Reply to How much do you remember in your first 20 years of life?

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[quote=Anonymous]watch out for this, dwelling on this can be unhealthy:

[i]Hi, I'm understand where you're coming from.  I have a stepdaughter with BPD who is close in age to your son, and who also has delusional memories of childhood.  Though nobody's childhood is perfect, her descriptions of childhood "trauma" have gotten more outlandish and less believable as the years with diagnosed BPD drag on.  Recently she's gone so far as to imply there was sexual abuse by her father, which is totally untrue.  She claims that she has been bullied by almost everyone around her.  To her, just offering her help would constitute "bullying," because in her eyes, an offer of help is demeaning and suggests that she's incompetent.  In summary, it seems she is trying to recast past slights into trauma, and use the trauma as an excuse to hurl insults and unrepressed rage at her family members.  In reality, she's the bully, and her interpretation of events is pure emotion, and not based on fact--sometimes there might be a kernel of truth, but she warps and reinterprets events to such a degree that she's delusional.  Rather than face reality, she'll lie.  Having said that, sometimes she doesn't even bother with lying, but instead she'll withdraw and avoid life completely.

I can't help but try to see through her rage.  Her furious outbursts tend to coincide with current disappointments--when she can't handle the day-to-day stresses of a job or studies, and she quits suddenly, or whenever things don't go her way.  I know I'm judgmental, but when she experiences disappointments, she will not act like an adult, take responsibility or take things in stride; rather, she blames others for her predicaments.  As her BPD has dragged on, increasingly she blames her parents and siblings for a traumatic childhood.  In her mind, the past trauma is the reason she is failing to function in an adult world.  I guess this is easier for her than facing the truth:  she's the only reason she's dysfunctional.  She resents being so dependent on her family for everything, but she can't step up and act like an adult and take some responsibility.  So she's stuck in the past, replaying and reinterpreting upsetting memories, blaming her distant childhood for all her current problems.  Though this view of the world has tired her out (with years spent ruminating about the distant past), she can't seem to give it up and look forward.  She doesn't want to accept things as they are and move on.  It's very frustrating for her whole family.

It's hard to know what to do, because the experts say that we're supposed to validate her feelings.  But if feelings are based on a delusion, validating the delusion seems counterproductive.  There's no arguing with rage.  Yet the rage seems to increase in intensity as the years go on.  The way I see it, the rage has increased as her ability to function as an adult has deteriorated.  Her peers have grown up, and yet she hasn't, and she's feeling FOMO and shame, and she's coping by blaming her predicament on a bad childhood.[/i]

https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=356686.0;prev_next=prev[/quote]

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