It's interesting how God guides your journey. I adopted my daughter from a Romanian orphanage when she was only 14 months old, and her developmental problems were so profound that I started desperately reading and researching to try to help her (really, to try to help US --- I was drowning). And then I discovered I loved psychology, and after all these years, I come around to figuring out what was going on in myself and in my mother. So I started out trying to figure out how to help my daughter, and ended up helping myself too.
Here is a link to a famous researcher ... this is his short bio (in this link) but once you know who he is, you can look out for his work. He has generated a lot of the research on mirroring and marking that I have referred to in this thread.
http://www.childrenshospital.org/cfapps/research/data_admin/Site440/mainpageS440P0.htmlI have been reading Understanding the Borderline Mother by Christine Lawson. I believe that it is probable that my granddaughter's maternal grandmother has borderline personality disorder, and I'm suspicious about her (my grandbaby's) mother as well. So, I got this book to try to figure out how to best help my grandbaby NOT turn out to have this or some other related disorder. But, as fate would have it, I recognized my own mother in the "Hermit" persona the book describes. Freaked me out.
My mom's problems for the most part probably wouldn't rise to the level of a diagnosis. I feel that an almost 50 year relationship with my very stable dad is the major reason for her symptoms staying low-level. I have said on this forum before that after he died she seemed to become the very worst version of herself.
If any of you know your mom has BPD or even suspect it, I definitely recommend this book. There is a whole section dedicated to telling adult children how to best handle a relationship with your BPD mother. The advice is based on your mother's primary persona --- there are four described in the book. It talks about limit-setting and how to handle common crises (like holidays!).