BPDFamily.com

Hi everyone,

I want to treat very carefully with this subject, but it's on my mind and I felt it'd be helpful to ask the question so that I can understand things better.

One of the things that hooked me in with my BPD ex very early is her trauma stories.

I felt very much like I needed to take care of her, because the things she shared were so intense, and so difficult (okay, we can critique my reasoning, but it's just how it felt before I knew any better).

I've been reading some things about BPD here though which kind of seem to point to the idea that the disorder can come with false memories etc.

I'm not asking anyone to tell me that my ex's trauma stories weren't true - I'm not really asking for anything definitive in any direction.

I'm just curious if anyone has any experience or knowledge of BPD and false memories.

I suppose it's interesting to consider the spectrum of likelihood around these things...

You know when you reflect, and you wonder how much was real - how much of any of the relationship was real - and how much was based on a false premise?

I wonder just how... crazy some things were or weren't.

She actually had a CPTSD diagnosis, but said she went to multiple psychologists to get that particular diagnosis.

I can't remember what she said the others thought she had (I think BPD, and bi-polar, if I'm not mistaken).

I don't know - in some ways it doesn't matter anyway, but I'm just making sense of things, I guess.

It'd be interesting to hear any thoughts you might have!

*tread very carefully.

(There was a CSA theme to the stories, and I don't want to go down the slippery road of calling someone a liar, or dishonest. I'm just interested in where any nuances/grey areas may lie as a result of BPD)

From my own experience there are absolutely distortions. The distortion I struggle with the most is my wife, now publicly that she has left, claiming that I am a pedophile, as I have shared with her the story of my grooming and abuse as a child, and my long struggle with pornography addiction from age 9 as a result. Another, would be that I have been imprisoning her in our home and consigning her to a life of therapy since she lost her job, when all the while I had been gently suggesting she see travels and visit's her mother and brothers that are out of town. Drawing from these and other experiences, I don't think there is a limit to the depravity and disconnects that could occur with respect to distortion of memory. The formula always seems to be some part truth and reality, and then some kind of inversion of that truth that suits the narrative of the person experiencing the distortion. The distortions in my experience also appear to deal with guilt or shame as a result of some difficult to reconcile decision being made, in this case it would be my wife's abrupt exit of our relationship after establishing an online relationship within our home.

BPDxw definitely had a lot of trauma stories from her past, and like you, this initially made me want to be there for her and help support her, believing I wasn't just with her because she was cute, but I was also "doing good."

Well... a few years later, I had enough experience with her to know that she had no problem lying, or if not outright lying, omitting key facts, embellishing stories and generally stretching the truth to consider her very dishonest, and an unreliable witness.

I don't know whether any or all of her traumatic stories were true or not.  I do know that taken together ALL of her trauma stories had a common thread of her being the victim, and other adults in her life (usually her parents) being either mean, openly harmful to her or just really lousy parents.

It all had the effect of making her out to be this really sympathetic case of someone who climbed her way out of poverty with no help from her cruel and selfish mom and dad.

I couldn't speak directly to her parents, (they didn't speak English), but I met them and formed my own opinions.  I also learned that in her home country, a lot of her claimed advantages (such as academic achievement) were solely the result of bribes her parents paid to teachers for grades or administrators for admission to better schools.

She obviously left those details out...

I don't doubt she had a traumatic childhood.  However, contrary to her "narrative" of it, it didn't product a hardworking, loving, wise woman, but one who saw manipulating others as the only path to walk, who couldn't be accountable for her actions, and who was at a loss for how to behave when she wasn't able to manipulate a person in her usual manner.

Thanks for the thoughts guys!

Yeah - interesting...

One thing that my ex shared with me seems like the kind of thing that a person should be very careful about dismissing.

It's just that it was hard to know what to make of everything when taken together - I too heard a number of stories that I thought

"Hmmm... I'll bet there's another side to that."

It made it very hard to know for sure exactly where the truth did and didn't lie.

For all I know, she might've been wrong about every single thing she shared.

I suppose the truth is more likely somewhere in the middle...

I'd love to know! But only really to satisfy a curiosity, I suppose.

Since I never spent any alone time with her friends/family, it's hard to piece together what the situation really was without seeing it all through her lens...

well, two people can have very different interpretations of the same event, and in relating it back, you can get two dramatically different tellings. 

"splitting the difference" isn't always helpful when it comes down to who was right and who was wrong, and BPD is involved.  :(

To explain further using an example: I witnessed an incident between BPDxw and a much older houseguest.  It was pretty innocuous: the person didn't take her shoes off when entering our house.  This was her first visit to our house!  BPDxw said rather curtly that she expected people would know to take their shoes off.  The older person did, but made a laughing remark about "so many rules here"

Well... I would've just ignored that.  The request was phrased rudely in the first place, especially as made to an older person, but BPDxw still got what she wanted in the first place.  They took their shoes off when she asked!  Did she let it go?  No!  She broke into a screaming fit, said the person "spit in her face" and carried on about this for literally MONTHS afterward, claiming I should've taken her side immediately, rather than trying to defuse the situation, and now she knows I'll never be there for her, and yadda yadda yadda.

So yeah, while an "incident" occurred, if you were tempted to give BPDxw some "credit" for her point of view, you're essentially justifying building a mountain out of a molehill and creating months of conflict over a single remark that hurt no one, and no one NORMAL would've even remembered 5 seconds after it was said.

Oh, does that bring back memories... The first of this sort was well over 20 years ago.  I had been married for several years by that time and she was upset one night over something about on of her best friends/co-volunteers.  Within a couple days we spoke with her supervisor.  He noted she'd said something to that woman.  I remained mostly quiet.  Afterward she berated me for not defending her.  I replied, "But that report was precisely what you said you wanted to do."  Her response, "But I would never do that, I only spoke to you in private, besides you're my husband, you have to defend me."  Sheesh!

There had been prior private incidents that concerned me but that was the first time others were impacted.  It wasn't long before we moved away.  I'd been volunteering for over two decades so that was a huge adjustment for me.  And the discord continued.  Eventually, after even more conflicts in the following years, I called the police, we separated and divorced.  Well, not that simple, but the pattern was clear, it was only getting worse over time, not better.  And I couldn't stop the slow motion train wreck.

Yeah, that’s a helpful example!

Hmm… I suppose there are things about my ex that I’ll never know.

I heard all kinds of stories (big and small) about family, friends, people in her community… many seemed plausible, some seemed like small incidents - like she was just being too offended…

The big, capital T trauma stories were also there…

I guess it’s just interesting to try to make some sense of it, and to piece together what was really happening.

I never really met her family and friends without her there, and I sometimes (especially with family) had a sense that something wasn’t being said.

I sort of felt like… there was an elephant in the room, and no one was telling me what it was (unless I was just projecting, and looking out for something where there was nothing to look out for).

I guess her family seemed hesitant about me - friendly, but hesitant… a bit reluctant to get close… rather than the warm way that families usually embrace a new partner.

It made me wonder just what I’d got involved with.

Either she was a relatively well person who - due to some big T traumas, really struggled with her mental health at times…

OR - to the other extreme - she was completely crazy and entirely removed from reality,

Or somewhere in between those two poles.

I’d love to know, but I suppose I never really will - and I have peace about that, even though the curiosity is strong!

I think it's possible the memories have a "real" origin to them but the interpretation is different. It feels real to them. If I think back on my childhood memories we were afraid of BPD mother's rages. Her interpretation is that she raged because she felt she was feeling invalidated.  Somehow even a small slight was felt by her as if it were to intentionally cause her distress, even though we felt we were doing what we could to not hurt her.

I have no proof of this but I wonder if she did experience some trauma/abuse as a younger teen or child and is somehow replaying it in the present. She perceives herself as a victim and somehow we inadvertently step into the role of abuser to her, even if we don't have any intentions of that.

How she feels is real to her though.

Notwendy hits the nail on the head when she says that how her mother with BPD feels is real to her whether it is based on past trauma or not. People who have been severely traumatized often find it hard to trust others, to know how to build healthy close relationships, and are constantly challenged in regulating overwhelming emotions that seem to come out of nowhere.

Some of the most helpful advice I have received on this site is not to validate the invalid though we can validate what seems to make sense with disordered people.

My understanding is that BPD has a genetic component, i.e. children of a pwBPD have a higher potential to also have it, or another behavioral disorder, and there's also the potential to develop it as a result of childhood abuse or neglect.  

Ultimately, it's not a disease like the flu, or a cold, where you can point to a specific virus and say "you have this."  It's a combination of behaviors that are considered abnormal or excessive compared to what's normal, and so I think down the road these sorts of things currently lumped together as "BPD" might get diagnosed differently.  

I've heard stories from my parents (who heard them from my grandparents or other older generations) about older relatives that never married or had some behavioral issues that rendered them loners or "black sheep" of the family.  No one is ever direct about things that happened; and of course my parents were already one-degree removed from the actual witnesses of the events, but I imagine a lot more abuse did take place in earlier generations, where people lived closer together, and just kinda kept quiet about things because no one wanted any "trouble."  Back then they didn't go to therapy, and domestic abuse was tolerated.  

Yeah.  When I think back on events like these, I get bothered by the fact that I tolerated it, or even went along with it at the time to keep the peace.  But I was still in the dark about BPD, or behavioral disorders at the time, and was just trying to live my life and make sense of what I was seeing, which seemed to insane to me. 

And it gets even harder to navigate - especially for the uninitiated - when the pwBPD triangulates or drags 3rd parties into the conflict.  This sort of behavior is super insidious... really depraved stuff, on a certain level. 

I've apologized to people who were on the receiving end of BPDxw's manipulative attempts to isolate me from my family and friends by stirring conflict out of nowhere like this.  I'm glad they all understood, and never held a grudge.  And almost all of them said they knew something was wrong, and felt bad for me, knowing I was stuck in an awful situation.

I compare and contrast the concern for my well-being with BPDxw's foot stomping, door slamming tantrums, and tirades as soon as she felt slighted, or "disrespected" or "not put first" or whatever self-absorbed nonsense phrase she found online to justify her behavior. 

I guess that's why I still post here.  I hate that other people are going through this stuff, and I think spreading the word helps others understand and cope with the misery of being in a r/s with a pwBPD.

There are no family members with BPD in my mother's immediate family. There are two distant cousins of hers that I think possibly have BPD. There are riffs and alienation- certain cousins not speaking to each other for reasons I don't know.

Little was known about mental health a couple of generations ago. It was also a shameful subject. I don't think families hid things on purpose- I think they didn't know what was going on and didn't think it was OK to speak of any issues.

My own thoughts, since my BPD mother is the only person with BPD in her immediate family is that there may have been some kind of trauma. The extent of her dissociating makes me wonder. Dissociation can also be a coping mechanism.

There's also the "chronic PTSD" diagnosis that seems to fit BPD characteristics that stem entirely for prolonged childhood abuse.  That could explain why it was isolated in your mom's family

In my experience, - assuming her stories have some truth to them!!! - BPDxw was largely abandoned to the care of relatives during the first couple years of her life.  Her dad had criminal problems and her mom chose to go with him on the lam, rather than care for her.  (they were not American; this all happened in another country making it impossible for me to corroborate)

I wondered about her parents; they didn't speak English, so I had to form my opinions from more general observations, but they SEEMED like decent people, albeit with a history of reckless behavior.  They were more hapless, maybe not great people, but not ill-meaning or malevolent, like BPDxw was.  Who knows?

I guess the important thing is to recognize that certain behavior is just  not on the spectrum of what's "normal" so that you can adjust to that, and not end up spending your life catering to them.  You can know to simply walk away and not spend your time filling in the proverbial bottomless pit.

I think something to add would be, that a child may not be able to tell the difference between things like; neglect, recklessness, abandonment, or malevolence. But, the impact of each of these states would probably be similar with respect to the fomentation trauma, and potentially cluster B behaviors as a result of that specific trauma. And, as the child grows to an adult, the impression of events would probably remain the same. I guess i'm just revisiting the theme of; there exists truth within each distortion.

The NEABPD (https://www.borderlinepersonalitydisorder.org/) has a media library of current research on BPD in general. If you search the keyword "memory" there is a significant body of research on BPD and memories.

Two articles stood out:

This one on Narrative coherence of autobiographical memories in women with borderline personality disorder and associations with childhood adversity (https://bpded.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40479-021-00159-5) from 2021, and

this one on Impaired memory for cooperative interaction partners in borderline personality disorder (https://bpded.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40479-020-00137-3) from 2020.

While neither directly answers the OP's specific question of "does she have false trauma memories and how can I know", both are scientific articles on targeted areas of intersection between BPD (which is a serious mental illness) and memory.

Important to keep ourselves up-to-date on what's being learned!

Hope those are helpful;

kells76

these are both good points about memory.

And on top of that, or perhaps because of the trauma, pwBPD seem to believe their own "spin" on things, even in adulthood. I figured this was some sort of twisted sense of self-preservation they developed: in their own minds, the only one they can trust is themselves. 

That's interesting.  So they weren't able to recall stories completely, or added or omitted facts from their own narratives when prompted FAR more often than non-BPD women.

I suppose - going forward - that sort of thing could be a red-flag red-flag red-flag to note when meeting someone, even if the stories being related are relatively benign, or you're still in the "honeymoon phase" of the relationship.  I assume BPD men are similar (?) although the study focused on women. 

Something to watch for... *)

This just brings back so many memories when I first started dating my wife. It was all trauma bonding. Telling me all the horrible things that had happened to her over the first month or so of dating. Between sexual assaults to her throughout college, her ex husband being physically and emotionally abusive towards her, her parents ignoring her in some ways, the lying she did around others because "she felt she was protecting their feelings" (no trivial things like not letting her other parent know she was in town visiting and would not go see them, only 1 parent at a time, because she didn't want the other parent to feel neglected) and just the strings of bad luck she had in life (car problems, debt, blah blah blah).

I too felt that I could do better than anyone else had in her life and I thought in return, she would do the same. Sadly this never happened. I held up by end of the bargain for years, but no matter how much I gave (paid off all her debts, over 60k) bought her a new computer, bought her a new car, when her first car died, I gave her mine, as I had a company vehicle and we went places together on the weekends anyways, then she didn't take care of the car I bought her, the engine exploded from a something she neglected to get fixed herself, and as a result I gave her my car again to drive (its been 2 years since, I primarily work from home, but it is still really hard to get around with an uber or lyft, while she still sues my car, and even asked the other day, when we could trade it in for her to get something bigger, like a minivan. I told her we can deal with that...AFTER I get a car.

But alas now we are in couples therapy trying to figure out why she doesn't remember certain things she has done to me throughout the past 10 years, and still doubles down that she never said, or did the things I am telling her about in counseling. Some of which, have caused me PTSD and am now trying to figure out.

I feel your pain and know that no matter what you say or do, you have to hold onto your reality. Do not let them dictate and gaslight you into thinking what they say is true. You are not the one with the personality disorder, they are, and sometimes you have to hold your grounds and you will feel like a jerk, but as someone who has codependancy issues as well, its only natural to feel this way after years of establishing no boundaries and holding back from making a big deal on the things you witnessed in order to "keep the peace". In the long run it drains you and you end up being the one that feels unbalanced, while they whilst off onto the next victim thinking that it was all your fault.

Man, I’m sorry you went through that - that sounds horrible.

It rings true though - your first comment - ‘it’s all trauma bonding’.

I wasn’t with my ex for that long, but it’s how I felt - I sorta ‘loved’ her, but it was really based on an anxious fear and a feeling of thirst and need.

I had the idea that it was probably true for her too. 

Now I’M probably one of her trauma stories, and I never meant to be… I deliberately tried to avoid that, in fact - taking steps which I thought would nullify the likelihood of it.

We even discussed how we could break up in a gentle way for each other, if we ever needed to.

She said “Just don’t dump me at Christmas”.

She dumped ME at Christmas… on the 23rd December…

Jordan Peterson said something interesting about BPD - something like:

“They’re terrified of rejection, and have been rejected their whole lives - but they behave in ways which are virtually guaranteed to result in rejection.” Sure rings true for me!

I've read things before speculating that people with BPD make up their traumatic pasts. I don't really buy it. I think they do have traumatic pasts.

My mom probably has BPD. I believe her that her father raped her and my (much) older sister that she had when she was a teen is a product of that.

Now, my husband who probably has BPD didn't have quite as traumatic of a childhood, but I know that his father was an alcoholic who would come home and drink and scream and yell at his family. I know because his other family members have corroborated that and have no reason to lie to me about it. (I also think the dementia his father ended up dying from was probably made worse by brain damage from all that alcohol.)

The thing is, lots of people have traumatic childhoods and don't develop a personality disorder.

One of the favorite things I've heard from a therapist was "your trauma is not your fault, but it is your responsibility." People with BPD are perpetual victims who never even try to heal from their traumas. They just want other people to feel sorry for them all the time. It doesn't mean their trauma didn't happen or their pain isn't valid, but eventually you need to at least try to pick yourself up from it.

I actually felt pretty bad once I realized that most of my relationship with my (now soon to be ex) husband was based on me feeling sorry for him. He always had me to vent to about how terrible everyone treats him and how unfair everything is. (I not only suspect that he has BPD, but more specifically it's petulant BPD.) It took me way too long to realize that he's always going to feel that way no matter what I do, and no matter what happens to him. There's no way I can "save" him. I tried to by marrying him and having a kid with him and it only made him worse. He's just as miserable now as when I first met him 15 years ago. And now that I've left him it's just more evidence that everyone is out to get him and screw him over.

I think he's now trying to convince himself that I was cheating on him and that's what I left him (because my D5 told me the other night that "Dada thinks you moved to the apartment because you love someone else now.") Of course that must be it! It couldn't possibly be because of anything he did!

I don't think pwBPD invent trauma out of whole cloth either: but I do think they struggle with consistency, and play fast and loose with facts.  Maybe this is out of a sense of self preservation... when memories are painful, the ability to create memories itself is affected.

I think the article Kells shared is interesting for that reason... pwBPD really do struggle to remember their own history.

As far as looking for certainty in a pwBPD's stories, you can truly never know... the trauma they suffered renders them unable to really understand and relate events accurately.  their memories and their perception are permanently affected by childhood trauma, and grow crookedly from those early events on.

We really do have to take the things they say with a proverbial "grain of salt"... while listening to them, not allowing their skewed & convoluted views to be a basis for our own decisions.

Yeah, it’s the wrong focus for me I know, but the trauma she shared with me was *so* intense… I don’t think you’d be allowed to show it (or even imply some of it) in a movie.

I know I ought not to suggest that she’s wrong about her memory of those events - and I’m not suggesting that either, actually; it’s just that… ah, I dunno.

It sometimes unnerves me to think that I spent a lot of time alone with someone where I really didn’t know the upper limit of the potential problems.

I got really caught up in a situation which I still don’t really understand.. not that I have to, but still.

I remember her explaining to me how she nearly married a guy… and eventually told me she’d never actually met him… the day she was due to, he cancelled and she had a severe psychosis event.

And I look at it sometimes and think “What actually WAS that whole thing I was involved in?”

The day she broke up with me, she said “see… I’d have married him, but I just feel that I wouldn’t marry you…” - she didn’t seem to feel there was any significance in the fact that she’d actually MET me, and she’d never met him…

I try not to spend time dwelling on it, but if I stop to reflect… I think… ‘jeez, what happened there??’.

I’ve kept all of our correspondence. Just *in case* any accusation was ever levelled at me. I still don’t know if that’s likely, or what her condition actually was, or what even happened.

Strange,really!

A lot of things can be true:

- she could have suffered severe trauma (psychological, physical, sexual, etc.)

- she could be unable to fully recall and relate what actually occurred to you

- she could be so delusional that she's made up some or all or a lot of what happened to her.

From my example of the fight BPDxw picked and the mountain she built out of the molehill, you could say she dramatically overreacted for reasons known only to her.  or she completely lied about her feelings to do so.  Or she has such a distorted view of the world that her perception of the event - while being real to her - was not something the majority of people would share.  I suspect on some level she knew what she was doing: her behavior afterward, creating a whole narrative around me "never standing up for her" or "not putting her first" recurred throughout our relationship, whenever she felt a need to push me to reassure her that I would do anything for her, and never leave, no matter how she behaved, or what she did

She needed this reassurance often... so often that the fights she would start over these accusations were completely destabilizing to our relationship and ability to function. 

So that was my take. 

Yours may have had similar goals of using events and memories - however distorted - to evoke sympathy and attention from you, but for reasons impossible to know, decided to end it.  Maybe she wanted you to chase her more, maybe there was someone else, maybe she just didn't know what she wanted.  In a way, consider yourself lucky she gave you an "out" and you're not here years from now wondering how to get out of a marriage with kids to a disordered person...

Yeah that's helpful - you're right!

I do count it a HUUUUGE blessing that we didn't marry - because we easily could have done, if things were just a little different (eg - I moved over to her city permanently, instead of temporarily - a plan which she didn't like; which led her to break up with me).

It's taught me a lot about the world... I can't believe there are people who are that unwell just sorta... walking about, working, on dating apps, out and about...

I know that might sound backwards or ignorant of me; I don't mean that people SHOULDN'T be out and about like that, it's just taught me to be a bit more guarded with new people, I suppose... you just don't know what's going on for folks...

I don't know whether there's a better explanation for how this is called "Borderline" PD but I've had the impression it's that their poor behaviors seem to place them not usually mentally ill enough to be institutionalized nor usually criminally actionable enough to be incarcerated.

Recently there were efforts to change "Borderline" in the DSM 5 to a range of less stigmatized names but that didn't happen.

I had a similar realization; I knew there were - for lack of a better word - "crazy" people out there, and I knew there were abusive people out there, but I figured it would be easy enough to recognize them and get out of the relationship before we got too "intertwined" for it to be difficult.

I also assumed that anyone who was not openly crazy was generally going about their lives in a certain way; maybe not completely honest, but at least trustworthy on some level, and appreciated that openly lying to your partner was not something that was sustainable, i.e. at some point you had to fess up and apologize, because the other person KNOWS what you really said or did. 

So it was a bit of a surprise for me to see the full-blown rages, and mood swings of BPD and not recognize it as an actual behavioral disorder, instead thinking I was somehow responsible for it.  Like "maybe she's dealing with some sort of stress or anxiety, and I'm not being supportive enough, but I can help her work through this"... though my gut instincts were telling me "if she can act like this now, what is the upside?  How do you work through someone being so openly dishonest with you and trust them ever again?"

Learning about BPD (3 years into marriage) was eye-opening and helpful, in that although she was never diagnosed, by understanding the nature of personality disorders I began to understand that whatever her issues, personality disorders were not my fault, and there was nothing I could do to improve the overall situation, other than in the short term, by defusing small arguments (not JADEing, listening with empathy, redirecting, etc.), but I realized that was not for me, and I wasn't going to tolerate a person like that in my life, for the rest of my life. 

We’ve all had the ‘people have never treated me right’ declarations from my ex and at the time - the idealisation phase - you believe them and just want to show that you’re not like that. Then later in the relationship, when you’ve seen how your partner apparently is never to blame for anything and the whole world is against them, you start to wonder how much of their statement was true.

I don’t doubt some of it may have been true but as we know, BPD magnifies everything and we can’t clearly separate fact from fantasy - if the sufferer can’t do it themselves then we certainly can’t. The key red flag is when you see them - the supposed ‘victim’ every time - constantly falling out with family, friends, workmates and everyone then you start seeing the pattern. If it happens in front of you then you see that nothing bad was actually done to them, they’ve just reacted in the usual heightened BPD state where everything trivial to us is a grand offence to them. It’s quite an eye-opener - and frightening too - when you see how they distort things and totally believe them to be true. I’m not sure how much they actually forget too, I think a lot of it they do remember but can’t admit it.

My ex never spoke of her childhood and I never tried to force it but her sister-in-law said she hadn’t had a happy childhood so that may have been the cause of her BPD either wholly or in part. I was never totally sure of how much BPD was responsible for her actions though and I’ve always thought she had a ‘bad streak’ anyway, which would only have made the BPD even worse.  I recall her mother telling me that even though I showed her daughter love, not to expect anything back from her as ‘she has her own way of going on’. Later on I saw this was a warning - which proved to be right.

I could never get my ex to believe in me; that I was 100% genuine in my feelings for her. It was like she could never see me as a ‘real’ person, just someone who might hurt or abandon her one day. Eventually the day comes when you can’t keep on this way and my day came after a mega-meltdown by her in which she turned on me in a split second. Like a switch being thrown. I still remember people in the pub being shocked by the instant rage she turned on, the jet black pupils of her eyes and how close she seemed to actual violence. I’d never seen that before from her and it was just one step too far.

I think on some level, maybe even subconsciously, they know what they're doing.  It's learned behavior. It works for them, at least in the short term, so they keep doing it.  They can't or won't consider the long term effects of lying though, and so they end up repeatedly alone, or if the non- can't or doesn't leave, in persistently high-conflict relationships.

Why they can or are willing to do this is anybody's guess... genetic predisposition?  child abuse? mom and dad never hugged them enough?  some combination of the above?  Virtually impossible to know, even with therapy, as they're not exactly reliable narrators.

 

I didn't have the exact same situation, but close enough.  Our last "fight" was bizarre... when I think back, but it was a pattern.  basically she intentionally crossed what she knew was a boundary for me, and when I withdrew, she went into attack mode. 

I didn't even say or do anything in response to initial behavior, but it was like we both knew the routine: she randomly - spontaneously really - attacks or picks a fight with someone from my family while they're visiting.  normally on the last day of the visit.  if I don't join in on the bully tactic, she redirects her anger to me, for "reasons"... I'm not on "her side,"... I'm not "putting her first", or [insert completely subjective impossible to meet standard here]. 

We had to go to a little kid's bday party at one of those indoor gymnasium kinda places after we dropped my family member at the airport, and BPDxw came up to me to try and engage.  I remember saying something like "please, just leave me alone right now" and she screamed "PLEASE READ (https://bpdfamily.com/safe-site.htm) YOU!" at me and stormed off.  I remember people sitting around us literally JUMPED in their seats at that. 

From my experience, I think she had a really poor and twisted self-image, and was truly very incompetent when it came to actually doing anything... she just had zero work ethic, and attention span.  Lots of grandiose plans that never came to anything once the rubber hit the road, but of course, that was always someone else's fault. 

Given the lack of self-confidence and poor self image, it might seem kinda surprising that she could act so aggressively in public, but I think she saw that there were fewer consequences from behaving like a nightmare than we've all been raised to expect, and the dopamine rush she'd get from seeing the reactions she'd cause other people by raging or by making a scene was just too good for her.  No one ever knocked any sense in her or forced her to suffer consequences for behaving like that.  She learned that was how to get ahead, and you were a sucker if you weren't doing the same thing. 

So the BPD went hand-in-hand with the self interest in her case. 

When actually cornered, she would flee.. like a toddler throwing a tantrum when they hear "no."  I remember our last MC session, when she started her "He needs to learn to put me first." nonsense, and the therapist said "Okay, what can he actually do to achieve that for you?" And she refused to commit to anything.  When the therapist pressed her on that (politely) she exploded, started yelling AT the therapist, stormed out and refused to ever go back.

Absolutely right - it becomes a script eventually and you always know how it will play out. Though she'd broken up with me many times before - always over things which didn't even concern me, like her having had a bad day at work, or having argued with her mother and even after simply losing a pool game in the bar, she'd never exhibited this intensity or ferocity. This time everything was directed at me personally.

It was like she was looking right at me but in her mind she was ranting at someone else - maybe one of the people who actually had hurt her at one time. The things she was saying were so obviously lies too that I really did doubt her sanity at the time as she was yelling 'You never buy me anything!'.. while wearing sapphires, diamonds and gold jewelry I'd bought her!  It was truly frightening. Afterwards one of the people who'd witnessed all this and seen her black and dead-looking eyes said 'If she'd had a knife in her hand she'd have used it on you for sure'. I totally believed him too. That's when I finally called it a day; moods are bad enough but the threat of physical violence is not to be tolerated under any circumstances.

I guess I'll never know how much of her actions she was conscious of. Whenever she broke up with me she'd always stay away a while then come back into the bar, knowing I'd be there and the one to make the first move to get her back, so I'm sure she did know she'd done wrong even if she'd never admit it or apologise.

I had quite a different experience to many people on here - although we did only last about a year (six months together, six months of push/pull after the break up).

She told me she'd 'beat the sh*t' out of me once, but was calm when she said it.

She raged once by driving me off in her car in the middle of the night, to a blacked out street I didn't recognise where she yelled at me a lot (that one was pretty scary).

Otherwise, she did do the "big pupils" thing, but it was more of a zombie like dissociation, where she just sorta stopped caring.

She completely pushed me away, said hurtful things... and didn't even seem to particularly know she was doing it... she was just 'gone'.

That really hurt too.

My therapist has pointed out that she also never briefed me on any of that.

If she'd said "I sometimes struggle with x, y and z; here's how you know it's happening, here's what you can do to help", it wouldn't probably felt different.

As it was, it's like she either didn't know that she behaved in that way, or that she was kinda choosing to not know...

Are false memories part of BPD?  Wondering if the person with BPD actually believes what they say is just one all-consuming and frustrating aspect of loving someone with the disorder. Hard to say. Our 19 year old daughter has many delusions. everything from psychiatrist-led pedophile rings, rape demons, special powers and allegations of sexual abuse by both friends and family members.  Given the nature of her delusions, we thought maybe something did happen to her, but sorting out anything resembling truth is virtually impossible at this point until she accepts help.  Does she believe these stories it or is she lying to protect her status as a victim?  Evidence points to the fact she knows on some level what she's doing- accusations always seem to follow someone challenging her or setting boundaries on her behavior, plus she refuses to get help of any kind or to press charges despite strongly encouraging her to do so, she even refused to go to housing for women who were sexually abused when she was facing possible homelessness. In other words, she actively avoids/almost panics at the suggestion of help or to even talk about the topic of her "abuse". My BFF has worked with sexual assault victims > 20 yrs and said she in NO WAY acts like a victim.  Also, she has slipped up with language a couple of times, accusing me of "not believing her" for things she says I witnessed?   Regardless, these lies/beliefs have resulted in terrible consequences for her and our family. Our therapist says "belief" does not work the same as it does for a non-BPD mind, she can concoct a story for psychological "protection" and come to believe it as long as it serves her.  They need professional help to help them tolerate the pain of reality as others also experience it and possible antipsychotics to assist in that effort.  (Oh, BTW, chronic marijuana use seems to have triggered/reinforced the psychotic component for her.)  its a sad illness for the person who has it and anyone who loves them.

My dbpdw has extremely disturbing stories of the abuse she suffered in childhood. Much of what she told me when we were first getting to know each other (online) she has somewhat admitted was false, and she has never explained why she lied. When I moved half way round the world to be with her, it became evident that some of her stories didn’t add up and I couldn’t make sense of it. But. I have witnessed her have ptsd nightmares, every night for months on end when we first met. She was absolutely terrified, writhing on the bed in pain and terror, gripping the bed sheets, repeating things like, “Don’t let him in” and “Ill be a good girl” “please don’t hurt me” over and over and over. I have no doubt she was raped. But my wife now questions her own memories of exactly what happened to her which was her uncle and all his friends raping her together. It sounds far fetched but she used to talk to me in the nightmares and listed many names of men who had hurt her. It all came to a head on the most disturbing night ever. “Dan… He can’t have been there… He wouldn’t have been there… He wasn’t…” I kept questioning her, “who’s Dan?” Eventually, I realised that she very clearly was needing to tell me that it was actually “Dad” who was there. I don’t know if these ptsd nightmares when people talk to others are in any way common. I couldn’t wake her from them, they would go on for hours, I would try to comfort her. The day after she told me about Dad being there, I asked her if she remembered the nightmare. She did not remember all the details. I told her what she had said about Dad. She had previously told me he abused her, but not that he was at the rape events her uncle organised. It seemed like a culmination of all the nightmares, which she had been having for around eight months we had been together. Since then she still has occasional nightmares but they have never been so graphic and physical since then. I don’t know what all this means but I would really like to know. These memories are very disturbing. If I’m totally honest, if I hadn’t seen the nightmares I would struggle to believe some of what she told me. But it has been suggested to me (on this forum) that maybe some of it was true like she was raped on several occasions, but maybe some of it her tortured mind created in childhood. She doesn’t know herself. Many of her childhood memories are missing. I still feel so very sad for her.

These responses (the above two) are both really helpful - thank you.

They touch on the exact types of things that I wondered about.

I won’t share too much about the trauma memories of my ex partner, because they’re quite specific and I want to speak delicately; but what she shared with me was… kind of… I mean.. it took a few months to recover from hearing it, for sure.

And yet… what she was describing… it involved streaming technology which was available in the mid nineties probably, but not widespread or ‘in general use’.

The setting for that streaming seems… not easy to do… and even just… those things taking place in a setting where you’d be easily discovered if someone walked in the wrong door…

I don’t know.

I don’t have to know either, I suppose; and I want to honour the fact that - regardless of the truth - she’s suffering, and that’d be horrible for absolutely anyone.

She also spoke about demons by the way, but I think that may have had something to do with what someone from a very charismatic faith group once said to her.

I suppose I just created this post because it’s part of me trying to piece together ‘who the heck was I sitting next to on the sofa for a number of months; and was she sitting in cloud of delusion more broadly, which I just had no idea about?’

I find that thought scary… like… I could have married her, never suspecting (if I wasn’t asking questions) that her reality was actually far removed from mine… and bringing children into that as well…

I’m not commenting on anyone else’s situation here - I’m just reflecting on my own and thinking

“Phew… that could’ve been a real near-miss!”

It’d be nice to know what I had a near miss from, and which ‘box’ to put it in (ie - knowing whether much of her memory was delusion or not would add to my sense of having a clear picture about the situation more generally), but I guess I’m becoming more peaceful with the ‘not knowing’.

Oh, and I will just say that even some of her present thinking seemed a bit delusional - like when she told me that “I know we’d have found each other some day, if we didn’t meet online!”

Because I had a t shirt with her favourite animal on, and ‘she’d always had a thing for people who do the work that I do’.

Lots of times she’d say a sentence out of the blue and I’d think “Oh!… that came from nowhere and seems a bit random/removed from reality… is this coming from a healthy place now, or are we back in BPD land…?”

It could shift in and out within a second or two…

Telling traumatic stories to your partner that may be entirely made up, or at best heavily embellished is bad enough.  Those of us in that situation at least have an idea of who we are, and adult concepts of reality to fall back on.  But imagine them doing & saying these kinds of things to their children, who have no experience and reference to fall back on.  It really warps their world. 

Some figure it out eventually... I imagine many don't.

Yeah, that's a good perspective.

I'm back in her home city now, and it's still a bit heartbreaking, but I just don't see how I could risk marrying and having kids with that girl.

In some ways she didn't seem as bad as some of the stories here, but it was bad enough - and she always said things like "There are things I'd tell you, but I'll only say once we're married."

Who knows what that was?

It's tempting to buy into a pretty face and a good heart... and if you saw her... she was maybe the prettiest girl I'd seen in a while.

But you can't put a price on peace of mind, yknow?

Your story, and some of the others made up here make me wonder if they intentionally create traumatic stories because they like the attention and concern it gets them. 

They share something, and get hugged and reassured they're a wonderful person and nothing was their fault. 

So... they do it again and again, or trot out new traumatic memories when you're made at them because of something they did.  "It's not my fault!  I was abused as a child.  Frankly, I'm disappointed in you not being more understanding, and bla bla bla."

I went through a similar reckoning, and unfortunately didn't realize that when choosing a mate, attractiveness needs to be "de-weighted" when evaluating whether they're marriage material or not.  Things you might overlook when dating should become a much bigger deal.  And they look a lot less attractive when dysregulating and raging over some absurd thing that set them off...

There's an interesting link between mental illness and perceived attractiveness (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/14/5/406 (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/14/5/406)). 

What is the difference between being single versus being married?
What is the difference between not having children versus having children?

Here's a clue... BPD F.O.G. = Fear, Obligation, Guilt

If you get married or start having children together, you will feel much more obligated than before to remain with her.  She knows or senses that.

Yeah, my ex badmouthing all sorts of people for not understanding enough - rather than asking herself if she needed to change.

That's a bit unfair actually, she was in regular therapy etc... but she even joked that she paid her therapist to agree with her - and many a true word spoken in jest, as they say...!

It's as if she wanted to change, but couldn't enact it somehow...

Did I misunderstand your post, or did you end up married to your ex partner?

Yeah, I think you're right. I used to think she just really wanted to be married, but I think fear of abandonment maybe underlied it.

A month or two after me, she was with another guy who called me and threatened me (she didn't tell me they were together).

Four months later, they were engaged.

I think engagement was the goal for her - and then marriage.

I think she wants to be the absolute most important thing in someone's life, and have someone who will always always always care just for her, etc etc

But all too soon the initial idolization phase would wear off and then slowly but surely the imperfections and recurring discord would surface.  It would be more and more apparent as time went on but by then she would hope to be married, maybe a baby too, and then the target would find it hard to discern what had happened.

As a general overview, we can't fix things, we're too close, being in the midst of a close emotional relationship.  BPD is a disorder most impacting to the closest of relationships.  The Denial, Blaming and Blame Shifting are so intense.  However, someone with no emotional connections - such as a therapist - might be able to impart meaningful therapy for the person's perceptions and life.  But that's a tough road ahead and it appears many don't take that path toward recovery.