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After returning home from Christmas at my family's house, I found myself feeling pretty depressed. My sisters and I don't have much in common and I felt really rejected by my whole family for some reason. I began to cry and shared what I was feeling with my H.

He then begins to tell me about how he feels abandoned by me when I'm with my family. I immediately stopped crying and started to withdrawl. He was trying to take this moment from me! I took a chance and reached out to him with my vulnerable feelings and he swept it away and made it about him! I was pissed. I didn't respond to what he said about feeling abandoned and he began to cry.

I said, "Why are you crying?"

He responded in tears, "I know how you feel when you feel rejected by your family. I feel that way about mine too."

Was this an attempt at empathy? Did he first have to make my hurt about him so he could understand what I was feeling? He frequently ignores my hurt and makes it about him but I've never seen him turn it into an understanding of what I feel. If that was his way of being empathetic I'll take it. It just freaked me out and I"m still trying to understand what happened.

I'm so sory, Chilibean.   

As you know, empathy seems to really be lacking in pwBPDs, especially for their close family members. It's not that they're without empathy. My H can be really empathetic toward strangers, but when it comes to me, there's a barrier. It seems like if he has empathy for me, he's got to really feel the emotion, which he's unlikely to want to do because it triggers him so much.

It's an odd conundrum. They are so emotional, yet they do not want to step into our reality and imagine what things are like for us. And that's because it triggers them so much. With a stranger or an acquaintance, they don't get as triggered.

So, for the non, it's like living in a desert without emotional support from the person who is supposed to be closest to us, our spouse.

I do think it was an attempt at empathy. It's just that he had to filter it first through his own experience. Not very satisfying for you, but I think he tried.