BPDFamily.com

Hi all,

This article has been one of the most helpful ones in helping me understand and make sense of the arc of my relationship with my ex:

https://bpdfamily.com/content/how-borderline-relationship-evolves

I can see, though, that is is heavily loaded with judgmental language (berserker, etc). What is helpful to me about the article is the idealization-clinging-devaluation/discard insight but I wonder how balanced it is given all the other language. What do you all think?

This article is the oldest article (first article) on the site. It explains the a relationship evolves and can transition from idealization to devaluation - explaining a significant cognitive dissonance members experience (how did I go from being the perfect man to not being a "real man"). It's an starter article that appeals to people in the earliest stages of emotional turmoil - it has a lot of emotional language. It is the most read and most quoted article on the site and by other sites referring here.

The language and the implied malicious intent in the article are overstated, as you point out.  We had the article revised by the author twice to soften this bias. He has since passed. Our thought has been that the core ideas that relationships goes through an evolution as "fantasy hits reality" is a really helpful concept and outweighs the authors personal bias on intent.

Look forward to hearing others opinions.

Yes, it fits my experience.  No, it's not balanced.  I find it lacks the nuance behind the why of BPD.  These folks aren't looking to hurt anyone intentionally in trying to get others to love them.  They're just trying to fill a soul aching survival need with the only tools they have. 

The part that resonated with me most was this section:
"It is like you are a Coast Guard cutter and she is a drowning woman-- but she drowns in a peculiar way. Every time you pull her out of the turbulent sea, feed her warm tea and biscuits, wrap her in a comfy blanket and tell her everything is okay, she suddenly jumps overboard and starts pleading for help again. And, no matter how many times you rush to the emotional rescue, she still keeps jumping back into trouble."

I struggled because we were married already and I thought he had worked through the self-sabotage in therapy before we got married or I never would have gotten back together with him (we were high school sweethearts).   Then I watched helplessly as he kept trashing our financial and emotional lives trying to figure out why someone would do this.  He couldn't acknowledge he was doing any of it.  It was like the sea swept him back off the cutter, in his mind.  At one point I talked with his therapist, because there were some decisions I had to make to protect my finances and my job that prevented him from bottoming out.  I had to ask, look, I'm doing this to protect myself, but I am concerned it's enabling him.  Is it worse for us to stay together, is it preventing him from the opportunity to learn on his own?  That therapist said with BPD, he could only heal in a relationship; it was the only way to work through his issues.  3 years later and he is back in the ocean again, as for me, I've turned that cutter back to shore to my own safe harbor.

Hi kc sunshine,

If I remember rightly this was probably the first article I read when I came to bpdfamily. Every sentence resonated with me back then as I was in the beginning stages of just starting to understand what a diagnosis of BPD meant within my marriage. It kept me here on this forum, it was the starting point for the end of my marriage as I expected it to be.
When I read it now it takes straight back to that time, the writing really captured the emotional intensity of my relationship. The language used was as dramatic as my husband's dysregulations and as extreme as my anxiety, and that was massively important for me at the time.