Writing down one's thoughts regarding their BPD ex. Any experience with this?

[Beware of Junk Psychology...]

Despite feeling great on Friday and Saturday last week, I have hit a huge relapse in my recovery process for seemingly no reason and the last 3 days have been nothing but constant ruminations and ensuing emotional breakdowns. In my endless quest to exorcise these thoughts from my mind, I decided to sit down and start writing things down on pen and paper to see if this would provide any relief.

My problem is that I started my account on the day of the discard and I'm 4 full pages in & still on that day. I can't really see this as helping me since I am digging up somewhat repressed memories of incredibly specific details from the day when this happened and it seems like I'm living them all over again. I took a pause in my writing to give my wrist a rest and wanted to see if anyone here had any experience with doing this? If so, did it help in any way? I am not expecting to feel all better after this or really to experience any kind of immediate effects at all but I am just curious to see what others have felt from doing this exercise.

[pjstock42]

Despite feeling great on Friday and Saturday last week, I have hit a huge relapse in my recovery process for seemingly no reason and the last 3 days have been nothing but constant ruminations and ensuing emotional breakdowns. In my endless quest to exorcise these thoughts from my mind, I decided to sit down and start writing things down on pen and paper to see if this would provide any relief.

My problem is that I started my account on the day of the discard and I'm 4 full pages in & still on that day. I can't really see this as helping me since I am digging up somewhat repressed memories of incredibly specific details from the day when this happened and it seems like I'm living them all over again. I took a pause in my writing to give my wrist a rest and wanted to see if anyone here had any experience with doing this? If so, did it help in any way? I am not expecting to feel all better after this or really to experience any kind of immediate effects at all but I am just curious to see what others have felt from doing this exercise.

[fromheeltoheal]

It depends what the goal is pj.  Writing things down by hand has a way of releasing them in general, and if that exercise unearths somewhat repressed memories, as you mention, then that could be beneficial in processing the emotions associated with those memories.  Another tool some find useful, to address the conflict between our heads and our hearts that many of us experience coming out of these relationships, is to make a list of all the unacceptable behaviors you tolerated during the relationship, and fully associate to how they made you feel, as an intentional focus shift to give you time and distance, so you can grieve and process more objectively, and a more balanced, compassionate view of your ex can follow later.  I know that you didn't have many of those, yours was mostly the surprise at the end, but others reading might benefit.

Detachment is a project, one you're taking on all the way, and good for you.  Have you continued with your writing?

[rfriesen]

Hi PJ,
There's no real formula for getting it all out. I did do some writing about things, but I often found myself trying to explain or understand things as I was writing, instead of letting myself feel the emotions I was going through, without judgment or justification. I actually found it more helpful to reread old emails we had sent each other. Then I would see how day-to-day my ex and I would swing from extreme happiness, to her getting upset over something and me apologising and doing my best to convince her of my love. Reading those emails, I would relive those intense feelings of love, and also the stress and anxiety, but with some sense of distance now.
It helped me see the different sides of our relationship in black-and-white, so to speak. There were incredible highs, but also a lot of stress and anxiety. That helped me get a firmer grip on what is now a basic truth for me: I don't regret the relationship, but I would never want to be back in it.

Do you feel that writing things down has helped give you a clearer picture of your relationship?

[VitaminC]

I actually found it more helpful to reread old emails we had sent each other.

I did a funny thing during my "trying to understand if it was real or in my head" phase - I used an online semantic analysis tool that allowed me to copy in a sample of our text conversation and then analyzed it for how well the two parties knew each other.

Obviously it was programmed to look for certain mirroring in terms of the words that were used to respond to each other - there  are underlying assumptions about how people communicate through language only (and to take out gesture and other body language). One could quibble with some of those assumptions, no doubt.

What was interesting, and I have to laugh thinking about it now (but at the time it was upsetting, of course), is how clear it was that whatever I said was being deflected or just ignored. I read the texts, had that feeling, but needed external proof that that is really how it looked to an independent "observer".  I remember being in a constant state of trying to connect one message to another, to find the thread. I believed there had to be an underlying sense to it, a message that he was really trying to communicate to me.

The message was "I change how I feel and what I think constantly, I don't know what's happening, I'll just keep playing this game because it's the only thing I know how to do"

To me it emphasises how much I privilege my intellect over my feelings - as if they can be separated, ha!  I think what rfriesen says about feeling the emotions and what FHTH says about fully associating with how the things you recall made you feel is bang on the money.

[fromheeltoheal]

The message was "I change how I feel and what I think constantly, I don't know what's happening, I'll just keep playing this game because it's the only thing I know how to do"

Interjection: that's pretty honest and self-aware from someone with "affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood" and "markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self", two traits of the disorder, and also admission that borderlines don't know why it's happening.  It would be very difficult to live like that, when you think about it.

[pjstock42]

heel,

I haven't yet picked up where I left off yesterday. I had about 3 hours of sleep going into yesterday and was a bit of a mess throughout the whole day, I've definitely realized that having a poor night of sleep makes dealing with all of these emotions much more difficult the next day. I think I will continue this later today after work. Looking at things objectively is certainly a goal of mine through this practice, I even started it out by saying something about how if I ever pick this up and read it, I hope I can laugh at myself for it.

rfriesen,

I commend you for reading those old emails as I don't think that's something that I would have the stomach to do. Our communications were all via text messages and those were all deleted right after the discard so I don't have a detailed log to go back to like that and honestly I think that would really make me break down if I read any of those. I can't really tell if this activity is giving me a more clear image of the relationship, not yet at least. All of the things I'm writing have already been micro analyzed by my brain 1000 times so there doesn't really seem to be any new information coming out.

[pjstock42]

heel,

I just took your advice and created a list of unacceptable behaviors. My list is a bit different since as you know, there was no devaluation period in my experience. I instead made a list of all of the things that she had told me about her past which conflicted with the "wholesome good girl" image that she portrayed to me. I won't write the list here but I ended up jotting down around 15 things and after going back and reading my list, I am shocked and incredibly ashamed of myself for ever having been romantically involved with a person of this quality.

This is clearly unveiling some of my own insecurities/issues as from an objective point of view, every single thing on this list is a deal breaker and I would call this out if a friend was telling me these things about his girlfriend. Somehow, I allowed myself to be ok with her dark & promiscuous past that clearly juxtaposed the clean & virtuous self image that she portrayed to me. My subconscious forced me to not care about these things, to buy into her gaslighting without ever questioning it and to basically live in the fantasy world that I wanted so badly. It is abundantly clear that a person with such a laundry list of trashy behavior is not going to be someone who I am meant to have a meaningful monogamous relationship with but I still tried to do it anyway. What I want to focus on now is why I made myself ok with this, why did I not enforce my boundaries and seek out a higher quality person, why is it just now that I am realizing what a suicide mission I was embarking on with her?

I feel like if I ever get romantically involved with someone again in the future, I'm going to be asking them for a detailed account of their entire life history, I'm not sure how well that will go over  .

[UnforgivenII]

My therapist told me to write. He said it is an ancient method. But then he told me to bring what I wrote so that se could tear it together.

I hope it works, as it does not make a lot of sense to me... .

[Icanteven]

after going back and reading my list, I am shocked and incredibly ashamed of myself for ever having been romantically involved with a person of this quality.

And herein lies the reason I stopped doing this exercise, and why my T told me to stop as well:  the person you love wasn't always this way, and the version of the person you fell in love and the person you're no longer with are NOT THE SAME PERSON. 

I have ten legal pad pages worth of reasons my wife is a terrible person.  Ten.  My wife.  The woman I married. I have fewer than ten words that swamp ten pages:  she is my wife and I love her.  Sadly, those are my only reasons at this point.  But, why do I love her?  Because for years she was every bit the dream come true you read about on these boards.  Yes, the rollercoaster got longer and steeper, but I could write 100 pages worth of amazing adventures we shared, and that was very real and truly amazing and no matter what I will always have those memories.

At the end, they were miserable human beings, and you're absolutely right that if you read the negative characteristics aloud you would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever fall in love with such a person.  Only you didn't fall in love with the person they are, you fell in love with the person they wanted to be/pretended to be/both.

If it's therapeutic for you, keep doing it, but for me it was an exercise in rationalizing the irrational.  Time, therapy, anti-depressants, friends and family, and the love of my children have all helped heal me.  I haven't even looked at that list again for months because all the bad stuff doesn't matter; accepting that she's a hodge podge of the good and bad, but mostly the bad and that the good is a temporal condition are what mattered.

[pjstock42]

I hear what you're saying, Icanteven.

I'm not going to continue this exercise, this list was enough to provide a powerful impact on my thinking.

If it makes sense, here is the benefit of where this exercise has left me. My constant ruminations of the good times, incessantly missing her and wanting her back - those are the thoughts that I have been trying to tackle first. This exercise has proven to me that these thoughts are pointless and here is why: I now understand that my BPD exgf isn't this perfect little flower out there on her own. She doesn't hold a magical key to my happiness and my access to all of the things that I want in a woman. It's easy to think like this because the negative thoughts keep telling me that going back to her would instantly provide me with all of the things that I am missing because I already spent so much time establishing these things with her. I now know that this isn't true because like you said, I never loved the person that she is and will continue to be, I loved the false self image / fantasy that she created. Of course I still have immense grief over losing this fantasy and missing that fake person but this has helped me to pinpoint that my detachment isn't from her, it's from the fantasy that I was living and even if I still desire many of the things that the fantasy provided, she is not the person to provide me with any of them.

It's not like this exercise has made me get over this immediately but it has provided me with that very important dichotomy of separating grieving the loss of her from grieving the loss of her false self image that never really existed in reality. Of course the grief and detachment is still very powerful because the fantasy was incredibly real to me for such a long time but I really do see this as a great foundation for my healing process in general. It's now up to me to understand how I was ever able to overlook her true self when it was right in front of me and that is something that will only be accomplished through introspection and self analysis, both of which have absolutely no dependency on her as a person.

[StayStrongNow]

In the book Rebuilding After Your Relationship Ends by Bruce Fisher, he suggests writing a good bye letter.

Every line starts with "Goodbye to... .", it correlates to all these posts suggesting you write what you didn't like or hated about the r/s but also instills in your thinking a finality to all this madness in your life.

I look back at my letter to give me strength, wisdom and courage to keep on walking away and detaching from this horrid life I had and move on.

[Icanteven]

this list was enough to provide a powerful impact on my thinking.

Then it was worth doing.  Doing mine had a powerful impact on my thinking as well, but the effect was temporal, because the emotional side of my brain was able to swamp the executive functioning of my brain, and with little difficulty.  So I thought, did I miss some things?  Do I need to read the list three times a day?  Five?  Truth be told, the list is true and everything about is is true and at the end it was like a drug in and of itself in that I needed more for it to work less and less.  THAT, is what I want you to avoid. 

The last thing in the world you should feel is shame or embarrassment.  pwBPD are a gift from god when you meet them and we can chalk it up to loneliness or self esteem or gullibility or co-dependency or whatever, but I was doing just fine in the dating world till my wife came along, only the difference with her was that she was chemistry on fire.  We meet these people and there is something about them that triggers whatever is locked inside us so acutely that the rest of the world can go to hell.  The connection was real.  The sex was every bit as advertised.  The highs were the highest we'll ever go.  All of it was real for US, and the fact that there is this whole other side, or even that the whole other side is the only true side, doesn't change that it was real for us.  No embarrassment warranted.