BPDFamily.com

I am 2 days post break up with my ex who has symptoms of BPD. She broke up with me out of the blue, 1 week after she got a stressful medical diagnosis, during a week when her therapist is on vacation, and after every single friend/family member she talked to about leaving me told her she was making a mistake. Last week we were talking about how we were both happy with where our relationship was & the direction we were heading. Everything was so so good. The she breaks up with me because of a moment from 2 months ago that she says hurt her & made her not trust me - she’s been ruminating on it for 2 months & never told me how she felt. Now she’s too resentful to continue our relationship.

She’s very aware of her bpd & mental health & has been seeking treatment for a while.  She told me she met with her psychiatrist (who she sees 1x monthly only), and the psychiatrist told her she wasn’t currently experiencing symptoms of bpd. I’M SO CONFUSED.. Maybe my ex didn’t convey all of the symptoms she’s experiencing? Maybe she needs for her current actions to not be attributed to bpd in order to feel ok about what happened? I don’t know…

Is it possible for the psychiatrist to be wrong?

Hi lovingmyself1st;

I'm starting to think the site should start a thread or lesson on "my pwBPD told me their therapist said..." !

You're not alone in having a person in your life with BPD tell you something that they said their MH provider said, yet it leave you scratching your head, like, is that even possible?

I will be blunt:

pwBPD can say all kinds of things. The fact that they said another person said something doesn't make it true.

We are wired for belief. This is how we get through life without being paralyzed by impossibility. Our default mode as humans is to believe what is presented to us. Can you imagine how life would go if our default mode was: "Whatever I see, hear, feel, experience, is likely not true, and must be proved to be true". Like, you might be sitting down right now, because you believed the chair you saw was actually physically there. It wasn't a long process of debating in your mind if it really was or not.

So that is a factor in this interaction. We initially believe what people tell us.

pwBPD are in emotional survival mode and are dealing with a shame based disorder. I know you know that taking the blame, taking responsibility, admitting to "something bad" about themselves... doesn't really happen. It's part of the way their minds are set up, it seems. Being wrong isn't just uncomfortable, it's annihilating, and so any suggestion of a shameful diagnosis, blameworthy behaviors, etc, isn't just to be lightly laughed off, it must be completely dismissed as wrong, irrelevant, not them, not happening, etc.

We don't know what happens in a session, but because we know (a) MH professionals are professionals with a professional code of ethics, (b) pwBPD behave in certain ways to avoid blame, and (c), our reflex is to believe what people tell us, we can put some likely pieces together.

Whatever it was that her psych did or did not say, she is telling you a narrative about it that makes her "just fine" and not blameworthy, and because we believe what we are told (initially), this confuses us.

I seriously doubt that what actually happened was that the psych saw her and was like "Wow, you are an amazing exception, you are in remission from BPD without doing any long term DBT work, it's a miracle, you're free to go!"

We have to make the nonintuitive move, when listening to or reading words from a pwBPD, of comparing it to the rest of what we know about reality, too. We can't just assume that they are wired like us to "tell the truth" about stuff. The fact that they are wired differently -- emotional survival taking priority over accurate recounting of reality -- means we have to slow down and not instinctively take what they say at face value. We can get so hung up on "but the words that she said" that we miss the bigger picture of the reality of how pwBPD do life.

...

Nutshell version for you and for anyone else reading this thread:

Whenever a pwBPD says "My therapist says [I don't have BPD, I'm cured from BPD, you're the only one with the problem, you need therapy...]"

It probably did not happen that way.

This is helpful. Thank you.