How do you let go of hurts from BPD responses?

[SomeoneSomewhere]

First post, new to the board but reassured by what I see.

My fiancé has BPD, which she has actively been in therapy for over many years. She’s an incredibly self aware, kind, supportive person in my life and we’re working together to understand her BPD and how we positively and negatively impact each others mental health (I have anxiety and ADHD). We’ve been together for 9 months and I’m still learning about her and about BPD in general, and I’m also recently divorced from 10  years married to a spouse with NPD. So … we come with some baggage.

All in all, our communication and relationship is extremely healthy and positive. But recently, our combined mental health struggles paired with me failing to communicate candidly resulted in her experiencing a string of intense BPD responses.

We’re in a good place now, but I’m struggling to let go of the hurt from the things she said during those meltdowns. So I’m looking for advice.

How do you let go of the hurts? I’d like to move on from them, but some days they’re crushing and I feel like I can’t breathe. For a minute, I’m right back in those arguments with her. I’m not angry or trying to solve for the arguments themselves. I’m just in pain and not sure how to get around it.

Any tips?

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[kells76]

Hey SomeoneSomewhere and

I'm glad you're finding the Bettering A Relationship board a reassuring place to be. There can be a lot of negativity and absolutism about BPD relationships, while the reality is that people choose to enter and stay in relationships for many reasons that are personal and valuable to them. That doesn't mean this will be an easy journey, but it sounds like you're willing to work on yourself and see what happens.

My fiancé has BPD, which she has actively been in therapy for over many years. She’s an incredibly self aware, kind, supportive person in my life and we’re working together to understand her BPD and how we positively and negatively impact each others mental health (I have anxiety and ADHD). We’ve been together for 9 months and I’m still learning about her and about BPD in general, and I’m also recently divorced from 10  years married to a spouse with NPD. So … we come with some baggage.

When did she get diagnosed? How does she generally discuss or approach her diagnosis (minimizing, accepting, denial, relief...)?

What kind of therapy is she in, as far as you know?

When you work together to understand your dynamic as a couple, what does that look like? I.e., discussions, topics, books, couples counseling, other?

All in all, our communication and relationship is extremely healthy and positive. But recently, our combined mental health struggles paired with me failing to communicate candidly resulted in her experiencing a string of intense BPD responses.

Was that the first time this had happened?

We’re in a good place now, but I’m struggling to let go of the hurt from the things she said during those meltdowns. So I’m looking for advice.

How do you let go of the hurts? I’d like to move on from them, but some days they’re crushing and I feel like I can’t breathe.

I think anyone, in any relationship (BPD or not), kind of has a limit to how much hurt they can take. I love my H (he doesn't have BPD, but his kids' mom has many traits), but even he and I have buttons that we push on each other -- we have our "conflict recipe" of him getting big and me withdrawing -- and it can really erode you and sensitize you to lower levels of conflict/hurt than you'd normally be sensitive to.

He and I, because we're "generally normal" (we have our own challenges, but neither of us have a PD), can find ways to dialogue about the past, take ownership for when we hurt the other person, and make changes based on what we learn.

Your GF may struggle with making long-term changes that stick, in terms of how she manages/expresses her sometimes harmfully intense emotions. It's good that she's in T right now -- that's really positive -- and, it is a long-term project for those wBPD to "rewire" their brains to change their personality away from "immediate hurtful meltdowns".

So the question for you, from my POV, is how to protect yourself from exposure to those hurts, via boundaries, as she works towards changes.

For a minute, I’m right back in those arguments with her. I’m not angry or trying to solve for the arguments themselves. I’m just in pain and not sure how to get around it.

One of the strengths of this board is that you can share a general "transcript" of how the interactions/conflicts/arguments go, and the group can work with you to find where you can make changes to your dynamic.

What if you posted a general "he said - she said" of one of your typical arguments here, and we can take a look and see where you can make an exit, for example?

I hear you hurting from what she says to you during the arguments. You don't have to participate in staying in the room to hear her say those things -- maybe we can find a way that feels do-able to you, to decline to receive the hurt, and reconnect when it's calm.

What do you think?

[SaltyDawg]

We’re in a good place now, but I’m struggling to let go of the hurt from the things she said during those meltdowns. So I’m looking for advice.

How do you let go of the hurts? I’d like to move on from them, but some days they’re crushing and I feel like I can’t breathe. For a minute, I’m right back in those arguments with her. I’m not angry or trying to solve for the arguments themselves. I’m just in pain and not sure how to get around it.

Any tips?

SS,
 


I personally use a variation of the DBT skill - radical acceptance [https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=89910.0] to cope and let-go of the pain inflicted by her painting me black, and saying her version of her truth from a black/white perspective where her version of the facts becomes extremely distorted to the point of being totally false (even though it is based in truth, but is a gross exaggeration of the actual events).

I call mine 'radical forgiveness' where I will forgive my pwBPD, as they were acting out in an emotionally dysregulated state, as they were not fully aware of what they were doing to you emotionally.  I have grown a thick skin when it comes to my pwBPD insulting and hurtful behaviors and just let the abuse roll off my back, and ignore it.  I will address it only, when my pwBPD is regulated and she wants to talk about it.

Let say, something annoys you, your person forgot to do something they said they would do - you are annoyed, and politely ask them not to do it again - this is how a normal person would respond in a relationship.  To your pwBPD, that minor annoyance becomes an all consuming distortion absolutes when they emotionally dysregulate, where your pwBPD might say something like, 'you never cared for me since you didn't do that for me', 'you deliberately did not do this to p!ss me off', 'I hate you since you never think of me', or some other variation of these kinds of hurtful words.  It is the same behavior, with two wildly differing responses.  Some pwBPD, will realize this, and apologize for it, others will not even realize they are doing this, and you will never get an apology, even though those responses were highly distorted to the point of being very hurtful.

If you respond, I will point you in some good directions to learn a lot more about BPD and how to manage the ups and downs of this emotional roller coaster ride.

Be sure to do self-care, whatever that might look like for you.

Take care.

SD

[SomeoneSomewhere]

When did she get diagnosed? How does she generally discuss or approach her diagnosis (minimizing, accepting, denial, relief...)?

What kind of therapy is she in, as far as you know?

When you work together to understand your dynamic as a couple, what does that look like? I.e., discussions, topics, books, couples counseling, other?

She's been diagnosed for over a decade, and been in talk therapy + DBT for several years. She hasn't had a consistent therapist for a long while, but is currently working with a new one that shows a lot of promise.

We have a lot of discussions when we're both regulated. They're a combination of talking together and text conversations following a moment of disregulation for one/both of us. We're also reading the book I Hate You, Don't Leave Me together currently. We're not currently in couples counseling, but have discussed it and are interested in trying this approach.

Was that the first time this had happened?

It wasn't the first time she's had an explosive BPD reaction, but it was by far the worst of them and the first time it's strung out into multiple reactions/arguments over the course of several weeks.

One of the strengths of this board is that you can share a general "transcript" of how the interactions/conflicts/arguments go, and the group can work with you to find where you can make changes to your dynamic.

What if you posted a general "he said - she said" of one of your typical arguments here, and we can take a look and see where you can make an exit, for example?

I hear you hurting from what she says to you during the arguments. You don't have to participate in staying in the room to hear her say those things -- maybe we can find a way that feels do-able to you, to decline to receive the hurt, and reconnect when it's calm.

What do you think?

I'll admit I'm hesitant to provide a blow by blow because I don't want people taking our relationship out of context and assuming the worst moments are the only moments, or the most important ones. That's something I've found incredibly hard about this situation though, is how isolating it is. My emotional support system is strong, but small, and I had someone very important to me react very badly when I tried to talk about this to her.

That said, I really could use the help so let's give it a try. I apologize if this is too deep in the weeds or too long. it was A LOT.

We're poly, and had been seeing other people outside of our relationship for a couple of months. It's something that's deeply important to the both of us. It's also been the main source of almost every single fight we've had. I've backed off polyamory for the moment while I reevaluate my emotions and better learn how to navigate both of our fears, and she has pulled back from dating others besides an agreed upon 2 as well.

We'd had a few arguments about how I was dating leading up to this, and without knowing there was a word for it I'd been JADEing the whole time. I was really struggling to understand why she was upset, but she was feeling increasingly betrayed by my actions while I was feeling increasingly anxious because it felt like no matter what I did I was going to be wrong. I was stuck on her saying things like I was lying to her, had betrayed her, or was fake and didn't care about her. I couldn't understand, because to me I wasn't doing anything with the knowledge or intention of hurting or betraying her and didn't know what I'd done that was anything more than miscommunication. Then, on an already emotionally-charged evening, I realized I'd lied to her without realizing to. During an argument 2 days prior, I'd told her I hadn't been actively seeking a specific type of poly experience, and then realized while looking back through my messages that I had actually made a post specifically seeking that exact thing I'd told her I wasn't seeking. I hadn't realized what I'd done until that moment. I now know that the way I'd been approaching dating and communication had left her deeply hurt and feeling unvalued and disrespected. Now that I've been able to understand where she was coming from, I see how awful it must have felt for her; I was treating communications with her about the way I was dating the way I would treat a conversation with a friend instead of a partner I was going through life with. She was informed, not included.

So then, when I lied, it hit her really hard. She didn't respond immediately, but we were on a long drive and about halfway through it her entire demeanor shifted. It was the first time I'd ever been scared by her in our relationship. It was an hour and a half in the car until we got home and she yelled the entire time. At first, she stopped the car and told me to drive myself home and that she and our 5 month old daughter (who was sleeping in the back) would Uber home. Then she changed her mind and got back in because of cost. She said a lot of things that hit my exact anxieties: that she was going to leave and I'd never see her again, that she had trusted me with her daughter, that I was a liar and she was just a joke to me, that she wanted to put her hands on me but wasn't going to, that she had spent the last of her money on me to take me to a nice dinner (which she had) to give me a good day because it had been a hard one for me and that now she couldn't even uber home. I really felt like she hated me and I didn't understand what I'd done to provoke such a response. I don't react well to being yelled at, so my response was to shut down almost completely and become nonresponsive. I'd occasionally quietly say "that's not true" or "I don't think that" but that's it.

Obviously, she did come home. We talked through it some, and she apologized for some things (saying she wanted to put her hands on me). But it weighed heavily on us both and we continued to fight off and on about tangentially related topics. One of the things she'd said during that drive was that she was "going to do me like I'd done her" and that I wouldn't like it when she did. So, fast forward a couple weeks and a handful of blow-up fights like this later ...

I'd scheduled a date, not realizing it went against a poly rule we'd set months before that we wouldn't date people we knew (the date was with an old colleague who'd matched me on Tinder). It was the final straw for her and we got into another fight. I went on to JADE and then shut down. This one ended incredibly badly: She'd said something that was speaking to motivations I didn't have, and I said that she was "implying intent" that I didn't have. She was furious, said "I hope you die, I really do" and left. When she did, she accidentally set off the home alarm but I didn't realize it. So, when the police showed up 15 minutes later I had a moment where I thought she'd killed herself. She wasn't answering her phone or texts, so I was obviously panicked. Turns out she hadn't ... she'd gone to her ex's house and cheated on me instead.


This is a lot to dump into a forum of people who don't know me, my fiance, or my life, and it's incredibly fragmented and shortened. I can't stress enough that this is not our relationship dynamic and that she's an amazing human who occasionally does tremendously hurtful things. From our conversations since, and my own soul searching, I've realized that I did several things wrong:

- Failing to communicate well in the first place, causing her a lot of built up emotional distress.
- Consistently JADEing instead of responding to her emotions.
- Shutting down instead of setting boundaries or removing myself from the conversations when arguments escalated.

Someone in a post on here said something that really clicked things together for me, about listening for what his wife was trying to say about how she was feeling instead of focusing on trying to understand what he'd done wrong. That's exactly what I'd been doing, and when I stopped doing it and spoke to the betrayal she was (legitimately) feeling things improved and we've been working to heal.

I do struggle to remove myself from arguments due to my own trauma. It's a combination of seeing how much pain she's in and not wanting to leave her alone like that, as well as me being in pain myself and deeply desiring for her to see that she's hurting me and stop. I recognize those things aren't helpful and am going to work on them.

But now, as we work through this together, I'm running into two major challenges:
- What she said and did hurts. It hurts that she said she wanted me to die. It hurts that she implied I couldn't be trusted around our children. It hurts that she wanted to hurt me.
- I've done a huge amount of soul searching to make genuine, honest apologies for the role I played in this, and while she's apologized for pieces ... she's doubled down on others. She won't admit that she cheated on me, she instead calls it a "get-back" focused on righting things in her own mind. She says she shouldn't have said she wishes I'd die, and that she'd hoped I hadn't heard that, but she hasn't addressed how incredibly hurtful it is to hear your partner say that.

I don't want to rehash these arguments with her. I actually physically, mentally, and emotionally cannot rehash these arguments with her. But damn do I wish she would look at me and say "I'm so sorry for the hurt that I've caused you. I know it was wrong and you didn't deserve that. I'm working on making sure that never happens again". Instead she says "I'm just sorry we had to get to that point". I know she feels bad for hurting me. I know she knows how badly she hurt me. And I see her working to find a new therapist who can be consistently there for her and is working to readjust her medications to better manage her anger. I see her changing her behavior, and that's what really matters, but I'm struggling to let go of all that was said in the meantime.

Anyway, this is long as heck so if you made it to the bottom I commend you for that. I'm not going to proofread this novel of a post, but I hope it makes sense and that you understand that this is the worst of things ... not the regular of things. She and I are okay, and working through it. I'm okay and working through it. I just don't know how to find closure in myself and not be crushed by the weight of her words and actions.