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I’ve been with my partner with bpd for about a year and a half now and it’s pretty much the same cycle since the beginning. She’ll be completely into me for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks then she’ll say or do something that would insinuate the relationship going to the next level and she’ll pull back for about a week or so but she would always make some sort of effort with me by texting me throughout the day (even though they’re dry texts) and even meeting up for dinner a couple times a week until she comes out of her funk. In the beginning she would split on me a lot and she would get pretty vicious with her words but for the last year or so they’ve been far and few between and they short and mild. Two weeks ago she split on me real bad and I barley heard from her for three days, she asked if I would like to meet her and her kid for dinner and I went but 15 minutes into dinner she split on me again for the same exact reason she did a few days before so I left and texted her the next morning like I always do and she was speaking for a while then stopped so communication has been maybe once or twice a day and they’re very dry for about two weeks now. The part on confused about is she still lets me see and take her kid places every time he asks too see me, if she doesn’t want to speak to or see me why would she still let me see her son who she doesn’t trust very many people to watch him

Hello Joe3825, glad you found us and *welcome*

Confusion is certainly the right word for your situation. From our perspective, the behavior of a pwBPD makes no sense; it's irrational. If she thinks you're "bad" right now, wouldn't a good mom keep her child away from a "bad" person?

That kind of disconnect is more of a feature than a bug of BPD. BPD is a real, serious, and impairing mental illness that affects the sufferer's beliefs about the world (and themselves), perceptions of reality (hypersensitive in some areas, underreactive in others), and emotions and regulation.

Many pwBPD also cope with "black and white" thinking, which could also be described as "all or nothing" thinking. Grey areas can be difficult for them, so often they seem to be un-integrated in their thoughts. I wonder if in her "partner" view of you you're all bad, but in her "stepdad" view of you you're all good. A "generally normal" person might be able to integrate those but she is pretty impaired so she's doing things that don't make sense to us... but make sense to her.

Given that you're here on the bettering board, it sounds like you want to stay in, and improve, the relationship?

If so, a good place to start is our section of articles on When a partner, spouse or girlfriend has Borderline Personality Disorder (https://bpdfamily.com/portfolio-4-cols). Not much about a BPD relationship is intuitive, so it takes learning a lot of new, often unintuitive tools, skills, and approaches to make things work. Take a look when you have a chance and let us know what stood out to you.

Yeah I would like to stay in, it’s had its moments but it really hasn’t been that bad overall. She’s been texting me a couple times a day with things like “how’s your day going” just to get a conversation going but after a few texts back and forth she’ll disappear for a few hours and send another generic text.  We originally met at work a couple years ago and about a month ago she asked the supervisor a question and he definitely did get out of line on how he responded to her so she walked out, both her and our supervisor sent me screen shots of the entire conversation and I did tell the supervisor that he was in the wrong and I even went to the owner and explained the situation, he agreed the supervisor was wrong, and told me he would talk to him about it but he didn’t want her back because it’s not the first time she just walked out (I saved her job a few times) when something didn’t go her way. Everything was fine for the first two weeks after that then one night I get a text from my supervisor telling me what I was doing the next day and I replied with nothing but a “k”, so she asked who was texting and I showed her it was just the supervisor dispatching me like he does with all the employees. She freaked out on me saying how could I be buddy buddy with him after how he talked to her like that and started say some really nasty things I’m not gonna repeat, that lasted a few days before she started talking to me again but after like 2 days she split on me for the same reason but was still dry texting me a couple times a day. Last night she text me asking if I wanted to meet up in the morning for breakfast, it’s what she usually does, it’s kinda her way to say sorry and start getting things back to normal again. A couple seconds later she text never mind I don’t feel like it, so I asked her again what was going on ad she said I can’t see you the same way after you let them treat me like that without doing anything about it not even an apology from them. When I asked why she let me take her son for the weekend if I was such a horrible person she said “because he likes you”