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this is one of the hardest aspects to accept, not that any aspect of the explosion of my marriage is easy to accept.

beforehand she was a super-competent, articulate, funny, a little arrogant, a live-wire, with independent tastes, nothing stereotyped about her. i loved it, i loved her. then we get involved and then married and she becomes needy, dependent, "forgetful", entitled, never responsible for any issue. she gets unhappy. i contributed i know, in part out of frustration that the person i married had disappeared or was being hidden from me. she gets out of her unhappiness by a campaign of deceit about which she is wholly unapologetic. but - she is now super-competent, articulate, energetic again - she's the person i fell flat on my face for.

i'm NC almost 4 months, out of need for healing, out of shame that i ever gave my vow to this unapologetic betrayer and adulterer, but also because i can't interact with the person she's become again. it's too painful.

Hey Maxen,

Normally, you can light a candle at a dinner party and nothing happens.  But if a person with BPD happens to be in the room, it's like having a gas leak: suddenly the air is highly flammable and lighting a candle might cause an explosion.  Just because you lit the candle that "triggered" the explosion from your pwBPD, it doesn't mean you did anything wrong.  So don't beat yourself up.

Lucky Jim 

It's not your fault.

I agree with you maxen it is hard to accept that we where the trigger. I can recall trigger day and what I said that perpetuated her "going wild" and destroying the family and marriage. I knew nothing about BPD or what was going on in our r/s and marriage, but trigger day would have come sooner or later. It was inevitable.


It's a deep pain. The excuses that I get from my ex about her adultery is painful because she cannot accept her actions and distorts it and I took my vows seriously, and she broke that sacred covenant.

Every time that I pick up the kids and I see OM's jacket on the coat hook, or his shoes in the doorway (he never faces me and hides in the house) it reminds me of her cheating / betrayal / infidelity and lack of remorse / regret as if that covenant had meant nothing to her.

Some sort of acknowledgment of shame / guilt would make me feel a little better, but it's something that will hang over the r/s that we had whenever I think about it. If it was something that she had done once with this man, I can forgive, but more than that, there's no excuse.

At the end of the day maxen, there are women out there that share the same values and morals as you and I.

When I think of the ex in our r/s and marriage I think of the good person that she was, she was there for a short while but that person was gone for much of it. I said good-bye to the person that I met (closure) but the person that she transformed into, I don't want in my life, not even as a friend. She is the mother of my children and that's the way that I view it.

maxen, I understand where you are coming from. Sometimes I wish that I hadn't triggered her, but how where we suppose to know? It's a perpetual cycle with relationships unless they get help, and I can speak for my ex wife, there is absolutely nothing that I could have done to get her help because the denial is too strong and she believes her reality. I don't think there is anyone but her that can make her get help.

Do you know what we have in common that our ex's don't?

We can hold our heads high. We weren't adulterers.