5 golden years

my thoughts

  • living in borderland: crazy making

    [This is part of the series, “Living in Borderland,” in which I describe my experiences living with my Mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder; covering psychological criteria, manifestations, effects on children, family and sibling reactions, and finding help.] ————— My therapist introduced me to the term, “Crazy Making,” a psychological concept that perfectly described the world in…

  • living in borderland: helping yourself

    [This is part of the series, “Living in Borderland,” in which I describe my experiences living with my Mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder, covering psychological criteria, manifestations, effects on children, family and sibling reactions, and finding help.] “Be gone.. you have no power here.” Visiting the Land of Oz, we hear these words from the good…

  • living in borderland

    I am working on a comprehensive expose of understanding and living with my Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) Mother. The multipart series is coming soon. I thank you for your patience and support. And, I have to tell you, reviewing and re-living my experiences to share with you, while emotionally provoking and bringing grief to work…

  • clinical aspects of addictive families

    [This is for those interested in the psychological underpinnings of families living with addiction; focusing on abusive relationships, and on etiology and treatments, drawing on my personal and professional experiences as a family therapist, along with current research.] “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”(Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)…

  • addictive family effects

    Mother was terrified of alcoholism and regularly regaled us with its evils. We often heard about her friends who became alcoholics after cooking with wine. What is more plausible is the story of her father, after WWI, in a drunken stupor, almost died, saw hell, quickly reformed and became a “hell fire and brimstone” circuit…

  • the why of it

    In the midst of caring for Mother, her negative verbalizations and erratic behavior were so intense, I did not have time to process. I just felt it was my duty as a daughter. I am compassionate, and a soft heart can leave a person vulnerable to abuse. After I was free, I began questioning: “Why…

  • dissociating

    Where do I start? Throughout my childhood I was just surviving, not attempting to make sense of what Mother was doing or why was she doing it. With all of the physical and verbal abuse, I quickly learned to distance myself, dissociate, although I was not able to label it as such until as an…

  • hoarding: a psychological perspective

    First, let me say, I found it very sad and pathetic; her whole life, Mother stressed over getting organized, but accepted no help, nor self-reflecting as to the causes. Several years before my moving to care for Mother, I attended a week-end seminar to gain more understanding, finding hoarding is one of the most difficult…

  • anatomy of a hoarder

    Nature abhors a vacuum (Aristotle), and we all find ways to fill emptiness in our lives and in our souls. It can become a constant battle, especially for those living with hoarders. When it became clear that Mother could not live alone (convincing her of this is another subject). It fell to me to clear…

  • something’s wrong

    In the words of my sister, “Growing up I knew something was wrong, I didn’t know what, but I got out of there as soon as I could.” She was smart and went away to college. Me, not so much. Going through Mother’s pathological hoarding (details in another blog), I found family photos from our…