BPDFamily.com

Hello everyone!

I'm new to posting about BPD. I'm so thankful I found this website! I thought I was the only one going through life with a person who suffers from BPD. I'm not alone!

Eight years living with my BPDgf. We have a seven year old daughter together. Nine months ago I left. It has been a daunting challenge post-leaving.

We had gone to couples counseling. She quit after six sessions. I went three more times alone to try to figure out what I needed to do to work things out with her? It was the psychologist in our last meeting with just him and I at the very end he told me my gf suffers from some form of Borderline Personality Disorder. So after six meetings as a couple and three meetings with him, I find this out at the end and I have no idea what it is. Never heard of it before. Didn't know it existed. Didn't get any advice on how to deal with it. Great!

I didn't know there was a name for the hell I had been living. MY gf was the passive/aggressive type of BPDer. She used the silent treatment to great effect. Withheld sex. Ignored I existed. Treated me like a doormat. Of course like many of you, it wasn't always this way. I was idealized but once she split me black, it was a living horror movie.

I've had a very tough time since I left dealing with all the turmoil. Trying to adjust from being idealized to being devalued. The constant pull me back in just to push me away. I'm stuck but she seems to be getting along just fine.

Her biggest issue with me was always the finances. Every time a silent treatment would end and we would talk, she would ask me to contribute more money to the household expenses. It used to drive me nuts because she was sitting on a large inheritance with at least a million dollars in the bank. I was living paycheck to paycheck. She owned her own house. She had everything most people could ever dream of having yet, I didn't contribute enough financially.

Now here I sit in my sister's basement trying to save money so I can get back on my feet. She's doing fine! And in all those years of listening to her complain about the finances, last night at work, memories came flooding back that I had never put together while living with her. Something finally clicked. When I met my gf her mother had recently passed away. My gf had thousands of dollars stashed in books throughout the house. When it came time to clean out her mother's house, I was told not to throw any books away because her mother had stashed cash into books as well. Sure enough there was money found in several books. Then it comes to light that her father used to cut out the middle of books and hide cash too.

So both parents hid cash. The finances that she constantly hammered me about not paying enough had to come from how the parents both hid money. There must have been an issue when she was a child involving money. Maybe money equals love and withholding money means you are withholding love? Money is something you can actually measure, see and touch. I don't know what the significance of my sudden memory has to do with what she always claimed was her biggest issue with me but I did find it somewhat revealing that she hid money just like her parents did.

So after living a nightmare for the last two years of our relationship, I finally left. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done. I was broke. Wasn't sure where I was going to go but I had enough of the silent treatments and all of the other ill treatments. At first, she tried in her own way to get me back, now she has pushed me completely away.

One of the most revealing things she ever told me about her past, was one day her mother packed up to leave her husband and she was taking her sister with her. She told my gf she was staying home with her dad. To this day that still bothers my gf that her mother could do and say that. Is this the start of the abandonment issue and now I left her am I her mom revisited?

Another one of the memories was that her dad was a drunk. He never spoke to her and when he did, he would always just yell at her. They didn't have a normal father/daughter relationship. The other thing I wonder? They call it transference, her dad worked night shifts just like I do. Am I her dad? Does she see me as her dad because I work nights? And all that anger she showed me was really anger she felt for her dad?

So last night for the first time, I felt some clarity. I saw direct correlations between her past and our life. I don't know if anyone else has ever remembered things their partner told them from their past and saw how it related to your lives together but for me it was a WOW moment last night.

In any event, I'm still trying to put my life back together and finding other people who lived through what I have been through is a relief in and of itself. I feel so alone. No one understands how difficult it is to break free from them.

Welcome, itd1959... .  I am sorry that you have been going through such a difficult time.  

Hang out at these boards, it will help with the loneliness and educate you, too.

Please know that you are not alone.  

Thanks for the warm welcome Chazz,

Oh well, yesterday was one of those days you knew would be coming. I picked up my daughter and she's talking about mom's new "friend." I knew it would be coming because reading this board and other sites you know they have to fill the void but it hurts nonetheless.

I know now about the illness. I know more about the illness but nothing really prepares you for how you are going to feel when they act as they do. All of the pull me in and push me away since I left and all the while she's actively searching for that new person to take your role.

The thing I find myself often wondering is if her friends every wonder about her? Her ex husband is a nice guy whom she threw out. I'm a nice who walked out. I know I heard the smear campaign about her ex but when I got to know him, he was not the monster she made him out to be. I don't know too much about her prior relationships but no one wonders, not even her, that there must be something going on with her and not the two nice guys who now are banished and smeared?

And the new "friend" doesn't wonder about it? It's frustrating. I haven't even thought about another woman in my life since I left because I want to get my stuff together but they move right along.

I hate this illness. I hate what it's done to my life. To my kids life. To the life I thought I had with her. I hate it! And she doesn't even know she has it! No it's me who's screwed up. It's her ex that's screwed up. We're the ones who are a mess in her eyes. Not once do they think, "What did I do wrong?"