I found this book while reading “The essential family guide to borderline personality disorder.” Our daughter was diagnosed with bipolar and BPD a year ago.
Her symptoms started as a teenager about 10 years ago. We walk on eggshells all the time and her personalities and outbursts have controlled our family for so long, that many of us are broken emotionally and even suffering physical ailments from the stress.
She has two small children, and they all live with us. We would ask her to leave if it wasn’t for the children. We are the only stability that they have. We feel stuck and alone.
We’re looking for support and any advice available. Thanks!

Well, i certainly hope so.  But - she is 50 and the longest she has held onto any job - any - is maybe 2 years.  She was given permanent SSDI disability before she turned 30 - and that is jot easy to get.  So someone at some point before the age of 30 determined that she was unlikely to be able to support herself financially - ever.  Could she maintain an income without me?  I don’t  know, but her history says no.

While your spouse is certainly different than my ex, BPD exists across a broad spectrum, let me explain something I had noticed in my case over the years...

I had been married over a decade and watched my hard working spouse gradually display more and more poor behaviors, more of the behaviors that fit the Borderline traits.  Little did I realize it, but when I came up with the idea for her to feel better with a child, it made our marriage worse.  As I look back, she unconsciously perceived me morph from a husband to a father, triggering her childhood FOO of an abuser stepfather and a complicit mother.  Our marriage imploded before our child was 4 years old.

As I stated above, she was hard working all those years.  But she stopped working and became a SAHM once she was a mother.  Home life became filled with her arguments, rants and rages like never before.  In the final months she was moaning and groaning so much, slamming doors and locking herself in with our child at night.  Never could I ever imagine she could dig herself out.

Then we separated.  Suddenly, she morphed again.  I never heard her moaning and groaning again.  It's been two decades and she went back to work and has supported herself over the years.  Yes, there was short term spousal support and child support that helped her until I was awarded majority time, but apparently her financial life worked out.  She's still what I consider somewhat dysfunctional in relationships but otherwise she is functional enough to get things done in her life.

Might your spouse be of that sort, where she might do better post-marriage than she leads you to expect?  Could the support you've provided for years be allowing her to let herself remain financially unproductive and claiming to be helpless and dependent?

Maybe she can't take care of herself.  That might be so.  But isn't it possible she can take better care of herself if/when she has to?  Just a thought.

Hi Anon57 and welcome
I do remember quite vividly when my DD announced she was pregnant! Just a few questions – is DD living independently and if so how often do you see her/have contact with her? Also how often does bf come and stay with your DD?

I remember being very aware that I would not be around for ever. So I kept wondering if the best thing I could do for my DD was to support her and the child so that when I wasn’t around there was some sort of ‘family’. Then lots of other scenarios and possibilities went through my mind.

You mention your DD is recently diagnosed – I am wondering if she is taking any medication for depression? This is like a whole new chapter perhaps now that there is a diagnosis and hopefully something for the depression. When my DD did take antidepressants it made a huge difference in relation to raising the bar as to what would trigger her anger, but the signs of BPD were still clearly there.

I find that ways to avoid huge problems often come to my mind – when in fact I have little or no control over my DD’s decisions. The main thing that strikes me is you are so exhausted from the journey so far, so I think focusing on how you can get a ‘time out’ from it all is an absolute priority.

Is there any chance you can take a few days, a weekend or just overnight and go somewhere to sleep and recoup a little? If not, is there another way you can get a time out or two or three in your week?

In many ways this is a new chapter – whether or not DD does become pregnant. It is new because you need to look at this next period of time in a different way – as I do, just because we are getting older.

I hope there is some possibility of you creating some ‘space’ that is a DD-free zone – as the first step in this new chapter.             

Hi Great-Lakes-Mitt and welcome
Your position is different in that you have been no contact for quite some time and live a fair distance from your DD and GS. Do you have any information on how DD is going at the moment -why I ask is that for some people with BPD, the symptoms can lessen, while for others that is not really the case.

So I think first step would be to try to find out how your DD is travelling at the moment if you don't already know. Is that possible. It makes a huge difference as to how you move forward for many different reasons: it might open the door to considerable problems for you and it might trigger your DD's intense sense of abandonment which she may be coping okay with.

Is there any contact at all that you have kept up over the years eg Christmas/birthday and if so how has that gone? Sorry for all the questions!

Pete - a valid concern, but in my case I am not too worried about this.  My W can’t hold it together under any kind of stress, especially to any authority.  She also would be afraid to ask for more than 50/50 because she knows that if she did it would put her life under a lens to which she finds risky considering her history of mental hospitals, unemployment, and unstable relationships.

In fact, she cites this as a way I “control” her.  In her mind, me saying that I would want 50/50 custody forces her to remain in the marriage because she can’t accept anything less than 100% and that if she challenges she knows she will lose because the court is “sexist”.  She then claims her only solutions is to “kill herself”.

My hope would be to find a way for her to be okay with 50/50 until the raw emotions fade and reality kicks in.  After that, things either remain that way or have worked themselves out naturally.  I have zero worries that a court would find a way to give me less than 50% parenting time.

@LovingBPD
Girl I have never read a post and felt more connected to someone. I do know exactly what you mean. It's exhausting. Idk exactly what I'm looking for here either, but it sure feels nice to not feel alone. It is exhausting to do so much for someone and have them constantly put you down.

I feel you. Your feelings are valid.

@Pook075
Glad to have the validation that I have things going on in my favor. Glad to not feel so alone. Thank you.

Our biggest repeating issue is misunderstandings. He constantly thinks that my face/body language/tone is saying something different than the words I'm actually saying. Now that we have been together over a decade, I can usually tell when he takes something I said a different way so I am actually able to confront it then, but that is hard. I know there are many times where he perceives something I'm saying completely differently and I don't catch onto it. When I do realize it is happening I try and say something like "idk what you took from that, I just want to be clear that what I said was..." and repeat my words again.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes he calls me a liar. Tells me I'm being manipulative. It gets so confusing and I try to fight it with logic (which I just read in the book doesn't work) and yeah it doesn't work... I will try and say what makes more sense? And then pitch him the truth vs what he said/believes. I don't know how to change my face/body language/tone to match my words to him and it's hard to say something and then also have to convince someone of it.

We don't have kids. We have two dogs and it can be extremely frustrating because he gets so upset with them over their basic needs. He will start yelling when they are just asking to go out, up to the point of getting super angry and potentially shutting down completely.

Our arguments can be pretty bad with him ending up yelling or getting violent. Thankfully to objects and not to me, but it can still be scary. The biggest issue with our arguments however is that we don't seem to grow from them often. He will shut out what happened. Tell me he doesn't remember any of it. Or that he remembers it a completely different way. He will gaslight me about arguments and turn them into a completely different thing, to the point where I will be so confused and questioning everything that was said.  This got so bad that I started recording when I knew we would get into a big argument because I wanted to be able to hear it back later and know for certain that I am being calm and he is getting angry and it is actually as I remember it.

Thank you for the help (:

One more thought: given your statements indicating you're contemplating an end to this marriage, you should absolutely be preserving evidence of these conversations, especially if they're in emails or texts, or some format that could corroborate what's being said.  If these conversations are all verbal, try to record some of them and save the recordings.  If not, at least write down the dates they occurred and who said what. 

If it comes down to it, and you or she files for divorce, it sounds like she'll fight for custody.  It's a bit of a red flag she made the comment about 50/50 custody.  It could very well show she's been thinking about this already. 

In my state, if you're at 50/50, I don't think either party is liable to pay the other party child support.  Sounds like she knows that.  A judge could still order it, but it's not automatic.  Also in my state, the non-custodial parent (i.e. the parent with less than 50% parenting time) gets a default possession schedule that amounts to around 35% of the time, sometimes more, depending on how holidays and school breaks go.  So if you're not going to be the primary custodial parent, you'll have to fight for 50/50, and - barring clear evidence one parent is not fit - that's a he said/she said, subjective fight.  However, the fact that your wife is willing to blow up the marriage to go have an affair with some other woman is a pretty strong weight in your favor. 

If this is against your values and you are not okay with it, absolutely do not allow it.  And keep a record of it. 

If you are already consenting for her to have a side piece and go on dates, you're going to have a much harder time in court. 

It sounds like from your first post you agreed she could go meet with this person more as a friend, and there wasn't a romantic interest there, but then she blindsided you with the request to have an open marriage.  I think you need to make clear - ideally in writing - that you're not okay with this, you misunderstood what she was looking for, you're not okay with an open relationship, and not consenting to it. 

I don't recall the ages of your children, but I recall how my family court and even my Custody Evaluator viewed parenting schedules.  For children up to preteen years both advocated equal time for co-parenting.

Because our child exchanges were places for my ex to play games posing as the aggrieved mother, I wanted exchanges as far apart as possible.  With equal time being discussed and the schedules designed across two weeks, I favored alternating weeks.  My CE, a child psychologist, corrected me.  He said a better schedule for children until at least 10 years old was two exchanges per week and described the 2-2-3 schedule (or 2-2-5-5 across two weeks).  One parent would get Mon-Tue overnights, the other Wed-Thu overnights and they would alternate Fri-Sat-Sun overnights.  I decided the second half of the week would be best for me since then I could review my child's school assignments and be sure they were done each week.

And my lawyer agreed, he asked me whether I wanted the court to think I felt my child didn't need more frequent time with me.  Um, not that!  As it turned out, even when I got majority time during the school year at age 12, we continued with 2-2-3 during summers until he was finished school and aged out of the system.

I also advocate for the children to have access to school counselors.  My son had regular counseling sessions until he was 12, starting at age 3 with play therapy.