BPDFamily.com

Hi, all. My first post; nice place you've got here. I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right forum - I'm torn day to day and hour to hour about whether I want to save and improve the relationship or whether I'm looking to get out. Apologies if this should be somewhere else, and if it's overlong.

I'm WM, straight/cis. My girlfriend/partner (I'll call her "Holly" - names have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and everyone in-between) is diagnosed with BPD, CPTSD, bipolar and I forget what else. Much of this stems from a horrifically traumatic childhood of abuse & neglect (and probably from a genetic predisposition, given family history). Her ACES score is a 10. She has lots of physical health issues, too, not surprisingly, some stemming from years of on again/off again anorexia. We're both around 50 years old. Together for almost 3 years, most of that long distance. This past fall I finally left my city where I'd lived almost 30 years, and my job of 18 years, to move in with her, in another city and state. Our hopes were that things would improve once we were no longer long distance (something that is hard for any couple and was enormously triggering for her abandonment issues). But on average, things have been more volatile than ever. Six months later, everything is falling apart.

During our latest fight on Thursday night, she cut herself badly, requiring stitches, for the second time in as many months (something that she hadn't done in several years before then). EMS and police came to our apartment after I called 911, while she screamed and raged and sobbed at me and staunched the flow of blood from her arm with a kitchen towel. She's back in the psych ward as of Friday, also for the second time in as many months (again, it had been years previously). She is on suicide watch. Friday night she spent 2+ hours texting me a torrent of venomous criticism and complaint about my failings as a partner, calling me a "nightmare" and a "monster" and a "bully" and I can't even remember what else. She says her mental health has been destroyed by our relationship and "You all but put the knife in my hand to help me along." Thursday night in mid-rant she smacked a (small) (empty) cardboard box into my face; she's talked before about how often she wants to hit me and has to suppress the urge, but this is the first time she's actually struck me, however mildly. (To be fair, on Saturday over the phone, she brought that up unprompted and apologized profusely for it and said, believably, that the fact it hit me was accidental. For what that's worth.)

Holly claims that everyone who is "supposed to love her" has abandoned her. In her telling, even her dad (with whom she has a pretty good relationship), and her best friend have responded to her latest crisis by "giving up on her." I know enough about those people and about how her perceptions are distorted when she's in that state, that I'm sure that isn't a fair characterization. She even texted a few of my close friends and my sister, telling them she was in the hospital on suicide watch and complaining about me. This was particularly triggering in the case of my sister, who has lots of emotional problems herself and a history of suicidal impulses and hospitalization for them; my sister didn't respond and just blocked Holly. She was on thin ice in my family's eyes already, and I'm not sure her rep with them can recover from this.

She has basically been flooded 24/7 for weeks now, and taking a very black and white/"split" view in which she has done everything she can and this is all my fault because I refuse to hold up my end of the relationship - something that has not previously been typical of her. I have little doubt that one factor is that the docs made a major medication adjustment during her last inpatient stay. So she's still in that transitional period where dosage is being tinkered with and her body is learning what to do with the new drugs.

I won't go into the "things are so magical when they're good" speech; most of you know how that goes, too. But I wanted to mention that it applies here. She can be immensely caring, empathetic, generous, charismatic, and fun, and she's very intelligent and artistically talented.
 And gorgeous. She can also be very rigid, in the neighborhood of OCD, with how she wants things done and how she wants her life arranged, partly as a control mechanism after a life during which she has often felt the victim of uncontrollable forces; and she can sometimes be quite unforgiving when others, including myself, can't or won't live up to her rigid expectations.

Another nuance that makes things even more confusing: She has had decades of DBT, 1x1 psychotherapy, and other psych work, is on lots of medications, and in many ways is a success story, by the standards of her history and diagnoses. She has more than once said something like, "By all rights, I should be dead or drug-addicted and homeless or something." Most of the time, she is highly functional; just a few months ago, she lost her part-time job of over half a decade, which she had loved. She is usually pretty self-aware about her BPD and other challenges, and can speak articulately and with nuance about them, including in self-critical ways.

But then Ms. Hyde emerges after some trigger or other. The twist there is that Hyde doesn't always or even usually take the form of raging and sobbing and self-harm. She can be superficially calm, extremely articulate and hyperverbal. In this state, she (mostly unconsciously, I think) weaponizes the jargon and concepts of psychotherapy, DBT, etc., to make her flooded emotions sound intellectually valid, and to attack me while convincing herself (and sometimes me, temporarily) that she's simply engaged in observations and analysis, and that my hurt reactions are just me being "defensive" and unwilling to credit her thoughts. (Her latest theory is that I may be on the mild end of the autism spectrum and that's why I'm supposedly unable to respond properly to her emotions; a concept any of my friends and family find bizarre.) A longtime friend of Holly's that I was texting with the last couple days observed that she "can mask a certain amount of being totally flooded emotionally, so that you think you're talking to someone's reasonable mind, when you are in fact only interacting with Trauma, or one of the F's (fight, flight, freeze). It took me years to get any handle on this!" (I'd be particularly interested to hear if anyone else here has similar experiences.) She falls back too often on (paraphrased) "I'm sick and have trauma so it isn't my fault that I behave like this, you have to support me better so I don't get into this state and then things will be okay."

I don't claim to be blameless in all of this; I have my own issues with temper, defensiveness, procrastination, and disorganization that mesh very badly with her issues. When she is critical and reactive, I can be defensive and reactive, starting a chain reaction that ends up with our both becoming flooded. Rather than doing the things that all the books & research tell me I should do to calm and validate her, I try to argue my side, and I'm sure you all know how that ends up going. I've gotten better at not actually flipping out and yelling at her, at least. I have recently started a weekly DBT group course to improve my ability to support and communicate with her, but that's a slow process. And yes, I have a therapist myself, plus Holly and I have been in couples therapy for roughly a year and a half, but that hasn't gotten us much of anywhere. I had a rare 1x1 session with our therapist the last time Holly was inpatient, and she expressed frustration, saying something like, "Part of my job is to call out both parties on their [bleep], and Holly is so reactive to even mild pushback that it makes it very hard to do."

I've gone back and forth recently on whether to keep working on this as things get increasingly hard, or to give it up, but it's difficult to see how the latter is even a practical option right now. We moved a few months ago to a new apartment that's much more than either of us, especially she, can afford alone, and then spent a lot of money on fixing it up beautifully. I can't simply leave her here to shoulder the rent by herself, especially given she's unemployed and in no shape to find or hold down a new position anytime soon. She's eating into her savings as it is. And I can't really afford to pay this rent by myself for long, even with my very well paying new corporate job. (That's a whole other topic - I was just formally notified my job performance isn't up to snuff at the new gig, which I believe is at least in part because my brain has been so fried from stress and not enough sleep; so the new life I moved so recently to build is looking shaky in all respects.)

That's more than enough out of me. Empathy, advice, thoughts, questions... I'll take it all. I just need to connect with people who "get it" from firsthand experience. I'm desperate and exhausted and sad and angry and ashamed and a thousand other things. Thank you all in advance.  :heart:

Hi likely story and welcome,
I am sure many of us will relate to your story. I am in a lesbian marriage and my wife was diagnosed bpd before we met. She also had a highly traumatic childhood with a history of abuse, and has suffered with eating disorders, self harm, and suicide attempts.. all of which she appeared to be using to manipulate and control me when we first met. We have now been together since 2014, and I joined bpd family around early 2021. I used to tell people bpd fam saved my marriage, I was that excited about the changes I had manifested. Hmmm but then we had a terrible year in 2023 when she split on me for the whole year basically, so I would never say anything could save us now. But I have learnt that there were things I could change when I had got myself into a position of being incredibly helpless. That was the part I enjoyed, reclaiming myself, wearing what I wanted to wear, doing what I wanted to do, taking photos of the kids and sending them to my mother, which bpdw had forbidden. I was successful despite my wife not knowing I was doing this work or putting in any effort of her own. It is literally all about trying to handle her in the best way possible. Stopping being invalidating made a huge difference and I found that my wife’s behaviour was calmer, often by my speaking less and not disagreeing constantly with her warped view of the world. Anyway, this website is very good especially if you need specific advice then the forum members are so helpful I still come on here most days even though I don’t post that often. I highly recommend the book, “stop caretaking the borderline or narcissist”. I am not in therapy and my wife is not willing to do anymore, but I do question whether your couples therapist understands bpd well enough to help. Calling out pwbpd on their sh1t unfortunately sounds like invalidating them. Much as we all want to tell them what we think (my favourite word used to be “ridiculous”), I’m not sure it works with pwbpd, because they need to feel connected, heard, and understood before you can even attempt to negotiate anything with them. This may be ridiculous, but it seems to be true. Good luck with your journey.