Okay, so things actually do get better eventually

[Makava]

Had a short but wonderful relationship with a wonderful woman. Never any abuse but she abruptly walked out, seeming unable to remember any of the good parts. Naturally it kind of broke me. Eventually I figured out that she's 9 for 9 on the BPD diagnostic criteria, so just the quintessential quiet BPD.

I gently reached out to her a few a few times (against the explicit advice of this board, whoops), got myself cursed at and blocked, with vague and baffling allegations of mistreatment. After a VERY rough few months, I'm happy to report that I'm in a much better place.

A few things that helped:
-I learned an enormous amount about the disorder, reading through all the major books, a lot of first-person narratives from sufferers (which really helped with empathy for me), and a decent amount of academic medical literature.
-Therapy, obviously.
-I managed to reach out to my one mutual acquaintance with my ex and have a quiet comparing-notes conversation with her. Turns out, lo and behold, my ex has a history, unbeknownst to me, of very erratic and emotional self-sabotaging behavior in her friendships. This sort of solved the mystery of "Why did this happen only to me?" (it didn't) and confirmed any lingering doubts I had about what was going on.

I still feel pretty emotionally connected to her, but learning more about the disorder has slowly transformed that connection from "sweeping romantic feelings" to something more akin to "concern for the health and wellbeing of a close friend." Reading the BPD material has made me realize how much she must be suffering inside and how frightening and painful day-to-day life must be. I'd particularly recommend Shari Manning's Loving Someone with BPD book, which really did an excellent job of describing the internal emotional state, which was very helpful in letting me process what had happened and letting me feel confident I could react more appropriately if she pops back up again.

And finally, one weird thing recently: the one place I see any sign of her is her online dating profile (which she probably does not realize I can see). For a while now I've had a strange sense that everything on it, her interests and such, were describing things pretty specific to OUR relationship, but I assumed this was just wishful thinking/paranoia. But a week ago she randomly added an explicit reference to owning a special and very specific gift I'd gotten her, which she'd led me to believe she hadn't even kept. I genuinely have no idea what to make of it. It's like she is looking to recreate our EXACT relationship without me in it. But that's the mystery of the disorder, I guess.

[NP345]

Sorry you went through this - feeling discarded like that is so painful. Glad to read that you're doing better though. I was wondering why you are still looking at the dating profile of your ex? Is it to get a better understanding of her behaviour so you can process what happened?

I'm asking this because maybe she does have a hunch that you are reading it and she has put these references there on purpose. To confuse or hurt you ("see, I am trying to attract someone new and using our shared memories to do it") or to entice you to recycle (as you wrote, the text reads as a copy of your relationship).

You will continue to do better – and hopefully over time you will no longer feel any need to look at what she's doing. I'm taking the opposite approach and explicitly avoid my unBPDex's dating profile. I know he probably created one the day we broke up, making me feel even more like a disposable item, which is why I don't want to hurt myself by looking at it. That also means I am still affected by his opinions and have some recovery to do still. Wishing you luck!

[Makava]

Honestly, at first I checked her stuff because, you know, recent breakup and all, but recently it's been sporadic and just out of curiosity. It's slightly painful so I don't go looking all that often. I really don't think she knows I can see it for various reasons, but even if she's secretly hoping for a recycle, I'm pretty comprehensively blocked and have no foolproof way of reaching out! So she's made a slight tactical error there.

Very frankly, I wouldn't mind an attempted recycle, less because I think we could rebuild the relationship (clearly not) but because any kind of re-idealization would be a good chance to gently probe about treatment. She's had a terrible year where she's become aware she has real-deal diagnosable mental health problems, and she's pretty dedicated to seeking treatment... but I don't think she was ever diagnosed BPD! Worse still she was in twice-a-week therapy until pretty recently but quit, because she thought she'd successfully medicated the problem away. Given she's only 26 I really think this degree of progress towards treatment is a pretty optimistic place for her to be, so if we interact again I might just talk about my therapy and see if there's opportunity to give her little nudges in the right direction without being too explicit about anything. Maybe not, maybe she'll split me again, but it's all I can do.