I'm in a friend/mentor relationship with a woman who is diagnosed BPD.

This young woman "K" is 32, but acts more like 18-20. Comes from a sh!t family. Both parents were addicts, and dad is a schizophrenic. She is the youngest of a litter (some of her sibs also have psych diagnoses), and admits she was pretty much left to raise herself. K was molested by a family member for years, and ended up spending almost a year inpatient in a psych institution.

K lives with her elderly mother and works part time at a thrift store She's recently started dating for the first time, but it doesn't work well because she gets into these "friends with benefits" arrangements with low rent men. They use K, and she always seems to develop feelings for them no matter how ghetto they are. It's very sad. K seems to have zero self esteem, lots of anxiety, and no standards or boundaries of ability to regulate her emotions. She has lots of "had days".

This description is so spot on and enlightening. I've read BPD is one of the hardest to treat because they are very manipulative people who are also charming when they want to be. That is my mother to a T.

Just the other day, I was telling my mother about the recent upheaval with SD.

Out of nowhere, she suddenly was seething, screaming, boiling over like I had flipped a switch or triggered something in her: "That little bitch! Who does she think she is? She's just a big-nosed *Arab* -- all those people do is fight!!!"

I was stunned, speechless at first that she reacted so intensely -- I mean, she was seething! And the Arab thing...what the hell? They dragged us to every Arab country in the world when we were young. I know she loves the culture. It disturbed me so much, I started defending not only Arabs, but even SD! I was trying to calm her down because her words were so...just ugly.

No kidding, within about three minutes, she'd totally flipped again, but this time she was calm, sounded reasonable, her voice was a lower pitch, almost nurturing: "Well, she IS his daughter. You have to be more patient with your husband. How would you feel if you couldn't spend time with your father because his wife doesn't like you?"

And the interesting thing about this conversation (because conversations like this were never unusual with my mother), was that I noticed how she made me flip because she flipped. One minute I was complaining about SD, then she flipped, so I flipped and found myself defending the very person I'd just been complaining about. It was as if I unleashed this monster in my mother and I didn't know how to put it back in the box.

But then she flipped again and I was left thinking, WTH? What just happened here?

The conversation just shot me back to my childhood of being raised by someone who could flip and rage on a dime, would say hostile, scathing things to me one minute, "I wish you'd never been born!," and the next be defending me with her life.

My mother is especially prone to abandonment triggers -- they're when she acts her worst.

One of the saddest things about my estrangement from my SD is that we both were raised by women like this. It would be easy for us to connect on that level (and on a rare occasion, we did way back when) if she could be civil to me.

Yea...BPD mother. Terrifying at 5, still terrifying at 51...

i read the book "Understanding the Borderline Mother" and she is definitely the Queen archetype. She was abandoned by her father at 7 and her mother and had had five different husbands. North Korea fears abandonment and the SD's they aren't ever allowed to move out and away. She is promiscuous and a swinger with her husband . She spends money outrageously and is a lot of debt. She too flips. And she can't be criticized or told she is wrong. In the book it describes the type of men they marry and how entitled they feel even after divorce to their ex husbands time and money.