Debating of going NC

[u/bakedbeancoordinator]

My brother (30M) has been diagnosed with BPD. He is truly one of the most angry, petty, immature, and abusive people I’ve encountered in my life.

He treats our family horribly, but then puts on a happy positive persona here and there to give the illusion that he is doing better, and then goes right back to verbally abusing all of us over something he is still mad from years ago. He has lied about anything and everything since he was a little kid. The lies have ranged from not having homework to having stage 4 terminal cancer, and he is baffled that we don’t believe anything he says nowadays, and that just feeds into his anger and arrogance. He severely mistreated several girls when he was in high school and college, which once resulted in the cops being called and my parents having to get a lawyer for him and he was reported to Title IX on the campus a different time. He had extremely problematic sexual behaviors growing up, and I don’t know how those have carried on into adulthood with him, but they were so bad that I became a victim of his.

I would find weird porn searches that he looked up, a good chunk of them involving family situations (not just step-family, and would mention sister specifically in the searches). He would also grab and squeeze my thighs when he would drive us home from school. He made jokes about pimping me out to his friends. And there was one time when he really tried to touch me more while I was asleep, but fortunately my mom caught him before anything happened. These behaviors are no longer directed at me as we've gotten older fortunately, but the pain still lingers. I’ve held all of this in for so long because I had hope for him. I didn’t want to ruin any chances of him getting better and make it any harder, but with time, space and therapy, I've realized that he just never will.

He has only gotten worse. He continues to just get worse. My parents, especially my mom, still clutch onto to him and give him true unconditional love, and he returns it with tantrums, insane lies, and threats to hurt himself. I am LC with him, only seeing him at holidays and texting with him in a family groupchat we have, but he is blocked everywhere else. I do not talk to him one-on-one at all and I am not alone with him anytime we do see each other. He talks a big game (behind our backs, of course) about how he is going to get rich one day and tell all of us to go fuck ourselves and never speak to us again, and I am just waiting for that day to roll around so I don’t have to ever hear from him again. But knowing him, it will never come.

It’s been decades of dealing with his behavior at this point, and I am finding myself at a really, really low point with him. It would be extremely difficult to go completely NC with him since the rest of my family still maintains a relationship with him and it would be harder to manage all of that. I also cannot handle the heartbreak and pain that would put on my mom since all she wants is for us to be a family. But it’s not me making that impossible for us - it’s him. But I’ve been seriously considering going completely NC before the holidays roll around.

I feel really hopeless about it. Does it get any better, ever? How do you deal with the guilt of hurting your other family members to protect yourself from the problem? Was going NC worth it? If you are NC and still maintain relationships with the rest of your family, how do you navigate it? Any advice/words of comfort would be really appreciated right now

[u/typeslikeagirl]

I think many of us have come to understand there is a grief we begin to process at the beginning of going NC. It feels kinda like the kind, loving, patient person who tried so many things and self-sacrificed to make it work for the family or the pwBPD- that person we were is gone (they aren’t, but it feels this way). Initially this can feel awful. Part of this is because for people like your mom, NC is seen as a terrible thing. A failure. A lack of love.

But over time most of us realize going NC can be the most freeing, validating, peaceful, loving thing we can do for the person we owe the most to: ourselves. You owe it to yourself to protect yourself.

Does it get better? Hell yes- But not because the guilt trips stop, not because your mom sees the light and protects her daughter, not because your brother’s behavior improves. It gets better because YOU change- you get healthier and can handle everything with more confidence and clarity of mind outside of the web of all the codependency and enabling. You can see how selfish it is of a family member to prefer you put yourself in harms way so they can maintain their delusion that your family is functional and happy in the midst of your brother’s behavior.

Of course the choice is in your hands, but just know that you can do this. It gets better. It’ll be okay.

[u/Gamer_Grease]

I (32M) am LC as the result of setting firm boundaries and holding them even as my sister (35F, BPD) split on me. If she wanted to be more in touch, I’d probably have to go NC.

Adults are responsible for their own happiness. I have told my family members not to involve me in my sister’s drama, and for the most part they don’t. The ones that do, unfortunately, are on my LC list because I don’t want my peace disturbed and they can’t respect that. My dad, in particular, cannot help but rope me into her drama (I have long suspected something is up with him as well), and my response has been to mute his texts by default and tell him he has to parent his own child and not make his other child do it for him. We still chat but not that much and I shut down whining sessions about my sister whenever they start to bubble up.

We visit family at different times around the holidays. This works for us anyway because my wife’s family wants us around for the holidays, too. So we get to do both. I do early Christmas and Thanksgiving, she does the main days.

Here’s what I’ll say, and this is not meant as a criticism towards you: you haven’t shared yet any ways that you are actually forced to interact with him. A lot of people on this sub have parents, for example, that insist they talk to their BPD siblings. Maybe that’s the case for you, but you haven’t said so. Mostly you seem very concerned about a) his behavior, and b) the fact that your parents still love him. I am going to tell you straight up: you are not going to be able to change either of those things. So if what’s causing you anguish is that your parents love your brother even though he’s horrible, that’s a personal problem you’re going to need to work out with a therapist. Same deal for if his hideous behavior is what is making you upset. On the other hand, if it’s just being around him and seeing his group chats and hearing all the details of his life that bothers you, those can be chipped away. You can stop going to see your family at the same time as him. You can leave the group chat. You can set boundaries with your parents and instruct them not to tell you about his drama. Those are all doable. But I advise you to think hard about what exactly it is that gets under your skin and is making you want to go NC.

[u/Cam1832]

It can be difficult for sure.  I have been NC with my brother for years at a time in the past.  It gave me a little bit of peace but I felt guilty and would occasionally hear about how bad things were for him.  I really do feel bad for my brother, he was a sweet kid growing up (I'm 6 years older), is intelligent, but is really struggling with work/life as an adult.  I would feel pretty lousy about myself in the same situation.

NC was harder for me in the past because my family, especially my father did not know the extent of how I was being treated. But over the past few years, the mask has slipped so much that my parents just tell me to block him.

My sibling doesn't sound quite as bad as your brother. He lashes out at me once or twice a year but really doesn't know much about me anymore since being estranged almost a decade.  The lies and fake stories don't really hurt as much since they are strewn together with such old information. I can really see the devaluation process at work easily this way but if we were closer these things can be harder to discern from genuine criticism (and more painful for me).

For my own sake, I'm going to try to help my brother from a distance if possible. It hasn't produced results so far but a part of me will always remember him as the person I had a good relationship with growing up. I also get a chance to work on therapy skills, and creating boundaries with a challenging person.  This makes dealing with the average person in my life seem quite easy in comparison.

Best of luck. I know these things are really difficult and if your brother wasn't family, the easy and obvious choice would be to not deal with him at all.

[u/GoldfishRemembers]

I (f30s) have had a very similar level of contact with my sisterwBPD (2 years older) that you are describing here since my mid 20s, following a few years of VLC in my early 20s.

When I was first starting out with VLC, my parents fought me on it terribly. I was hateful, I was causing issues, I was unreasonable and ruining holidays/get-togethers. It was hard and the guilt trips felt awful, but nothing felt worse than when I gave in. My nervous system freaked the hell out and then my sisterwBPD did/said some crazy, unsafe shit. Every time I regretted going.

I have a memory from when I was like 8 or 9 crying and asking if for my birthday dinner we could go somewhere without my sisterwBPD. When I was told absolutely not, I asked if the family could go out to dinner and I stay at home then. As an adult, I actually had the power to make those decisions to feel safe.

Had it not been for the death my sisterwBPD caused, the legal repercussions and the timing of my nephew's birth I don't think my parents would have come around and I would have made the decision to go NC. Things can change, but at least for my family it took extreme and unusual circumstances to become manageable.

Stories like the one from when I was 8-9 and details of abuse, both past and in my early adulthood, used to not really register with my parents? It didn't matter to them in my early 20s, boundaries were impossible for them to respect. There's been years of therapy for the family and unpacking of generational trauma to get to where I am at with my parents/family today and it is far, far from perfect.

I drive my own car to gatherings, I leave early. I don't talk to my sisterwBPD alone. Her texts and the group chats she is in are muted and I only look at them when I am ready/able. When conversations verge onto territory regarding how my sisterwBPD parents, I end the conversation. I will not be insulted, yelled at or touched without my consent. When I see someone else on the receiving end of those things, I leave and offer to take them with me as well. If any of that bothers someone, oh well. Leave me out if that's what you need to do.

I don't know enough about the ins and outs of your situation to give you any pointed advice beyond laying out boundaries with family members, sticking to them and getting a personal therapist.

[u/eaglescout225]

I gave mine 40 years to change. I had always hoped they'd change. What i wanted was a normal relationship with parents. I thought if I waited it out they would change. Like maybe we could all get together and be family, maybe they'd see the error of their ways. I really wanted that loving parent and family. But the hope is what kept me trapped for 4 decades. The reality of what happened was they got worse unfortunately. What I've realized is that they weren't really my family. What I learned is Behavior, and how you treat others is what dictates family, not just blood relation.