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my last conflict with my dBPDw started shortly after she she sat up in bed. she started talking about how upset she was becouse she had a dream about me sleeping with her best friend.

any talk of cheating is a big red flag for because it has been the source of so much conflict in the past. me sleeping around in her dreams has caused problems; but she also will accuse me of sheeping with friends at other times (both male? and female). she would worry about me sleeping with students when I worked at the university. now that I am in the private sector my coworkers fall under suspicion. if I talk to much about a person at work in a positive way there will be questions... .not to bad at frist who is her boyfriend? or is he gay? the upshot - I do not talk much about other people.

ok so now that the background is done I will move back to the moment after she informed me of her dream. I get defensive and say "I did not sleep with your friend." she gets stone faced and starts to get angry at me. I also tried "it is just a dream" which gets "SORRY YOU DON'T HAVE DREAMS THAT FEEL REAL!" around this point I realized my mistake and try to emphasize with her about her dark dream. say sorry for my fist few comments.

this is what she wanted but now it is to late and she is upset. she accepts my empathy sort of and then finds something else to be mad about. total time for the communication 3 minutes.

Wow, so sorry you experienced that, dog_star.  Yep, I've been there.  I've been blamed for stuff in her dreams.  And I know how it is, you are tired, it just sounds so absurd and you want to put a quick end to the conversation.  After all, most people you have met in your life would easily recognize it as just a dream, process it themselves, and if they even tell you about it, it would be much later and told in a humorous way.  Am I right?

The problem is, to them the dream feels real, and it is quite disturbing.  Saying, "I'm sorry, it was just a dream, go back to sleep" is extremely invalidating, because in that moment they are experiencing extreme emotions.  If you can be awake enough and level headed enough in that moment, you need to validate the underlying emotion that having bad dreams is rough, and that fearing you are cheating on her is rough.  Then re-assure her it was just a dream, that you love her, and aren't cheating on her. 

I can feel your pain... .something just happened to me today similar to yours but not with a dream.  We're both at work, I texted her in the morning good morning and haven't heard for 4-5 hours.  she calls me around 1230 to say hello and we chatted for a minute.  We're both very busy at work today. 

She text me at 1:20 and I just saw the texts, and she calls me upset saying I was chatting with someone so I didn't text her back soon enough.  All the while she goes 4-5 hours without texting the minute I go 20 minutes without replying back due to the same reason she couldn't reply, it's an immediate problem and now the accusations start flying.

Right most people do not feel like a vivid dream needs to be acted on in the waking world. and I think you are spot on. if I had just had the presence of mind to not take the accusation personally and validated her dark feeling the whole thing could have been avoided.

so later that day we had  a joint T appointment. the T tried go get her to see how I could be a "little" sensitive about the cheating subject after being accused so many times. not that how I responded was right just can you see why on some level he did what he did. her response was that I deverved all the accusations. Arrrrrgh!

also sorry about the typo in the thread title. a danger of posting from my phone. lol if a moderator reads this please feel free to fix it :)

I think it is a classic case of just having a bad experience putting her in a bad move. It could have been anything, so she has to soothe it by blaming someone for something. You are there so you are it. Effectively telling her she has nothing to worry about invalidates her feeling, thats the trigger and away it goes. Probably not the best answer, but then it wont always be, your human.

Often trying too hard to patch up a slip up only draws more attention to it and makes it worse

Feels like an unfair ambush, but that is life with BPD. I wouldn't stress too much over it. It is still her problem to self soothe, you cant fix everything. I would take my fishing rods and go fishing and let it run its course. *) Soothe yourself.

Hi dog_star

I had a similar dream, so I dumped the friend lol  Bad joke

Something like this I try to look at and approach as how I'd talk to a friend in the same situation.  It takes the 'personal' out of it.

"Ooo, aw, that would feel really bad.  It makes sense that you're feeling this way"

thx for replying everyone.

@ waverider

thanks for reminding me to be human. and that part of making this work is going to be some level of acceptance on my part of her disorder.

@123Phoebe

hahaha. also I like your suggestion of language for validating her. may not have work as waverider pointed out but it would have been better then what I said.


yep I get this from time to time as well. you did not text me back! or I really needed you and your phone was dead! never mind that sometimes at work people are working and cannot check their phone every 15 minutes. or that I have a work land line on my desk that works just fine.