BPDFamily.com

Hi ,
I have been dating a bpd for 7 months .. we have recently hit engaged and I moved in with her about 5 weeks ago.

We are currently on holiday overseas and before we left she didn’t know if she wanted to continue the relationship.

We are now overseas with 3 weeks to go we had a huge fight and I said some horrible things , she says she is done with me and it over .. and that the relationship isn’t working.

But today she would occasionally hold hand and let me kiss her.
We get home and she sleeps on the other side of the bed .. we haven’t been intimate for several weeks.

I don’t want this to end. But I feel she is completely off me and doesn’t trust me ..

How can I get her to know I love and care for her and would never leave. We always fight only when I am quite and withdrawn for work or not knowing how to deal with the push pull.

I love her to bits .. she said let’s continue the trip but whatever happens , happens when we get home .. meaning it’s over in her mind.

Today o suggested I move hotels for a few days to give space and she initially agreed then when I went to leave wanted me to stay and spend the day with her .. granted we had the best day in weeks out and there was some small intimacy but I could tell she wasn’t fully comfortable.

She has always not been a cuddled in bed.  But I can’t continue on this trip if it’s over and there’s no intimacy ..

She has always needed control of this relationship and dictated terms.

Is it over ? Only 2 weeks ago she was telling it was the best relationship she has ever had. Now it’s full blown nothing. She has been in and out the entire time …

I know now how to talk to her and not go cold and over communicate and always reply with a good tone.

Is it too late ? She wants me to potentially move out when I get back home …

She doesn’t have any close friends and only ever talks to her mum on multiple occasions daily.

Again I Hurt her for getting quite and pulling away from time to and again with a big fight as I was feeling a disconnect and at my whitts end .. do I take her word as gospel as it’s also confusion.

Please help me with a strategy to best move forward and recconnect. She is 36 yo female… longest relationship 2 years .. all others similar length to this …

Read up on intermittent reinforcement: https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=61921.0

Three options:

a) You can let this end now, on a not-terrible note

b) You can wait for a likely much-worse method of it ending that may involve much more trauma

c) You can keep it going and learn to accept this bitter month because it'll be 2-3x/year minimum for the rest of your life.

See, I'm not telling you what to do - I'm just laying out the options.

yes, these are more or less all you can do.

also, @Stew007, don't beat yourself up too much for how you treated her.  PWBPD seem to go out of their way to provoke a heated response from their partners.

They actually seem to enjoy it in some cases... it allows them to be the victim, and validate their belief that you're the problem.

in my experience, BPDxw would calm down if/when I'd lose my cool and yell or even curse at her.  It would make me feel terrible of course.  But she'd seem content she had gotten to me.

In contrast, if I remained calm, and said something to her like "I don't want to talk about this right now" she'd explode and follow me around yelling at me.

I surmised later on this was how her parents behaved when she was growing up (and still did), and to her, this was a sign of love and commitment... being angry and emotional.  Totally the opposite of how I grew up.   :)

There are more options too:

Get engaged/married in the hope of that fixing things.

Have a child in the hope of that fixing things.

Have a second child in the hope of that fixing things.

This was the approach I followed.

Don't be me. 

It is not your responsibility to fix anyone but yourself - and you'd probably fail miserably at the effort. 

What you have described is the psychological phenomenon known as “projective identification”.

what part?  her calming down when I yelled at her, or her getting angry when I remained calm?

It was a weird dynamic.  

Her calming down after you get angry. The reason she gets angrier when you stay calm is because she’s not succeeding in passing the “hot potato” to you.

ah, got it.

my gut reaction was that it was a different dynamic.

From her stories of her childhood, I gathered that there was a lot of constant conflict in her home, including mutual infidelity by her parents, alcoholism, and even domestic violence.  

Sometimes she'd complain it was too calm around the house and that made her uneasy.  My theory is that she was more comfortable when tempers were flaring, and the house was chaos.  

Along those lines, when she'd succeed in dragging me down emotionally to her level (so to speak) she'd suddenly snap out of it and drop whatever issue had lead her to provoke a fight in the first place.   She truly DID seem to be more comfortable when things were chaos, and tempers were flaring.  This was all exhausting and insane to me.

A guy who knew both of us, and who's wife was friends with BPDxw (until they had a falling out), told me she expected me to beat her, and when I wouldn't do that, it upset her more, b/c she equated beating with caring.  

that may sound completely insane, but I felt that sometimes, when she'd be screaming incoherently about things, getting in my face, etc. that was what she was hoping to provoke.  

Ah, OK. So in Transactional Analysis terms she would be looking for “negative strokes” from you like in this game called Uproar: https://sites.google.com/site/worldeveryone/home/ta-games-using-criticism