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Even though I have pretty much uncoupled from my ex in most ways I have still been longing for the infatuation/idealisation stage. Last night I was thinking about this, wondering what was so good about it that I still long for it a year after we split up and I think I figured it out. The early stage of the R/S "felt" like the love from my mother, my exes love "seemed" constant, unconditional and like a mothers love, it felt like it would never end. I had been in relationships that started intensely but not with this level of intensity, nothing even close. So it's  pretty potent to think you are being loved like your mother loved you. Of course, once the dust settles, you realise this was a completely different sort of "love". It was purely needs based on her part. It was nothing like mothers real love, it was about her and her needs, it wasn't about us but the key point here is that for perhaps the first time since we were little, we felt like it was a repeat of that beautiful motherly love and that's why it's so hard to forget about it.

Many times, it was also very much about our needs.

Yes. We have been mirrored. We saw the best of us in another person, someone showed us, what we like in ourselves and it was wrapped in a beautiful body, in this beautiful eyes and in this tender and caring words, we longed to hear all of our life - but nobody ever told us, that we are lovable - first of all we never told it to ourselves. All the beauty we saw in our BPDex's was the beauty, we had in ourselves, when the relationship began.

It is exactly the same. The relationship starts with all that mirroring/love-bombing/idealization... and we relate like we would to a good mom. The attachment is strong, like a primary bond, we feel safe with the world, happy in a globalized manner that we are not used to. It seems like we finally have the soul mate we imagined. Unfortunately it is not unconditional love, but a lot of need on the part of the pwBPD, and if they dump us or we breakup, it is the kind of pain you have when a parent dies... or more, like if you had ideal parents and one died. If the pwBPD shows up hanging on someone else, the hurt is nearly unbearable.

You have nailed the nail on the head.

And forgetting is an intellectual thing.  The hardest, and crucial part, is to stop feeling about it, which is an emotional thing.

This is the third thread I've read in the last 2 days about this very subject and I think it's the key to why we got so swept up in all of it and why it's such excruciating pain when it ends.  It really is like the loss of a parent.  Maybe not so coincidentally, I felt like I did lose my parents just before I met my ex as we had a big fall-out and we've been estranged since, 5 yrs now.  No wonder I was so vulnerable to his charm and idealisation!  I ended our marriage and it was the most difficult decision I've ever had to make.  It was like cutting off my arm to save myself.

The other aspect of the relationship I still have difficulty processing is the disconnect between the person they presented themselves as (or the person we created in our head) and the actual person that we saw at the end of the r/s. One extreme to the other.

Yes... .I often think of it as two separate people inhabiting the same body... .very hard to reconcile.

Pretty sure I wouldn't have fallen for her if she had shown me the irrational irate hater I came to know later. When she was sweet... it had a tinge of phony, when clingy... seemed like 1/2 truth, but when hating... WOW, 100% real, felt like every fiber of her being was consistent. Never seen such fury. They may not have a core self... but mine was most like the hater from hell. I think part of what bugged me when she was hateful was she would sometimes mockingly baby-talk real sarcastically.

Yes, a person’s interpersonal functioning is largely a consequence of their attachment style, with different types of interpersonal problems associated with different types of attachment styles. 

Attachment styles are experientially derived, and interpersonal problems are re-enacted in order to maintain a psychological connection to an earlier attachment figure viz. a parent. 


Attachment Styles:

-Secure

-Anxious/Preoccupied

-Fearful Avoidant

-Dismissive Avoidant

The classic BPD pairing is Anxious/Preoccupied + Fearful Avoidant

The Classic BPD/NPD pairing is: Fearful Avoidant + Dismissive Avoidant

Although these patterns are excoritatingly painful, they are maintained to reduce the anxiety generated by the threat of the psychological separation from the earlier attachment figure. 

Sounds right... where did you find information on this? Is the BPD person the one that is Anxious/Preoccupied?

I had concluded that many if not most of the people in BPD r/s had attachment issues... from schizoid to anxious(misdiagnosed often as ADHD)

Most of the non-afflicted would fall into the "Anxious/Preoccupied" category.

An important element to bear in mind is that the most intense emotions are experienced during the formation, maintenance, and termination of attachment partnerships.  Combine "Anxious/Preoccupied" with BPD and their hypersensitivity to emotional flux, and you have created the line of best fit for the worst possible relational pairing under the sun. 

In essence, breaking the BPD cycle is tantamount to partially/fully severing the psychological bond to a maladaptive attachment style.   

Once you have achieved sufficient critical distance from this experience, I can assure you that life will never be the same again. 

Yep, I'm one of those folks with an anxious attachment style who attached to and then detached from a borderline, and life is not the same.  Sometimes we need to learn what's right by going through what's really wrong, and the experience has had a ripple effect, in that I've removed several people with avoidant styles, kryptonite for me, from my life, be it romantic relationships or otherwise.  In my naivety I once believed that everyone was the same, wanted to be treated the same way, and if I treated them well they would reciprocate.  Ha!  Time to grow up, it ain't that simple.  But it's not that complex either: know what you want, notice what you're getting, don't ignore your gut, act accordingly.

I lived by this same error for most of my life.


I applied this syllogism to my life, and was always dismayed by the results:

You teach people how you want to be treated.

I treat people well

Therefore, I teach people to treat me well.

It rarely worked in my favour. 

I suffer from a disadvantaged upbringing: my parents taught me to be hard-working, forbearing, considerate, and polite. These are very useful characteristics to possess if you live in Narnia.  Less so in North America. 

That's pretty much all you need to do to live a happy life I think!  Most of us don't know what we want, we ignore how we are being treated, we don't trust our gut... .years of misery!


Better to change it a little: I treat myself well therefore I teach people to treat me well (boundaries).

a lot of truth to this. Mine seemed a little "fake" also. And the half truths lol wow.

Those traits are still valued, your parents did well, and it's pretty obvious when someone wasn't raised that way.  The only piece that is missing is the part about surrounding ourselves with people who like, care about, and respect us and whom we can trust.  

I like simple, especially when things seem confusing, so I have a new secret to life, borne out of borderline hell: there are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who bring us up and the ones who bring us down, so one key to life is removing the ones who bring us down and adding the ones who bring us up, a continual purging and upgrading on the way to the life of our dreams.

We should be thankful in a sense then.  I did not know that I was anxious/preoccupied before my uBPDexgf.  She crumpled me, but recovery will make me stronger.

So the afflicted would be the ones with dissmissive/avoidant personality's... .that sounds backwards.

Seems like avoidant types, keep people at arms length(from being burned a lot way back maybe)... and the Anxious/preoccupied ones are desperately seeking attachment like a pwBPD. I am curious as I have been described as avoidant or schizoid ... .have made great progress with a T, and don't seem very BPD like at all. I do suspect that most of the bonds between pwBPD and people on this board... involve attachment issues on both sides, though only the more dramatic BPD is focused on by most people. Hard to accept that we have any issues, due to ego.

One thing I really like about attachment style theory is that everyone has one, 100% of the population, and none of them are 'bad', they just are.  There are only incompatible combinations, like someone with an anxious style together with someone with an avoidant style, that won't work well for either, but only 20% of the population is avoidant, so me, someone with an anxious style, still has 80% of the population to connect with. 

And most importantly, a personality disorder is not an attachment style.  During the idealization stage my ex seemed anxious, and during the devaluation stage she seemed avoidant, but that was much more a result of the disorder than an attachment style.  The good news is a relatively small percentage of the population has a personality disorder, and our finely tuned radar will be able to spot them quickly next time, already have in a few cases, so eliminating those from consideration, dammit, leaves us learning about attachment styles and developing compatible pairings.  Moving forward... .

An attachment style is not a personality disorder, but as you said... everyone has one including those that go on to develop disorders.

Some of the styles strongly resemble and probably are misdiagnosed, like ADHD and anxious attachment. Hypervigilence, anxiousness and difficulty concentrating are pretty much the same behaviors. I used to think ADHD was organic in nature, genetic, inherited. However I have come to the conclusion that it probably isn't, but rather any physiological changes are due to adrenal gland overload, and the difference in brain function is habitual, developed early. Or, to put it the worse way I know... Montel Williams might be right.

The difficulty with both PDs and attachment styles... is they don't change easily if at all. There is a little bit of literature on changing your attachment style by reparenting yourself... and similar doubtful sounding treatments.  If you were raised by one or two PD parents, good chance you will have issues, attachment and otherwise, perhaps your own full blown PD. I have really dug in to trying to change my attachment style... and have made great progress in understanding, and in other areas... but it is so deeply rooted it is questionable just how it can be changed. I think well adjusted people could become much less so, easily, like wartime PTSD... could change them.

The BPD r/s seems at first to be accomplishing just the sort of therapeutic change we are talking about... otherwise reserved, rational, stick in the mud types, get back in touch with and unlock long lost emotions and feel the love and even secure base they need... during the idealization phase of the r/s. However the subsequent phases pretty well offset the gains.

Yes, attachment styles are relatively fixed, and I've become totally OK with accepting my anxious style as-is and not making it 'bad'.  Research has shown that a person with an anxious style getting together with someone with a secure style can actually make the anxious one more secure, where getting together with someone with an avoidant style will make the anxious one more anxious; it's about compatibility and partner selection.  So how about nothing needs to be 'fixed' because nothing is 'broken', and maybe the most important thing in life is surrounding ourselves with people who bring us up, not down.  And those pesky borderlines need not apply.

If its not broke don't fix it... .always found things that were not broke... were incredibly hard to fix... spun wheels trying to do so.

Still have some issues to contend with uncovered via the BPD r/s... but those are fleas in comparison to a PD.

Changing who you date isn't real hard... picking someone with no sparks over someone with crazy giant ones is not so easy... .probably best to do that though.

Yeah, I was trying to meet un-borderlines, extra sane women for a while, and whether or not there were sparks didn't matter, just please don't be crazy.  But really, that's reactionary.  Someone doesn't have to be boring, it probably won't work anyway if we start out boring anyway, but how about the right kind of sparks?  That legendary love affair that seems effortless but right, the flags are all green, the gut is quiet, the crotch tingles and the eyes light up.  Oh yes!  Who do we need to be to be open, available and qualified for that?  Sign me up... .

Yes I see. It's like a parent dying great analogy it's not just a b/u . It just came to me the issue is that we mature in the r/s and this is truely my experience and we get in the place of just doing the routines and not engage in drama or find these tantrums as that big anymore . I had such a confusion of why the heck now that things are semi smooth did you want to just cause havoc. There was a situation that did happen at thanksgiving but was it huge yes it kinda was annoying her ex decided to pull some creepy attack on me... .Been there done that my desire was I wanted her to be a member of our team. She went crazy it triggered something ? I askedher do you have any alliance ? She said no. I don't take teams and it was on... .A war of ridiculous ? Wow I don't know how she or this disorder can't see the damage. It's not like you can keep fixing this stuff ? I had to take on my own alliance .