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I am married to a high functioning borderline. Our marriage is on the rocks (in counseling now, but heading towards a separation/divorce).  In counseling, I have subtly altered the counselor to my spouse condition (repeatedly used phrase walking on eggshells)...not sure if counselor gets it as she describes my wife’s behavior as maladaptive coping skills and co dependent, but either way I have finally told her I will be setting boundaries and no longer allow her to continue to blame me for everything that goes wrong in her life, and won’t put up with her repeated bouts of rage. The question I have is if it’s worth giving my spouse a copy of walking on eggshells to read. On the one hand, I think she lacks in the insight to understand it describes her perfectly, but on the other I figure what the heck - what can it hurt? As it’s going now, we’re likelt to get divorced anyways, but if the book can open her eyes maybe she will get help and we can work things out (which is generally what I want). Of note my spouse and I are both doctors, and I think this is particularly problematic and she does not willingly accept medical help. She has some insight into the fact that her behavior is problematic, but I think acceptance of BPD is a long way away. Has anyone ever given their spouse a copy of Walking On Eggshells and had a positive response from their spouse? Thanks for the input.

Short answer, no don't give it to her.  High functioning pwBPD can be tough because they've been able to get by with their coping skills and attain a good amount of success in life.  If you try to convince her that she has BPD and needs to fix herself, it's going to go poorly.

The counselor isn't wrong to describe what she's doing as maladaptive coping skills.  BPD behaviors are a constellation of painfully ineffective and damaging maladaptive coping skills.  It's best to concentrate on behaviors rather than labels like BPD.

Once we get clued into BPD, learn some coping skills, and understand how our behavior interacts with our partner's to fuel conflict, we realize that there's a lot we've been doing that we need to stop doing, and things we need to start doing.

Can you tell us more about how she is blaming you and about her bouts of rage?  We can give you advice on how to respond to those situations in a way that is less likely to worsen the conflict, and may reduce it.

RC

Still learning myself, but crashed and burned royally with the book or mentioning personality disorder.

Ive has better luck tackling the maladaptive behaviors individual as “poor coping skills”. Example is with blame game, usually spouse locks into victim hood, and needs a persecutor and a rescuer. I found I was being put in one of those two roles. Understanding that, started to find different ways to break out of that, told her wanted to be viewed as challenger or coach, and wanted to see her be creator or creative in coming up with solutions rather than projecting blame on everyone and everything. This has taken months of careful work, but seeing progress.

Are there specific problem behaviors/examples see as most urgent that you can start addressing?

a lot.

i understand the tendency; its a good one. you want to be on the same page as your wife. you want to see improvement in your marriage. the message you send though, will likely not be the one you intend.

if you want to share resources, i highly recommend getting a copy of The High Conflict Couple; share that. spouses here tend to be very receptive. a lot of the tools here are based on this book, and it will give you a head start on resolving conflict, in concert with your wife.

Pretty much anything that goes wrong in her life or our lives is my fault.  Dishwasher broke?  My fault.  Got sick? My fault.  Raining today?  My fault.  In those rages she will bring up everything under the sun that has gone wrong since we've been married and pin the blame all on me, in a repeating cycle, and then threaten divorce and taking my kids away.  She has zero support network outside of me (has had huge blowouts with all of her old friends and family) so I bear the brunt of everything.  She says she is seeing a therapist but hasn't gone (I know for a fact). She openly ackowledges the rage issues 2-3 days later, says she needs to work on it, but the cycle continues.

Thank you I have ordered the book

Just wanted to echo that no, you probably should not. My wife reacted badly after noticing Eggshells in my Audible purchase history and I had some explaining to do real quick. I told her I was just curious about the disorder and suspected my cousin might have it. Like your wife she is high-functioning (trusted financial position, six-figure salary, etc).

It sounds like most of you are just living in fear, like I have been, of your spouses. Does this ever go away? I don’t think I can continue to live in fear of her over reactions to everything that she sees, hears or perceives. Fundamentally, can this ever change? If not, then I guess there really is no fixing the marriage.

The emotional dysregulation we've all experienced is due to maladaptive coping skills which are often excaerbated by Anxiety and Depression. The core feelings of a pwBPD is that their feelings don't matter (hence, easy to invalidate), but deeper is, "my feelings don't matter; therefore, I don't matter, and am unworthy of love." The core feeling is shame. That is, "I'm a bad person." Compensation for this is anger, blame (or blame-shifting), and lashing out in order to not deal with these core feelings.

I get you... I was blamed for "throwing my 'sickness' in my face!" When I just suggested she needed help.  I didn't even mention BPD.

NO  *)


Yes. And if you work at it you might lead her to conduct herself a bit better or a lot better. It's also possible, this is all she can do.

Most of us gave it a earnest shot at resolving it and many have succeeded. Many have failed. It's really hard to generalize.

The first thing to know is that she is over-reacting and to not see it as anything other than that. Sometimes we grab onto things that would just pass if we let them.

The second thing is that they are reacting to our reaction. Oddly, the more you react, the more you attract over-reaction. This is true for any relationship.

There are lots of things to learn. And in many cases they improve the relationship. How much depends on the personalities of the partners.

Wow, Turkish...thank you for posting this.  This makes so much sense to my situation.  My uBPDw is always saying "it doesn't matter" to everything from feelings to what we have for dinner, everything.

OK, tying in what you've said above to your other comment about feeling afraid, how do you feel when she is blaming you for everything and threatening divorce?  Getting to a place where we feel less threatened is tough, and involves many different things.  I'll try to name a few:

* Developing empathy for the disorder (which can help make the poor treatment of us feel less personal).
* Committing to making our own behavior be healthy even in the face of breakup threats
* Getting good at having healthy boundaries
* Getting good at validation, particularly partial validation, which is an excellent tool to counter blame -- we can validate their feelings, but ignore the blame.
* Having a broad support network outside of the relationship
* Having a healthy life (friends, activities) outside the relationship

That's a start.  I'm sure other members can add ideas of how to move towards feeling less threatened.

RC