BPDFamily.com

Having read Stop Walking On Eggshells, viewed many many video on BPD, spoken with my therapist extensively, and read most of the threads here, I realize that 'taking care' of the BPD partner is a common thread.

We find ourselves doing it without being asked, just how the relationship dynamics start to develop. But ultimately, their NEEDS become more important than our own. Conversations revolve around their needs- to vent, complain, feel validated, etc.

In my own experience, looking back, my ex said the words "I NEED you to ________" so many times very early in the relationship. Things like "I need you to prioritize our relationship!" when she was, in my mind, the most important thing in my life! I would jump at the phone whenever she called, no matter what I was doing or how late it was, I would respond to every text very quickly, say yes to every event she wanted to go to together, drive across town on a moment's notice to help her with something, leave my phone on at night in case she called in the middle of the night needed help.

When she said "I need you to prioritize our relationship" I, in fact, explained the above to her, so fully confused as to how she could think I didn't prioritize us. She responded angrily with "I don't need you to leave your phone on all night!!"

To this day, I still don't know what she was talking about. But I think it was related to things 'about me' that she wanted to change....like the food I ate, or ....I don't know. But she interpreted me not eating what she thought I should as me not prioritizing the relationship.

Early on, in a moment of actual connection, when her guard was down, she cried and told me...

"Will you take care of me?"

I said yes, of course I would. That is the most important thing in my life, I will always take care of you. But of course, in her eyes, I didn't. And I still don't know how I didn't.

One night when she was really upset and belittled me and mocked me until 3am, she looked at the books on my shelf and said "Look at the books on your shelf, how can you take care of me if you can't even keep the books organized".  They were not a mess, just your average bookshelf with some askew, not all. That night she had ignored very clear boundaries I had set earlier, told her not to come to my business, told her I wasn't ready to renew our physical connection that night like she wanted to, told her I would call her when I was done at work and done having dinner with my clients.....and she ignored all of that and just showed up anyway. And then got mad at me for 'taking her' to the place I would have dinner with my clients!

My therapist told me that if a potential partner ever says the words "will you take care of me?" to move on. She thought those were signs of an unhealthy partner.

I resonate with this. Looking back I see how I believed him when he said he needed X or Y. I'd been raised to trust and not question when I loved one says X is something they need from me. Now I feel he took advantage of me over and over. It took so long to realize this and make changes. I see I put his "needs" over my own. I see how I rarely express my own needs, certainly not to my former partner. Early on I internalized that he had no capacity to give to me (except a huge need to THINK and show to the world, to convince himself, he was giving to me) and somehow I went along with the ruse.

I struggle to move forward: I don't like the thought of questioning a loved one who says they need something, and yet I suppose I must--or do better at weighing their stated need with my own.

I do shudder--now--to think of a partner asking to be taken care of. It foreshadows the parent-child relationship that so many of us in non+BPD marriages and relationships have instead of a romantic relationship of partners.

Yes, this is very familiar to me as well.

I learned caretaking as a way of life when I was a child - caretaking my BPD (adoptive) mother. It was interesting to watch home movies of my childhood - my ex-wife was shocked, because what you see is a 10 year old kid acting like a little adult. My mom was constantly threatening suicide, and I believed it was my job to take care of her, to prevent her death and soothe her pain.

I did a ton of caretaking over the course of my 25 year relationship with my ex partner. She would go helpless about so much (so many ordinary life tasks), and would escalate into a frantic state - so I would step in to take care of things. And I would have to constantly listen and try to soothe her as she talked endlessly about how she was victimized by other people.

Then she told me that she was in an affair with someone else and was breaking up with me, because her needs weren't being met, and that I hadn't been sufficiently caretaking some of what she expected me to (e.g., that I'd done nothing in the prior year to help clean up the tax mess she'd created).

In a funny way, she had a slightly valid point - I was so conditioned in childhood to caretake and self-sacrifice that I was doing it for lots of people, leaving less attention/caretaking for my ex. Ironically, one of those people was her son/my stepson. In the last couple years, he was in crisis and I devoted much of my time to helping him. A friend of mine said she never thought someone could do as much I was doing to try to help my stepson.

I marvel now at the degree to which my whole life has been awash with people with BPD. My adoptive mom had BPD. A decade ago or so, I found my birth family. My birth mother had, at a minimum, very strong BPD traits, and probably would have qualified for a diagnosis of BPD. My one full sister has very severe BPD, and her daughter has BPD. My longterm ex partner has BPD, her brother (whom I ended up close to) had BPD and committed suicide, and her son (my stepson) has BPD. I guess it makes sense that I ended up with a BPD partner after being raised by a parent with BPD - that's just repetition compulsion. But going from a birth family with BPD to an adoptive mother with BPD was a low probability event.

Yep. Like others mentioned, this hits close to home. Having my own issue of needing to "fix" things and always feeling like I am personally responsible for everyone's happiness certainly didn't help in the relationship either.

The problem was the "needs" part. There was only so much I could do to fulfill the needs on any given day before I felt burnt out and just needed space for myself(which I could never get with my ex).  My ex with BPD was also a type 1 diabetic and struggled with substance abuse. I learned all about diabetes and blood sugars through her, even learned how to apply her emergency shots of glucose if she was ever at a dangerously low level(which happened way more often than I ever thought). So my caregiver instincts was always kicking in, checking in on her, seeing if she needed food, making sure she brought her insulin on trips, etc. It got to a point where she just wasn't consistently taking care of herself anymore.

Then even little things she "needed" felt so strange and off to me. For example, she'd refuse to go to bed and sleep unless I was there with her to cuddle with her, even on nights when I didn't need to wake up early and just wanted to stay up to play games. She was always sore, needed massages, felt like I was intentionally distancing myself from her when I chose to watch TV sitting in a comfy recliner instead of next to her on the couch. She needed me, constantly and always. The rare times she would try and "give me space" so I can do my own thing like play games, listen to music with my headphones, or just browse through YouTube, she'd end up watching things on TV or social media that trigger her insecurities and interrupt whatever I'm doing so I could give her reassurance. If I'm in the shower and miss her call, she'd call 3 more times immediately, and when I did call her back she'd interrogate me about what I was doing and express how upset it made her that I didn't respond immediately.

The bottom line was that she is physically and emotionally high maintenance, something I didn't see in the first stages of the relationship. I dedicated my very existence to trying to help her any way I could with the one request being that I could get a little alone time here and there, as being alone was the only time I ever felt peace in the relationship. By the time she was diagnosed with BPD(3 years into the relationship ship), it felt too late. I read many books, browsed through every article on this website to help me understand her struggle so I could better help her and the relationship. But it was already too late. I had let her break almost every boundary I had for relationships in the futile hope that it would show my love for her, and when I tried to re-establish those boundaries she took it as me 'resenting' her or trying to push her away.

I don't regret the relationship at all, as it gave me a good hard look at my weakness of folding to my loved ones needs out of guilt and lack of boundary reinforcement. It made me realize the importance of self care and self love.

For someone with BPD, everything is emotional in the moment.  So what she meant back then was, "Can you take care of me right now, while I'm feeling like maybe you don't know if you want to be with me or not?"

If she got the validation she was looking for, then great...maybe the moment passed.  But if she didn't, then it was a red flag that never quite went away in the back of her mind.  It's what starts the fear of abandonment to build.

Here's the thing though- her question wasn't clear, so you had no idea what she meant or what she "perceived" that you did wrong.  If she would have just said what she was thinking and talked it out calmly, all those fears could have been quashed in the moment.  That's what all of us experience and we never know where it comes from because it's never verbalized in a way we can do something about it.

Even with extreme cases of BPD like my young adult daughter, she'll tell me, "I just want you to listen!"  But then she'll rant on about 40 different things for 10 minutes straight and end with, "I don't feel like I can say what I want to tell you, to make you understand." 

What I ultimately take from those experiences, when she's doing everything possible to express herself and keeps getting caught in tangents, is a few things:

1) Her brain is working a mile a minute and she can't focus on any one specific thing to talk it out.
2) She's built up real trauma and it's not just one thing bothering her, there's layers of instability she can't deal with.
3) Her viewpoints are often absolutes and can't imagine how others don't think the same way.

For example, she recently bought a snake.  Her roommate/best friend hates snakes, so he hasn't been there much.  She can't understand why.  I'd tell her, "Well, he hates snakes!"  She'd say, "No he doesn't, he used to like snakes."  (He never liked snakes, she just assumed he did). Then she added, "Why didn't he tell me he doesn't want to be around the snake?"  I replied, "He just said that to your face four times...and I've said it three more!"  Yet she still doesn't understand that the problem is her...she can't even begin to see it.

Why?  Because in the back of her mind, she convinced herself that everyone loves snakes and there couldn't possibly be a problem with impulse buying a small python.  It's disordered thinking and that's just one random thing- there are probably thousands of those absolutes in her mind that influence her behavior and decisions.  And she probably has several of those misplaced beliefs about everyone she interacts with that leads to unfortunate conclusions. 

That's why these relationships are so incredibly difficult and unstable- you can't know what you don't know.  Oh, and by the way....you absolutely love snakes.  Don't think or say any different because it's an absolute, a fact in life.  Your opinion on the subject doesn't matter because it's been proven without your input.

Thanks for your thoughts Pook075. A couple of them really struck me.

re: "Her viewpoints are often absolutes and can't imagine how others don't think the same way."

This so accurately describes what I so frequently encounter with my adult BPD stepson. He constantly articulates viewpoints that are absolutes, and is unaware of all the assumptions he's jumped to, that underlie those (frequently mistaken) absolute viewpoints.

re: "Then she added, 'Why didn't he tell me he doesn't want to be around the snake?'  I replied, 'He just said that to your face four times...and I've said it three more!'  Yet she still doesn't understand that the problem is her...she can't even begin to see it."

This reminds me of the conversation my BPD ex and I had when she broke up with me (dumping me for a new guy).

Over years, at the end of an evening, I would always tell her I loved her. That occurred so many hundreds of times. And I would express that on many other occasions as well...e.g. one day, only months before the breakup, we were walking in a beautiful natural area, and she kept stopping in delight to observe one wildflower after another. Because she kept stopping all the time, she said to me that it must be hard for me to deal with a raging ADDer. I swept her up in my arms and told her that I absolutely loved and adored my raging ADDer.

In the conversation we had after she told me that she was breaking up with me (to persue an affair with a new guy), I commented that I'd always loved her. Her reaction was one of complete surprise, and she said "Why didn't you tell me that?" (implying that she wouldn't have left if she had known). That was shocking to me.

Recently, I ended most contact.But we agreed to still communicate about her son (my stepson) and a few other important things. A few minutes ago, we just texted about her son (he's in another crisis and we're trying to help him). Then she began sending me pictures and video that she took a few days ago in a natural area, on her latest vacation with her new guy. She wants me to identify the bird species and plants in the videos, etc. She seems utterly clueless that for me to receive a flood of pictures and video from her vacation with the new guy would be painful for me.

One thing that's kind of funny - both my stepson and my ex recognize that the other one's thinking seems disordered, but they can't recognize that in themselves. Last year, my stepson asked me if I thought his mother might have autism. I told him that she doesn't, but I didn't talk about BPD.

That's a good insight. To be aware that we are trained to not question and trust when someone says they 'need' something from us. I was the same way. And we also put their needs above our own. As a man, I got the sense very early from her that I could not have needs, nor emotions. But, as I wrote above, she had very many 'needs' from me. A very specific 'need', though....

I need you to _____________. I needed to do something, change something about me. The need was for me to be someone she needed me to be. In other words, she was really controlling. My guess was to feel less of something, but what I do not know.

But it went further. She had some very specific needs that she never, ever would tell me about. Then get mad at me for not meeting those needs. This is mind reading expectation, and I made that very clear to her. I'll give an example...

She was sick at home with a cold. As a person who loved her I called and texted for days asking her what she needed- she repeatedly told me she didn't need anything, she was just resting, etc. I became very confused that she kept saying she didn't need anything. If I was sick and my girlfriend asked me repeatedly what I needed, I would tell her. Like, hey...a hamburger and fries might be nice. Or, could you pick up some NyQuil for me? Or, a nice smoothie would taste good.

After a day or two, I started thinking maybe she doesn't like to ask for things? I started making suggestions about what I could do for her- run to the store, come over and give her a back rub....

She stopped answering my calls and responding to my texts. 4 days later she called, very mad at me......for not taking care of her. I expressed confusion, reminding her that I had asked her repeatedly what she needed and she said nothing every time. I had even made suggestions about what I might do for her that she rejected. Her answer, verbatim, was...

"my friends know what to do without asking!! I shut my phone off because I didn't want to hear from you!! And oh wow, who needs a back rub when they're sick?!!"