BPDFamily.com

I don't even know where to begin with this.  My uBPD husband and I have been married for less than six months.  We kinda rushed into marriage after less a year and fought even before the wedding.  We're both in our mid forties.  We fight about things like the his absolute insistence that I live to keep him from sleeping at night.  He has excruciatingly sensitive hearing and every time I get up, it wakes him up.  He expects me to keep perfectly still all night. Btw, he doesn't keep still.  We sleep in a full size bed and I tried to explain a hundred times that a queen size would go a long way to help. He won't accept.  Just says the size of the bed won't make a difference. I simply live to keep him sleep deprived.  He does things like insist that I give him "death stares" and yell at him all the time. Honestly, my yelling has gotten worse.  His accusations of me have gone from odd to troubling to downright traumatizing.  He decided somewhere along the line that I hate it and get angry when he watches tv.  I don't think that way at all and never said I did.  He even told me that he's convinced that I spend my days just brainstorming what I can do to make his life as unbearable as possible and I get a perverse pleasure in doing so.  Oftentimes, my yelling comes when he makes theses accusations. He refuses to believe that I love/care about him and my trying to change his mind  escalates to a fight  He'll storm out, sometimes for a whole weekend  (his parents have an unoccupied apartment nearbly, that he flees to...   When he comes back, things are stiff and distant.  The cycle repeats over and over.  To make things more complicated, he has full custory of an 11 year old daughter, so I'm now a first time stepmother (no kids of my own).  To make things even worse, I have a history of pretty intense depression/anxiety.   Very refractory.  Sometime it responds to treartment, sometimes not.  And my husbannd doesn't believe in clinical depression and just doesn't get it.  When I need to withdraw within, he sees this as another source of rejection and becomes his own unique combo of furious and devastated  It has compromised our sex life and for this I do feel very guilty...   I could go on and on with issues, but the above are some highlights.  He actully  mentioned marital counseling several weeks ago and I said no, thinking that his anger  issues and  paranoia issues about me would preclude and useful counseling. Of couse he interpretred it as my being worried about containing my own anger.  Over the months, he's actually threatened divorce but alwasys stopped short. This time he forcced me to leave our home, while declaring to me once and for all that I hate him and everthing about him.  i've been able to "talk him down before," but not this time.  I suggested marriage counseling yesterday and he's not interested. When I left our home, I want to my father's house... The weird twist is that he wanted all my out of our house asap and told me multiple times yesterday and today, that he would bring it all to me tonight because he just wanted it gone.  Well, it's past midnight and my stuff hasn't materialized. don't know what to make of it.  he's always accused me of playing mind games with him and what he did tonight is most certainly a mind game if I ever saw him play one.  I gotta end this by apologizing for the endless, ramblimg.  I just needed to dump it all out.  Sorry, as well for the numerous typos - I'm usually pretty meticulous about my grammar and spelling, but it's late at night and I'm tired and frustrated.  Anyway, if anyone out there has some similar/overlapping experiences and/or insight, I'd be very grateful.  One thing, though - as bad as I make my husband sound, and it can get bad,  I really do love him and want advice on how to preserve this marriage.  So, people whose advice is that "I'm better off without him" need not respond.  Thank you.

Hi, I'm sorry to hear about all the troubles you are having. My partner seems to have BPD traits and breaks up with me quite frequently. I find that not yelling back at him really helps. It is not easy when someone constantly interrupts and is just being awful/cruel/mean, but with a bit of studying here and perhaps watching videos on communication techniques you can at least work on your side of things. I think my husband tried to divorce me just two weeks after we married. It was painful and humiliating. He just suggested, was it yesterday, I'm not sure, it's such a blur, the same thing. Over and over and over I hear this, followed by apologies and statements of how he will never do/say it again and didn't mean it. Sigh. I have never once said this, never would unless I was really going to go through with it.

He has 3 kids. I never had any. I welcomed this with an open heart at the beginning, but he made it extremely hard and did a real number on us by turning his kids against me. But then, poor kids, he tries to turn them back to liking me when he does again. I am a bit under water here myself, still recovering from his last break up, and afraid because he got some bad news from court about owing his ex money, I am sure this will be used in the next break up attack against me somehow, so I am already girding for that... .so not a lot to offer by way of strategies here today, but do want to say I care and I am so sorry for your pain and suffering! :) It helps to keep the picture of the person you love in mind, and depersonalize this stuff whenever possible.

Maybe you can negotiate on the sleep stuff? Would separate beds or rooms be possible? Is he ever in a white phase and willing to find a solution? If you ask in a non-blaming way, but in an extremely supportive way would a change be possible to at least see improvement on this one issue? :)

I wish I could be helpful, but I'm pretty much in the same boat. Just have a read through some of the resources on this site for tips on how to manage your reactions and responses to outbursts. I've mostly been trying to take myself out of the picture when he has outbursts, just listening and letting him get everything out, not defending myself or giving any advice. I still need to work on being able to give any response that won't be taken negatively.

As for him not bringing your stuff over, I doubt he really wants a divorce at this stage. Maybe just check on how he's doing without mentioning your stuff or divorce, and see if he wants you to come back. I've gone through a few "divorces" already, and they don't last longer than a couple days for us.