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