Hi there,

I agree with the other posters, do not contact her ex, and do not contact her psychologist.  If you pwBPD finds out, she will use it against you.  The plan will backfire in my opinion.

Look, though your intentions might be in the right place, you can't help your disordered partner unless she wants to get help for herself and take her therapy seriously.  La pelota esta en su tejado.

In the meantime, I'd advise you not to change yourself for your partner, in the sense that you shouldn't become alienated from your family in friends just to please her.  Why?  Because no matter what you do, she won't be pleased, and she'll always find something to be upset about, as that is classic BPD.  I'm not advocating that you go off and have an affair to spite her; what I'm saying is that you shouldn't isolate yourself in the vain attempt to make your partner happy.  In the long run, you'll regret missing out on your life.  If she has a meltdown when you visit family in Madrid, I'd say, let her have her meltdown, but not in front of your kids.  What I'd recommend is to give her an "adult time out."  That's shorthand for giving her time and space to cool off.

Saludos cordiales.

We can sympathise totally with what you're going through, BPD always runs to a very predictable script. almost like the sufferer has loaded a computer program into their head and is following its instructions.

There would be little point in contacting her ex; at most, you would just get confirmation that they had been treated the same as you. My ex-BPD played the 'previous guys never trested me right' routine which I fell for at the start but I eventually realised that it was her who treated them badly. I'm quite sure if I had contacted any of her previous partners I'd have heard identical stories to my own.

If she finds out you contacted her ex that will definitely upset her and you'll then be accused of 'plotting against her' or something like that. Remember that BPD's always see themselves as the victim.

Also, by contacting him it might bring him back into the scene where she can use him to cause jealousy.  Far better to let sleeping dogs lie, things are complicated enough without ex's getting involved.

I think the goals are the same- to be able to attend the event, and also stay emotionally calm and focused on your brother. The suggestions I made are about how to manage this - for yourself. It's not about your mother.

For adult children who grew up with an unpredictable parent, we become hypervigilant around them, for our own emotional safety. As much as we can be rational as adults, we may still automatically be on alert when we are around that parent. Signs of this can be- difficulty sleeping, a sense of fear. We may feel shame and guilt over feelings we were told were wrong when we were kids and still go against people's expectations.

You mentioned feeling dread over seeing your mother. If you feel a sense of dread or fear, that is how you feel. It's not your fault. The goal is how to attend this event for your brother and still take care of you. Staying somewhere else, having someone with you- these are strategies to help you feel emotionally safer when you do spend time with her.

So, yes, attend and also have some safety plans for yourself in case you feel you need them. These are strategies to make some contact possible, so you can attend family functions and maintain contact with other family members and if you choose, also your mother.

I hope all goes well for you and that it's a great time. 

Thanks once more.

Actually it is about my uBPD ex-partner, not about my daugther.

I was not strong enough and contacted her to try to talk things out and try to make her see how some of her behaviours and reactions are, let´say not normal, without mentioning BPD at all, but she refuses to speak with me. It is like a nighthmare. One month ago I took her daughter on holidays with mny kids, and treated her as my own daughter of course, and she is not easy at all to handle. One week later me and my uBPD ex made a lovely trip to the Netherlands that was like a honeymoon. We did not live together but I spent all my free time at their place, and then went home to sleep, just across the street. And now I am like a total stranger and have no access to them, although she says that when my kids come visit from Spain we can hang out as usual. Nothing makes sense to me.

Btw, I actually think her traits are not only BPD but also NPD, especially because she would never seem to be aware of her bad behaviour, never ask for any apologies when she would do something clearly wrong and show no empathy at all in very complicated moments for me, like no compassion and a revengeful or cruel character at times, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide.

I am trying to do a lot of sport, I walk long distances and I am trying to get back to frienships that I got away from just to accomodate to her. It is very painful seeing everything from some distance now, but it is also very painful going through the beautiful moments together and with our kids as ifi those moments were just a dream. I dreamed of rebuilding a family with her and our kids because when it is the five of us it is just perfect. I have the feeling that the moment I interact with anybody else, especially females but also males, then problems start. It was as if she want me just for her and I could not relate to anybody else. Sometimes, when I had plans for lunch or any other thing wit any friend, which happened very seldom, she would turn ill or find a way to make me feel guilty for not cancelling and be with her, which I ended up doing. Even once she made me not go to work because she was sad that a tree in her condo garden was cut out, she made a huge scene when I told her I would go to work when she asked, and I ended up staying with her. I never told this to anybody before, it is surreal but at the momentm the fear of losing her made me accept thing like this and much worse, like physical abuse (slapping, throwing water and hot tea over me, kicking...)

I know best thing for my mental health is to get away, but the dependance became huge because I let myself be isolated from the "normal" world.

Thanks for reading. Letting this out helps.

I don’t have time to type out an extremely long message because I am leaving for work shortly, but this was unbelievably healing and insightful, thankyou for helping me understand better.

I hope she gets the help she needs, I did genuinely love her & I do wish the best for her regardless of what she did.

I will keep this explanation in mind every time negative feelings surface from what happened.

Thanks again.

I hope you have a great time and more importantly, I hope you realize that you can overcome this.  Maybe you reconcile with mom, maybe not, but just being able to co-exist and let go of all the emotions tied to it is a massive step.  I wish you luck!

I completely understand.  My wife and I had several arguments when we first got together in person because she's such a strong, independent woman who's moved mountains for herself and her son.  The family bonds in the Philippines are so much stronger than the USA as well; family is everything here because you can't survive without them.  So there was a lot of figuring out the cultural differences for both of us and it was an adjustment for sure.

For you, having to do that on top of mental illness problems sounds like such an impossible task.  I'm so sorry you went through all of that.

Think back to when you were a kid and did something you knew your parents would be furious about.  Maybe you stole a piece of candy, or got in a fight at school, or failed a major test.  Whatever.  We all have different memories like that and in our minds back then, it was like the entire world was going to end for us since there was no way past it.

In all of these stories, we eventually told our parents (or they found out another way) and we did get in trouble, but it wasn't the end of the world after all.  Sometimes, we didn't even get in trouble because it truly wasn't our fault.  But our childish minds just couldn't process that sort of thing because we focused on the emotion of getting caught, our parents being so mad at us, etc.  So we just hid the story for as long as possible and walked around carrying that lie that was eating at us.

That's what BPDs do their entire lives, they hide their emotions or they explode because of them.  That great girl that you met, she's really that great girl...but she has decades of trauma that's always just beneath the surface.  And once something happens, he mind goes into that same fight or flight mode we experienced as kids where she just can't get past it.  She's thinking about this massive, unavoidable problem that's not that big of a deal to you or I, we could find ways past it.  But her mind can't, it keeps seeing all the failure and the mistakes and how shameful everything is.

That's why BPDs start random arguments over nothing; they've been fighting something else internally all day and a tiny little thing is suddenly a huge thing that makes them snap.  They can't tell you the truth, so they argue about that other thing instead because they get to release all those emotions.

To you, she threw away six months of great memories.  But to her, she ran from an unsolvable problem...and it was something that you guys could easily solve if she wasn't thinking like a terrified kid who's going to get caught for stealing a cookie from the kitchen. 

That's about as non-technical as I can make it and BPDs do this their entire lives, running from self-created problems and relationships because if you knew how messed up their thoughts are, surely you'd leave them.  They get so upset over the thought of breaking up that they leave you instead to save themselves that pain.  It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy because every relationship is doomed from the start, even when things are going great. 

Truthfully, it's heartbreaking for you and it's heartbreaking for her.  It's heartbreaking for that baby too.  But it all comes back to what I said in the last post- this is not about you, it's about mental illness and continually making the same mistakes in life.  When she gets into that mental state, her reasoning and logic all but shuts off as emotions take over and she's that scared little kid with nowhere to run.  She just doesn't know how to work through the tough stuff in life.

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.


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).



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.

Hi,

I lived through a phase of suicidal threats and gestures, some blatant, some thinly veiled ("My life is over / It's hopeless / I don't want to be here anymore"), some projected ("You should be euthanized").  I called it the "nuclear" phase.  Alas, my pwBPD attempted suicide multiple times.  What stopped this behavior?  I think what stopped it was her realization that if she continued to make suicidal threats and gestures which landed her in the hospital, she would be involuntarily committed long-term, and she'd lose her freedoms.  Her doctors and her dad told her as much ("This is serious, if you do this again, you'll lose your freedom").

I think if I were in your shoes, my reaction might depend on the intensity of her mood.  If she's riled up, I might ask, "Are you thinking about committing suicide right now?"  If she responded that she was, I'd dial 911 or take her to the emergency room myself.  If she's reasonably calm, I might ask, "Do you want me to dial 911 and get some help for you?"  If she declined the offer, I think I'd feel better that she wasn't really in distress.  Both of these approaches take her seriously and validate her feelings.