BPDFamily.com

Hello!

I've got a problem that I could with some help with. How do you tell the person and the disorder apart? So the context is, that a frequent point of conflict is that I leave all the thinking to her.

Now I know some of this is her having problems with telling apart reasonable worries from catastrophic thinking. That she builds these chains of connection, that make no sense at times. However she does have an actual point at times about me ignoring stuff that needs doing and in the end leaving it to her. My defense is that I am so worried about her response to when I do things, I just don't do it.

This feels though a bit like I am just using her problem as an excuse not to work on me. But I am having a real problem knowing where the line is. Anyone else had to deal with this?

They are both the rational side and the disorder. It helps to remember that.

As the unafflicted partner, you need to be the emotional leader.

There is no clear cut dividing line. Both sides of this notional line are real and authentic to her.  There is  a sliding scale of how much any particular aspect may have a negative impact on her and others around her, this is what we might call the dysfunctional aspect

Trying to determine were this line should lay will lead to huge invalidation for her when her needs of the moment cause her to wander over this line.

With my wife there is no boundary between real, distortion and straight out fabrication. She will use whichever she perceives meets her immediate need. There is no hesitation weaving from one side to the other. Hence the fabrications can include portions of truth. So it is hard to tell apart, and to her it is all reasonable. Especially as a lot of the time a better result can be obtained by sticking to reality and there is nor reason at all to have wandered from it.

This is typically a life long, or at least a long standing, disorder,  so it has formed the person she is. It has affected her choices in life, the reactions of others too her, the situations she has found herself in. To you it may seem like something that has recently cropped up, but it hasnt it has being simmering away affecting her life choices for a long time, and will continue to do so. This behaviour has created consequences, her actions going forward are coloured by these consequences so a compounding loop is at work, with more consequences. So the point is its so intertwined you cant just "slice off" the disorder and under that is a 'normal" person. A "normal" person is who they are because they have lived a lifetime of "normal" actions and consequences. A pwBPD hasnt experienced that.

Your reality is that you are reluctant to go wandering into minefields, especially if you are not certain if there is any real need to it. Avoidance is a common side affect of dealing with a pwBPD. This does affect your personality and the real risk is that it spreads into all aspects of your life. It is easy for a self confident and capable person to become a withdrawn insecure and self questioning version of themselves.

You have to separate certain areas in life that you control and make decisions, and leave some areas to her even if they end up a muddled mess. Trying to co-manage many things will often turn into conflict

Thanks for the response. I can see the wisdom in what you're saying, the trouble I am having with it is that the very area where we seem to fight the most, and where she seemingly has trouble telling about what she feels and what's real, is exactly an area where I have trouble keeping seperate.

A common fight is basically over how the flat is ordered. So stuff like where the coats go, or where important papers are stored. So the scenario is for example that she comes home, dumps her shoes, coat, letters etc, wherever they fall out of the hand. I will then come home and put them where the belong, which I honestly don't mind. We will always on the weekend, afternoons etc, do pass throughs and tidy. So far so good, but then I think my mere presence makes the flat feel untidy to her, so then the flat IS untidy for her. No matter what I do at this point, I am the reason said flat is untidy. She then will start to actively search for things that are not in the right place and then follow me around, some times for hours, presenting me with things that I haven't done right. This can continue until she is literally shouting at me and wanting to break up as she can't deal with me any more as I don't listen or respect her, or am somehow a danger to the kids etc. So the core is that when she searches for things I haven't done, she finds things because I can be lazy and disorganised so something that is "true", but then her reaction is so extreme that even just exisiting can sometimes feel like walking into a minefield.

So your advice to have seperate areas of life, whilst I believe is solid good advice, becomes difficult for me to follow as the very problem is something that is shared, i.e. a shared living space. So I do try to put up boundries and try to work to my best in that area, but then she finds where I fail which makes it hard to enforce the boundry as the citism is at least in it's core correct. Also the point "I am but a human" is like a red flag to a bull.