BPDFamily.com

I had gone NC with my wife in a very true attempt to let go.  Unfortunately, given that yesterday was Mother's Day, I broke down and reached out to wish her a Happy Mother's Day and tell her we love her and miss her.  Once she responded, she apologized for her communication style - the silent treatment, ignoring texts, making contact then breaking off contact in the middle of important discussions - and that we'd speak Tuesday.

I am so confused by her.  She loves me.  She misses me.  She misses our children.  She doesn't want to be apart from us.  And yet, here we are.

Is there anything I can do to steer the ship towards some sort of reconciliation?  I feel like I was almost at peace with having to let her go, only to have her surprise the hell out of me with her conciliatory tone yesterday (at least as it relates to communicating) and implicit suggestion that she wants to stay in contact with me.  And, again, the only reason in the world I'd even consider reconciliation is that she is my wife and we are a family; if this were a girlfriend or a fiancee I would never even have visited this website; there are literally no other reasons to keep going.

I kinda feel like this is my one last shot at moving the needle.  

I think the only thing you can really do is to keep a place at the dock open for her should she choose to come back to shore.   Naturally you can't wait forever for this but I suspect you will find out quickly if she can fit her boat at your dock again.   In the meantime you might want to work on yourself and ways on how you can protect yourself and your children from the instability that all too often surrounds pwBPD.

Moments of clarity from a pwBPD are wonderful when they happen but rarely are they persistent.   If there is to be hope for you she needs to prove not only to herself but you as well that she can take this self-awareness and make positive and persistent change.

BPD is an impulse driven disorder. There are times when she will have clarity only to have an impulse throw her forcefully toward something to fill the seemingly bottomless abyss of need, to manage the anxiety.

The more clear you are about who you are, the more stable you are, the more likely she can feel the clarity of the relationship.

It's tricky to do this because many of us become accustomed to appeasing and apologizing and bending the universe toward them until we ourselves feel empty.

You can actually get back to center and support her at the same time, though it can feel impossible at the onset of figuring out how to do that. A lot of the discomfort is about letting go of the feeling that we have any control over them, or anyone for that matter.

That's what I'm doing my best to accomplish.  As my T said, nothing you say is going to change your mind, you're going to have to do.  The issue is that I will not pursue her (I have children to protect and a job that's important to taking care of all of us), so there's not nothing I can do immediately to show changes.  My downfall was expecting her to be my wife when she could barely be a functional person, only she hid so many things from both me and her family for so long that we really didn't know what was going on. 

We spoke today and she's in such a bad place, but I don't really know how to help.  Things have gone completely off the rails and I though I'm willing to accept that I can't change her mind, I'm having a really hard time with how sharply she's declined.

I'm so sorry, Icanteven. It's painful to watch loved ones fall apart. Maybe more painful than falling apart ourselves.

Hitting bottom sometimes is the turning point. The hope is that our loved one finally gets to the place that was so frightening, and learn that it's just a bottom, nothing else.

I don't know if this will help or not, but I found that asking simple (super simple) questions helped me find my way when my loved one was in such a place of pain and self harm. Questions like, "Oh?" or "And then what?" and sometimes, "Is there anything you would like me to do?" kept me grounded, away from trying to rescue and fix and save while still staying engaged and empathetic.

Another part that helped is going through what my T calls beefs and griefs. I grew up in a family that never processed negative feelings, we avoided mention of them, tip toeing around it all. When I could step back from feeling grief for others, and focused on my own injuries and sadnesses, it taught me I was resilient, and that resilience comes from processing the pain, not avoiding it. And certainly not focusing on maintaining and corraling the grief of my loved ones, as I was taught to do. I had to learn to let others feel pain and show trust in them, that I knew they could experience the pain and make it through to the other side. My role was coach and empathetic bystander.

It finally made it easier to detach from the dynamic that made us both miserable.

Such hard work, and so meaningful.