Book Review: “Stop Walking on Eggshells”
I wrote a book about the emotional experience of having a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). That said, I’m not a psychologist or clinician. I also want to equip people with other resources about having a mentally ill family member or friend.
In anticipation of my book’s release later this year, I’ll be posting reviews of resources I’ve found tremendously helpful in understanding, and accepting, my mom’s mental illness.
Book Overview:
Stop Walking on Eggshells, written by experts Randi Kreger and Paul T. Mason, presents the clinical perspective of this personality disorder and its components.
This book was recommended to me by my counselor when I first learned my mom suffers from BPD. I found it to be tremendously helpful for understanding this mental illness—finally, there was a name and a reason for everything my family had been experiencing!
While understanding BPD certainly didn’t make enduring the erratic behavior and abuse any easier, it did help me understand the “why.”
Stop Walking on Eggshells offers a clinical perspective of Borderline Personality Disorder: what it is, how it manifests in the individual with BPD, and the ways it impacts that person’s relationships.
Why This Book is Helpful:
If you know someone with BPD or borderline tendencies, this is a great place to start! The content gave me the freeing recognition that, “Someone else understands what I’ve been experiencing! There’s a reason why my mom is this way. I’m not the only one who’s been manipulated and doesn’t know how to talk about it.”
Although written about the clinical behaviors and aspects of this disorder, the book’s content is both informative and accessible for the average reader. As a layperson with no background in psychology, I had no trouble understanding the concepts and how they applied to my own situation and family.
The authors break down the different behaviors specific to this disorder, along with lots of real-life examples of these behaviors. I appreciated reading the testimonies and accounts of what it’s like to have a borderline family member from people of different ages, genders, and walks of life. The combination of perspectives allowed me to get a fuller picture of both the disorder and behaviors.
What This Book Doesn’t Do:
While it does present a helpful clinical perspective of BPD, and it does include some brief testimonies, it doesn’t include much lament from hurting family members or friends who’ve tried to help their mentally ill loved ones for years and don’t know what to do anymore. Yes, there are factual testimonies about the behaviors of borderline individuals and how that impacts relationships (which is appropriate for a clinical book), but there isn’t much about grief.
When things were really bad in my family, I cried myself to sleep for months. My anxiety was at an all-time high. My relationship with food and exercise became increasingly disordered. It felt like I had tried my whole life to be a good daughter, and in the end, it wasn’t enough.
I saw factual representations of this relational downfall presented in Stop Walking on Eggshells, but I didn’t finish reading the book thinking, “Oh, other people have cried themselves to sleep at night too.” Again, this wasn’t the purpose of the book. However, a part of me wished for more emotional depth and a sense of understanding that other people had been where I’d been and were stronger for it.
Additional Resources:
Here are a few additional resources that may be helpful as you discover the intricacies of BPD and its effects on people, families, and relationships.
