The key ideas

Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder

Paul Mason and Randi Kreger, 1998

You check a person's mood before you say hello. This book is written not to explain him, but to give you back your life: how to stop paying for other people's storms with your calm, how to speak so that you are heard, and how to set a boundary that holds without his agreement.

Who it is for

For people whose partner, parent, child or friend lives with borderline personality disorder, and for everyone who is tired of choosing every word to avoid a storm.

A lighthouse is not responsible for the decisions of the ship. All it can do is be the best lighthouse it knows how to be.

About this book

You rehearse a sentence in your head before you say it. You check his mood from the doorway. Yesterday a joke made him laugh, today the same joke makes him say: “You don't care about me at all.” Hundreds of people who wrote to the authors describe life alongside someone with BPD this way: walking on eggshells.

Paul Mason and Randi Kreger gathered these letters into a book that has gone through three editions, and made an unexpected turn in it. The first part explains what is happening to your loved one. The second and third parts are entirely about the reader.

There will be no explanation here of where the disorder comes from or how it is treated: that is a different book with a different task. Here there will be only what is in your hands. Let's start with why you are not believed.

Idea 1. The disorder has two faces, and only you see the second

Why do friends answer “no way, he's so nice”? Because borderline personality disorder looks different from the outside, and the third edition of the book describes two variants directly.

The first variant the authors call the typical one: the pain is visible to everyone. Outbursts, impulsive acts, self-harm. Such a person is seen by those around as ill, and the relative is at least believed.

The second variant the authors call the atypical one, and it is harder on the family. The pain is not shown, it is shifted outward onto others. At work and among acquaintances the person is charming, successful and confident, while everything heavy falls on the one who is closest. One witness sees the storm, and that same witness turns out to be the only one who complains.

Hence the most exhausting part: you start to doubt not him but yourself. If nobody else sees this, perhaps the problem is me.

What this means for you: if everything looks well from the outside, that is not an argument against your experience. It is a description of the second variant, not proof that you are exaggerating.

The head of a department is considered the life and soul of the team: light, witty, always helping. Her husband has sat through a third evening in a row of being told that he has ruined her life. He cannot tell anyone: they simply won't believe him.

That only one person sees the storm says where the pain is aimed, not whether it exists. Your experience does not become less real because it has no witnesses.

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About the author

Paul Mason is an American mental health professional who worked for many years with borderline personality disorder. Randi Kreger founded one of the first online communities for the close relatives of such people and gathered hundreds of their stories in the book.

All books by this author: Paul Mason and Randi Kreger

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