Support forum gone wrong continues and gets worse.
And fuck it, I’m not long afraid to not disclose the website. It’s BPDfamily.com and the site has gone to hell.
This morning I got up and discovered that our board was deleted and all that was left was the new “Healing” board. All my old posts are gone. I never got the chance to save them.
They’d shut down and banned those of us from the old Coping board. A big red message appeared at the top of the page stating:
A MESSAGE FROM THE MODERATOR: Hi, (Username). Both the post and send personal message functions on your FTF account have been temporarily inactived.
The ACoBPD boards are being offered on an invitation basis to current “Coping” members. If you are interested and agree to the board platforms and the dual board set-up, please RSVP to admin@bpdfamily.com before Friday, October 19th midnight CST.
I was still logged in at this point and able to read the boards. But just now, upon refreshing the board, I found I had been logged out. The above message was repeated but instead it said “Hi, Guess” and then below it was this:
An Error Has Occurred! Hello (Username). Your access to bpdfamily.com is temporarily restricted.
The ACoBPD boards are being offered on an invitation basis to current “Coping” members. If you are interested and agree to the board platforms and the dual board set-up, please RSVP to admin@bpdfamily.com before Friday, October 19th midnight CST.
I found I’m really really really upset over this.
Every since the Dayboard stuff went down I’ve been completely silent. I haven’t posted on BPDfamily. I haven’t questioned anything. I’ve been silent and kept my head down. I wanted to stay under the radar. I wanted to be ignored. I didn’t want to be targeted and banned. I’m just…
Ugh.
ETA 9/28/2013 – I’m disabling comments on this post for a while. I’m over what happened at BPDfamily, and I’m kind of tired of it being brought up again and again. I’ve said my piece. I’ve told what happened. This is the truth of what went down. I don’t really want to keep talking about it.
defying ptsd 
I think it’s really important that you get support but (from the outside looking in) this really isn’t supporting you. Try to move on – there are lots of lovely safe corners here on the interweb. Don’t get drawn in to the pantomime honey xxx
My understanding is that the moderators wanted to add a message-board for adult children who had a BPD parent that wanted to learn tools for maintaining some relationship with the parent and the rest of the family. This message-board was to be in addition, and separate of the existing message-board that supported adult children who wanted to have little or no contact with their BPD parent.
Some older members protested this change and left.
I agree with Weegee, if it isn’t working for you, find a place that does. I’m still a member there, as far as I can tell your posts are all there, and I got the same note, replied, and am active.
I think some people over reacted.
First of all, I’m sorry this didn’t get approved sooner. I thought I put it through, but for whatever reason it didn’t.
My issue with BPDfamily as well as the others I was friends with on there, nearly all of whom were included in this ‘Dayboard’ thing to ‘discuss’ the changes the mods wanted to make, is that the mods were being extremely invalidating, not listening, and manipulative. Their behavior was inappropriate, invasive, controlling, and at times even abusive. They deleted all the evidence of this, of course, though I have screencaptures of some of it.
The idea of having a no contact board separate from a maintaining contact board isn’t a completely terrible idea. However, many of the members of the Children of BPD parents board tried to address the fact that often times it’s a lot more complicated than no contact vs contact. Some members are low contact, some very low contact, some use medium chill, some have no choice but to go back and forth between no contact and contact and going back and forth between 2 separate boards seemed ridiculous. Especially when the mods were saying you could only be part of one or the other, not both. This was something we tried very hard to express to the mods, but the mods didn’t seem to understand-possibly because most of the mods were from chosen relationships with bpds. Our relationships were unchosen, this is family, and it’s a very complicated mess.
The other issue was the mods attitude towards healing. They were putting a huge emphasis on maintaining and repairing the relationship with the disordered parent. In not so many words they said that anything other than that, especially choosing not to have contact with the disordered parents, was not healing. This was something most members were not okay with regardless of what their situations. This was saying that we are not healing unless we return to the abusive relationship with our parents. This was something that generally no one on the Children of BPD parents board agreed with; we understood that everyone heals differently and at different speeds and that for some the healthiest thing for an individual may be not having a relationship with their disordered parents. Yet the mods were expecting us all to follow a rigid step-by-step healing process.
That’s what happened, and that’s why a lot of people left.
I no longer go on those boards, and honestly, I’ve long since moved on. I have my blog, my ohana family, and my therapist. Sure, I still miss the people I met on the boards and having some place I could talk to people who would understand. But I’m doing fine without it.
Hi,
I too got banned from bpd family.com, but it was about a year ago. I was posting as “LOAnnie” (for “L’il Orphan Annie”, because I felt like I was emotionally orphaned.)
My speculation is that I got banned because I was too angry about having been abused, and would say in replies to other posters, “Wow, from your description I think that what your mother did to you would be considered criminal child abuse, that’s awful!” I was blatantly not sympathetic or compassionate toward those with bpd who abuse their kids, basically. I feel the same way about pedophile parents who sexually exploit their kids, and I think my comparison of the two (bpd parents emotionally exploit and abuse their kids, pedophile parents do it sexually) is what finally got me booted out for good. I am *permanently* banned.
But even after being banned, I’d still go on the site just to read the posts in the “coping with parents with bpd” section, which was the section I posted in, and I noticed that recently there was this HUGE change and practically all the regular posters had been removed, their threads removed, etc.
Wow!
Me personally, I think that the owners and staff of bpd family.com have a decided bias in favor of those with bpd and see THEM as victims, as opposed to feeling compassion for the victims OF bpd parents. And I think it was arbitrary and even cruel of them to suddenly cut off access to the board for dozens of members like they did. Holy Cow!
If you like, check out “bpd central” aka “Welcome to Oz”, run by Randi Kreger. She coauthored the “Stop Walking on Eggshells” book. WTO has a support group specifically for the adult children of bpd parents, which I really like. I think that *should* be a separate group. There is a support group for the parents of children with bpd, and for chosen relationships as well, similar to bpd family. Randi’s “Welcome to Oz” site including the Yahoo! support groups are SO much better than bpdfamily, because they’re not run by “nazi-esque” bpd-apologist moderators.
It really makes me wonder whether the owner and mods at bpd family believe that they themselves are recovered bpds, and so perhaps feel personally insulted when members discuss the very real damage and even criminal abuse that their bpd parents subjected them to or the hell that the adult kids are still experiencing?
I guess we’ll never know.
Hi LoAnnie,
How are you? I remember your threads about wanting laws to prevent people with BPD from having children because they are so abusive..
I like this blog because it is honest.
My Mom expected me to always be there for her and my reward was that she humiliated me most of my life. I hate her and I love her. I’ve been a member at BPDFamily.com for 3 years because of my own daughter. I tried posting on the Adult Children board in the beginning and no one would respond to me because I wanted to stay in contact with my Mom. That hurt me that others like me couldn’t accept me.
I personally think that having a No Contact and a Contact community makes sense and I welcomed the change. I want to stay in contact with my father and my brother and that just is’t possible if I go no contact with mom.
We’re all angry at our moms and rightfully so. But we all have different needs in dealing with it.
Ennie
PS: All the posts are there. You just have to be a member of the NC board to see them.
I’ve been looking for a blog post like this. I put years into that site and in the end, got childish, belittling emails telling me I had to choose a board or leave. What I have seen are Moderators who function like doctors coercing people into following their agenda of “stop complaining so much and see what you can change about yourself”. Normal post mortem on the abusive episodes is truncated because they set their arbitrary timeline for how long you get to cry and scream out your pain on their site. I believe it has been taken over by people who are NPD, BPD sufferers and a staff that blindly follows these folks. I agree that they respond as if personally wounded and could give a rats ass about the recovery of the members. I just read a thread where a member is withholding her address from a flying monkey who will surely pass the addresson to her abusive mother. A Moderator gets on and makes a case for why she should just suck it up and stop reacting to her mother ith such fear and go on and give out her address. These people, like NPD BPD, are looking to endanger former victims by keeping them in the abusers orbit. Much like an abusive judge who sends a child back into the custody of his abusers, these people send members back to the perpetrators because they are there to serve their fellow abuser.
I really feel sorry for the unwitting victims coming onto that site now. Many probably won’t catch on to the sick hidden agenda being pushed. I didn’t believe it when I read the complaints of members trying to warn us over the last few years. Now that I’ve been locked out for saying far less than the above, I know they were telling the truth. Thank God I never gave them any money for their endless “fundraising drives”.
Hi guys, interesting read. I too was thrown off but like you say, no one believes you and just think you are bitter. A small group of us have our own forum now, they are easy to set up and free. We tracked down “skip” online, a very dodgy and clearly narcissistic character but then many people whe seek to “help” others are as it immediately makes them superior! I have seen much of this in my world of being a psychotherapist. I don’t know that they have an agenda, I agree that the time for complaining has to end sometime. Personally I don’t see my parents and I have nothing pleasant to say about them. They broke my whole life for so long and I will never forgive them for that. BUT I also had to stop being their victim and get on with being me. I personally think that bpdfamily know that this is the desirable way but are a) somewhat fucked up themselves and b) entirely unskilled. Just my thoughts
Funny, I think we know each other? Unless there’s another group that got kicked off and started their own forum and even figured out who Skippy really is. Lol, you don’t have to say who you are or anything, it’s fine. What you said just sound so familiar.
I’m mostly over the BPDfamily thing. Though I’m a little sad to lose a support group, I feel like a lot of people have moved on. I wasn’t very active on BPDfamily anyway. I didn’t have a lot of time to read posts and when I did, I didn’t have much to say. I wish I’d been able to give back more to the other people on there.
its all about repeat business for them. thats their living , they want folk to go round and round in circles
When I read bpdfamily, I often wonder if the posters are really the bpd-ers who are projecting on their spouses.
That’s something I’ve heard a few times before… particularly of the members of the chosen relationships boards. I never read the other boards myself, I mostly just stayed on the children of bpd parents boards.
Yes, I have been restricted there as well and I have no idea why.
Yeah. They never really give reasons as to why they ban people. Even when you ask nicely they just don’t respond or give some vague bs.
I can’t believe I found this! I was just recently banned from bpdfamily due to reaching out about a relationship that I was in that began with another member from that forum. Unfortunately I was stupid and became involved with him, it turns out it too was a toxic r/s, just like the r/s that had brought me to the forum originally. I believe him to be npd/bpd/ocpd among other things and I’ve been doing some serious detaching from the sick hold he had/still has over me. I made the mistake of trusting a couple of the ambassadors and sharing with them that after we broke up he was posting things that were hurtful and directed at me. I shared the information hoping of all people they would understand, this is what the website is about supposedly, dealing with toxic r/s and detaching from them! I realize I broke what I agreed to when signing on about not getting involved with other members, but in the beginning the ambassadors were on board with me and supportive despite that info. At some point I became the criminal, the bad guy in all of this, they turned it over to Skip who proceeded to tell me I was no longer welcome and would need permission to rejoin again in the future. I no longer can log in, not that I’d want to and my posts have been removed as well. I assume they have all been removed, I can only look at threads I remember posting on and my responses have been deleted. Meanwhile, the former bf/member is posting away, arrogant, entitled, smug, as usual, giving his profound advice, it makes me sick. It feels good to read I’m not the only one. I suspected I wasn’t, two people I had enormous respect for mysteriously were “gone” as well from the website, I always wondered what happened to them, now that it’s happened to me I believe they were also thrown off. I too was at the point where I just wanted to give back and share, be supportive. Now I’ll never get that chance. Thank you to those of you that shared this. I feel badly for each of you but am glad that it wasn’t just me like I thought it was.
Skip and his crew have long since hacked the pm system and I became one of the disappeared a couple of years ago now due to some of us venting our frustrations “privately” via pm.
I’m sorry to hear they have given you this crap, but you are not alone, it is not personal. Unfortunately, so often in life the only people who want the effort of running organisations, are the ones who are most likely to be disordered. Think about it, they get to control, to reject, to be praised.
Reblogged this on detachingforgood and commented:
I’ve wondered many times if they read pm’s, wow, seems a bit corrupt to me what is going on over there! One of the people I mentioned that “mysteriously disappeared” was someone I had pm’ed with. She was very honest with me in her messages about people that were unkind on the boards, then she was gone too! I noticed after that, I couldn’t find any of her posts and she never responded to my last pm. I just got in touch with a friend of mine that still is a member on the boards. She pm’s quite frequently, I told her to be very careful what she says and that she might want to consider emails with her other friends instead. I feel so much better finding this and people who have been there. It really made me question if I was the one with the problem. And you’re right Dean, the fact that they seem quick to take control and reject members is very much the profile of a disordered individual.
I was there for about a year and made a few friends (despite my pseudonym here I am female!). We regularly shared pms where we made fun of some of the staff on the site and in some cases complained to each other about treatment we got there. Of course they couldn’t admit that they were reading pms (“skip” is an IT guru from Texas, can’t remember his name now but looks like a very dodgy character – I read on another site somewhere that he was making a LOT of money from donations given by vulnerable people) but as a group we were being monitored, this became clear to us all and of course we pm’d about this. Eventually one of our number was attacked for a post which at the time we could not really understand why it was considered so bad and was temporarily banned. The rest of us obviously got pretty irate and suddenly we were all banned. Luckily we had swapped sufficient email addresses with each other to all be able to get in touch and my partner set us up with our own forum! In fact in a couple of weeks time we are all meeting for the first time, all of us women, who have been talking for over 3 yrs now.
It is terrifying that there are narcissists out there who will take advantage of people in this way, at the time it all happened I felt terrible, rejected from a place that had so often been my lifeline, even at 2 in the morning! But I was lucky to be alongside others so didn’t take it very personally though I completely understand why one would.
You met some great people; you got a lot of help; you met someone who although disordered, taught you a great deal about yourself and how to avoid choosing these relationships. I met some great people; I got a lot of help; I am off on a great trip this month to meet some dear, dear friends.
So in the end I say we won, we got what we needed right when we needed it which I am sure is more than can be said for the evil nutters that run that place! 🙂
I did learn a lot about myself and met some great people too. Prior to my “send off” I had pulled away from the boards and had pretty much stopped posting. It wasn’t until I voiced concern over the other member I was involved with and the things he was saying that were directed at me, that I became a problem. However, I believe they were watching me as well and I had become a “concern” to them prior to this. I had been involved in a thread that was very controversial, had spoken up for someone who was being berated by a moderator and they removed the entire thread because it was too real and honest, raw. Everyone who posted in that thread was really irate and angry, including me. After that whole incident the guy I had defended and who was someone I pm’d with once in awhile, also mysteriously disappeared. I realized this when I tried to pm him one last time and I was blocked from sending him a message. Pretty soon, all his threads/posts were gone.
It was around this same time that one of the moderators got in touch with me, we began some pm’s as well and she voiced her opinions about other moderators who didn’t allow us to say what we really thought. She said she agreed with the things I had said in defense of the member who was berated and banned. She told me to keep speaking up, not to let others influence me or keep me silenced/down. After her messages to me she too mysteriously disappeared, along with her posts and I never heard from her again. I lost touch with a couple of other members that I wish I would’ve gotten their email addresses, they were awesome people. I’m still great friends with one girl, we keep in contact and have for over a year now.
I’m in a good place now in my life, so you are right, we are so much better off! I’ve learned a lot about myself, it did serve a purpose while I was there but I’m actually glad that I was banned. I don’t want to remain stuck and frozen in the past like so many of those people, they aren’t going anywhere and it seems many of them are okay with never moving forward. I’m so thankful I found these posts, I felt so alone, humiliated, embarrassed that this had happened to me. I feel badly for the new ones who are there now and don’t know any better. Not everyone will be as lucky as we are, coming out stronger because of it. I hope you have fun on your trip! Thanks for sharing!
Oh yes, some are stuck for sure, permanent victims and the mods love them, many of the staff there love to feel needed and work hard to keep people dependent.
But everything happens for a reason, and anyone who suffers there as we did will grow just as we have.
I really do get that you were embarrassed etc, how outrageous is it that people can do that to people who have suffered so terribly and simply opened their hearts up for help. Shame on them, not us
Thank you for all of your comments, it’s made me feel so much better. One of the things I said to the two ambassadors I turned to about my ex was that he was very dependent on the boards, was on there all the time, obsessed really. I told them it would be a good idea to keep an eye on him, that I wouldn’t want some other woman to fall prey to him. So it doesn’t surprise me that right after I made those comments to try to gain some support from them, is when I received the “goodbye” letter from Skip. In that letter he essentially referred to me as the nut for reading my ex’s posts, I was the unhealthy one. He’s right, I was unhealthy then but for good reason, I had been in a highly damaging r/s and was trying to heal from a toxic bond! Oh well, it doesn’t matter anymore. They can all have each other! I agree with you, shame on them, not us!
defyingptsd, thanks for bringing this topic out in the open. I apologize for hijacking, it just feels very validating to know I’m not alone. Thanks for letting me vent!
Hi everyone, just found this page while trying to find out why I cant get, or find BPDfamily site?
Was busy writing a post, when suddenly the site disappeared and Im unable to google it, just says the page can no longer be found? Have I been banned? I got no email to say otherwise.
The last message I sent on bpd was just talking about my exbf and we were all discussing
“do we dream about our ex partners”? Dont know, but Im a bit down as been a member since 2011 and cant say I ever upset anyone on there, not intentionally anyway. If ive been rude why
cant they tell me?
It’s possible you’ve been banned, but it’s also possible the site is having issues. It is pretty common for the mods to not bother telling you why you’ve been banned, even when you directly ask them. People who were banned were usually able to still see the public boards, but they couldn’t see anything that required being logged in, and they could not post or reply to posts. I think there were some who were banned and not able to access the site at all, but I can’t be sure.
If you still can’t get on try from another computer or a phone as they bar your ip address. When I got banned I would recieve a sinister personalised message if I tried to go near even the public boards. I considered it pretty pathetic in the end although at the time the friends I had made there were my lifeline. I strongly advise anyone on those boards to swap email with good friends. Luckily I did and we are all in contact to this day
Ditto.
As with you, I felt quite aggrieved for being cast out for voicing honest opinions about all those in the throes of the disorder. The stance of the moderators was so overwhelming punitive and unyielding that, on reflection, I was happy to be shunned by the group.
When I first stumbled upon the website, it was like manna from Heaven, because I had been wrestling with my partner’s bizarre behaviour for long enough that my physical and emotional health was being compromised, and it was such a relief to finally have some answers.
I had a brush with “Skip” early on: he seemed to view new entrants to the website as fresh meat ripe for further victimization. After being utterly excoriated-emotionally-by my partner, I was non-too-enthused to be on the receiving end of “Skips” size 12 boots within 24-hours of becoming a member.
I do think that the website is specifically tooled to the sensibilities of those who require to be cast as perpetual victims, and I do think that there is an overabundance of people there making a future of living entirely in the past. There is a certain sterile sameness to the proceedings there that wears on one’s patience after a while, and honestly, most of the members don’t have the pluck to assume ultimate personal responsibility, heal, and move beyond the whole BPD nonsense.
My brush with BPD was one of the most traumatic experiences in my life. Being treated like a four-year-old by moderators with an elementary school, hall monitor mentality definitely made my BPD experience far worse.
Oddly enough, I found far more sympathy, patience, and tolerance on the website for people suffering from BPD!
I to got banned fromBPDFamily, It could have been some PM’s, I could have been me taking on “clearmind” a moderator, or passing a few tips I got from my Therapist. Who knows. I too am a IT specialist and have been in the game for 40 years. After I was banned, my IP address was blocked. I soon changed that as I was very suspicious that my computer was under attack. I set up a clean machine, new IP, and joined up again, new name. No problem, until I installed Outlook with my 3 email addresses I use for business. Next time I logged into BPDFamily, I was immediately banned again and received 3 emails one to each account telling me I was banned. When I set up the new account at BPDf i used a new email address I had just created on my server. Obviously they run a spybot and it checked what email accounts were on that machine, found my old email address and banned me again. I hacked back in again, and all my postings over 18 months have gone ! Hey, if they read this and don’t like it, sue me ! MontyD (bpdfamily name)
the site is a real fraud ,its a business posing as a forum