🎠What it means to have grown up with a parent who had borderline personality disorder
Growing up with a parent who had BPD meant living with extreme emotional volatility, where love came with mixed messages—sometimes your parent was emotionally available and caring, other times they were distant, overwhelmed, or completely unpredictable.
You may have learned that relationships could disappear without warning, that people you depended on might suddenly become unavailable or turn against you entirely. You became an emotional sponge, constantly absorbing the feelings of everyone around you, which helped you navigate unpredictable family dynamics but left you exhausted and confused about where your responsibilities end and others' begin.
You may have developed conflicting desires for both closeness and distance, creating simultaneous push-pull behaviors in relationships. You might find yourself alternating between clinging intensely to partners out of fear they might leave, then pushing them away preemptively to protect yourself from potential heartbreak, sometimes doing both with the same person within a single weekend.