Four Types of Borderline Mother / Daughter Relationships | Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel oh this is dr. Grande today's question asks if I can explore the relationship between a mother who has borderline personality or and her daughter so as I was working on this video as thinking about a few different ways to structure this content and the way I'll structure this video is I'll be presenting the four types of borderline mother-daughter relationships so not really signs but rather patterns we see in relationships between a mother with borderline personality and her daughter so just to clear up how these examples are broken down we see in different situations here a dependent daughter so this would be a daughter who's young so she's dependent on the mother so typically like under age 18 or under age 20 or 22 or something like that and then also be looking at the independent daughter so this would be a daughter who is financially self-sufficient and living on her own now I know there can be other situations like a daughter who is relatively independent but still lives with her mother or a dependent daughter who's in a shared custody arrangement but I'm just gonna focus here on dependent versus independent so before I get to the types I'm going to go through real quickly the list of symptoms for BPD there are nine symptoms in the symptom criteria list in the DSM of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual we see frantic efforts to avoid abandonment unstable relationships this is a pattern of idealization and evaluation I'm going to refer to this as the love-hate cycle identity disturbance impulsivity at least two areas that could cause self damage we see suicidal behavior affective instability chronic feelings of emptiness inappropriate or intense anger or difficulty controlling anger and paranoid ideation or severe dissociation now we know when we look at the daughter of a borderline mother we see that daughter is that higher risk for developing the disorder herself we see that borderline mothers often struggle with bonding attachment and a construct called mentalization and this one is particularly important especially in the early stages when the daughter's young we see with this mentalization construct this is the ability to infer the mental state of another so essentially to know what somebody's thinking based on their behavior we know that borderline mothers misinterpret the mental states of their children about three and a half times more often than mothers without were line person is water so we see here they're more likely to make what we call non attuned comments so comments that demonstrate they did not understand where the child was thinking which of course can be highly invalidating for a child so I'm going to go through the types now the four types of the borderline mother-daughter relationship of course there are more than just these types I'm just trying to cover some of the common situations I've seen in my clinical experience and what we see in the research literature so with the first type this is a borderline mother who has a daughter and perhaps other children but no longer has a relationship with a daughter's father and the mother actively dates so she has multiple romantic relationships and of course we would expect these romantic relationships to be unstable there would be this love/hate cycle with each of the boyfriends in the example I'm using here so the borderline mother really focuses on this relationship with the boyfriend and she makes it central to her life during the idealization face so essentially the daughter and the mind of the borderline mother is there to support the mother's relationship with the boyfriend so when things are going well with the boyfriend the mother introduces him as an authority figure and asked the daughter to respect and obey him suggesting that he's in charge and really kind of pushing him into the role of being a father so the daughter really feels like she's not as important as the boyfriend then during the devaluation face one would think that the mother would become closer to the daughter and they would side against the boyfriend but what I often see is that the borderline mother blames the daughter for not being supportive of the boyfriend for driving the boyfriend away even though the mother is really angry at the boyfriend this is really a feature we see with world line person is order and anger when somebody with the disorder is angry they are often angry indiscriminately they expressed reactive anger toward everybody or at least many people that approach them and interact with them so it's not a selective type of anger again indiscriminate so from the daughters perspective no matter which phase is operating the idealization or the devaluation the daughter isn't being attended to now moving to the second type so in the example I used before in the first type we see that the love-hate cycle that manifests what the key relationship is focused on a romantic partner I used the example of a boyfriend but with the second type the key relationship is really between the mother and the daughter and again I'm still talking about a dependent daughter so this relationship the mother-daughter relationship of course lacks the romantic component but it still has the insecurity the anger the frantic efforts to avoid abandonment paranoia and emotional dysregulation this is certainly a more active type of relationship as compared to the first type the first type is really kind of distant this one's really a meshed so it has good times bad times a lot of communication a lot of intense feelings sometimes we see guilt trips we also see that the borderline mother is constantly looking for reassurance that the daughter loves her the mother is jealous of other people that the daughter is spending time with and the abandonment fear I mentioned it's still there but it manifests a little differently because of course the daughter really can't just abandon the mother she's dependent on the mother she's going to live there from one day to the next kind of no matter what happens so the fear is really more about being abandoned in the future so we see this repeated prediction by the borderline mother that she will be abandoned someday by the daughter and of course much of the time this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy now with this dynamic with this type of relationship of course we see instability but the love-hate cycle moves back and forth in a way that can become predictable from the point of view of the daughter so the daughter sees the cycle over the long run and she kind of knows what's going to happen next but this changes as the daughter moves from being dependent over to independent that transition period so she's dating looking for educational options maybe like college career options thinking about getting a place of her own and when she reaches adulthood of course she can leave when she wants to leave so she can reach a point where it becomes a decision she can make and this really creates like a constant threat on the borderline mother this constant stress of potentially having the daughter move out at any time and this exacerbates the borderline traits so this transition stage which would be difficult even if neither the mother nor the daughter had were line person a sorter becomes particularly stressful if the mother has BPD the BPD only magnifies the emotional pain of this transition so now moving to the third type so the first two types I was talking about a situation where we have a mother with borderline personality and a dependent daughter and here with the third type and with the fourth type we're looking at the independent daughter so a daughter who lives somewhere else perhaps has a romantic relationship of her own a career maybe even children of her own so she's really building her own life and with this third type the relationship between the mother and the daughter is distant the daughter may resent the behavior of the mother she may be embarrassed by the mother's behavior and the daughter may feel that the mother never really understood the daughters emotions right so this really goes back to when I talked about before with mentalization those non attuned comments the comments that the borderline mother makes that just missed the mark right it's really kind of like an attempt to make a reflection in counseling somebody looks a certain way and the counselor says you look like you're a little depressed except with the borderline mother she misses that reflection instead of saying you look a little depressed maybe she says something like you look a little angry so she's really not getting that accurate reflection she's not accurately picking up on what the daughter is thinking so really way I hear these relationships described a lot is is described as one continual miscommunication so the daughter really feels like she's not being heard or understood another dynamic I commonly see with this particular type is that the daughter doesn't really have the energy to deal with any type of stressful component from the mother like impulsivity suicidal behavior emotional dysregulation paranoia anger there's only so much the daughter can tolerate and she may feel like she's already paid her dues because she was raised by the borderline mother and she spent all that time with her so essentially with this type the daughter has distanced herself from the mother to protect herself to move past the dysfunctional relationship so with this type the borderline mother realizes her fear of abandonment this of course was the exact outcome she wanted to avoid being abandoned produces great feelings of anger shame guilt and resentment so this is a challenging scenario for the mother with hoerlein person is where being abandoned by the daughter kind of brings her worst fears into reality so moving to the fourth type and again as I mentioned this will be the independent daughter as well we see a daughter who has built a life of her own somewhat separate from the mother but with this type the daughter maintains an active and unhealthy relationship with the mother so specifically I'm referring to a relationship with a daughter has borderline traits as well maybe even the full criteria for the disorder and again we know that daughter is at an increased risk so this is an eighth really uncommon situation we would expect to see this on occasion where a mother has borderline personality and the daughter does as well and again with his fourth type the relationship is maintained even though the daughter has become somewhat independent so the dynamic in this relationship would be tumultuous a lot of ups and downs with both the mother and the daughter going through separate love-hate cycles and separate manifestations of the other symptoms of borderline personality may ignore the mother for potentially a long period of time and of course the same thing could happen with a mother finding a new love interest when the daughters angry the mother may withdrawal when the daughter is impulsive she may drag the mother into her behavior so the mother and the daughter get in trouble together so what I find particularly interesting about this particular type is a dynamic that occurs I've seen this a few times in my career what we see is that sometimes the love-hate cycles aligned on the same person for example if the daughter has a boyfriend and she's going through a devaluation cycle so she really believes the boyfriend is bad she hates the boyfriend the mother may join in and also devalue the boyfriend confront him yell at him threaten him caused an incident and then we can see the same thing on the idealization face so when that phase comes around for the daughter the mother may join in with that as well so from the boyfriends perspective he's having these expressions occur to him from two directions at a time so two people devaluing him and two people idealizing him so it becomes extremely stressful for his relationship with the daughter and the mother regardless of which boyfriend were talking about whether it's the mother's boyfriend or the daughter's boyfriend right so essentially the mother and daughter can act as a team in some of the symptoms right so again something I've seen from time to time and clinically speaking it presents kind of a special challenge right that can be a difficult situation especially if you're only working with the mother or only working with the daughter in terms of as a counselor so those are four types of borderline mother-daughter relationships I know whenever I talk about topics like this there'll be a variety of opinions people who agree with me and disagree with me and have other thoughts and examples from their own lives please put those opinions and thoughts in the comment section as always I hope you found this description of these types of mother/daughter relationships to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 123,787

Keywords: Borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, BPD, cluster B, antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, mother daughter relationship, borderline daughter, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, identity disturbance, impulsivity, feeling of emptiness, emotional dysregulation, anger, paranoia, enmeshed relationships, counseling, mental health

Id: 6ro3gTyuoTc

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019