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I finally came out of the FOG the other day.  I started thinking about positive things I have gained from being in a relationship with my pwBPD.  The main thing I have learned is patience.  Before my relationship, I had absolutely no patience.  I am interested to see if anyone else has found a silver lining in a BPD cloud.

I guess my silver lining is not being as reactive and being more strategic, which on the downside can turn into being less authentic, but on the upside, gives me more choice and can definitely direct the interaction in more positive and fruitful directions.

In the abusive phase of my marriage, I learned a how to enforce boundaries. I got REALLY good at it. When I started spending a lot of time with a difficult person I only noticed after the fact that I must have been using good boundaries... .so good that the first 'testing' phase of abusive behavior met a wall, and it never escalated with me at all, even though this person was very abusive with others.

After the abusive behavior truly ended, I thought I was out of the woods and so was my wife. In this recent episode brought on by cheating I did some really amazing self-discovery, and realized that I had pretty much been not making my own choices in my life... .since my childhood, not just my marriage.

Since then I've been much more in touch with my feelings, and I've been making choices how I want my life to go now.

Maybe not since childhood in my case, but not in a lot of years.  I have done very few things just for me in a very long time, and for those few things I have done there has been hell to pay.  Since getting back into T and also learning about pwBPD, I have begun taking charge of my own life again.  I'm starting to feel like my old self.  My mother told me last week that "you sounded like your old self, back when you were a teenager." 

I finally realized that appeasement doesn't work and even on the rare occasions when it lowers the heat temporarily, it's ultimately counterproductive.  I have discovered that nothing terrible is going to happen to me if I stand up to my wife and she gets mad.  I'm also learning the difference between JADEing, which makes her angry and is useless; and setting boundaries, which also makes her angry but has some personal benefit. 

It's a hard call to say whether dealing with her BPD is worth it to have myself back.  I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, let alone my spouse.  But if there is any silver lining to this, it is in finding that I am so much stronger and more valuable to me than I ever thought possible, and it's OK to admit that.