Wendy, If we did not have small kids I would probably say this isn’t working out and that both of us would be better with our own space, and then help her find a place if she wanted.  More than likely, she would move with friends or family out of state.  This has nothing to do wit my feelings towards her, it’s more about recognizing the need to move on being in both of our best interests.

But the kids keep her here, as I would not agree to her leaving the state with the kids.  And she does have a role as a mother, however dysfunctional at times.  A 50/50 parenting time would be ideal if it could be maintained.  That will certainly take effort from me to ensure the kids are provided for when they are not with me.  Kids with me 100% of the time would be emotionally difficult on them.  I know there are other arrangements, but these all present similar problems.

Either way, if she wants to be with women or does not want to have a monogamous marriage, I can’t do anything about those desires.  Neither would work for me given the already stressful nature of this r/s.  If it came down to it, I would say that we have to find a way to separate.

Superdaddy -  

I understand what you are saying.  In my case, my W is cerebral enough and had enough therapy in her life to know the problems she is creating are her own.  That doesn’t stop her from projecting, but if I were to “play along” for awhile in hopes she would realize the problems she is creating, it would serve no end because deep down she already knows she is the source.

Another thought on your wife's dependency on you and shame.

Does your wife "mask" in social situations? My BPD mother had an entirely different persona in public. Charming, intelligent, seemingly competent. Nobody would have had a clue.

I felt envious that other people got the "good side" of her, but then I realized it was the mask that hid the parts of her that she felt shame about. It wasn't real. We got the real side of her, as difficult as it was sometimes.

She had become friends with a woman about my age. By then, I knew that if someone was in her circle, that wasn't my place, so I didn't have contact with this person. She needed to have a separate world than family, because, we saw the bigger picture. I contacted her when my mother passed away and she shared memories of the good times they had together.

One one hand, this was crushing. She and my mother did things together that I wished my mother could have done with me. On the other hand, I knew she couldn't, because, I knew her in a different context. With this person, BPD mother could present the part of her she chose to let her see.

I think this is what your wife is seeking. She is completely dependent on you and knows she needs you, but that also triggers her shame and she feels resentful. You've seen the larger picture. The good and the not so good. But that's all of her.

Your wife isn't seeking to replace you or find another husband. It's actually because she has you that she can be something different to someone else. It also might appear that my BPD mother had found a "replacement daughter" but she wasn't seeking what she already had. This was a relationship that met an emotional need for her.

On this dating site, your wife can be whoever she chooses other people to see. There's no history with this woman, so there's no shame. At least not yet. If this woman has less materially than she does, she doesn't feel less than her. She may even feel superior to her. This person is showing her attraction, admiration.

Your wife needs you but this triggers her shame. She doesn't "need" this other woman. She can reinvent herself with her. While you might feel jealousy, that this woman is getting the "good side"- what she's getting isn't real, even if it appears that way to you. It may meet some need of your wife but it can't give her real love because the woman isn't getting the "real her". How long this lasts, one can't tell. But you're the real person to her and at some level your wife knows that, even if it shame triggers her.

oh yeh I agree with you. What I said was completely wrong, triggering and definitely not the right way to go about things. But it highlights the lack of accountability and the double standards. But at the time I’d said those things I wasn’t even aware bpd was a thing.

The problem I have with your suggestion is the way the majority of bpd persons mind works. If you put one little seed in their mind something that can dysregulated them, it can end up like a runaway train. The scenarios that play out in their heads become their reality. I’m not sure how long your relationships have lasted, but from my own personal experience and many others on here, if you did something they perceived as a slight towards them 20 years ago, even though they got the complete wrong end of the stick, you’ve explained tirelessly that they misunderstood or misread the words/situation/look/sound you made, it doesn’t matter what you say or do their mind is made up, and that thing that happened 20 years ago, no matter how insignificant or misunderstood that thing was, it will be dragged up time and time again, and it is just another round of ammunition they have in their armour against you.
I completely get where you are coming from and the idea behind it, I just really do not think it is a good idea…… at all.

What you tried is completely different from what I suggested. You just brought a hypothetical situation to the conversation, which doesn't work at all. And then you made kind of a threat, which just fills into the drama and has a detrimental effect.

What I said is to just let her fall into the trap of believing for a while that you are actually doing the thing. I have done this a few times in different relationships and circumstances, and it has always worked in making them regret their past actions. In my experience, it works perfectly in making them drop the double standards. They are much more sensible, so they learn fast from just "a fabricated sample" how it feels to be on the other side.

Everyone gets angry, so avoiding that entirely probably isn't possible.  It's what we do when someone around us is angry that makes all the difference.

For example, my current wife was mad today because her son didn't come home from school for about three hours.  The longer we waited, the madder she got, and I could tell that he was going to get screamed at when he came in the door.  If he talked back or made excuses, he'd get slapped...it's just how these sorts of things go.

Mind you, my current wife isn't mentally ill.  She does have anger problems at times though and expects her son to be perfect.

When I saw her getting upset, I knew it was out of worry...what if something happened?  I was looking at my watch too because it's unlike him to be out late.  So I validated her anger by saying I understood why she was upset and I was frustrated too. 

Just like that, her anger went from like a 7 to a 3.

BPDs are the same in that regard; everything is emotional and explosive and over the top.  They could be yelling about something left on the counter, but that's not why they're angry...the truth is something deeper that we rarely get to see.  Yet we get drawn in over that one dumb thing and it turns into a war when we don't even understand why we're arguing.

For my wife above, I knew her anger was actually worry over something might have happened to her son.  So I reacted with validation and sympathy not towards her anger, but the actual problem. 

For BPDs, you might say, "Well, if the stuff they're dysregulated over is hidden, how the heck do I address it?"

But that's the beauty of it, the 'why' doesn't matter.  They just want to feel loved and supported in every interaction.  They want to feel like they matter and they're seen.

If I see my BPD kid or ex wife completely unhinged, my first reaction is compassion by saying something like, "Oh my gosh, what happened?  What can I do?  Let's talk it out."  And by doing that, it's targeting that frustration away from me and towards someone else.  Why?  Because I'm making it "our fight" instead of "their fight".

That doesn't always work because sometimes, they came in the room intentionally mad at me.  Or maybe something I said/did/thought set them off even further.  That's when I'll try to walk away, but I don't do it by saying, "Hmmph, you're impossible and I'm not doing this." 

Instead, I lovingly say, "Look, I'm on your side here and I don't want to argue.  I'm going to walk away for a few minutes so we can both calm down."

Notice that I used "I" several times and used "we" only once.  The statement was all about me and how I felt; that's to avoid placing blame towards the other person when they're disordered.  The only time I said a variant of "you" was in the phrase "I'm on your side".  That's intentional to be positive there with any "you" statements.

Other times, I might say, "I love you and I don't want to argue...."  It carries the same type of message.

When a BPD is dysregulated, it is almost always stems from abandonment issues, self esteem, feeling neglected, feeling worthless, etc.  An easy catch-all word would be "depressed".  In that state, they seek validation (or affection) and if that doesn't happen, then you have anger and conflict. 

And don't get me wrong here, most of the time we completely miss the social cues that show a dysregulated mood is incoming.  Or maybe there weren't any clues to begin with.  But if we respond with genuine concern and empathy, that can allow the moment to pass without the chaotic blowup.

I hope that helps.

Hi hiiumaa ,

Oh, I see the grandiose ideas lead to binge drinking. But honestly, this is something you should not try to control. And trying to control this with words is the worst way. This is super invalidating for pwBPD. And if he is dissociating while he does so, then it's really impossible to bring him back to reality with this approach.

What you can do is to read about the orthomolecular protocol from Roger J. Williams and about the prescription drugs used to treat alcoholism. If you google "drug used to treat alcoholism," you'll see a few names, and the main one is also used off-label to treat severe symptoms of BPD with very high success rates. Then once he contacts you and is open to receiving recommendations, you can forward him the information. Hopefully he would be encouraged to forward it to his psychiatrist. Most psychiatrists won't know it, but you can forward them the studies:

https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2010-06891-012
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34029405/

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Now back to my case... I hardly slept at all this night thinking about it. Yes, I'm inclined to give up on being there for her and to maintain a romantic relationship, at least temporarily, until I see results from her treatment. Because by now, not interacting seems like the only way to avoid conflict. But she can meet me, if she wants, every 3 days when I take our 2-year-old back and forth.

It would be so easy for me to just find a new company, an easygoing girl, and rebuild my family without her. I'm very self-confident about that. But what holds me back is the hope that I have in the treatments that are available (DBT + N + K).

I understand this situation. I didn't see the whole of it initially. I also wondered why my father didn't divorce her, why he put up with her behavior. I would not have blamed him if he had divorced her.

I didn't see how dependent and low capacity she was as she mostly leaned on him and also she was very invested in keeping up the image of competence. Her behavior was a family secret. I don't blame her- it would have felt shameful to her if anyone truly knew the whole of it. 

Rather than seem appreciative, being dependent also felt shameful to her, and she resented that, and so, doing things for her- which she needed, also enhanced her feeling of incompetence, and at times she'd project that and react to it.

In her later years, I could see just how impaired she was with her BPD. She truly could not function on her own in any capacity. While having boundaries was necessary, how much to disconnect posed a moral dilemma. Even if we have every right to walk away from an abusive situation, how does one leave a completely dependent person who can not function to fend for themselves?

Yet, like the bridge story, we also don't have to go over the edge with them either. Where's the balance? 

I don't have an answer. These are complicated situations and different for everyone. I don't think there's one right or one wrong way. It would be easier to leave if your wife found someone else to stay with- that way, you'd know she'd not be on her own. So far, that isn't happening. Maybe one day, divorce would be a choice for you, maybe not. For now the issue is the one at hand- her wanting to meet up with a woman and what happens with that.

I really don’t think this is a good idea. If your partner has bpd and you can convince them of something like this, you open yourself up to all sorts of situations that will run through their heads and they will convince themselves that everything that is going on in their head is fact. You then are faced with the consequence of trying to convince them it was all an elaborate plan to try and get them to change their own view point and they just simply won’t believe you. And it will get dragged up in every argument from that moment until eternity.

We spend our lives treading on eggshells trying not to make one wrong move to stop them becoming dysregulated, why on earth would you manufacture a situation that could, or probably would, be unrecoverable from.

I doubt it would make much difference to the disordered person anyway. For example, I asked my ex how she would feel if the shoe was on the other foot and I was a drug addict that ran off with my drug dealer, would she not fight for the relationship and try and show me how my decision was a bad one. She did agree to some extent but made no difference. In one heated exchange I commented that maybe I should go and f*** a few of her friends before running off with one, which is exactly what she has done, only for her to call me a sick twisted b*stard.

I’m afraid with a pwBPD you will never get them to see the double standards at play.

Your wife may be seeking something different in this relationship.

We tend to form relationships with people we meet in our own circle, so it would make sense that my BPD mother would marry someone who was similar to her family members who had stable jobs.

Also, if we want a family, we'd want to be married to someone with similar goals, and capacity to provide and care for them- whether that is by traditional roles or shared ones. Your wife isn't seeking a husband and father- she has you.

In terms of having a poor self image, BPD mother would look to others for her own self image. Having a husband who provided for her helped her to feel valued. She, herself didn't have a lot of accomplishments but being married to someone who had a good job contributed to her self esteem.

BPD mother did not work outside the home. Yet, when a sibling had difficulty with employment and worked a lower paying job, she was very critical of that. I think this could be a reason why your wife is critical of your income, the house. She doesn't think she's enough, so from her own thinking, you aren't either. But this is a reflection of her thinking, not you.

With other people, like female friends, BPD mother tended to seek out people who had less than her. It didn't start out that way. Prior to the "women's movemement" she was similar to her peers who didn't work outside the home, but after that, as women entered the workplace and she didn't- maybe it was harder for her to feel good about herself around women who had careers. Perhaps she chose people who she didn't feel would be challenging to her own self image.

This may be why your wife has chosen someone whose circumstances are less than hers. It's hard to know what is going on. I assume this person put "working in medicine" on the dating website, but not all medical related jobs are high paying. It's also possible she fell on hard times with the divorce. Why she's in this situation is anyone's guess.

Hi SuperDaddy!

Thank you very much for the great exchange!

I can well understand that after this response from your wife, you felt the need to explain yourself very clearly again. I probably would have had the same impulse.

Unfortunately, I also know that even follow-up explanations—even when given after some time to cool down—don’t get through.

You say you’re giving up. Does that mean you actually want to end the relationship with your wife?

As for my partner’s grandiose fantasies, the unfortunate thing is that they fuel his alcohol binges. He always goes through these cycles. And it starts with a kind of mania, including grandiosity. The more frustrated he gets that the grandiose ideas don’t work out, the closer he gets to alcohol. That’s why I started telling him that I see that only small steps are possible—in the hope of grounding him. But, as mentioned, that doesn’t work.