BPDFamily.com

Hi. Help. I dunno how active this forum is.

I have a 3 month old daughter, my first child, in my mid 30s, who’s the light of my life, with a man w/ uBPD. It was his suggestion that he has this condition, at some point over the summer, and in my opinion he absolutely does. We both work sort of intense jobs with difficult populations and that’s how we met.

I *did* see all the red flags when we got together. He is impulsive, promiscuous, did the love-bombing stuff. It worked, and I got pregnant after 6 months. It was scary but I definitely wanted to have a child, and one with him. He has children from a previous marriage and appears to be a fun, funny, creative, loving parent to them. Quite early on it began with paranoia, threats to leave or throw me out, repetitive arguments over what seems like nothing, and verbal abuse the likes of which I couldn’t imagine. But then periods of incredible insight, support, good humor and joy. He’s also a workaholic and very successful professionally, absolutely brilliant. Our work lives became enmeshed. It was covid. Nothing was conventional and it was fine, I was very much in love.

But when I tried to set boundaries, about time alone, about privacy, I was gradually led to believe that his past trauma and paranoia made it impossible for him to respect them. To this day he rants about me never making him feel “special,” never caring, never making any effort, never addressing his needs. I feel like it’s all we ever talk about.

When we first started dating, he told me we needed to go to couples therapy, to preempt problems he’s had in the past. I believe this was a genuine attempt to grow and change. But it didn’t last long, he’d bail on the sessions, and now describes it as a waste of time wherein the therapist just blamed him.

The last time he was here, after a series of fights, paranoia, bickering, verbal abuse, denigrating, going through my phone, etc, he got to a point where I felt physically intimidated because he wouldn’t stop and tried to physically grab my phone from my hand, several times, once with our infant in my arms, causing her to cry out.

I said he had to leave. I was afraid what would happen and didn’t know how it would end. I said we needed to go back into counseling. Since he left he’s been pretty difficult and petty with me over every little thing. I’ve been raising our daughter alone, struggling with anxiety and depression, I miss the person I know he can be. Help...

You fell in love with an emotionally difficult man. Here’s an article that might give you an overview of this type of relationship: https://bpdfamily.com/content/what-does-it-take-be-relationship

That he’s engaged in some physically intimidating behavior is worrisome. I encourage you to take the MOSAIC inventory to determine the risk level in your relationship. https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=304172

These relationships are difficult and as much as we would like the return of the incredible person we originally fell in love with, the truth is that person is only one part of the whole individual.

Whether or not you can tolerate the other parts of his personality will be the deciding factor about the sustainability of your relationship.