Revitalazing left brain hemisphere after BPD r/s

[Tupla Sport]

I told my therapist yesterday that I feel I've been in an emotional brain fog for a long while now. I have immense trouble prioritizing, keeping track of practical matters and not just ruminating all day.

He suggested activating my corpus callosum, that is, the bridge between the hemispheres of the brain. This ought to integrate the functions of the hemispheres so your rational brain and creative, emotional brain can discuss more harmoniously. Activities of such nature include anything that makes you use your non-dominant hand. Playing the guitar or any instrument two-handed is a good example.

How this relates to surviving BPD relationships is this: I can only speak convincingly about myself, but I think the rumination-ladden brain fog where I feel stuck in the past, unable to make decisions for myself follows from the r/s forcing me to shush out parts of my brain. Some people here have reported similar cognitive changes. The way I see it is that walking on eggshells and trying my best not to trigger my ex by using my rationality "against her" gradually made me lock up some of my more rational impulses. Some examples of these rational impulses:

Saying
"that's really not true though"
"I'm sorry but that sounds wildly exaggerated"
"you are being very biased"
"I'm sorry you feel that way but that's the truth and we need to do something about the situation"

My ex has quiet type BPD and she would also avoid asserting much of anything rationally to me unless there was a painfully clear indication made before-hand that it was okay. In the end I became as anxious about that as she was. I felt absolutely destroyed if she did correct me in conversation. I feel she made it into a quiet competition where the aim was to be always correct in what one says. She would call herself an idiot to my face if she missed any trivial detail about anything. After a while you start thinking "does she think I'm also an idiot for making similar everyday happens-to-everyone kind of mistakes?" She also shamed me for my responses to her correcting me: she would regularly berate me for "flying off the handle" when she would correct me. "I can't tell you anything!"

I let her disorder dictate my own rationality to the point that I was functioning on emotional logic not perhaps 100% because it's a pointless venture trying to estimate such abstract percentages but the point is, I adapted to the situation by letting my left brain hemisphere dry out . That is at least how I feel.

[imstillhere89]

My ex would constantly tell me that I take everything too personal and I feel attacked even tho he isn't attacking me. In the beginning of our r/s I believed him. I thought "actually he is right, I try to defense myself everytime he says something to me, I have to change it". In time, I realised I did defense myself but only because he was attacking me! Often with a smile on his face or in a very caring way but there was so much attacking in it.
After few months of our r/s I've started to see that he is the one always taking everything as I was attacking him. And often it was leading to a fight. He would also get angry at me if I didn't understand what he meant and he would make me look like a total idiot. Or he would rage at me, for whatever stupid reason, and then if I was upset, trying to speak to him, why would he treat me this way,  he would try to convince me that the reason why he got angry was totally different than I thought it was. In time I really felt like I'm an idiot that doesn't understand simple things.
We worked together for over 6 months (his building services) and he would teach me some stuff. Then when he was in his "mood" he would shout at me for doing something in a certain way, even tho I was doing it exactly how he told me to do it. I would try to explain that this is how he wanted me to do it and then he would scream like crazy that he never said that and this is not correct and I shouldn't put words in his mouth and for sure he would never try to teach me to do it this way... usually it was happening when he was angry at something or someone else. I was the one to get the blame and the anger. After few months of working together I was so miserable at work sometimes...I was scared everytime client pissed him off or one of the tools wouldn't work properly because I knew..I just knew I will end up being a target...

It's been around 7 weeks since the breakup and I still catch myself trying to avoid things that would make him angry. Now I see that walking on eggshells affected me a lot.
And straight after our breakup when I tried to explain to my family and friends what I feel I would often say "noo it's not a normal heartbreak, you all don't understand me! He did something to me! I feel like he damaged my brain!" And that's how I felt. I'm slowly getting back to "normal". But is there gonna be any normal in my life after this r/s? I have no clue...

[Tupla Sport]

My ex would constantly tell me that I take everything too personal and I feel attacked even tho he isn't attacking me. In the beginning of our r/s I believed him. I thought "actually he is right, I try to defense myself everytime he says something to me, I have to change it". In time, I realised I did defense myself but only because he was attacking me! Often with a smile on his face or in a very caring way but there was so much attacking in it.

I just got a jolt of guilt right now thinking back to the situations I wrote about. I started thinking that maybe I was that impulsive and sloppy that I said things I didn't think through and then get angry when I was corrected.

But thinking further back, she was being passive-aggressive and conflating correcting someone with actual conversation at the very least. She would take the sideline, let me have my own little monologue and chip in when she felt she could correct me.

And she never did it with any kind of visible glee or malice. She just sat there, proverbially sipping on her tea and waiting for an opening or weak spot in my arguments or observations. Like she was literally forced to listen to me and correcting me was her way of punching up.

I have to admit that the discussion culture in our relationship was toxic and weird from the start but one huge part of that was that she never engaged me in a healthy manner! She thought of me as this unrestrained tyrant walking all over her when all I wanted from her was she would stand up for herself in a healthy manner and steer the discussions like a normal person would. It is not normal or healthy to make yourself the passive-aggressive spectator of a conversation on the regular.

[imstillhere89]

I don't think there is a normal conversation with somebody so unstable emotionally. She was waiting for you to "make a mistake" so she can show you how little you are (in her mind). She wanted to show you she is the wiser one, the stable one, the one that is never wrong. This is manipulation. And she could be even unaware of doing this.

My ex would interrupt anything I was saying but if I interrupted him (for example when he was telling me the same story for 5th time) he would get angry. Also when I was talking about my feelings or something that upsets me he would change the subject. So I felt like my feelings aren't so important or I exaggerated again. He would look for inconsistency in what I was saying so he could catch me lying. But usually he was wrong because I wasn't lying, he just didn't get my point or remembered something different than what I have said. For example he knew that before I met him I was seeing someone for a very short period of time (guy turned out to be aggressive so I didn't continue). I told my ex that he doesn't live locally. Few months later after a fight (about something totally different than previous partners) he attacked me
Ex: "I think I even know this guy you were seeing before me, I think I have seen him around your house and I think he lives street away from us"
Me: "you don't even know how he looks like, and no he doesn't live here and never lived here. I even told you in the beginning that he lives in another city"
Ex: "what? That's not true! You told me he lives here!"
Me: "No this is impossible and I have never said that because he never lived here!"

And this conversation would go on and on and he would try to convince me I said what he thought I said. There could be hundreds of examples of this conversation just with a different subject.
So either they really believe in what they are saying or they just want us to believe we don't know what we are saying and thinking.

[Tupla Sport]

I don't think there is a normal conversation with somebody so unstable emotionally. She was waiting for you to "make a mistake" so she can show you how little you are (in her mind). She wanted to show you she is the wiser one, the stable one, the one that is never wrong. This is manipulation. And she could be even unaware of doing this.


For sure. When we started dating, she would not step in to correct me at all. Then slowly she would take up that dead-inside look with the deadpan correction routine.

The height of that routine was when she started commenting on my pronunciation of foreign words. She almost never told me "actually, I think that's pronounced..." but would repeat what I said by muttering it under her breath. Or just casually using it in a new sentence for no real need. An example:

"I think "Ye" (Kanye West) is up to some weird business again."
"Haha, that's "Yaayy" for you..."

[Sappho11]

Can confirm. The projecting, gaslighting, constant manipulation drives you crazy. My BPDex and I used to have the craziest arguments. For instance, he was incredibly flaky. At some point he convinced me/I agreed that lack of punctuality is just as good as punctuality. Insane.

Even two years later, I still don't feel like the woman I was before. The brain fog is real. Also the emotional defenses have taken massive hits; even now, I'm still very susceptible to stress and much more irritable than I was before.

I greatly like your therapist's excellent point about activating your corpus callosum. I'd never heard of that before, but it makes perfect sense – in the past years, the only thing that has given me a profound sense of relief has been playing the guitar and the violin. It worked like magic and I never knew why, but this is a perfect explanation.

[Tupla Sport]

Can confirm. The projecting, gaslighting, constant manipulation drives you crazy. My BPDex and I used to have the craziest arguments. For instance, he was incredibly flaky. At some point he convinced me/I agreed that lack of punctuality is just as good as punctuality. Insane.

Even two years later, I still don't feel like the woman I was before. The brain fog is real. Also the emotional defenses have taken massive hits; even now, I'm still very susceptible to stress and much more irritable than I was before.

I greatly like your therapist's excellent point about activating your corpus callosum. I'd never heard of that before, but it makes perfect sense – in the past years, the only thing that has given me a profound sense of relief has been playing the guitar and the violin. It worked like magic and I never knew why, but this is a perfect explanation.

I feel like someone weaponized my insecurities against me and I have twice the work to clear it out now. If my insecurities before were saying "You need to prove to people that you're worthy of their time", now they're going "Every person is a puzzle and each time you interact is another chance to lose a piece or two".

The insane pacts you make with them. The micromanagement of everyday interactions that makes you feel like an abuser if you're not 150% on your eggshell game 100% of the time. She argued to me that asking how was your day on WA is something "she really prefers to do live" so if I ask her how her day was, she didn't need to ask it back. And I just nodded like yeah, makes sense. Because asking for 4 words in reciprocation was too much for her.

We made "strategies" so that I would not burden her with my emotional troubles because it was my thing, you know. I'm an adult, I can't just dump my emotions on anyone. One of the absolute worst mindPLEASE READery is when they refuse to see you for the emotional being you are and you are forced to dump your emotions on them only for them to cry wolf when you do. You truly cannot win with them. If you're in an intimate r/s and the other person is constantly dodging your negative emotions outside of triangulation, you will start to beg them to confront them and by then it's game over.

[Sappho11]

I feel like someone weaponized my insecurities against me and I have twice the work to clear it out now. If my insecurities before were saying "You need to prove to people that you're worthy of their time", now they're going "Every person is a puzzle and each time you interact is another chance to lose a piece or two".

Excellently said. I recognise the feeling. For most of my adult life I've taken good care of my appearance (50% because I value aesthetics, 50% because I thought "I have to look presentable to have a right to exist in society"), but ever since the BPD relationship it's been taken to extremes. I feel I can't just throw my hair in a bun now and go out, instead everything has to be perfect, makeup, hair, accessoires, the whole lot. It's like putting on armour and I can't leave the house without it.

In interactions I'm constantly wondering "Is that person another energy vampire?" But when it turns out that they aren't and they do ask me questions about myself, my mind just goes blank. I either give a completely vague answer or I start rambling and can tell the other person is tuning out. Often times I also get the feeling that some of the more "advanced" energy vampires ask a pro-forma question because they sense you're assessing the give-take ratio. It doesn't help that I have a friend or two who have brought this up in conversation (actually asking me whether I feel that they're exploiting me, and I'm not sure whether that's genuine concern or a massive red flag that they are and are just looking to secure their supply).

The insane pacts you make with them. The micromanagement of everyday interactions that makes you feel like an abuser if you're not 150% on your eggshell game 100% of the time. She argued to me that asking how was your day on WA is something "she really prefers to do live" so if I ask her how her day was, she didn't need to ask it back. And I just nodded like yeah, makes sense. Because asking for 4 words in reciprocation was too much for her.

I literally had the same conversation with my BPDex, it's insane. Even down to the WhatsApp detail and him saying he prefers "to do it live". I couldn't make any sense of it then but I'm now wondering whether it has something to do with accountability – if it's written, the onesidedness is obvious and you can hold them to what they said or didn't say, but if it's spoken, you can't.

We made "strategies" so that I would not burden her with my emotional troubles because it was my thing, you know. I'm an adult, I can't just dump my emotions on anyone. One of the absolute worst mindPLEASE READery is when they refuse to see you for the emotional being you are and you are forced to dump your emotions on them only for them to cry wolf when you do. You truly cannot win with them. If you're in an intimate r/s and the other person is constantly dodging your negative emotions outside of triangulation, you will start to beg them to confront them and by then it's game over.

Agreed. Also the constant unfairness that you're not allowed to have a single emotion, while they constantly dump their emotional BS on you 24/7, even in the middle of the night. I remember a night where I learnt that a friend of mine had cancer, my pet of eight years was sick and a third piece of bad news of a similar degree, all in one day. BPDex refused to come over to console me, told me to ask one of my friends instead, insinuated I was crazy and whether I was keeping a journal of these "moods"? – But when he, for example, missed a bus and had to take one five minutes later, he was furious and I had to comfort and console him for the rest of the day.

Madness, absolute madness.

[Tupla Sport]

Agreed. Also the constant unfairness that you're not allowed to have a single emotion, while they constantly dump their emotional BS on you 24/7, even in the middle of the night. I remember a night where I learnt that a friend of mine had cancer, my pet of eight years was sick and a third piece of bad news of a similar degree, all in one day. BPDex refused to come over to console me, told me to ask one of my friends instead, insinuated I was crazy and whether I was keeping a journal of these "moods"? – But when he, for example, missed a bus and had to take one five minutes later, he was furious and I had to comfort and console him for the rest of the day.

That's horrible.

I remember breaking down in front of my ex with her just staring into the middle distance. When I tried to clumsily ask for her support she just said "I can't help you if you won't tell me what you need". She was already in fight mode. It destroys my heart in hindsight. What a terrible existence.

When she was going up the corporate ladder before being dropped back she would softly gloat about her work accomplishments. She knew I was not happy with my job and she just kept going. She worked from our home and I worked at an office. One day as I was leaving for work she said "My supervisor is really giving me too much positive feedback" and it just felt like a disgusting humblebrag. It's one of those situations where you had to be there to catch the tone. One day I could't handle the gloating and broke down and she said "don't blame me for your own failures". I don't think anyone has ever said anything more cruel to me, and I had a BPD mother and a narcissist friend ruining my life along the way.

[Sappho11]

I remember breaking down in front of my ex with her just staring into the middle distance. When I tried to clumsily ask for her support she just said "I can't help you if you won't tell me what you need". She was already in fight mode. It destroys my heart in hindsight. What a terrible existence.

I'm sorry you had to go through all this.

The middle-distance stare seems to be a physical hallmark of the disorder. Often along with them suddenly going ice-cold, like a corpse. I call it the black-eyed stare because all life seems to have vanished from their eyes. Just no human emotion whatsoever, as if they'd suddenly turned into destructive robots.

They cannot be relied on for consolation because they simply don't have capacity for empathy.

[Tupla Sport]

I like to think of BPD as childish narcissism when it comes to empathy. Even children learn to manipulate their parents. It's maddening in adults because there is the emotionally broken child and an often-rational adult in the same person. They're usually not completely bonkers but have a chilling way of being half-mad half-lucid that freaks me out. Like phasing in and out of the world of hurt they're in.