BPDFamily.com

Hello, my BPD h of 20 years constantly looks for sympathy and tries to make me feel guilty about being happy or meeting friends or not cooking dinner or not being sympathetic enough etc etc... Sometimes I find it hard not to get sucked in to this and feel like a bad person for enjoying myself when he is so miserable. I have to go to away for a week soon to do with study and spend time with our daughter and he is really freaking out about how he'll cope. I don't want to dismiss his feelings but how do I not get drawn in to feeling guilty? Is it important to keep doing things so that they are forced to become more self reliant? He seems to feel very helpless and incapable of looking after himself... but only in relationship with me... he has a demanding job as a disability support worker and also tutors at the local university... so this confuses me a lot... do I somehow make him feel helpless? Is this just manipulation?
Thanks everyone

Manipulation through fear, obligation, and guilt (FOG) is common. Perhaps realizing this will help you not fall into that trap.

https://bpdfamily.com/content/emotional-blackmail-fear-obligation-and-guilt-fog

Daisy I will chime in here with my teammate and provide a different perspective here. She has you covered with the topic of FOG. I will take the path of encouraging you to look at your life through the lens of being an individual. Yes, you are married, but you are both still individuals. That means what you do and what he does doesn't necessarily mean it has to influence the both of you. I would encourage you to focus on outcome independence and thinking of yourself as an individual. Now before there is a rebuttal...understand I am focusing on helping you to see that just because you are married and with someone doesn't mean that you forget about YOU and let YOU go. Make sense?

The variables in your equation that you need to understand are that you can change and be dynamic. Your husband is unfortunately static so you know that variable will be constant and not change.

So I implore you to look at maybe how you are responding and reacting and see if you can make subtle changes that perhaps lead to better results that do not weigh you down. Lastly, a very important point I have to make...you are responsible for no one's happiness but your own. Learn to care for yourself and have everything else fall into place. An old saying from the Spartan and Athenian days..."If a King does not lead how can he expect his subordinates to follow." Daisy you are the king here...your husband is the subordinate. You lead, he follows.

Cheers and best wishes!

-SC-

Thanks for your replies.
 It is a great relief to hear all this. It makes me realise how confused I become by this manipulation. It wears me down over a long period so that I don't even realise it's happening.
I've realised that my life is my responsibility...and that it is important and good to pursue my own happiness even if my BPDH cannot.
I need to work on being happy about my own happiness

I so hear what you are saying. I've been working on gaining back my own life and autonomy and trying to forgive myself for ever having let it go.

It has been such a freeing, liberating experience to allow myself to be with friends, take a class, do things I love to do. And it makes my husband miserable, irritable, frightened, angry, etc. So then I have to deal with that, which is not fun. But I will not ever go back to how I was living before, husband's dysregulation be damned.