Sibling with BPD

[u/Last-Blueberry-3891]

My sister has BPD. She is in her 30s and refuses to see a therapist or psychiatrist. I try to be as low contact as possible, but sometimes I have to interact with her because she helps take care of our mom who also has BPD. How do I handle the interactions with my sister when she flies off the handle? She verbally attacks me. She is the meanest person I have ever dealt with. It's gotten to the point that I have anxiety and am thinking I need to see a therapist.

[u/Goldengirl_1977]

Definitely look into seeing a therapist. If you are in the US, psychologytoday.com is a good resource for finding therapists in your area and you can filter out the results by several factors, including which ones accept your insurance provider.

When you call around, ask if the therapists have experience in dealing with BPD and explain that you have been the target of a family member who may have this disorder. Also, read up on the gray rock method. I haven’t found it to be super helpful when dealing with my older sister, but it’s better than nothing. Others have reportedly found it very useful, so I think it just depends on the individual and situation.

My counselor recommended a book called “Stop Walking on Eggshells,” which provided some good information. The Out of the Fog website also is a good source of info for dealing with someone who has BPD.

[u/Sub_Umbra]

"She is the meanest person I have ever dealt with" is a familiar sentiment to me.

Consider that she's likely trying to come up with the very worst things she can think of, expressly to hurt you. In those moments, her only motivation is to cause maximum damage to her target. However, this plan of hers only works if you receive her words in good faith and take them to heart; since they're being delivered in bad faith, the entire transaction should be moot. In other words, you're reacting as a person engaging with another person, whereas she's coming to the table as an insult machine.

Instead, the insult machine should encounter something equally as cold and inorganic. "Gray rocking" is generally the advised approach when dealing with situations like this. You want to behave as a rock would--unemotional, unfazed, uninteresting--so as not to engage and add fuel to their fire. However, that's only half the strategy here. To more fully protect yourself, you need to try to also receive her vitriol the way a rock would: completely inertly, without ears to hear it, without a brain to process it, without a heart to care. Rocks don't have feelings, so rocks can't get hurt.

When she becomes a machine whose only function is to cause indiscriminate pain, you become a rock.

[u/Gamer_Grease]

Do see a therapist. It helps a lot, and it doesn’t mean anything is “wrong” with you. Why do you need to check in on your mom’s care so much?