BPDFamily.com

Two years ago, my relationship with a person who had BPD ended. She was professionally diagnosed with BPD, and a lot of her traits seemed to match it. For a long while, I understood what happened between us in the context of BPD. A couple of months ago, I received an e-mail that sent me reeling a little.

There was this woman who I'll call A that my ex was obsessed with while we were together. She would listen to all the same music this woman did, fawn over this woman's artwork, base her online screen names off of this woman to the point where it seemed as if she was trying to impersonate her, and just talk about her constantly. It was so weird. At first, this woman was just a stranger whose art she admired/whose life story she felt connected to. Then she tried to get to know A online and A blocked her almost instantly. My ex raged about it for a while, then asked me to find out why A did this.

My first reaction was basically "let it go." My ex told me she was in severe crisis and likely to kill herself over the fact that A didn't like her, and that if I could patch things up between them she might not do it. At the time, my ex and I were in an LDR and so these threats made me feel especially powerless.

I sent A a gentle message asking her if she would mind talking about her falling out with my ex and stated that I wouldn't hold it against her if she didn't want to. A was furious. She told me that my ex was a stalker and told me that she highly doubted I knew her as well as I thought I did. The intensity with which A reacted startled me. I didn't want to share what she said with my ex, but my ex basically insisted. When I relayed that back to my ex, she started painting A black. Suddenly instead of a fabulous artist with a beautifully tortured soul, A was a r*pist/child trafficker/monster/sadistic creep/murderer/etc and my ex had just been afraid to tell me this before. I was pretty frustrated because I knew that either my ex was making it up OR she was encouraging me to involve myself with a dangerous criminal, both of which were bad.

Well, about two years after my ex and I broke up, I wrote A to apologize and to tell her that she was right about my ex. I hoped to just give her some validation that she wasn't crazy for being freaked out by my ex's advances, but what I got was a lot more intense. A explained to me that her daughter went missing twenty years ago, and that my ex had impersonated said daughter. Supposedly A let my ex move in, but then was confused when my ex refused a DNA test. She told me that my ex was some kind of con artist type who pretends to be various things to various people for the sake of scamming, manipulating, stealing, spying, etc. She does lousy things for lousy people. In A's case, she had gone NC with her mother and her mother knew the missing daughter would be a powerful manipulation tool so she actually coached A about how to fake being the daughter.

A lot of what A told me (dates, names, locations, etc) matched up with certain things my ex had told me about her life. The way she described my ex taking over her house, not allowing her to see her friends, promising things and then refusing, being evasive to the point that you'd just give up when you asked her to make good on her promises, etc, was so familiar to me. It fit perfectly to be that my ex basically left A and went straight to me.

This was a huge blow and very confusing for me. My ex pretended to be someone I knew a *long* time ago and I understood the breakup from the standpoint of losing that person, and now it turns out my ex was likely lying to me too. I don't even know if I'd believe this b.s. if it wasn't happening to me.

My ex apparently has about five different names and it's unclear whether or not the mother who I met is even related to her, how old she really is, etc. A has lawyers and the police involved and says there's a strong likelihood that my ex will be behind bars soon.

I thought people with BPD were supposed to be, at least on some level, unaware of how much harm they were causing or telling the emotional truth rather than the logical truth. My ex wasn't doing that ie: saying someone was abusive when she means that she feels hurt by their actions. She was just flat-out lying, knew she was lying, and believed beyond all rational doubt that she had a right to do this. She dumped me after I started coming close to figuring her out.

I'm pretty much over the ex now, but I'm just morbidly curious/wondering how to understand what she was in light of this new information.

BPD behaviors lie on a spectrum. Some, like mine, are "high functioning." Some members here have BPDs in their lives that are even therapists and other professionals. The low functioning ones are strippers, drug addicts, violent, cutters, and suicidal types. Yours could be NPD or even sociopathic.