To be nice is to accept
anything, even sin itself. Why? Well the deep unconscious
motive for being nice is fear, the fear that if you speak
the truth you will offend someone who will then reject you and abandon you. To
love is to speak the truth and, with
non-judgmental bluntness, to call a sin a
sin.
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Imagine your
mother talking to a friend, complaining about how difficult it is for her
to have a problem daughter like you. If the friend were merely nice, the
friend would say, “There, there, you’re doing your best to be a
good mother.” But if the friend were to speak the truth, the friend
would say, “Well, no wonder your daughter has so many problems! Look
at how miserably cruel you are to her!” So there’s the difference
between being nice and speaking the truth from a heart filled with
love. |
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So stop being nice and start
being genuine.
To be genuine with others, though,
you have to do your own psychological work first, so that you can be genuine
with yourself. You can find help in doing this by reading and studying
the entirety of this website; you might also need
psychotherapy. In any case, once
you can see how you deceive yourself, you can
help others see how they deceive themselves.
Mind you, being around your mother
while you are still in the process of your own
healing can be psychologically precarious and
dangerous. Your best protection, at least temporarily, may be to distance
yourself—emotionally, and even physically if necessary—from your
mother. In addition, if you enter psychotherapy, you can rely on frequent
guidance and coaching from your psychotherapist about what to say and do
in regard to your mother.
You Go Where
You Are Praying
Just keep in mind that as you
change and become more and more genuine, your mother’s behavior
might eventually change as well. Initially, though, she will accuse you of being
mean and ungrateful, and she will try to make you feel so guilty that you will
come crawling back on your knees to her domination. So pray constantly that you
can speak always from a place of love, and pray constantly for your mother’s
enlightenment and repentance. In the physical world we go where we are looking;
in the spiritual realm, we go where we are praying. So if you’re not praying
for what you want, you don’t really want it.
As for your marriage, everything
depends on your husband. If he is psychologically strong, confide in him
and ask for his help in maintaining a distance from your mother and in your
becoming more genuine. Also, pray together for the strength to resist your
mother’s subversion. If your husband is not psychologically strong,
well, beware, because your mother will prey upon his weakness to undermine
your marriage.
Recommended
Reading
A treasure of a resource for psychological and spiritual healing. Information
gathered from my websites (including this webpage) is now available at your fingertips
in book form.
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Falling Families, Fallen Children by Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D. Do
our children see a mother and a father both living in contemplative love for
God with a constant awareness of His presence and engaged in an all-out battle
with the evil of the world? More often than not our children don’t see living
faith. They don’t see protection from evil. They don’t see genuine, fruitful
devotion. They don’t see genuine love for God. Instead, they see our external
acts of devotion as meaningless because they see all the other things we do that
contradict the true faith. Thus we lose credibility—and when parents lose credibility,
children become cynical and angry and turn to the social world around them for
identity and acceptance. They are children who have more concern for social approval
than for loving God. They are fallen children. Let’s bring them back.
Ordering
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