Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in

[VIDEO: "What is parental alienation?"]

Hi!  

Back to bpdfamily.com after a 2 year 'vacation'.  

A big thank you to all on this board that helped me with my custody/divorce.  Thanks to your advice and help, I have  enjoyed so many pasta dinners, vacations, movie nights, Easter Egg Hunts, bike rides, etc with S4mos   and S4   (now S4 and S8)

Things had been going OK 3 years post divorce from dBPDx.  Boys are doing well.  Most of the time spent in Kansas, with an occasional (every 3 mos or so) detour to Oz when x would do something not in the Parenting Agreement or attempt to exert some control.  But I dealt with it and minimized it saying it was just a stupid email that I should ignore or her threats were baseless.

Me: a new   relationship with someone I care about deeply. New job, better career, and  love the sanctuary of living in my own place.  

x is still nuts... .  SMOTW was cast off x moved  in internet guy and get remarried within 14mos.  He is a puddle of dysfunction which tells me that opposites don't really attract.

Unfortunately, dBPDx senses how happy my life is and now gone off the deepend in the last 90 days in an  attempt to sabotage my personal life: police wellness checks, court motions, false crimminal accusations, harassment, etc.

I am lawyered up with a new L that is an Eddy Disciple and I love not having to pay $250/hour to explaining  BPD and next moves.  He is dealing with court effectively and looking to draw some boundaries/get some security for boys, DavidWebb and my gf.

The constant emails, phone calls, etc dealing with the day to day activities of the boys have had a toll on me,(physically, mental, and spiritual)  my relationship, and my lifestyle.  It was my thinking that for some reason I needed to appear to be a 'good co-parent' post divorce/custody. Try BIFF, try SET, pi$$ on a sparkplug in order to minimize conflict.  Answer the email about the missing baseball glove,  who buys the posterboard for the homework, etc, etc.

After the world caved in with the police visit, I reached my breaking point in February and was giving up hope that I would ever find happiness.  The 3 sentence, just the facts emails in order to foster a 'business like relationship' were ignored and crimminal charges were filed.

It wasn't until my gf, T and L said that further (=ALL) detachment was needed, and giving me their direction on 'co-parenting' with a psycho.  gf has been saying it for years, but I am a typical stubborn guy optimist that just kept saying thing's would get better and x wasn't nuts enough to do anything stupid.

This is a great article that was published late last year that I thought was too valuable not return to FfF to share.  Every one of these 5 points have relevance in my situation.  My biggest takeaways are that no one can be critical of the way I chose to NOT communicate / parallel parent with x until they spend a night at the police station and I no longer  sweat the small stuff (where is the libary book?)  with the boys.



What Therapists Don't Tell You About Divorcing A High-Conflict Personality

Virginia Gilbert, MFT



Therapists are trained to help clients become self-aware and authentic. For people who grew up in invalidating environments, where they learned to suppress their feelings and needs in order to be accepted, therapy can be life-altering.

Competent therapists who provide a corrective emotional experience can make it possible for people who never had a voice to find one. Once self-actualized, people generally find the quality of their lives improve: they find the right career, attract the right mate and extricate themselves from toxic relationships.

Unfortunately, this type of personal growth can be disastrous when divorcing a high-conflict personality. When working with a client who is married to, or separating from a narcissist, therapists need to invert the goal of traditional therapy. Instead of encouraging people to be authentic, they need to counsel people to be strategic. Expressing one's true feelings, admitting vulnerability, and apologizing for one's missteps can bury a person who is trying to dissolve a marriage with a narcissist -- especially when children are involved.

Why Don't More Therapists Understand How to Treat High-Conflict Divorce?

Graduate psychology programs teach future therapists how to facilitate a client's personal growth. Students learn what personality disorders look like, and how they develop. But there are no courses in graduate school that train psychology students how to help clients navigate high-conflict divorce.

When treating a client in individual therapy, a therapist doesn't have the benefit of observing the narcissistic spouse. Even in couples therapy, a therapist might be duped by the high-conflict personality, who often comes across as charming, while the more reasonable spouse, who has spent years being traumatized by crazy-making behavior, can look like the difficult one.



5 Tips for Divorcing a High-Conflict Personality

1. Minimize Contact

High-conflict personalities thrive off of battle. Their agenda, which is often subconscious, is to maintain your relationship by creating drama: bad-mouthing you to everyone under the sun and especially to your children, cyber-bullying, multiple, intrusive phone calls and any other way they can find to keep you from moving on with your life.

While your gut reaction might be to defend yourself, you cannot reason with a terrorist. Anything you say can and will be used against you. To mitigate the chaos caused by a high-conflict personality, you must keep communication to a minimum. Avoid face-to-face contact. Cultivate a "just the facts, ma'am" style of e-mail and text correspondence. When possible, arrange neutral places such as school for the drop-off and pick-up of children.

2. Keep Your Feelings to Yourself

High-conflict personalities are bullies. They like to "win" by making you angry or beating you down. Do not act on your feelings. If you yell, cry, plead, or otherwise tip your emotional hand, you will invite more attacks. Being stuck in the cross-hairs of a narcissist is traumatic, so by all means seek support through safe means: therapy, and online support groups for people with personality-disordered exes are two examples. But whatever you do, don't let a narcissist know how you really feel -- especially if you have a different point-of-view, which will always be interpreted as a threat.

3. Plan for the Worst

Do not listen to conventional wisdom that your ex will "move on" in time. Well-adjusted people move on; high-conflict personalities never quench their thirst for revenge and their desire to feel like "the good one." Anticipate being dragged into court for minor indiscretions, or worse, total fabrications.

Do not say or write anything that might make you look bad. Respond to even the most frivolous accusations with factual, non-defensive e-mails detailing what actually happened. Document everything; save hostile e-mails, take screen shots of abusive texts, note every violation of your court orders.

You never know if a narcissist will follow through on threats to sue you, so you must be prepared if they do.

4. Never Admit a Mistake

You can, and should be, accountable for your part in the end of the marriage. But be accountable in a safe environment: therapy, 12-step groups, or in the company of trusted family and friends.

Do not admit wrongdoing to your high-conflict ex, especially in writing. Apologizing will not create a more amicable relationship. A high-conflict ex will interpret your apology as proof that you are the mentally ill, incompetent, stupid person she says you are. Even admissions of minor mistakes can be twisted into admissions of heinous acts and spur a high-conflict ex to take you to court, or simply broadcast to everyone with whom they come in contact that you are a terrible person.

5. Stop Trying to Co-Parent

I have written before about the one-size-fits-all co-parenting model. Well-meaning, but misinformed therapists do targets of high-conflict personalities a huge disservice by advising them that they can, and should, co-parent. Certainly, an amicable co-parenting relationship is ideal for children. But attempts to co-parent with a narcissist or a borderline will keep you engaged in battle. You will forever be on the receiving end of intrusive, controlling, chaotic behaviors which will make you and your kids crazy.

Parallel parenting is the only paradigm that should be recommended to people with personality-disordered exes. This means that you give up the fantasy that you can have consistency between homes, or appear as a united front. The more high-conflict your ex is, the more you will need to separate yourself and your parenting. This may mean hosting separate birthday parties, scheduling separate parent-teacher conferences and not sharing what goes on in your house.

While you may feel that you are sending a terrible message to your children by limiting contact with their other parent, you are actually protecting them by minimizing the potential for conflict.

Targets of high-conflict personalities need to accept that it isn't wise to be "authentic" with their ex. Strategic, limited disclosures and iron-clad boundaries are essential tools in managing a high-conflict divorce. While it may seem paradoxical, true authenticity comes from holding on to one's sense of self while gracefully disengaging from a narcissist.

[DavidWebb]

Hi!  

Back to bpdfamily.com after a 2 year 'vacation'.  

A big thank you to all on this board that helped me with my custody/divorce.  Thanks to your advice and help, I have  enjoyed so many pasta dinners, vacations, movie nights, Easter Egg Hunts, bike rides, etc with S4mos   and S4   (now S4 and S8)

Things had been going OK 3 years post divorce from dBPDx.  Boys are doing well.  Most of the time spent in Kansas, with an occasional (every 3 mos or so) detour to Oz when x would do something not in the Parenting Agreement or attempt to exert some control.  But I dealt with it and minimized it saying it was just a stupid email that I should ignore or her threats were baseless.

Me: a new   relationship with someone I care about deeply. New job, better career, and  love the sanctuary of living in my own place.  

x is still nuts... .  SMOTW was cast off x moved  in internet guy and get remarried within 14mos.  He is a puddle of dysfunction which tells me that opposites don't really attract.

Unfortunately, dBPDx senses how happy my life is and now gone off the deepend in the last 90 days in an  attempt to sabotage my personal life: police wellness checks, court motions, false crimminal accusations, harassment, etc.

I am lawyered up with a new L that is an Eddy Disciple and I love not having to pay $250/hour to explaining  BPD and next moves.  He is dealing with court effectively and looking to draw some boundaries/get some security for boys, DavidWebb and my gf.

The constant emails, phone calls, etc dealing with the day to day activities of the boys have had a toll on me,(physically, mental, and spiritual)  my relationship, and my lifestyle.  It was my thinking that for some reason I needed to appear to be a 'good co-parent' post divorce/custody. Try BIFF, try SET, pi$$ on a sparkplug in order to minimize conflict.  Answer the email about the missing baseball glove,  who buys the posterboard for the homework, etc, etc.

After the world caved in with the police visit, I reached my breaking point in February and was giving up hope that I would ever find happiness.  The 3 sentence, just the facts emails in order to foster a 'business like relationship' were ignored and crimminal charges were filed.

It wasn't until my gf, T and L said that further (=ALL) detachment was needed, and giving me their direction on 'co-parenting' with a psycho.  gf has been saying it for years, but I am a typical stubborn guy optimist that just kept saying thing's would get better and x wasn't nuts enough to do anything stupid.

This is a great article that was published late last year that I thought was too valuable not return to FfF to share.  Every one of these 5 points have relevance in my situation.  My biggest takeaways are that no one can be critical of the way I chose to NOT communicate / parallel parent with x until they spend a night at the police station and I no longer  sweat the small stuff (where is the libary book?)  with the boys.



What Therapists Don't Tell You About Divorcing A High-Conflict Personality

Virginia Gilbert, MFT



Therapists are trained to help clients become self-aware and authentic. For people who grew up in invalidating environments, where they learned to suppress their feelings and needs in order to be accepted, therapy can be life-altering.

Competent therapists who provide a corrective emotional experience can make it possible for people who never had a voice to find one. Once self-actualized, people generally find the quality of their lives improve: they find the right career, attract the right mate and extricate themselves from toxic relationships.

Unfortunately, this type of personal growth can be disastrous when divorcing a high-conflict personality. When working with a client who is married to, or separating from a narcissist, therapists need to invert the goal of traditional therapy. Instead of encouraging people to be authentic, they need to counsel people to be strategic. Expressing one's true feelings, admitting vulnerability, and apologizing for one's missteps can bury a person who is trying to dissolve a marriage with a narcissist -- especially when children are involved.

Why Don't More Therapists Understand How to Treat High-Conflict Divorce?

Graduate psychology programs teach future therapists how to facilitate a client's personal growth. Students learn what personality disorders look like, and how they develop. But there are no courses in graduate school that train psychology students how to help clients navigate high-conflict divorce.

When treating a client in individual therapy, a therapist doesn't have the benefit of observing the narcissistic spouse. Even in couples therapy, a therapist might be duped by the high-conflict personality, who often comes across as charming, while the more reasonable spouse, who has spent years being traumatized by crazy-making behavior, can look like the difficult one.



5 Tips for Divorcing a High-Conflict Personality

1. Minimize Contact

High-conflict personalities thrive off of battle. Their agenda, which is often subconscious, is to maintain your relationship by creating drama: bad-mouthing you to everyone under the sun and especially to your children, cyber-bullying, multiple, intrusive phone calls and any other way they can find to keep you from moving on with your life.

While your gut reaction might be to defend yourself, you cannot reason with a terrorist. Anything you say can and will be used against you. To mitigate the chaos caused by a high-conflict personality, you must keep communication to a minimum. Avoid face-to-face contact. Cultivate a "just the facts, ma'am" style of e-mail and text correspondence. When possible, arrange neutral places such as school for the drop-off and pick-up of children.

2. Keep Your Feelings to Yourself

High-conflict personalities are bullies. They like to "win" by making you angry or beating you down. Do not act on your feelings. If you yell, cry, plead, or otherwise tip your emotional hand, you will invite more attacks. Being stuck in the cross-hairs of a narcissist is traumatic, so by all means seek support through safe means: therapy, and online support groups for people with personality-disordered exes are two examples. But whatever you do, don't let a narcissist know how you really feel -- especially if you have a different point-of-view, which will always be interpreted as a threat.

3. Plan for the Worst

Do not listen to conventional wisdom that your ex will "move on" in time. Well-adjusted people move on; high-conflict personalities never quench their thirst for revenge and their desire to feel like "the good one." Anticipate being dragged into court for minor indiscretions, or worse, total fabrications.

Do not say or write anything that might make you look bad. Respond to even the most frivolous accusations with factual, non-defensive e-mails detailing what actually happened. Document everything; save hostile e-mails, take screen shots of abusive texts, note every violation of your court orders.

You never know if a narcissist will follow through on threats to sue you, so you must be prepared if they do.

4. Never Admit a Mistake

You can, and should be, accountable for your part in the end of the marriage. But be accountable in a safe environment: therapy, 12-step groups, or in the company of trusted family and friends.

Do not admit wrongdoing to your high-conflict ex, especially in writing. Apologizing will not create a more amicable relationship. A high-conflict ex will interpret your apology as proof that you are the mentally ill, incompetent, stupid person she says you are. Even admissions of minor mistakes can be twisted into admissions of heinous acts and spur a high-conflict ex to take you to court, or simply broadcast to everyone with whom they come in contact that you are a terrible person.

5. Stop Trying to Co-Parent

I have written before about the one-size-fits-all co-parenting model. Well-meaning, but misinformed therapists do targets of high-conflict personalities a huge disservice by advising them that they can, and should, co-parent. Certainly, an amicable co-parenting relationship is ideal for children. But attempts to co-parent with a narcissist or a borderline will keep you engaged in battle. You will forever be on the receiving end of intrusive, controlling, chaotic behaviors which will make you and your kids crazy.

Parallel parenting is the only paradigm that should be recommended to people with personality-disordered exes. This means that you give up the fantasy that you can have consistency between homes, or appear as a united front. The more high-conflict your ex is, the more you will need to separate yourself and your parenting. This may mean hosting separate birthday parties, scheduling separate parent-teacher conferences and not sharing what goes on in your house.

While you may feel that you are sending a terrible message to your children by limiting contact with their other parent, you are actually protecting them by minimizing the potential for conflict.

Targets of high-conflict personalities need to accept that it isn't wise to be "authentic" with their ex. Strategic, limited disclosures and iron-clad boundaries are essential tools in managing a high-conflict divorce. While it may seem paradoxical, true authenticity comes from holding on to one's sense of self while gracefully disengaging from a narcissist.

[marbleloser]

Thank you! That's good stuff.I'm in the beginning of high conflict divorce at the moment. Keep up posted please.

[lost007]

I think that advice is on point. There is no reasoning with these high conflict individuals. You will never be right. If there is a hint of rationality it will be short lived-only until the next perceived slight or injustice. Their manipulation is nothing short of super human and brilliant. So yes, full disclosure and honesty with these folk is a potential noose with which to hang oneself. There is always a ulterior motive on their end. Fortunately for us their impulsivity can lead them to make mistakes. Especially if we are able to maintain a matter of fact persona and resist the urge to become emotional and irrational ourselves. Sometimes easier said than done.

[livednlearned]

Sorry to hear your ex is back on the warpath. I keep hoping to hear from other nons that they lived happily ever after once divorcing their BPDs, but it sounds like that may be, at best, an episodic type of fantasy. I'm 2.5 years out of my marriage and still living from one court date to another, with many crazy messages between in case I forget for a moment that I married a raging abusaholic.

The article is excellent -- good advice for other Ts, and good advice for nons. "You cannot reason with a terrorist" summarizes everything. My life became manageable once I went behind the iron curtain. No coparenting here for this target.

Thanks for posting. Hope you get a reprieve from the storm for a while.

[DavidWebb]

Sorry to hear your ex is back on the warpath. I keep hoping to hear from other nons that they lived happily ever after once divorcing their BPDs, but it sounds like that may be, at best, an episodic type of fantasy. I'm 2.5 years out of my marriage and still living from one court date to another, with many crazy messages between in case I forget for a moment that I married a raging abusaholic.

I had the opposite problem... . 2.5 years out of marriage and I forgot that I was divorced!  It took several (too many) reassurances it is OK not to exchange 2-5 emails a day about the kids and to stand up for myself to NOT have personal contact with crazyx.  Feel I am on a good path now, but took me too long to get here... .

[livednlearned]

I had the opposite problem... . 2.5 years out of marriage and I forgot that I was divorced!  It took several (too many) reassurances it is OK not to exchange 2-5 emails a day about the kids and to stand up for myself to NOT have personal contact with crazyx.  Feel I am on a good path now, but took me too long to get here... .

It's a process -- for many of us, our positive qualities (to be fair and kind and patient) don't hold up so well with BPD sufferers. My ex had a manic/psychotic episode 10 mos ago that helped me find a whole bunch of boundaries I didn't know I had. My son, who only sees his dad 8 hours on the weekends, asked me if I thought N/BPDx was lonely, and my response was, "If he is, he should have thought about that when he was being mean." S11 lit up, and said "I know, right?" It's a miracle that I could get to that place, after being a world class door mat for so many years.

After last summer, I went straight to parallel parenting, and haven't looked back for a second. When we try to appease people by being reasonable or accommodating, I think it's a misguided way to think that we have some control over the situation. And with BPD, we don't.

ps. Your gf sounds like a saint 

[DreamGirl]

Hi David,

Welcome back.  

I have all the confidence in the world for you. You always impressed me with your knowledge of the BPD dynamic and navigating your way out of the place you call OZ.

I want to offer up a piece to this puzzle, because I find it interesting that the new GF might have been the gateway (trigger) back in to OZ.

A new girlfriend can be really hard for a Mom - it was hard for me (in all my perfection) when my son's Dad got remarried and had a baby.  It wasn't so much that I couldn't stand him being happy but more about the necessity for me to change and adapt in a capacity that I just didn't want to (or wasn't ready to yet).

She was young and amazing. Athletic, spirited, classy, calm. She didn't like that my exH and I had such a "friendly" relationship. She was also determined to get my kids to love her and wanted so much to love them. Sounds crazy, but she awakened every insecurity I had as a Mama and it scared the begeezus out of me.  

It also awakened a humility in me... . for I slowly began to understand the completely irrational thoughts and behaviors of my stepdaughters' BPD mama that was exhibited years ago - when I had first come on scene.

We simply can not help how we "feel" - and I felt intruded upon, afraid, angry, and powerless.

Being relatively mentally healthy, I learned to adapt and regulate those hard emotions. I also had a great support system (my current husband) in keeping grounded and rational and who was constantly reminding me when I was being a neurotic moron over silly things. Like my once questioning her intentions when she started showing up at my son's baseball games and hanging out in the dugout with my exH who coached the team. I was livid when one parent thought she was "mom". It killed me. An innocent gesture of wanting to be a part of my exH's life (including his kiddos) with an equally innocent reaction of another parent affected me profoundly for no other reason... . then it just did.  

It was difficult for me to adjust to the "new normal" - where she was part of the picture and I didn't have a say in the matter. He had created a whole other family, that I was absolutely not to be a part of, without asking me first my thoughts on the matter.

If you did a poll for every mom who has dealt with this kind of adjustment, you'd probably find a statistic in the 80% range who experienced similar feelings varying in different degrees of difficulty.  So when you throw the BPD in there, you have someone that is having really hard emotions (although pretty normal) and lacking the skill set to deal with them.  

I say this to you, because I think sometimes when we understand (i.e. empathize where they can not) the other person who is reaking havoc in our life, it really helps to see the place where they are standing.  As you know, feelings/emotions become facts for a person suffering from BPD with one of their core wounds being fear of abandonment. She's so full of fear (emotion) that she's tapping into every single BPD coping skill she can in order to gain control of that fear.

She's also probably inadvertantly postitioning all of you on Karpmen's Drama Triangle.  She's being rescued (new husband) and persecuted (you and GF) placing her in the Mighty Victim stance, which is so difficult for those positioned around her.

Especially the kiddos caught right smack dab in the middle of all of it.

I do think that it will help to grant you and your ex some space. I think lawyering up at this point is vital. It is not your responsibility to help your ex-wife regulate her emotions. I also think that she's embarked upon some pretty unforgivable territory with the false criminal accusations.  :'(

I'm glad that you have found love, DW. You deserve it.

~DreamGirl