BPDFamily.com

Hello bpdfamily members,

I chose to name myself hopeful_future because that is how I feel right now and it is what I believe. Here is my story.

Back in the summer of 2012 I met a woman who was very charming and attractive. She was likewise attracted to me and we hit it off. We dated while I interviewed for a job in a city she was leaving and we only overlapped geographically in that city while she was moving and I was interviewing. We then had a long distance for a few months during which she made an unsuccessful bid to start a new life elsewhere. She then chose to move back to the city I was in, renting a room in a friend's house. Her relationship with her friend deteriorated in an explosion of fleas and an inability for the roommates to agree to get rid of them using effective tools. One result of this conflict with her friend was that she moved in with me into my tiny one-bedroom apartment.

During this time she and I were also dreaming together. We were both in nomadic families as children and were crafting a dream together to go on a grand adventure. We would move to Peru and establish a new life down there. I was not happy with my employment situation in the city nor did I much like the city itself so this idea had its attractions. Yet it was definitely not thought out, impulsive, and extremely unplanned. These qualities are not normally how I operate. I am an INTJ on the Myer-Briggs scale and typically bring much methodical planning, sometimes too much, to my actions. Somehow I got caught up in the romance and the impulsiveness that characterized this ill-fated adventure. My wife is an ENFP.

In the fall of 2013 I quit my job after saving over $15,000 and we left on our grand road trip to Peru. That trip lasted three months, traversed only the length of the West Coast of the US and Baja California, and ended with her being pregnant, us being broke, and moving in with my parents. Ugh. Not exactly what we had in mind.

I did what I thought was the right thing and married her in the spring of 2014. Our son was born in the fall of 2014. Little did we know what we were in for. He has an immunodeficiency and had two meningitis infections before he was five months old which meant we lived for six weeks in the hospital during those first five months. We discovered the immunodeficiency during the second meningitis.

Also in the fall of 2014 my wife started medical school, an intense three year program that required us to take up a nomadic life in and have her on-call 24 hours a day nearly every day of the month in a highly-irregular schedule. All these factors meant I was not able to return to my full-time career and instead served my family as a stay-at-home dad doing odd jobs as a freelancer.

During all this I struggled with our relationship. She was very difficult to work with on typical household management stuff like finances, grocery shopping, and any sort of planning for the future. Any time I tried to discuss these issues, diplomatically, conflict would almost nearly always arise. Financial crises were regular fixtures of our lives together, yet all my efforts to control our spending with budgets were met with passive resistance. My assessment remains that my wife is pretty terrible at the game of life and only just barely holds it together.

As an INTJ I wanted to improve our relationship so I applied my significant analytical skills to understanding the system of our relationship. Through this research and thinking I found the description of the traits of Borderline Personality Order. The description made sense of everything I was witnessing in our relationship as well as her past relationships and family history as I know it. It was like one of those connect-the-dots pictures where the description of BPD clarified the picture for me and explained what I was experiencing. I tried to help by showing her the results of my analysis. That did not help. Yet another data point aligned with BPD.

I tried to talk about this stuff with her and she didn't want hear it. She refused to believe that she could have a personality disorder although she was willing to consider that she might have a mood disorder.

After attempting to influence her to get help for many months and tired of the blame-shifting of her poorly managed emotions onto me, I set a boundary-consequence pair with her in May of 2017. The boundary was that I was not willing to stay in a marriage with a person who is unwilling to acknowledge or treat her mental illness. The consequence was that I would file for divorce at the end of July, giving us a month to gracefully separate before our lease ended at the end of August.

Ten days before the end of July I was forced from our home by an ex parte protection order alleging domestic violence. In her affidavit she had taken real events as seeds for her story telling; embellished each of those events into a long narrative that painted a really ugly and false picture of me; and then sought a year-long protection order where I would have limited and supervised contact with my son among other punitive asks she made of the court. These false allegations were ultimately dismissed by a judge in a revision hearing after the protection order was incorrectly granted by the court commissioner who I believe was vulnerable to her false emotional pleas. Fortunately the judge was not vulnerable to the false messaging. On reflection, my mistake was in telling her the boundary-consequence. I should have instead acted in secret and just filed for divorce; I wanted to be transparent with her and try to get her the help she needs in one last effort. I am reading a book by Bill Eddy and the false allegations were a predictable event and one that I could have been better prepared for.

I filed for divorce on the same day the court commissioner incorrectly issued the ultimately-dismissed protection order. Now that a temporary parenting plan is in place after several hearings we are attempting to individually re-establish economic and geographic stability for our respective households. I am making good progress on this after she left me destitute, scrambling, and in debt to an attorney to defend myself from her false allegations. I suspect her progress will be more limited due to her inability to create a pattern of good life decisions.

Once I am re-established financially I will hire a new attorney and we will hash out the details of custody and debt allocation. I am anticipating a great deal of high-conflict behaviors from her in establishing legal custody, physical custody, and debt allocation which I am really not looking forward to. Economic and geographic stability will help me weather that impending storm. Fortunately I am the petitioner of the divorce and thus able to drive the timeline such that I have the ability to establish successful new life patterns before tackling those important issues and the anticipated high-level of conflict surrounding them.

This is my story and yet I am hopeful for the future. I know many of you have similar stories and I look forward to reading about them.

Where I need help and support is in answering questions like:

• Can an undiagnosed and untreated, likely high-functioning, Borderline be a reasonable or even good parent?
• What position should I take on legal and physical custody to best support my son's mental health?
• How can I influence my wife to get the help she needs?
• How can I successfully settle this divorce out of court to avoid the expense and conflict of a trial?
• What is most important in preserving the wellbeing of my co-parenting relationship such that my son preserves good and healthy relationships with both of his parents?

Thanks for welcoming me here as well as sharing your stories and advice with me.

Sincerely,

hopeful_future

Hi hopeful_future,

Welcome and hello  :)

That's a lot to go through, and it says a lot about you that you can see a way forward that is positive for you.  |iiii


She may be able to meet some needs of your son, but she probably won't be able to offer him emotional or psychological safety. It is fairly common for BPD parents to invert the parent-child role, where she will seek emotional validation from your son, instead of the opposite, in which she validates his emotional reality. There was some research shared here on the board a while ago about how many children with BPD parents are at higher risk for psychopathology, ranging everywhere from anxiety and depression to full-blown BPD. The good news is that by living separately, you will be able to raise your child to be emotionally resilient. This might take some learning on your part -- the skills are not intuitive and for many of us, have to be learned. Eddy wrote another book called Don't Alienate the Kids: Raising Emotional Resilient Children When One Parent Has BPD. It's excellent, and highly recommended.


Ask for what you think is best. If you think primary physical custody is the best, then ask for it. The worse that will happen is that you'll get something less than that. Your wife has shown she is willing to play hardball, so any hope that she will meet you somewhere in the middle is probably not realistic. Also, if your L tries to talk you out of asking for full custody or primary physical custody, I came across a study a while ago that says while it is true that more mothers get more custody, it is also true that more mothers ask for more custody. In the cases where fathers asked for primary physical or full custody, they were awarded it as often as mothers were. Sometimes, lawyers unknowingly perpetuate a bias, to try and manage expectations.

Experts like Dr. Craig Childress and Richard Warshak, who write about parental alienation (one of the pathological parenting behaviors often associated with a personality disorder), advise parents to get as much visitation as possible.


Probably not. Especially now that you have been split black.


If she is high-conflict, you may not be able to avoid going to court, unfortunately. There are some ways you can try to minimize costs, though. And getting advice from the peanut gallery here will help a lot (it did for me). Probably the most important thing you can be doing right now is to create a system of documentation. This will cut down on the he-said, she-said.


There are dialectical behavior therapy skills that can help prevent things from getting worse. Your wife likely has a crippling sense of shame and incompetence, so learning how to communicate with her in ways that do not escalate her intense and unstable moods may help stabilize things a bit.

What kind of mother has she been to your son so far?

Is he bonding with her?

What kind of parenting arrangement do you for now?

Have you talked to a lawyer yet?

Glad you found the site  :)

There is a lot of collective wisdom here and people who have walked in your shoes.

Hi livednlearned,

Thanks for your response here and for the welcome.

Great book recommendation from Bill Eddy on how to raise a child in my context. Thank you for that and the other advice as well, it was all valuable.

To answer your questions:

What kind of mother has she been to your son so far?

I think that my wife has been a good mother so far. She biases pretty strongly towards the permissive side and I tend toward the authoritative, not authoritarian, style of parenting. In my research it seems that permissive parenting correlates to poor discipline, anxiety, and other issues arising, so I have some concern about her style of parenting. Yet, it is very clear she is doing her best and loves him very much. I personally experienced the classic emotional push/pull along with other BPD traits with her and hope she does not do the same to my son. I do believe that my wife's most difficult BPD traits will be and remain linked romantic partners and not affect her relationship with her son because she is not in fear of being abandoned by him. Yet, it is still something I'm watching out for. I'm going to seek to grow an emotionally resilient little boy to the best of my ability.

Is he bonding with her? Definitely. He loves his mom very much.

What kind of parenting arrangement do you for now? He is with her for four continuous days each week and I have him the other three, 96 and 72 hours respectively. He does not have contact with the other parent during each parent's residential time. We're largely allowing each other to parent independently. I would like us to move to 50:50 for both legal and physical custody, but as you mention in your response a cooperative outcome like that may not be probable. I asked for on 80:20 split in my favor in the divorce petition. I am anticipating much more conflict in finalizing our divorce and the residential ratio is going to be a core issue.

Have you talked to a lawyer yet? Yes, I have spoken to two separate layers in detail about my case. The first helped me largely with defending myself against the false allegations that started our legal process. After running out of money I successfully won the revision hearing pro se and the protection order was terminated. After I land a new job and stabilize financially and geographically I will hire a new lawyer that has experience with high-conflict personalities and press forward to a final decree.

My high level goals are and have always been:

• Minimize the risk of my son carrying forward problems regulating emotions as BPD is known to be passed down to children of mothers with BPD.
• Minimize the expense, in terms of time, money, and emotional toll, that this process takes to complete.