BPDFamily.com

I have a problem with my pwBPD which is when she goes into her super negative attack mode it often ends with her doing something really stupid like lose something because she is so upset she isn't thinking clearly. This time and the last it was her phone. When this happens everything must stop and go into full panic mode as she has a small nervous breakdown, usually blaming me and my daughter for everything. We spend lots of time finding the lost object ( phone dropped on the street last two times, smashed by cars first time but miraculously intact this time) and then things slowly wind down with her depressed but at least not hysterical. Is this a typical BPD thing to have the world stop for the crisis of the day?  How do you deal with it?  At this point I just try to be calm and solve the problem but she hates my being calm. It is the only way I can cope. Just wondering if anyone else goes through this. Our relationship is pretty bad right now, I'm just trying to hang in a little longer.

I'd suggest you separate that into two aspects:

• She lost something, and is looking for it in a panic.
  
  This is reasonable. My ex was kinda like that, and I wasn't prone to her level of panic, and didn't really like being around it, but I (eventually!) realized I couldn't talk her out of it, and usually I helped her look.
• "Super negative attack mode"
  
  If she is attacking you (for any reason), this is time to enforce some boundaries and protect yourself... .in short by removing yourself from her company.
  
  Do you need help doing this?

Emotional crisis is being processed as physical crisis and projected onto you so she is not alone in it. You trying to solve the physical crisis is bypassing the real issue, the emotional crisis. By staying calm you are leaving her isolated in her emotional crisis.  She see this firstly as not listening to the real issue, and secondly abandoning her to her turmoil.

If you fix the physical crisis you deprive her of her means of expression, so she rolls it into the next, feeling undermined and devaluated.

It is a "need" and a need is a process, it doesn't have a start, finish and resolution. It is ongoing.

Listening without fixing is often the most productive course in the long term, even if it is against your instinct.

This rings many bells for me. My wife frequently has a "crisis du jour" — and the expectation is that I'm supposed to drop everything and help her handle it. For many years, I did just that, but more recently I've started delaying my responses. And what do you know... .she often figures things out for herself without my assistance. I don't love the idea of playing games with her, but by delaying my responses to her frantic texts and voicemails I've avoided getting sucked into many of her (often self-inflicted) crises. For the situations that really merit my help, I make myself more available.

Self-care!

CATASTROPHIZING (https://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-catastrophizing/) is a pretty common BPD trait.

Thanks for the input, yes catastrophizing is a common thing I deal with.  Also giving a little wait time is also a good thing as indeed she will figure things out usually.  However, I do usually have to deal with it because the crisis is usually founded in some reality.  Hard for me to get too worked up about it though because these crises are such a regular event.  I wonder how 2 BPDs together work out?  Seems like it would be disaster but maybe they could support each others black and white thinking.

Short term they validate each other. Like two way idealization. But eventually self interests will cause a blow out.

My friend, K, will go into crisis, seek out my help, and then sometimes not even use the help she begged me to provide in the first place.    Last time this happened, I was actually in Paris, France on a vacation.   K contacts me at midnight, my time, Wow she is stranded somewhere and doesn't have bus fare to get her out of whatever stupid situation she was in, and get herself back home a few hundred miles away.   She sounded desperate and panicked and actually vaguely hinting that she was in some sort of unsafe situation.    So I go online and get he an Amtrack ticket out of town on bus the next morning.   Email her, etc.   She ends up not only never thanking me, she actually never used the ticket!     This sort of thing has happened several times - catastrophy - the sky is falling - I come to the "rescue", she doesn't even end up using the assistance she asked me to provide.  I'm assuming it's a bid for attention, nothing more.

The drama is not about the issue at hand, it is internal, the issue at hand is simply a vehicle for expressing it. Hence you fixing the "issue" doesn't solve the problem so it is not taken on board. You listening to her having a drama and validating that she is stressed is often all she really needs.

Common cycle is pwBPD asks for help/advice,  non gives advice, pwBPD ignores advice or even perceives the advice as controlling, non gets frustrated that they were ignored and eventually gives up helping. pwBPD has abandonment issues and paints non black. pwBPD plays victim and gets advice re abandonment issue from someone else causing triangulation and the dice rolls again.

I've lived this with my wife far more times than I care to remember. The difference is now that I know what's happening, I don't engage nearly as much as I used to. Most of the time, she didn't accept my suggestions anyway! Eventually, she puts on her big-girl pants and figures out her own solutions to the crises du jour.

That said, if something truly requires my involvement, I will do so. But that threshold, in my mind, is much higher than it used to be. Take that, inner white knight!

Here's my lesson about catastrophizing. In hindsight, it's pretty funny.

When I first met my pwBPD, she was dealing with a medical problem that left her unable to drive and in need of a home care assistant. I helped her move back into her apartment, went shopping with her, put things away ... .I felt useful and needed, and it felt like a real problem that I could fix.

Flash forward through years and years of crises, big and small ... .accidents, injuries, broken-down cars, you name it.

... .until the day we were at a restaurant and her pho came with too much cilantro in it. She declared dinner was ruined and inedible, so I sat there picking cilantro out of her soup so she would eat it. Like having a toddler!