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Hi all!

Have any of you tried the geographic cure (i.e. getting out of town) to help detach? If so, can you tell me the pros and cons?

Thanks!

kc

I actually had to move for work, so that I'm now about a 5-hour flight from my ex. On the con side, I think I put a little too much hope in the idea that moving would lead to a fresh start. For the first maybe 8 months, the problems pretty much followed me -- phone calls, skype talks, even a couple of visits. Destroyed me for work and settling into the new city, meeting people, etc. I was consumed by the never-ending collapse of our relationship.

On the plus side, I can't even imagine how much longer and worse, how many more recycles, etc, there would have been if we were still in the same city. Neither of us could let go. And when we're together and get to a point where we can't resolve some emotional tension, we always turned to sex. That was our salvation, except that it left every other part of relationship increasingly toxic. So the big big plus is I'm not tempted to just run over to her or to hold her and give it "another shot". And as hard as the recovery has been, it's a godsend to have so much distance between us, so I can have room to breathe and think and do activities without her.

Like I said, I was moving anyway. I'm not sure I would have thought to move cities just to get away. I guess that depends a lot on job situation, family, friends, etc.

That said, it has been a big plus overall. I just should have been more prepared for the fact that the problems will follow to the new city, unless you make a real effort to leave them behind.

I did this after my first divorce from BPDwife.  It didn't help.  I just ended up a long ways away from my support system, lonely and hurting.  :)etachment is an internal process, so changing your external location isn't going to fix things. jmho

Interesting, there's a thing called a 'geographic' in Alcoholics Anonymous; a drunk, in an attempt to quit drinking and start over, moves somewhere.  It invariably doesn't work because they have alcohol there too, and wherever you go, there you are, the same person is in a new place.

Anyway, the common message is recovery, healing, growing are inside jobs, not dependent on external circumstances, so it doesn't matter where you are.  Now under some circumstances, you work with your ex, you live in the same house with your ex, whatever it is, and you've decided that you absolutely need to get this person out of your life to retain what's left of your sanity and heal, and they ain't leavin', then it may make sense to move yourself.  Is this an issue for you, something you're considering?

To qualify my earlier response somewhat, I agree with fromheeltoheal and Wize that, at the end of the day, you need to deal with what's going on inside of you, wherever you find yourself and no matter how far from the other half of the relationship that's hurting you.

But if you know that living close to your pwBPD puts you in high risk situations, then it can help the healing process to be in a different city. For me, it was always a high risk situation to be with my ex in person because we seemed inevitably to end up having sex and rekindling that passion, no matter how toxic.

Of course, I agree that the goal is to heal to a point where nothing like that is "inevitable" for me, that I'm strong enough and healthy enough not to embrace a toxic situation, but to walk away instead. But to continue with the alcohol analogy, I think it would certainly help to move away from a party scene, at least in the first stages of recovery.

That said, moving to a new city is a pretty drastic step if taken solely to get away from a relationship. And, as I noted in my post above, it certainly doesn't offer any instant cure. At best, it gives you a little extra breathing room, and a little less temptation, so that you can focus on the real work of dealing with your own issues.