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To say a pwBPD is "unwell" in the same way gives an unwarranted pass to their calculating behavior. .. And also prevents those victimized by them from standing up for themselves and enforcing healthy boundaries to distance themselves from it and keep their own sanity.
Hmm. PeteWitsend, right now I don't see it that way. For me, seeing uBPDx as unwell is actually helping me to protect myself. I might hate him, I might feel sad about the Dr Jekyll version of him, but ultimately, there is no point bargaining with a disorder. If he's sick, that's very sad for him, but putting distance between myself and the sickness is the right thing to do.
To use an imperfect analogy, you wouldn't get on a cruise ship knowing there was a deadly viral outbreak on board (unless you were a doctor, had appropriate protective gear, etc). Whether the people who have contracted the illness are to blame or totally faultless, is beside the point. You won't help and you'll make things worse for yourself.
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I'm currently living in the Philippines (because my wife is here) and the average household income is $8/day.
Pook, my country of origin is in the same region as the Philippines. It is a different environment where there is much less expectation that external or professional services will intervene to help someone in personal or mental health crisis. Partly because the resources are simply not there for most people, and partly because people's conception of self is much more interdependent and less individualistic than the West.
Apart from the manipulative dynamics, I think this may also have made it harder for me to just detach from uBPDx's many problems and toxic actions. A sense of obligation that made less sense in a modern, Western context where he actually could seek other services and wasn't going to end up on the street if I asked him to leave (and in the end, he showed no such qualms about telling me to leave, so).
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I have another idea about your feeling of attachment to him. It was romantic but also unconsciously felt familiar and obligatory- due to your experience with your mother.
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There's also boundaries and a sense of self that got blurred in families with a disordered person. So perhaps if you say that your ex was abusive in ways- you may feel a sense of this being wrong about you. If you were to think he was not a good person, would that feel wrong to you, or as if you were doing something wrong by saying it (whether he is or isn't) due to your connection to him.
NotWendy, you've got it again.
I still feel angry with uBPDx, obviously, but I also feel embarrassed for him. I want him to be 'good', act well, hold his head up, face and fix the things he's done. As if this will prove that I, too, am 'good'. After the boundaries between us were blurred for so long in the relationship, with his repeated assertions that everything he did (whether bad or good) was because 'you made me that way' - I have internalised the idea I am responsible for, well, everything. It's a fantasy of redemption and control.
The migration process and isolation which ensued tended to exacerbate pre-existing mental illness tendencies in my mother. I think uBPDx was certainly unwell and behaved badly in his country of origin, but I suspect it became worse after he emigrated. Maybe something about these dynamics triggered a deep familiarity in me.
For a long time, I had a strong sense of loyalty to my mother. No, she wasn't 'bad'. She was just too special for others to understand. Or the good in her was so very good that it made up for everything else.



