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all of us experienced some behavior that left our heads spinning. lots of us are still trying to make sense of it. we all know that no one is perfect, and that we have some questions to answer about our own behavior in regard to our relationships; anything from tolerating inappropriate behavior, to acting in an extreme way in response to that behavior, to acting out on our own accord, in some cases to manipulate that persons behavior, or even our behavior after the relationships demise.

so what are your examples? i have plenty of my own, and ill list two, maybe more, a bit later. 

Yeah I'll have to admit I had some extreme behavior. Once I completely flipped out and broke the phone i bought her and totally went mental for a good hour. I was fed up. And I blew up. I regret that.

Texting him from fake phone numbers (because mine was blocked) the few days before I had a plane ticket to come see him.

I had no idea if he would show up, as I hadn't heard from him in a week. He said that was part of what drove him away. Maybe it was my fault. 

Borrowing vehicles a number of times (3 to 5) to drive by her house when she was off from work and acting oddly and not wanting any contact with me for days on end and being weird about her phone.

I was nearly certain she was not home (in contrast to what she claimed) or had someone there that I did not know about.

Turns out I never caught her doing anything like that.

But I would lose my mind when right after idealization, she would act like I was a leper for a few days on end.  It made me imagine the worst.

im proud of all of you for recognizing and admitting this. ill try to admit without blame or equivocation. ill admit im self conscious about it though.

i took a hammer to some cds i had bought her during an argument.

we were both at her apartment and arguing. she locked us both out, while my stuff was still inside, and got in her car to leave. i wanted my stuff, so i stood in front of her car blocking exit, shouting, cursing, and threatening to damage her car.

punched a hole in my own wall.

pulled my own hair out.

i called her variations of "psycho" and "crazy" countless times. she was diagnosed bipolar, so i knew mental illness was at play; i consider this counterproductive at best, and cruel at worst.

equally important that we recognize, admit, and work through these things, is that we forgive ourselves for them. that doesnt mean we merely say "hey, i was in a crazy experience", although thats part of it. we chose these relationships and remained in them. theres a certain amount of newtons law at work. for every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction, and this applies to both partners. its one thing to ask why we didnt leave when our exes displayed extreme behavior. its another to ask why we didnt leave when we did. i think owning our part helps depersonalize, and thus, ultimately, forgive them and ourselves |iiii

When I'm a guest in someone's home, I'm the type of person who's respectful of the resident's privacy.  We had separate homes.  During the r/s I'd ask his permission to open personal spaces like a desk drawer if I needed something like a pen. I didn't open closets, or cabinets containing personal items. 

He was out of town when I chose to exit the r/s and return to my home state.  I'm not proud that I snooped in a few areas of his home while he was away just before I left. I checked the caller ID on his land line. I looked through photo albums to get a better sense of his childhood. I sifted through a cabinet containing memorabilia and cards/notes from his mother and read her notes. It sure shed light on lingering questions.  I felt pretty sad for him.

To be honest i checked FB messages and her sms/text it showed me alot about who i was dealing with yet still chose to put all that info in a big box marked 'I CAN MAKE HER FEEL LOVED SAFE NORMAL SO WE WILL FORGET WHATS IN HERE' 

Once we moved in together upon doing usual things like putting her stuff away i'd find folded up pieces of paper that were actually notes to her Ex that read like a script of what she was telling me

and finally i found a old diary in a drawer and couldnt help myself (i knew by this point something was very wrong but still wanted it to work so wanted to glean as much info to understand as possible) and it actually showed how she de-valued 2 of her ex's whilst lining up new supply... .

F.O.G Is a terrible thing to be in 

I read her diary.

I also told her that she was just like her mother when she broke up with me. (She is, really, a more mild version, but very similar personality traits).

That's it though. Those were the only times I did crappy stuff. In comparison, and she told me this as a reason for why we had to break up, I treated her 10 times better than she ever treated me.

Called mine her mother as well in the last text I ever sent her. Crazy huh?

I went through her phone several times to read the Tons of graphic erotic exchanges she was having with at least 3 or more men. I dont regret it at all. Mobile telephones are nothing more than portable Cheating Walkie-Talkies to these types. Yeah, I also drove by her place a few times expecting some random, unknown car to be parked at her place but that never happened

Bingo ! my ex had plenty to hide but against my own morals i checked regularly and found all i needed to know but i didnt confront her for fear of rages foe spying (erm what about emotional affairs if we are getting moral here love?) but it's what keeps my resolve strong 

It's strange, definitely. Lately, I've even been questioning myself as to whether or not I am disordered. In a lot of ways, I think I am, but it's hard to say considering that a disordered individual pretty much was my life for the last 2.5 years.

Definitely will seek a therapist as soon as I am in a better position to do so, geographically.

Towards the end, I started getting furious at tiny provocation, and she was obviously pushing my buttons. I would also 'push' to go ahead and have a blowup if I thought one was coming, I'd launch a salvo about what I thought she was ready to shout at me about. I was also trying desperately to set boundaries (which I hadn't done), and this often involved me saying stuff like 'You won't do that' which prompted reactions. I would also keep on going in a fight because I was tired of her always getting to 'win' against me. This made our ending fights much more mutual than the early fights. It's not something I'm proud of, but on the other hand the fact that it's so different from my normal interactions with friends or partners that it helps confirm for me that the relationship was destroying the real me.

I also was tempted to snoop through her phone records, email, and computer history once we had broken up but before she moved out and went off of my phone plan, but I never did beyond pulling up phone records and seeing that there was information I could poke through if I wanted to.

In the last fight we had before divorce, I cursed and cursed with all the vocabularies I know of.

I'm not proud of it and I regret it happened, but she really drove me to a corner AND had me up on the wall. I'm so done with her out of the blue outbursts... .but I'm not happy with myself loosing control like that, sunk to her level so to speak.  I will learn from this experience and focus on control myself regardless of the situation.

First off, this is a great topic!  So often we reflect upon "their" extreme behaviors and hesitate to evaluate our own.  Hindsight surely offers clarity and provides an opportunity for growth and change.

I don't mind being overlooked, but I detest being ignored.   It is my Achilles' Heel.  Within that framework,  here's the short list:

---sent obscure text messages in the wee hours of the morning trying to illicit a reaction

---made an unannounced home visit

---triangulated for the sole purpose of gaining information

I read my Ex's journals in the months she was living with me and basically conducting her juvenile r/s pretty much in my face. I kind of felt badly, but she left them lying conspicuously about. When she left, one of them was left by itself on an empty shelf in her old bathroom. Perhaps for me to read? I had been reading it as she was updating it.

I also retrieved many messages she had been writing to the OM on our computer. It's amazing what a simple cntrl-v brings up from a person you know writes their emails in Word first to spell check them.

Long before we even had kids, I did one incident of what could be considered road rage. I have a sporty car. I was mad at her and I took a 90 degree corner sharply. The car handled it fine. She called me out on it. I apologized. That's being passive-aggressive instead of voicing my feelings.

She drove really quickly through traffic a few times in her old car, such that I was scared as a passenger. I did it the one time when no traffic was around. She really scared me the times she did it. Of course, this the same woman who a couple of times came home and said that she flipped someone off, and that she had to take a roundabout way home because she thought they were following her.

I also regret the few times we got into yelling matches. She would initiate, and I ashamedly rose to the bait. That didn't help. Ignoring her was worse, of course (abandonment), but me giving a version of the silent treatment wasn't healthy either. That's my own BPD trait or  my-issues from my BPD mom.

i snooped a lot too. my excuse at the time was to see if she was spying on me (she was). theres so much wrong with all of that.

I raged back at her at times and reprimanded her often. She would treat me poorly and a short time later speak of marriage. I would try to get her to own her behavior so we could move forward but the reprimanding just made things much worse. I was pathetic at the end hanging on and begging her to stay in the rs. I was terribly addicted and texted her hundreds of times the day she broke up with me. Then when I found out she already had my replacement when she said she didn't I got drunk twice and sent her flurries of nasty emails followed by her having her adult children contact me and threaten to call the cops if I contacted her again. I have so much guilt over how I handled the end. I was so addicted

I was constantly checking his Facebook until he blocked me.

This goes hand-in-hand with my guilty for getting angry thread. For me, I started out calm, but after her relentless berating, I allowed myself to be reeled into countless arguments that would slowly escalate to yelling and screaming. I am not that kind of person, but I became that kind of person. One time I swiped a lamp off the table and it broke (my favorite lamp). It wasn't until the end of the relationship that I snooped in her computer and read many emails to and from previous exes, each time involving her trying to reel one back in while she was with another or after she had just ended a relationship. Also, I got so frustrated a few times I ran to my closet, grabbed all of my clothes and threw them in the trunk of my car and drove several states away to my family to stay (but really with the intent to leave her). This is just not how I operate... .

Me too. I regret the times that I lost it. The times I used some profanity because that is not my style.

Mostly I regret telling "too much" to others about our relationship problems. I didn't need to say as much as I did to as many people as I did. I was in crisis mode nearly everyday and didn't have much of a filter. I consider myself the type to keep marital confidences and protect somebody I love from verbal assault, but I wasn't this way with my uBPDw. All bets were off. I have since read about the Karpman triangle but I am still trying to understand if I really triangled my close friends or? My uPBDw found this terribly disloyal. I can understand that. I feel awful that it hurt her, especially when she read my private emails.

I also regret terribly not having patience and understanding with her daughter. The kid had issues and we argued about her constantly. Sometimes I think I was so mad at my spouse that I would take it out on the kid whom I eventually began to resent as well if I am honest. I saw both of them as a team who disregarded my feelings and basic needs and used me. I didn't want to do family things eventually because I felt like a complete fool.

There are a few things that I'm not proud of:

I lied to her last winter and she now says this is one of the reasons why she broke up with me this November - over 1 yr later. I didn't know her well enough back then and I didn't have any proper tools. The lie wasn't about anything serious, but she - this being a question of trust in an already unstable r/s, and a lie being a lie whatsoever - took it in a really bad way and had no trust in me after that.

I called her 'mad', and 'crazy' last winter. Apart from showing very strong traits of BPD she is also bipolar... .man am I sorry for saying those things to her.

I talked to family/close friends too much. I can really relate to michel71's post:
This backfired for me eventually. I feel very bad about that by telling others of the ordeals my then gf felt excluded. I became her enemy.

As for violent outbursts I didn't have any (she was violent though). I can now see that towards the end I made myself a bit emotionally unavailable and distanced. I had started to grow tired of the tantrums and impossibilities and demands and just plain odd behaviours. That I don't regret. I was trying to protect myself, maybe not in a really honest mature way, but I had no energy left at that time.

But - probably the most extreme behaviour of all was that I let her violate so many of my boundaries, to the extent that it's changed me from within. Meaning, I should have left long ago. That I regret most of all. I am not responsible for her warped reactions, but I am responsible for the hurt I now live with through making the choice of staying and trying to repair and fix things.