Just a random thought. This whole experience has been one of the most devastating in my entire life. I have had other ups and downs but none as confusing or painful as this one.
But there is also something so serene (can't think of a different word) about this situation. I never knew about BPD or anything about PD disorders before this experience. Now that the FOG has cleared I realized that there was numerous people in my life with BPD and that several of them were orbiting me, some of them very clearly manipulating me and using me (specifically a coworker and an ex-gf/friend that continues to pop in and out of my life even though our intimate relationship is long past).
Now that I am aware this very much reinforces that I need better boundaries. I was so naive and my need to be loved has damaged so many relationships.
I like this post, it reflects closely where I think I have reached as well. After my discard, I did a ton of research to find out what the hec just happened to me, and found out for the first time in my life about personality disorders, narcissism and BPD. Quite a revelation.
And I get what you're saying about serenity. I couldn't quite say that I am serene as such, but the learning I have done has given me (for the first time ever) a framework to interpret some of the more difficult and disturbing relationships I have had in my past. I am now certain that my father had a form of narcissism, maybe even NPD (raging/blaming/beating my mother/selfishness/social ladder climbing) I guess he fits the criteria pretty well. And my mother also was a damaged person, had a nervous breakdown (maybe because of my father) and was sometimes spectacularly unempathetic with us children. As one tiny example, there was one time when I was 17 yo and I had been in a lot of back pain for many months and it was having a terrible effect on my life. I said to my mother, "If I had £1,000 I would gladly give it away to be better" Her reply was... ."yes, but you don't have a £1,000 do you". And that was it.
She also made a quasi sexual advance on me at the age of 14.
So basically I grew up in what was quite a dangerous environment, certainly at an emotional level I think it has had lasting effect on me, and I have for example never wanted to get married.
This I guess is hardly surprising given my upbringing, and another example was that that I was only told by my parents that either of them loved me for the very first time in my life, was after I had left home and was in my early 20's. Before that, I never heard the words "I love you", either between my parents or ever said to me. I never even saw my parents kiss. Not once.
By the time I was in my mid 30's I had cut all contact with them, and I lived my own life away from them. At some level, I just knew that they were bad for me, and even though they were the only example of a family I had, it was not a good example.
This I realise now was my NC, self imposed to protect myself. It had nothing to do with them, I never thought about them, I didn't care.
So wind on a few years, and this awful experience with a BPD woman. It ripped off all the emotional bandages I had put in place to protect me from thinking about my parents and the poor childhood they had given me. Now I know so much better what happened to me, why I became a fixer personality (I was always trying to fix my parents broken marriage - even at the age of 9 or 10 years of age) and that fixer personality has sometimes overridden my gut feel/boundary warnings. So I have stayed in dysfunctional relationships too long sometimes, trying to fix them, rather than walk away when I should have done. I first walked away from my exBPDgf after 5 weeks of dating. I ended it, my gut feel was to run and stay away from her. But my fixer personality overrode this and I went running back to her, to ask for her back, and of course that is when the mayhem began.
But in the learning and sharing and personal development I have had to undergo to get over this, I have somehow got myself a new "toolkit".
The tools I have learned, about PD's, boundaries, red flags, self protection, self love, standing your ground, not trying to fix situations (or people), etc... .etc... .has given me a type of serenity. I now understand my childhood better, I feel a sorry for the young me, the little boy hearing his parents arguing, my mothers screams as she was beaten. And I understand that little boy saying to my father, please don't do that. His self centred useless reply was "it's just what adults do sometimes". He was wrong, it is what he did, not what adults do. And I can now comfort that little boy (inner child?) and say it is not your fault, you don't have to fix these things. You did what you could, but these are not your issues to fix. You did what you had to to survive, and when you could get away, you did.
So there is now more serenity and turbulence all at the same time. The serenity from understanding me, and my past very much better than I did, and having to face it head on and accept that it happened, that my childhood was in a family with little love, little affection and dysfunctional parents unable relate to each other, let alone us children.
But with that comes a new turbulence, in that I may not actually be quite the person who I thought I was. I guess I am still learning.
The serenity also comes from being able to read and understand people very much better than I used to be able to. And that has involved being very careful who I let into my life, and indeed ejecting one or two who in truth I am now glad to see the back of.
It has also helped me understand far better the nature of abuse, how people can get hooked into the cycle, and end up staying with their abuser, something I had no knowledge of prior to this experience.
I guess for me it has all been a life changing experience. I knew it was going to be when she dumped me, especially how she did it. I knew straight away that the life I had envisaged had gone, and that things were going to get tough. And yet, now I feel like I know myself better, I understand human nature better, and I now have more the tools to help me navigate a difficult and complicated world.
I'm not happier now than I was, I have after all seen the dark underside of human nature, and that has left it's mark on me, but at the same time I am certain I am wiser, and that I will keep my life calmer and more in line with how I want it, maybe that will be with someone else, maybe not, let's see.
Thank you Marti, your short post somehow brought a lot a loose ends together for me - and err, sorry for somewhat hijacking your original post.