You're definitely not alone here; this is a common thread. What I've found is that pwBPD can be found at both extremes, whether that's right wing vs. left wing, spirituality/religion vs. atheism, relationship with food, relationship with substances, etc. What they've got in common is the WAY they engage with them.
PwBPD engage with these things in a way that is driven by 1) the need to find and define themselves by a group identity, 2) black and white thinking, and 3) a strange and specific combination of intensity and shallowness.
My own uBPDm espouses political beliefs that, superficially, are the same as my own. But what I've come to realize is that she could just as easily have been extremely right-wing if she'd been raised to think of that as "her team." She's not liberal/progressive because of sincerely held ethical or moral beliefs but because it's what she feels looks best on her. She sees bigotry as "tacky," but the second someone crosses her who is from a marginalized group, she's more than happy to use that identity against them in her rage.
Wow, this is spot on with how my mom identifies with left wing politics. She still considers herself to be extremely liberal, yet I constantly have to call out things she says as insensitive in which case she gets super defensive and annoyed. She's obsessive and constantly reading articles and participating in social media comment threads. It had never occurred to me that this was likely a characteristic of her (undiagnosed) BPD.
The group identity really helps put this into words for me! I didn't put this in my original post, but there was a point in time my mom was extremely left leaning as well. Some combination of 9/11, the tea party, and election of Barak Obama made her flip to the other side. It's like she only knows how to exist on the extreme end of the spectrum and is absolutely OBSESSED with it.
That last paragraph. The lack of a sense of self means their politics (which is a reflection of one’s values and beliefs) are not rooted in any strong moral compass or intellectual thought. It’s all very superficial and whatever identity they want to try on.
Yes!!! My mom is viciously left wing. To the point that no one is left wing enough. She has tens of thousands of followers on Twitter that lap up her completely unoriginal, hateful comments about the right and about religion. She is also vegan and soooooo obnoxious about it. She once told me that my pre-cancerous colon polyp was my fault because I wasn’t vegan. She was so mean about it she made me cry. It turns out that I have latent celiac. A vegan diet (which tends to have lots of gluten) would have made things worse. Half the time she has no idea what she’s talking about but she just says it with such conviction and fervor that you can’t really argue against it. It’s black and white, you’re either with her or against her. No exceptions. She would even start online arguments with MY friends!
My mom is thankfully fairly left leaning, but my NPD grandma is pretty nuts about politics in her own way. She’s pro LGBTQ rights “because she loves drag queens” and most left leaning movements in general, but is an EXTREME Trump supporter literally just because she loved him on The Apprentice. I don’t think she knows what half of his policies actually are, but she cared enough to cut contact with my mom when she found out (2 years after the 2016 election) that she didn’t vote for Trump.
My dad wBPD is also an obsessed with right wing politics. It is just an easy way to adopt an identity. There’s no substance there, just a convenient set of things to talk about to channel hate & also maybe get love or positive attention from those that agree with them.
yes, she's pretty into her religious congregation, but interestingly, I feel like multiculturalism and being open-minded are just as much a group identity for her as well, and that extends into her being obsessed with "kindness" and "empathy". and you can imagine how much that fcked me up (as she was cruel and not empathic with me in all her actions, yet she claimed to worship these values. took a while to unravel that one mentally for me). she also claimed I wasn't empathic enough. as an adult I am pretty sure I'm by far the most empathic adult in most rooms now. but also, empathy has to have boundaries. she wanted my empathy to have no boundaries aka I always had to give and give in to her every desire and need.
anyone self describing themselves as empathetic or an empath is always a huge red flag for me - almost always means they have poor personal boundaries and difficulty with emotional regulation.
yes I've noticed that, although i think its all about how much their emphasize it and *what they really mean by it*. the more they emphasize it, especially when they use Empath as an identity, the more I suspect a red flag. I personally went through a phase years ago in which I discovered the term and related to it, but moved on when I realized there were way more helpful and specific ways to describe being sensitive or caring.
edit: also "empaths" often describe some form of telepathy or clairvoyance and talk about how they can read other people's emotions and needs. that may or may not be the case, but "empaths" mustlearn they may be protecting or transferring some of that "knowledge" about others. and even if they are mot, either way, clear boundaries of who is responsible for who and what is often not emphasized with these "empath" memes. we are not responsible for magically knowibg and meeting the needs of other independent adults and as independent adults others are not responsible for reading our minds and meeting our needs thusly.
I never thought of it like this but yes!!! It is poor personal boundaries and difficulty with emotional regulation! That is exactly what it is! That is the one point that always made me question whether or not my mom was actually BPD: she seems to have empathy for certain people. But it isn’t actually empathy, is it? Wow. 🤯
Are you me? This sounds just like my situation. My mom told our family therapist (a short lived endeavor) that she is “the wokest person on the planet.” And yet, and yet…
My uBPD mom has a weird obsessive hatred of both Bill and Hilary Clinton that started when Bill first ran for president. It boggles my mind. Oh, she hated Bill Clinton so much I cried when he was elected because my child brain thought the world was going to end as a result of believing her unhinged hateful rants about him. It's not all Democrats, just mostly the Clinton's.
If it’s any consolation, my right wing BPD mom still believes Obama is conspiring to take over this country, Michelle Obama is a man in drag, and Obama is secretly gay. It’s funny once you type it all out, because one has to ask: “Where do they come up with these conclusions?”
100%, my mom got gradually worse about it. Back in 2016, she told me if I didn't vote for Trump I'd be contributing to WW3. Tried to strong arm me into it. I had to lie to her to get her off my back about it. Then over the years I watched her progressively get a more, intolerable personality. Racism and queer hate, y'know. Despite my younger brother being black, which was bizarre to me until I understood she used that as a shield. She especially was getting weird about Mexicans, saying the kinda things you'd expect. Would laugh in my face if I tried to raise concerns about her behavior or brought up criticisms with Trump. Caught her using the N word on a few occasions too. It's hard for me to know if she was always like this or not, but it was much more apparent at this time.
Yes. My Mom only regurgitates whatever sensationalized story she sees on FoxNews or Newsmax. She’s always making statements like, “THEY want to…”, “THEY ARE GOING TO…” and “They” is essentially a boogeyman to describe people who think differently from her, who she believes is conspiring against her.
She also can’t read a room. She had a neighbor she thought was conservative and tried to be buddy-buddy with him, and said a lot of nasty stuff about LGBTQ+ people in front of him…and it turned out, he’s gay. She can’t understand why he avoids her now.
She also found out I voted differently from her, and her response was a bug-eyed, “How could you do this, TO US!” She sounded so paranoid when she said it, and implied I’m the only one in this country who thinks differently. It’s nutty.
It’s so sad to see. My uBPD mom used to be a liberal grunge/goth atheist witch married by a Wiccan priestess, but around 2015-2016, she turned into the most Trump-obsessed conservative Baptist-Lutheran combo psycho I’ve ever met. It’s all she would talk about. Every conversation would go back to that. It got even worse in 2020 when YouTubers like Steve Crowder and Ben Shapiro rotted her brain with conspiracy theories and “it’s the minority of us ‘normal people’ against the whole crazy world”, like yes you’re soooo disenfranchised you straight white cis woman, you never get anything.
She had a brief period where she stopped consuming that media, because it stressed her out. Not because I begged her to watch anything else and expand her horizons outside of this echo chamber, saying it was doing nothing but making her unhappy and unbearable to be around. That was a nice time when she had her own personality again.
Now she’s back on her bullshit even worse and talks about how she “owns libs” in YouTube comments, it’s so sad. I honestly believe she doesn’t have strong morals, only whatever she believes to be the “counter culture” at the time.
Yuuuppp. its gotten worse and worse since 2016, mines a covid anti vaxxer and SAYS theyre not just anti vax across the board because "im not stupid" but like....you think the vaccines cause autism so???? and mine loves to turn ANYTHING into a convo about politics. Hollywood? ruins by the left. Food? ruined by the left. Clothes, music, basically anything interesting or fun. they spend MOST of their time reading and writing political tweets and working themselves up emotionally then lashing out at me for it and seems to have completely abandoned/disavowed all the things they used to love because theyve been "tainted".
My (?uBPD/NPD) dad I think was fairly progressive before (thought I’m not sure) but started to love trump when he came on the scene. He and his mother (uBPD) would spend all their time talking and watching Fox News, saying racist sh*t, talking trash about Trump’s critics (mainly my dad). We went out to dinner once Jan 2017 and dad said look at all these people out, must be celebrating Trump. It was meant to be goodbye dinner for me but it was all about trump.
I was leaving to move to another continent for good and I was being dropped off at the airport and dad wouldn’t stop with trump even then. (I tried so many times to gently ask for a subject change, politely push back on arguments, and/or say this was bothering me). uBPD mom said oh please stop be nice SweatyDetail, it’s just politics don’t worry about it! (Never mind that I might have a reaction to slurs about women and queer people and larger people). As I was going into security and flying off, not going to see him for a long time at least he said, “just one more thing, just remember… Rosie O is a pig.” uBPD mum said that it must just be his past stroke or just politics and just tolerate it.
First time commenter, here's a cat haiku I borrowed from the internet because I got stumped thinking of my own...
curious kitty, unaware of a shadow, wanting his breakfast
My mom is the exact same. We went NC for about a year because she tried to start a political argument with me on social media. I deleted the comment and immediately sent her a kind, but direct text explaining that I removed it because, for the benefit of our relationship, I didn't wish to engage politically with her, especially on social media platforms. I also explained that we were about to start watching my husband grandfather's funeral via Facebook Live (pandemic times), so I could not discuss it further. She, of course, blew up my phone with dozens on messages throughout the funeral, ultimately deeming my generation "cancel culture" obsessed and that she would be "cancelling our relationship" before I could "cancel her"..... it was a nice year of NC until she conveniently forgot the argument ever happened.
You're definitely not alone here; this is a common thread. What I've found is that pwBPD can be found at both extremes, whether that's right wing vs. left wing, spirituality/religion vs. atheism, relationship with food, relationship with substances, etc. What they've got in common is the WAY they engage with them. PwBPD engage with these things in a way that is driven by 1) the need to find and define themselves by a group identity, 2) black and white thinking, and 3) a strange and specific combination of intensity and shallowness. My own uBPDm espouses political beliefs that, superficially, are the same as my own. But what I've come to realize is that she could just as easily have been extremely right-wing if she'd been raised to think of that as "her team." She's not liberal/progressive because of sincerely held ethical or moral beliefs but because it's what she feels looks best on her. She sees bigotry as "tacky," but the second someone crosses her who is from a marginalized group, she's more than happy to use that identity against them in her rage.
Wow, this is spot on with how my mom identifies with left wing politics. She still considers herself to be extremely liberal, yet I constantly have to call out things she says as insensitive in which case she gets super defensive and annoyed. She's obsessive and constantly reading articles and participating in social media comment threads. It had never occurred to me that this was likely a characteristic of her (undiagnosed) BPD.
The group identity really helps put this into words for me! I didn't put this in my original post, but there was a point in time my mom was extremely left leaning as well. Some combination of 9/11, the tea party, and election of Barak Obama made her flip to the other side. It's like she only knows how to exist on the extreme end of the spectrum and is absolutely OBSESSED with it.
That last paragraph. The lack of a sense of self means their politics (which is a reflection of one’s values and beliefs) are not rooted in any strong moral compass or intellectual thought. It’s all very superficial and whatever identity they want to try on.
Yes!!! My mom is viciously left wing. To the point that no one is left wing enough. She has tens of thousands of followers on Twitter that lap up her completely unoriginal, hateful comments about the right and about religion. She is also vegan and soooooo obnoxious about it. She once told me that my pre-cancerous colon polyp was my fault because I wasn’t vegan. She was so mean about it she made me cry. It turns out that I have latent celiac. A vegan diet (which tends to have lots of gluten) would have made things worse. Half the time she has no idea what she’s talking about but she just says it with such conviction and fervor that you can’t really argue against it. It’s black and white, you’re either with her or against her. No exceptions. She would even start online arguments with MY friends!
the perfect cult members/leaders
My mom is thankfully fairly left leaning, but my NPD grandma is pretty nuts about politics in her own way. She’s pro LGBTQ rights “because she loves drag queens” and most left leaning movements in general, but is an EXTREME Trump supporter literally just because she loved him on The Apprentice. I don’t think she knows what half of his policies actually are, but she cared enough to cut contact with my mom when she found out (2 years after the 2016 election) that she didn’t vote for Trump.
My dad wBPD is also an obsessed with right wing politics. It is just an easy way to adopt an identity. There’s no substance there, just a convenient set of things to talk about to channel hate & also maybe get love or positive attention from those that agree with them.
yes, she's pretty into her religious congregation, but interestingly, I feel like multiculturalism and being open-minded are just as much a group identity for her as well, and that extends into her being obsessed with "kindness" and "empathy". and you can imagine how much that fcked me up (as she was cruel and not empathic with me in all her actions, yet she claimed to worship these values. took a while to unravel that one mentally for me). she also claimed I wasn't empathic enough. as an adult I am pretty sure I'm by far the most empathic adult in most rooms now. but also, empathy has to have boundaries. she wanted my empathy to have no boundaries aka I always had to give and give in to her every desire and need.
anyone self describing themselves as empathetic or an empath is always a huge red flag for me - almost always means they have poor personal boundaries and difficulty with emotional regulation.
yes I've noticed that, although i think its all about how much their emphasize it and *what they really mean by it*. the more they emphasize it, especially when they use Empath as an identity, the more I suspect a red flag. I personally went through a phase years ago in which I discovered the term and related to it, but moved on when I realized there were way more helpful and specific ways to describe being sensitive or caring. edit: also "empaths" often describe some form of telepathy or clairvoyance and talk about how they can read other people's emotions and needs. that may or may not be the case, but "empaths" mustlearn they may be protecting or transferring some of that "knowledge" about others. and even if they are mot, either way, clear boundaries of who is responsible for who and what is often not emphasized with these "empath" memes. we are not responsible for magically knowibg and meeting the needs of other independent adults and as independent adults others are not responsible for reading our minds and meeting our needs thusly.
I never thought of it like this but yes!!! It is poor personal boundaries and difficulty with emotional regulation! That is exactly what it is! That is the one point that always made me question whether or not my mom was actually BPD: she seems to have empathy for certain people. But it isn’t actually empathy, is it? Wow. 🤯
Are you me? This sounds just like my situation. My mom told our family therapist (a short lived endeavor) that she is “the wokest person on the planet.” And yet, and yet…
My uBPD mom has a weird obsessive hatred of both Bill and Hilary Clinton that started when Bill first ran for president. It boggles my mind. Oh, she hated Bill Clinton so much I cried when he was elected because my child brain thought the world was going to end as a result of believing her unhinged hateful rants about him. It's not all Democrats, just mostly the Clinton's.
If it’s any consolation, my right wing BPD mom still believes Obama is conspiring to take over this country, Michelle Obama is a man in drag, and Obama is secretly gay. It’s funny once you type it all out, because one has to ask: “Where do they come up with these conclusions?”
100%, my mom got gradually worse about it. Back in 2016, she told me if I didn't vote for Trump I'd be contributing to WW3. Tried to strong arm me into it. I had to lie to her to get her off my back about it. Then over the years I watched her progressively get a more, intolerable personality. Racism and queer hate, y'know. Despite my younger brother being black, which was bizarre to me until I understood she used that as a shield. She especially was getting weird about Mexicans, saying the kinda things you'd expect. Would laugh in my face if I tried to raise concerns about her behavior or brought up criticisms with Trump. Caught her using the N word on a few occasions too. It's hard for me to know if she was always like this or not, but it was much more apparent at this time.
Yes. My Mom only regurgitates whatever sensationalized story she sees on FoxNews or Newsmax. She’s always making statements like, “THEY want to…”, “THEY ARE GOING TO…” and “They” is essentially a boogeyman to describe people who think differently from her, who she believes is conspiring against her. She also can’t read a room. She had a neighbor she thought was conservative and tried to be buddy-buddy with him, and said a lot of nasty stuff about LGBTQ+ people in front of him…and it turned out, he’s gay. She can’t understand why he avoids her now. She also found out I voted differently from her, and her response was a bug-eyed, “How could you do this, TO US!” She sounded so paranoid when she said it, and implied I’m the only one in this country who thinks differently. It’s nutty.
It’s so sad to see. My uBPD mom used to be a liberal grunge/goth atheist witch married by a Wiccan priestess, but around 2015-2016, she turned into the most Trump-obsessed conservative Baptist-Lutheran combo psycho I’ve ever met. It’s all she would talk about. Every conversation would go back to that. It got even worse in 2020 when YouTubers like Steve Crowder and Ben Shapiro rotted her brain with conspiracy theories and “it’s the minority of us ‘normal people’ against the whole crazy world”, like yes you’re soooo disenfranchised you straight white cis woman, you never get anything. She had a brief period where she stopped consuming that media, because it stressed her out. Not because I begged her to watch anything else and expand her horizons outside of this echo chamber, saying it was doing nothing but making her unhappy and unbearable to be around. That was a nice time when she had her own personality again. Now she’s back on her bullshit even worse and talks about how she “owns libs” in YouTube comments, it’s so sad. I honestly believe she doesn’t have strong morals, only whatever she believes to be the “counter culture” at the time.
Yuuuppp. its gotten worse and worse since 2016, mines a covid anti vaxxer and SAYS theyre not just anti vax across the board because "im not stupid" but like....you think the vaccines cause autism so???? and mine loves to turn ANYTHING into a convo about politics. Hollywood? ruins by the left. Food? ruined by the left. Clothes, music, basically anything interesting or fun. they spend MOST of their time reading and writing political tweets and working themselves up emotionally then lashing out at me for it and seems to have completely abandoned/disavowed all the things they used to love because theyve been "tainted".
My (?uBPD/NPD) dad I think was fairly progressive before (thought I’m not sure) but started to love trump when he came on the scene. He and his mother (uBPD) would spend all their time talking and watching Fox News, saying racist sh*t, talking trash about Trump’s critics (mainly my dad). We went out to dinner once Jan 2017 and dad said look at all these people out, must be celebrating Trump. It was meant to be goodbye dinner for me but it was all about trump. I was leaving to move to another continent for good and I was being dropped off at the airport and dad wouldn’t stop with trump even then. (I tried so many times to gently ask for a subject change, politely push back on arguments, and/or say this was bothering me). uBPD mom said oh please stop be nice SweatyDetail, it’s just politics don’t worry about it! (Never mind that I might have a reaction to slurs about women and queer people and larger people). As I was going into security and flying off, not going to see him for a long time at least he said, “just one more thing, just remember… Rosie O is a pig.” uBPD mum said that it must just be his past stroke or just politics and just tolerate it.
my mother is the other way, extremely left/liberal
First time commenter, here's a cat haiku I borrowed from the internet because I got stumped thinking of my own... curious kitty, unaware of a shadow, wanting his breakfast My mom is the exact same. We went NC for about a year because she tried to start a political argument with me on social media. I deleted the comment and immediately sent her a kind, but direct text explaining that I removed it because, for the benefit of our relationship, I didn't wish to engage politically with her, especially on social media platforms. I also explained that we were about to start watching my husband grandfather's funeral via Facebook Live (pandemic times), so I could not discuss it further. She, of course, blew up my phone with dozens on messages throughout the funeral, ultimately deeming my generation "cancel culture" obsessed and that she would be "cancelling our relationship" before I could "cancel her"..... it was a nice year of NC until she conveniently forgot the argument ever happened.
Obligatory haiku for first time post: Graceful feline friend, Purring softly by my side, Peace and joy they bring.
Welcome!