First, welcome to the fam. 

Second, take some time and peruse our tools and skills library which I believe would be of immense use to you.

For general all purpose: https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?board=36.0

When you check out the library please focus on 1.15 through 1.18. I think that should provide you some good direction.

Of course in the meantime please feel free to share as much as you want and ask as many questions as you need to. Please be kind to you and please take care of yourself.

Cheers and Best Wishes!

-SC-

Anyone?

Well you picked a up good place for support. When I say we get it and we understand here I really do mean it. Welcome to the fam  . In the meantime please feel free to share as much as you want to and ask as many questions as you need to. Please be kind to you and take care of yourself.

Cheers and Best Wishes!

-SC-

Recognize your mother's birthday if this works for you while knowing you have no control over how she responds. It might be easier to send her a small gift like flowers instead of a written message as she is likely to take what you say way out of context and use the written message to abuse you. She may throw away the gift or tell you how much she doesn't like it, so if you do send a gift it is important not to be attached to your mother showing some kind of appreciation for the gift.

I feel for you in this situation of the home and the memories.

I am 7 days out of a long term relationship with my BPD partner. We moved from one home to another to escape some "bad memories" that in retrospect I understand were BPD trait related.

We moved into a new, larger home (that I needed as I started a work from home job and needed space). The neighborhood, location, size, and features of the home were perfect for both of us. The first 4-6 months things were good, the house was well kept up, and we were upgrading and improving it to be our "forever" home so to speak. As he got more comfortable and his BPD settled in as he got older, things began to go down hill in the home.

6 years after we moved into this house, as our relationship crashed and burned due to a horrible combo of substance/alcohol and BPD, the house is a shell of what it once was, I barely recognize it.

Years of him not giving a PLEASE READ about anything in the house and just not caring have left it in shambles. All the projects he was going to "tackle" that I couldn't get him to do, but also wasn't allowed to do myself or hire someone to do, are left undone. I gave him a larger common room in the house to start a business in, that ended up spreading to all ends of the home to the point where I feel like I live in a garage not a house. I basically have 2 rooms that are not tainted, my office and the kitchen.

The last 6 weeks as things got really bad, my BPD partner began a pattern of destroying things and the house. There are over a dozen holes in the walls that he has punched or kicked (or in one case head butted). Some the size of a fist or a foot, others you could throw a beach ball through. Photos and other things were destroyed in fits of rage. Carpets were stained, things that had sentimental meaning to me and/or him/us were destroyed. All of this was "my fault" I was told after they happened.

Now, with him gone I'm left with this 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom large home where just me and memories of someone I love so much still it makes me physically hurt are left. I am barely getting by emotionally, I haven't even begun to look at what getting the home fixed would take. I'm just trying to get through each day at this point.

So, to turn this back to your post, do you feel like leaving your homes in the past mattered? Do you regret having done so? Part of me wants to make this house "mine" again so that myself and maybe someone else in the future if I can get to that point, could have a great life in this home. I'm just not sure if I can live here without the fond memories and the traumatic ones haunting me everyday.

I'm not sure where to even start.

I'm heartbroken, confused, angry, sad, and feel like I'm watching my life from the outside. I love and care for a person with BPD who has hurt me so much emotionally, and recently physically, that I should want to push them as far away from me as possible, but I can't stop thinking about their pain and their suffering, even though everyone else in my life (family, friends, therapist, even family of my BPD partner) tells me that I've done the right thing and need to concentrate on "me" for now.

Up until a week ago I didn't even understand why the person I loved was the way that they were. After a slew of what I now understand to be BPD related episodes and exasperated behavior by my partner, my therapist (who I later found out specialized at one point in working with BPD patients), recognized the behaviors and patters, and recommended I read Walking On Egg Shells.

Ironically I started the book on the night where my relationship finally crashed and burned with my BPD partner. I only really started to truly understand the "why" of it all an hour before the police took him away in cuffs for assaulting me and trashing our home.

Now, I am left with the pieces, the pain, and the guilt at the reality of the person I love more than anything else in the world, is now going to have to nobody to love and care for them, nowhere to go, no resources, no family, and a small group of friends who will quickly tire of the BPD traits I know he will bestow onto them, as the only people left in his life trying to help him.

I am an emotional wreck. I can't stop crying (and I'm not a cryer), I go to sleep worrying about him, I wake up worrying about him. Based on his arrest release and the order or protection I had to put in place, we won't be in contact for some time, if ever. This is so hard but as I understand it, is necessary for my safety. I want so bad to hug him, to pull him in close and tell him it will be OK, we can get him help, he can live a regular life again... but I know that's not an easy path, and is probably not one he can embark on until he battles other substance and alcohol issues he has. I don't know if he can do that honestly. The prospect of never having him in life again feels like more than I can bare, but I also know I can't be the one to help him. He has too much intense love for me, but also so much distrust and anger towards me, that until now I couldn't understand.

He brought me so much happiness but also so much pain. He made me feel like the best person in the world, he also made me feel like the absolute worst person in the world too. Over the past 12-18 months a slowly tightening noose was put around my neck that dictated what I was allowed to do, who I could be around (without being accused of having an affair with them), and where my life/time focus was allowed to be. Because of this, I distanced myself from almost every non-essential person and part of my daily life, to be able to give my BPD partner the attention he felt he needed from me.

Now, this has all come crashing down, I find myself without a solid network of support because of the distancing I'd been forced to do with those close to me. Many I've reached out to now understand my distance and change in behavior and are a mix between feeling bad for me, asking me "what were you thinking, you should've gotten out of that relationship years ago", but are generally just not able to fathom how I could have let things get this bad for me and the other person.

My therapist thought this group may be a good place to find some comrades who will sympathize with my situation and may be able to help. I hope that's true. Nobody I've talked to (save for my wonderful therapist who's been a life saver) understand the scope of what I've dealt with and am now dealing with in the aftermath.

I thank you all in advance for allowing me into your community.

Like you, I am a newbie and learning but I can empathize with the false/paranoid accusations.

I'm still trying to understand how to deal with this kind of stuff and develop those skills but the one piece of advice I will give is; never give a false confession to appease their anger or in response to claims like you "lying about it is why I'm really angry".

I have done this and regret it to this day.

@Pook075
Thanks again for your insight. It has been so helpful. I am currently trying to understand validation better and am going to make that my short term mission in this relationship.

I am also trying to come up with some kind of immediate tactics for dealing with conflict, just as a matter of survival... Frankly my identity has started to erode and I have isolated from my friends and family, so I have plenty of work to do on myself which is really the only aspect I can control.

@Elvis42
Thanks for relating your experiences, it is amazing to me that others can empathize or can relate things that are so similar, I've felt alone in this for so long.

I know what you mean about identity and reality becoming distorted.

I've agreed to all kinds of crazy rules and violations of my boundaries that I never would have tolerated at the start of the relationship when I was healthier mentally and physically. Part of me is terrified of these divorce threats because on some level I believe when she says no one else would have me, etc. I have been apologizing to her and begging her to appease her increasing paranoia for years now and I have caught myself buying too much of the criticism, etc, as I attempt to "understand" and "fix" things.

That 'appearances' thing has always amazed me. Outwardly, to people in the neighborhood, etc, I am the cold, unfriendly, stoic, etc, person (I struggle with being socially avoidant, this was before this relationship). She is the beautiful, fun, outgoing one. She seems laid back, grounded, etc. I am sure the local view is "What she doing with that dude?".

It is an absolute priority for her that outwardly we appear perfect. No one would ever guess at some of the epic rage she has directed at me and how we interact with these delusional accusations. The only upside to this is that while she has made threats to sabotage things, like, for example, my status at work, when she's been in a rage... To date, she never seems to repeat a lot of the wildly paranoid things she accuses me of to anyone else... Not even close friends.

If she splits on a casual friend, that is it. They are *gone*... she cuts all intentional contact and stops seeing them socially. She did this to our best friends in the neighborhood last year.

As the true inner circle, only the kids and I really understand how far from the norm things are. She will split at me in front of our kids so they understand on some level. The whole parenting thing is another entire can of worms... and I wish I would have understood BPD sooner so I could have done a better job insulating them.

Our kids are at the age where they will be leaving soon. I think some of this change has escalated things for her emotionally inside and is partially contributing to this ramping of frequency and severity. She will bring the kids leaving soon up when splitting and making divorce threats.

Thank you - just the acknowledgment of what I'm feeling helps. I can't even process what happened with how fast things went and the level of cruelty I was met with. It was as if nothing of the past year meant anything, when just the day before things seemed great.

I knew him a while before we started dating and he had told me that he'd been diagnosed with it. We didn't talk about it much but having some knowledge of personality disorders it fit with how he operates and while I knew that going in I didn't think it'd be like this. He sees a therapist occasionally but doesn't have people in his life he can talk to. Even before this he seemed locked into the idea that every person is untrustworthy or somehow a bad person, but he always told me how loved he felt by me until this incident and I sort of naively thought he'd let his guard down with me. In that sense I can totally understand the level of pain he was feeling believing I did that to him.

Since posting on here I've read through a lot of the tips and realized I did too much JADE. While I get what not to do, I don't know what to do. I felt unable to do anything else because he also took silence or redirection as admission of guilt or saving face. I apologized for the miscommunication and reiterated my commitment to things but he wouldn't have any of it unless I "confessed," and the accusations became more extreme. I tried to stay calm and loving but everything made it worse.

He blocked me yesterday. Since I can't reach him now I don't know what else to do. I just can't wrap my head around ending things over something like this with how much love we shared before.