BPDFamily.com

Hi there, this is my first post here so I'm going to give a little background. I'm a 21 yr old women in a relationship with my 20 yr old female partner. She is pursuing a BPD diagnosis, however the professionals (despite agreeing she has the symptoms) have been hesitant to diagnose her officially because her age. We've been dating for two years and live together. While things have been bumpy, overall we are great communicators and try hard to educate ourselves about BPD, how to cope, and how to maintain the relationship. We both go to therapy and she is on medication, which helps. We have been in a good place, but we had a family related stressor come up. We briefly talked about it and agreed to take time to think on the issue. Yesterday, there was a switch half way through the day. My girlfriend began acting very robotic. She was overly polite, cautious, and passive. When I looked at her or talked to her, there was nothing recognizable. I expressed my concern multiple times, and all I got was "I'm sorry, I don't want to hurt your feelings or worry you." There is nothing left of my girlfriend there and I have no idea what to do. It's been two days like this, and I broke down crying in front of her. She again just told me "I'm sorry, I don't know how to make you feel better." I ended up just asking her to go away. We've been acting like strangers. She's had episodes, but nothing like this. She's also refusing to take her meds. She even told me she did take them, but I knew she didn't. I'm at a loss and am so unequiped for this.

When my wife goes robotic like this, it's almost always that she is seething about something internally, and after enough time she'll have some outburst like, "You don’t listen to my feelings so I'm never expressing them again!".  Then she seemingly forgets or loses interest.  Although often it's less rational even than that.   In the past year she's been doing this about every 2 or 3 weeks, but It used to be a thing that she only did once a year or two.  So if your SO is like my wife, maybe this was always part of her repertoire, just you were lucky to have caught her during her better moments until now.