BPDFamily.com

I have been married for 6 years and have two small kids with my husband. He does not have a history of physical abuse, but struggled with people telling him something was wrong with him as he went through years of ADHD diagnoses and treatment. Though his father isn't clinically diagnosed as a Narcissist, I am pretty confident he is.

Our marriage has always been intense. He has these ideas in his head of what a perfect family looks like, and always compares ours to others on social media. He has very high expectations of what a perfect wife and mother should be, and when I fail to meet those expectations, he lets me know. He doesn't call me names, his form of verbal abuse is much more subtle. He ask what kind of wife/mother does x, y, z? "You're not normal, you know that right?"

If I need to go to the grocery store he thinks it is to get away from him. I have been out with girlfriends maybe 5 times in two years, and each time it results in a major fight, and he brings it up weekly and makes assuming remarks that I want to be single and party. I have a very hard time getting any time to myself. I am in a career that I love, have two toddlers, and my husband gets upset if I even read a book when the kids go to sleep because I am not paying attention to him. I know that if I ever leave the house to do something for myself alone, I will pay. I haven't had the energy to go above and beyond for my elderly grandparents lately because I am so emotionally exhausted. My friends know not to ask me to go and do anything with them because they know my husband will freak out (they have seen it first hand). I feel like he tries to control my every move.

I used to think that if I just sacrifice and meet his needs that he will change, but I am starting to learn that only his needs change, he becomes more demanding. New needs are constantly formed. Recently I started feeling so inadequate, until I realized that maybe it's not me. He is incredibly insecure, needy and self absorbed.

Sometimes I open up to him about things and he later uses them against me. My family often jokingly makes fun of each other and he takes every word they say to heart and insults me later in the heat of one of his rages. Lately he has felt me putting my foot down and he has begun to grip the bat even harder, hurting me so much in the process. He has done several things (like telling my family lies about me) in order to hurt me. His rages are out of control. No matter how much I try to walk away or tell him I need space to cool off (in a calm, loving way), he follows me and can't contain himself. He says awful things to me one minute, then texts me from the next room asking me why I won't come in there and just BE with him. While I am still so upset he can't understand why I can't just get over it and hold him or kiss him. Then he says I'm so cold.

He also uses sex against me a lot. I like sex. I have sex with him at least twice a week, but sometimes when he isn't feeling "close" to me and I am tired, he berates me with how HE needs to have sex because HE needs to feel loved and wanted, with complete disregard to how tired I am.

Recently, as I have been pretty hurt and just trying to focus on myself and not him, he has been freaking out. He runs me around in circles in conversations to start an argument and doesn't directly answer my questions. He knows how much he has hurt me over the past few weeks, but makes me out to be the bad guy and tells me he thinks I am having an affair, that he would rather die than feel so alone and unwanted, he is researching how to fall out of love with me, how I need to end it, etc. then says how much he needs me, how desperate he is, how I need to realize that I am losing him and I better show him my love or he is done. Literally, a few hours later he bought me roses. Never apologized or anything, just bought me roses. I said thank you, but I was confused. A few hours after that he got so mad at me and said I don't love him because I wasn't elated about the roses.

I don't know what to do. I want to follow instructions from the books I have been reading and take care of myself and communicate differently to him, but I guess I need to hear thoughts from other people if this behavior is normal or if it really is high functioning borderline. I would really appreciate any input.

Hi CareerMom11,  

*welcome*

I'd like to welcome you to bpdfamily. We can diagnose your H, only a professional can do that! What we can look at are traits. From where I'm sitting, there are a couple of traits that stick out for, black and white thinking and fear of abandonment and fear of engulfment.

A pwBPD see the world in black and white and they don't see the shades of grey, it's very rigid as you've experienced first hand. A good person has bad qualities and a bad person has good qualities, a pwBPD can't see a someone as integrated whole.

Your H was probably feeling resentment from being rejected or perceived rejection, a pwBPD are hyper vigilant when it comes to rejection, continuously scanning for rejections cues. He pushed you away and then that distance triggered his fear of abandonment and then he tried to pull when he bought you roses. I'd feel confused with the roses too, you have two completely realities playing out.

Anyways that one way of perceiving your post, I'm not a professional, I have an ex wife that I suspect has BPD traits. A pwBPD blame the world for their problems and that's when I started to clue in with my ex that there was serious problem, she's still undiagnosed and untreated, 1/3 of people are diagnosed, another third are diagnosed and don't believe that they are mentally ill and some people never get diagnosed.

Reading about the disorder helps in a couple of ways, it normalizes the behavior, it helps to understand why he acts the way that he does, at face value it makes absolutely not sense but text book it makes perfect sense. The other thing is it depersonalizes the behaviors, the behaviors that your H exhibits are not personal to you, it's something that he's going through because of the way that he's wired, he's just wired differently.

BPD? How can I know? (https://bpdfamily.com/content/diagnosis-borderline-personality-disorder)

I am so sorry and feel your pain. Your story is so similar to mine. Married 5 years, a toddler. All the same stuff with te making me pay if I go out, picking fights etc. things got so bad with my uBPDh in terms of verbal abuse that I kicked him out 5 months ago. This was before I knew about BPD. I would have done things differently if I had known ahead of time. In the last month or two things have changed drastically since I started validating and mirroring. We just spent the weekend as a family. It was not without him becoming disregulated three times but I can't  stress how validating has changed things in terms of how much faster things resolve. Good luck.