BPDFamily.com

Last night I got into a conversation with a friend about my relationship with my BPD ex. I was really upset because they seemed to be blaming me for "confusing" the guy and for "putting him into a love triangle" and all this stuff, as if he had no agency and couldn't control himself and was just under my control. Ha! He didn't have to be a part of anything he didn't want to be, and he chose freely to keep interacting with me and his previous boyfriend as he did. If he was emotionally cheating or couldn't make a decisive decision and execute it, that's not "on me."

But I don't think it even makes sense to look at it in a "normal" analysis anymore. As if the motives of my BPD ex were straightforward and consciously understandable in a normal way by normal people. Much of the situation was structured by behaviors that were erratic on my ex's part, resulting from subconscious disorder.

And then it's a whole different ball-game, in some ways, if you are interacting with someone whose own behaviors do not follow rational motives, rationally understandable patterns or causations. Especially if you think you are. Because then it's like wrestling with a shadow. Your own responses start to seem crazy, like when you have a conversation with one of those online robots or a paranoid schizophrenic. Your own comments start to sound crazy, because you are engaging insanity. You're trying to engage it rationally, but it's insanity, and so your own responses get drawn into craziness even by the very fact of trying to be rational.

"But no, sir, the dinosaur clearly can't be in the house because it wouldn't fit! It's too small!" You start engaging them on the level of their own internal logic, and you almost forget that there can't be any dinosaur in the building simply because dinosaurs are extinct (all question of "fit" aside)! As if it would make anymore sense for their to be a dinosaur in there if the building were merely big enough!

But when talking to such people you start to forget, because you start suspending your own disbelief in order to address them "on their own plane" and so get drawn into their own crazy internal logic, and your own responses and behaviors become accordingly crazy because they are being driven and structured by an dysfunctional pattern coming from the other person. Even rational attempts to engage irrationality become themselves irrational by the very fact that they are responding to, and thus structured by, the original irrationality. The only really successful rational response, then, is to refuse to engage.

Making us crazy No!

Our ex’s are responsible for their own emotions/reactions and we are responsible for our own emotions/reactions.

We feel like we are loosing it because in part we start to embroiled in their fantasy world – this is where we do need to be accountable! We do play a huge role in the dynamic – it’s not just the Borderline.

We engaged! This the part we need to start taking responsibility for. Our ex's did not suck us in against our will - it was voluntary and we had our eyes shut.

By laying 100% "blame" on the Borderline we are in fact doing exactly what they do to us! Accusations and blame were the most hurtful part of my relationship. I had to stop doing it to him too - two wrongs don't make a right.

I think that's my point: they have a fantasy world, and if we choose to enter it, it's on us. And once you choose to enter an irrational world, no amount of Reason is going to save you. Our rationality is not an excuse for us, because we're choosing to interact on fundamentally irrational terms. It's like if I were a translator translating Chinese gibberish. My translation of each word or phrase might be perfect, totally correct... .but I'm still translating gibberish, and no amount of correct translation, however brilliant, is going to add coherence or meaning to what was gibberish originally. The only way is to not engage at all.

I disagree to some extent that we nons are responsible for all our behavior in the relationship. Because I know I was conned at the beginning, and was totally unaware of the mental illness, financial, legal, and other issues my ex had. Of course he didn't tell me about it! I would've run in the other direction. After I'd become 100% invested in the relationship, it all started to come out. By this time, I'd also been turned into someone unrecognizable by months of emotional and then physical abuse. I was broken down. I now feel, three months after being dumped for the fourth time, that I am in many ways a shadow of my former self. Even if he hadn't hit me, I'd still be this broken because the emotional abuse was the worst part of it.

My therapist succinctly says "He made you sick." I ended up depressed and anxious and couldn't think my way out of a wet paper bag, so thoroughly had he messed with my mind. It is well known that people can come to share a mental illness. I have never felt so helpless or crazy in my entire life (or anywhere close to it!) as during my relationship with a BPD. I am an intuitive person and trying to make sense of the senselessness of the relationship made me very sick. Cognitive dissonance.

You are right, there is no point in trying to see it through the lens of normality. It can take a long time to realize this, but once you do, you start to heal. I accepted so much blame for our problems and of course I did, I am a feeling person who cares deeply about my relationships. It's been hard to realize that some people do NOT care about others even if they seem to. Once I accepted this, I began to see how everything was skewed all along. And I began to heal.

I am casting off the blame and shame and have stopped trying to make sense of any of it. It's good to be a loving and genuine person.  It's good to be a person who cannot make sense of someething deeply wrong and dare I say evil. Some people you talk to will not get how you feel and will perpetuate your shame and pain because they simply don't get the dynamic of what happened. My friends and family are 100% behind me and if they weren't I would have to stop talking to them about the relationship because I can't take another minute of shame-- I need pure acceptance from loved ones, something I never got in the bPD relationship. It's time to move on, knowing this whole thing was sick and I will never let someone do this to me again. THAT is my responsibility NOW. But that's pretty much all I take responsibility for. While IN the relationship, I was so disoriented and abused, I could barely get through a day, much less heroically fix myself.

Wow, writing this has made me so glad I have been set free.

It is the slow boiling of the frog in a r/s with a BPD. In the beginning you have no idea what is happening. And the desire to make the r/s work blinds you / me to what was really going on. Giving the benefit of the doubt and so on. Cognitive dissonance sets in and over time, it starts to make insane sense. However, it remains irrational.

The blame and shame is Not yours. That you are aware now what is the problem, it is possible to understand your role in the dynamic, step away from the toxicity of it and heal.

I was with my BPD ex for 2 months. The only reason I recognized that it was an unhealthy relationship was because I had done a lot of research on domestic violence beforehand. I had been to therapy so I was aware of my relationship patterns. I think that if someone is unaware of their relationship pattern, then it's incredibly easy to just keep doing the same thing over and over again without realizing it. I don't think it's helpful to blame the victim in an abusive relationship-regardless of whether it's an emotionally/physically/sexually abusive relationship.

I think that abusive relationships are insidious-they creep up on you. As Marek says "in the beginning you have no idea what is happening". I'm not an abusive person myself so I literally had to read up on domestic violence to understand that mindset... to understand WHY someone would behave in such a cruel manner. I think that borderline behavior IS hard to understand-I had to read a lot of journal articles etc to give me an idea of the behavior. I don't think it's fair to expect the average person on the street to have in-depth knowledge of personality disorders. I've actually heard that psychology students are told to "stay away" from borderlines-not to date them. Even psychologists treating them need manualized treatments because of the borderline's tendency to split other individuals.

That being said, I think that once the relationship is over, nons DO have a responsibility to examine their own behaviors so that they don't end up getting into another abusive relationship. I also get exasperated when nons on these threads talk about all the times the borderline recycled them. I have always had a rule that I don't get back with an ex-that one break-up is enough. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who choose to re-enter an abusive relationship. I think it's important to be realistic and be able to recognize that if the relationship didn't work out the first time around, then it's hardly going to work out the second time around. I understand that people might have wishful thinking about it but relationship issues just don't magically disappear-they linger and actually get worse over time.

I feel that communication is so important in relationships-if you can't sit down and discuss an issue in a calm, civilized manner, then there's something terribly wrong. I have found from past experience that each argument tends to erode the relationship. People can say hurtful things in the heat of the moment and those things can never be taken back or unsaid. If there's too many arguments, then resentment and anger will become common place in a relationship.

I also feel that a lot of nons have a tendency to play "therapist"-to try to figure out what's wrong with their pwBPD. I did that and it's a mistake. I'm not a psychiatrist/psychologist-I don't have the qualifications/training to psychoanalyze someone. That kind of thing is best left to the professionals. I used to always want to know "why"... WHY had someone hurt me? What was the reason? I try not to focus on that anymore-I still do at times however I know that it's a trap.

I don't really know how to quote things, but to the two points above:

It's really depressing that the average person doesn't know what a BPD is or how dangerous they can be!

I went back to my ex several times because I was so messed up by his extensive and extended abuse that I actually believed that everything was my fault. For whatever reason, after this last break up I suddenly saw that the relationship was abusive and that there was nothing I or anyone could do to make the BPD happy. He told me I didn't make him feel loved or secure enough, and I finally realized that absolutely no one could. But for a very long time, I truly believed it was my fault, so I kept going back to "fix" things that he said I'd done wrong. In the end, I didn't care if he felt loved or secure, I only cared that I'd been left out to die in the snow emotionally so to speak for four years; I only cared about myself. But I endured abuse for years, the worst of which was so subtle that I couldn't even see it.

This thread is bring me back.

I remember a distinct point where I thought this is contagious.  I noticed my reactions were getting more severe and my frustration level was escalating.

This kind of goes with musicfan's post about being theory therapist - these kind of struggles makes it easy to work from the outside in but its kind of a no win - lost cause.  Working it from the inside out seems to be more productive.  As in what do I need? Is this acceptable? Why am I engaging? Where were my boundaries?  What are my prinicples here?

I engaged on the other persons level for a long time.  It was exhausting.  It's good to have limits.

This pattern is very common in domestic violence. I've read that it takes women 5 or 6 times before they finally leave-something like that... apologies if I got the exact figure wrong. I'm not sure what the statistics are for men leaving an abusive relationship though however I imagine that they're similar.

What I really meant to say is that it worries me when someone doesn't leave an abusive relationship. I worry what will happen-whether the situation will escalate further etc.

I'm really glad to hear that you're no longer in that relationship. It took a lot of courage for you to leave.   

GreenMango-I agree with you... boundaries are very important. I like your list of questions-I'm actually going to write those down now, thanks! :)