Hi confetti and
i was with him for an exact year. the thing that bothers (or hurts) me the most is that he would always ask for NC while we were still together and things were great. he would say "you need to give me a whole week, you are not allowed to call me for 7 whole days or ill restart the counter"
everytime I couldn't put up with it I'd leave him cold turkey and he would cry is eyes out begging on the phone for me to not leave him, yet 120 days ago (in front of friends) said he didn't love me and is talking to someone new.
when I asked (i am much wiser now
) who it was,
he would say its his guy friend and he was only fabricating that it was a girl to mess with me.i am really not falling into that hole.
I think what may be helpful for you is to understand how his disorder motivated him to act in this matter.
As I see it, people with BPD (pwBPD) are unable to sustain stable intimate relationships. For them, intimacy triggers their disordered fears. And as the relationship progresses, the more intimacy they deal with, the more of their disordered feelings they have to deal with. So at the beginning, not so much. But after a year, you end up seeing quite a bit of it.
In the case of your BPD loved one, I suspect that it was usually after particularly "good" periods that he would ask for his "break." And I would guess that during his break, he "dealt" with his (imagined) fear of abandonment triggered by the closeness he felt towards you, by abandoning you first. And after his disordered fear dissipated, he would come back to you. Never mind that he went through pretty much the same pattern of closeness followed by abandonment with the other person.
When you decided you'd had enough of this, he would beg... . because to be "abandoned" is to be left first. He would beg and plead and do anything for you not to leave *first*, in order to avoid real (and imagined) abandonment. And then he would leave after you agreed not to leave.
So it's not you specifically that he has an issue with, it is with intimacy in general with humanity at large. :)ifferent people will trigger him to different degrees. But so long as his disorder is unaddressed, it is only a matter of time before his disordered feelings overwhelm him.
like many people here I recycled a LOT.
i wish I could help the people who are stuck in cycles of NC.
it is not worth the fabrications, someone you feel that would never lie to you who so obviously would if it meant life or death.
Here's the rough part about getting recycled a lot. Each time there is a break, it is a kind of mini abandonment. When pwBPD leave, they leave in a very nasty and absolute way. Which makes our feelings that much more intense when we "make up" and get back together. For pwBPD, they are only going through another idealization/devaluation cycle. This kind of on/off relationship is all they've ever known. For us, it is like finding out our loved one died, only to be reunited in throes of passion, only for them to be dead to us once again, etc... .
I don't know what the technical term for this is, but to me it feels like "battered puppy syndrome." The abused keeps running back to the abuser because the abuser is simultaneously the cure and cause of the abused's pain. Kind of like a very nasty addictive drug.
i tried to go to friends in my grieving throughout NC thinking this breakup was normal and that I was just really ___ty at coping. it is a lot harder for people who have not gone through these processes to even fathom how hurtful this can be.
People who have *not* been in a relationship with someone with BPD have as much understanding as someone trying to sympathize with a codependent having trouble letting go of an alcoholic relationship (without being a codependent or an alcoholic).
i want to also ask... . is it possible for BPD traits to rub off after so long?
Very much so. We call them "fleas." As I see it, we go through a smidgen of what pwBPD actually have to deal with regards to their primary abandonment trauma. The pain we feel is similar to the pain they felt as a child when they first experienced the trauma that caused their personality disorder... . as I understand it.
We "pick up" their behaviors, because their behaviors are basically coping mechanism albeit dysfunctional ones.
i sometimes get the feeling that perhaps i was codependent and locked onto the same feelings he had.
My understanding of codependency is that it is our inclination to focus on other people's issues as a means of avoiding our own. Which is why it is so much more painful when we have finally left our dysfunctional relationships: we are left with the pain within that we were able to dismiss/avoid/dissociate when we were caught up in the drama of our problematic relationship.
You are in the right place.
Best wishes, Schwing
