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I wonder if some of you can enlighten me on the subject of dependence as it relates to bpm. We have been married 48 years. My wife has always had a tendency to fly off the handle and blow up over relatively insignificant events which in the past I just wrote it off as a quirk of her personality. But as we get older it is getting more frequent, more spiteful, more self centered, and more pronounced. She has all of the classic symptoms of bpd that I am reading about here and it is magnified from what she was like when we were younger. She is retired from a very successful career as a teacher so she was always high functioning.

What I have noticed as we get older she has become more and more dependent on me. She used to drive weekly on interstate freeways but now she is afraid to drive except around town. She used to manage her own money but now I have to pay her bills or it won’t get done. (We have always had separate checking accounts.). She totally ignores housework and procrastinates forever on small projects that need done.  As I learn and read more about bpm I am curious about how all this works into it.

Some history that I am just wondering if it is significant: Her mother’s parents died when her mother was 13 yrs. old.  So my wife’s mother raised her kids with the philosophy of them being independent  and self sufficient by the age of 13. That sounds like a good idea and we raised our kids with that same idea. But I wonder if that could subconsciously create a feeling of abandonment in the child(my wife) and somehow be a significant factor in her bpm. Interestingly, looking back I’m sure her mother also was bpm. So how does all this fit in with her increasing dependence on me (the target of her raging)?  Any insights would be welcomed.

Hi, JJ74, I am sorry to hear about your problems. From what I read and experienced it is the usual thing to do for pwBPD to depend strongly on their ''favourite person''. What strikes me as weird is that you say your wife could do this tasks alone since recently (like driving and her behaviour change to worse). I would suggest to give it a thought if depression or dementia is possible (in addition to bpd).
When my hfBPD father was close to retirement his behaviour deteriorated badly for some time, home it felt like torture. We even went to our GP and he said he was probably depressed due to retirement - which made a lot of sense. I considered dementia back then also, since his grandmother had early onset. However, depressive episode passed in around 6 months and he went back to normal for him. That was before I knew about BPD, I thought he was just a choleric. Dementia did not develop, although beginning could have looked similar IMO.

Yes. Depression is definitely a problem and she acknowledges that. Her family doc prescribes an antidepressant which seemed to help at first but doesn’t seem to help much anymore. We’ve discussed asking for a referral to psychiatrist and she is not opposed to that but also never gets around to doing it. Alcohol abuse is also a problem and she also acknowledges that. I’m hoping that she will eventually get psychiatric help for those problems because she at least acknowledges them. We haven’t talked about bpd and I think I should leave that alone for now. But I am trying to get a better understanding about it. And from some of my reading it seems like dependence and fear of abandonment are part of it. So I am trying to understand how that ties in.