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Title: Late night epiphany Post by: ITP on January 03, 2014, 05:27:03 AM Hi there.
My SO (wants divorce, has taken kids, no communication) I believe is using emotional abuse as her crux for leaving. I have been reading about BPD, validation, enabling, invalidation and the 101 other things this site has to try and learn and try and save. Last night I came to a point where my brain spit out the following statement... . "Rather than emotional abuse, it's not having developed the skills yet to fulfil your emotional needs" I think it works for many different reasons. I was wondering on your thoughts, and how you might improve it! Many thanks :) Title: Re: Late night epiphany Post by: Nonamouse on January 04, 2014, 01:39:00 AM I think that's right. You have to learn the skills to manage your response to their extreme emotions, which mitigates further escalation. And maybe those small steps will build up to genuine improvement. That's what I'm learning now anyway.
I'd be careful about the "fulfilling emotional needs" part though. Because BPD emotional needs are never-ending. I had my own epiphany tonight, where I realized that one the biggest mistakes I make with my wife was being honest with her about how I was feeling in the past. My true feelings don't matter anymore, because she's not emotionally mature enough to deal with them. She can't handle the truth, even if its an obvious thing we both intuitively know. If she asks me what's wrong, or if I have a real annoyance at something she is doing, it's best to just say, "Things are fine" and deal with it in my own way. Title: Re: Late night epiphany Post by: ITP on January 04, 2014, 06:07:11 AM That's really interesting.
How would you re-word the `fulfil your emotional needs` bit? Could just use `help` instead of fulfil I suppose but i'm sure there's better than that. I'm trying to come up with some key `sentence` that describes what i'm trying to describe, so I can memorise it and use it as a guideline trigger for myself to help with the bigger picture. |