DH won't believe me that SD9 has many similarities to BM. Same hands, feet, chin, nose, then you get into same mental problems...

My SD17.5's BM is Dx BPD, and is an alcoholic. SD started displaying traits of mental issues at 13, beginning with self-mutilation (cutting and burning herself), and has only intensified in her self-destructive behaviors over the years. She has eating disorders (bulimia/anorexia), engages in risky behaviors (most concerning is her penchant for unprotected sex, which has gotten her a "forever" STD, which she shares freely with everyone she has sex with). SD's therapist (who she stopped seeing after moving out of our home, since BM doesn't "believe" in them), has told us that SD displays all of the necessary markers for a BPD/Histrionic diagnosis herself, but diagnosis before age 18 is rare.

One of the most common problems in treating mental illness (especially ones that create an inflated ego), is that the person does not see how their behaviors are directly related to the difficulties in their lives and interpersonal relationships. It is always someone else's fault. And in our case, BM made it very convenient for herself to rebuff professional help (and therefore make any healthy progress), because after her diagnosis (in court ordered treatment), she decided that the mental health field is based in fiction. She has always STRONGLY denied being borderline, although she fits EVERY single parameter of the illness, and we only know about her diagnosis because she told me about it as a joke. She was laughing at the sheer audacity of the therapist to suggest such a thing, about HER! Of ALL people!! What a quack!! (Little does she know, that was the single biggest "aha!" moment of my SM years. It literally explained everything, and both scared and relieved me.)

We really walked a thin line when SD was living with us, because BM's diagnosis is not common knowledge. It was a nerve-wracking situation, thinking about being the ones to tell SD about her mom's diagnosis, to actually put a name to the behaviors. Knowing that I was NOT THE CRAZY ONE!! was helpful for me to navigate the treacherous waters of dealing with BM, but we struggled with whether SD would be able to handle or comprehend that label. It was fairly serendipitous that SD took a psychology class her first term of school while living with us. When she was instructed to write a report on a personality disorder, I suggested BPD. After she wrote it, and then had an especially horrible interaction with BM a few days later, she asked me if I thought her mom might be BPD. I said yes, and that led to her having several sessions with her counselor that were centered around coming to terms with this realization.

I guess I was really hopeful that SD would educate herself about boundary setting, recognizing the manipulation techniques her BM uses to keep her compliant and submissive, and build a 'toolbox' of sorts. For her to be able to handle the pressures and complexities of having such an important person in her life carry an around an illness that has kept ALL of us from living peaceful lives. But the reality of our situation is that while SD recognizes the traits of BPD in her mother, she wants the reality to be different, so she pretends that it isn't so. Being detached from reality is the hallmark of her BM's illness, and SD has adopted a similar coping strategy.

When the big blow out occurred a few months ago, and SD decided to move back to BM's house of horrors, she told BM about BPD, and that we had told SD that BM had it. When BM filed custody papers on DH, she stated that we were perpetrating PAS by "bad-mouthing" her to SD. That part of our story has been the single biggest mind-fuck for us to come to terms with. I'm not sure how else things could have panned out, and I don't know what the future holds. Mental illness is pervasive and brutal. I guess I don't have any real advice to give if you're dealing with a BM that is truly mentally ill (other than to go no-contact as soon as possible to reduce conflict, and have iron-clad boundaries), but I empathize greatly with anyone dealing with a similar situation. It can be heart-breaking and destructive to relationships that we hold dear to our hearts. Personal counseling has been essential for me.

My skids' birth mom has Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Very basically explained, it's a form of epilepsy in which the seizures affect the part of the brain responsible for things like emotion and perception. A somewhat common side effect of the disease, one that BM displays a lot, is that the hallucinations and sensory experiences brought on by a seizure resemble religious visions. The damage to the neural pathways the disease causes have also been known to make people hyper-religious outside of their seizures. BM has had visions, even going so far as to being convinced during one that her daughter was a demon. She is raising the kids, against their father's wishes, to be very strictly Catholic because her disease has caused an extreme obsession with religion. I don't want to insult anyone's religious beliefs on here, but knowing that your skids are being lectured that you and their father are going to hell by someone who basically bought into her religion because of brain damage is more than a little frustrating. BM's parenting technique is to not really discipline the kids herself, but to keep the threat of sin and hell hanging over their heads to keep them in line. Scaring a 6-year old like that is unjustifiable, IMHO.

She's also been diagnosed as bipolar, which just adds to the mental health issues we already have to deal with. As hubs is also bipolar, you can just imagine how volatile their relationship was and still is! He's convinced that she is also a borderline sociopath and, while he makes a very good case (considering that it's obvious that she only does things for her kids when there's a good chance of her being praised, not just because it's what is best for the children) I am the first to say that he's a bit too biased to make a diagnosis that extreme.

So the end result is that the BM is an incredibly self-righteous and self-absorbed woman who believes that she is a better parent just because she drags the skids to church on Sunday and punishes them if they start to eat before her fiance says grace. And, while she is incredibly neglectful of the kids and occasionally screams at them that they're possessed, she constantly tells the them that their father is a horrible person just because Jesus doesn't play a role in his life. She's greedy and manipulative but the "visions" that her epilepsy give her have her convinced that everything she does is justified because god talks to her, and she's just a good Christian woman trying to negate the influence of us godless sinners in her children's lives.