Hi CC43,

Thanks for the validation and very perceptive response. Yes her behaviour makes me incredibly angry but you know how it is, anger is never going to be a productive response with a pwbpd. Don’t get me started! Despite my own dysregulation towards D6 that horrible day, at least I can be proud that I do stand up for the kids at times like these. We have four kids and the youngest is nearly 1 year old. Because my wife has co-slept and breast fed them all, she uses that excuse why she needs to sleep later in the morning. You are right, I get them all up and ready in the morning, nappies/toilets, dressed, breakfast, hair, teeth, shoes, I also get their school bags and water ready etc.Tbh I like getting them ready cos she’s not there to stress me out hahaha. She also has a dog boarding business which I do most of the care and she just meets the owners and sends them selfies with the dogs I look after for her. The annoying thing in the morning is if she comes downstairs and I forget to say good morning beautiful or something and talk about the kids or work or something else then sometimes she flips out over that. So atm I work two days and she does college two days. She seems to be doing ok but needs lots of help academically as she has dyslexia and her education was poor. She has already gone from splitting her amazing new friends from white to black which is almost funny as it’s so predictable and I’m just like, yeahhhh… and do you notice who’s actually still here for you? As always? Yes that would be me. I will take on board what you said about the situation and I think if such a thing happens again I can kindly remind the kids, Mummy wouldn’t like that (as in, we need to remember Mummy is not normal and as they grow up they will learn what mental instability is…) I hope I can support them through all this, I know their mother’s behaviour will affect them but the last thing I definitely don’t want is for them to end up as adults with controlling and disordered partners.

Hi everyone. I´ve shared so far a lot about my story, but there´s one piece that still I haven´t talked about in this forum. It happened on May 13, it was the last time we talked. It was a descend into human madness and somehow I felt relieved after that, but then I got worse, and worse and worse. I´ll explain in detail what happened:

It was 8:15 pm. I was at the barber when I received a phone call. When I finished getting my haircut I looked at my phone. I was her. She never calls out of the blue, she always asks on whatsapp first if she can call. I was surprised to say the least, it had been one month since our last conversation that ended with her crying claiming "I´m so sorry that i can´t give you what you ask for". Anyway, I called her back:

"Hi, did you call me?"
"No, It was just a mistake"

That´s when I took a deep breath to control my first impulse. Instead, I just said

"Okay, bye"

And I hunged up. I kept walking on the street when I received three text messages from her. It took her 5 minutes to erase them, but I could read them. She was asking me the following:

"I wanted to know why I´m not enough for you?"

I guess you can imagine how I felt when I read that. I mean, how on Earth can a person who has left you, who has broken up with you twice can come three months later and ask you that? I got both anxious and angry. I couldn´t understand anything. So, when I got home that evening we talked. We where on the phone for 2-3 hours and this is what happened.

"Hi, why do you think that exactly?"
"It´s just that I can´t understand how is it that you want to be with me if I´m not your type"

I never said I had a type. I just said once months ago that I thought wavy hair was fine (she has wavy hair) and that also some women are ok with a fringe. I´ll continue, it just got worse:

"Are you again wondering about the girl who drew a portrait of my demised dog?" (long story short; she got mad at me due to one girl I just saw once in my life and before being with her)
"Not just that. I know there are more"

I was shocked. She was telling me I liked another girl I didn´t know about! I asked her:

"What do you mean?"
"You do like this girl in my class!! I know that"

Let´s call this girl Barbara. She claimed that I felt attracted to Barbara, a girl to whom I have never talked to, because she had the physical traits and features that I once described. The reality is that the only thing this girl has is a fringe and she somegow reaches to such conclusion. She also said that, since she has to see Barbara everyday in class, if she is in a relationship with me she can´t be comfortable in class knowing that I feel terribly attracted to Barbara. I said that all of that is made up, that it wasn´t true and it was all in her head. Her response was

"How can you tell me it is all in my head?! I know it is true!! You said (something made up in her mind)!!!"

This was absolutely crazy to be honest. She once gave pancakes to an ex of her (she´s been in 5 relationships and she´s just 22) while being with me, but I am the one that was cheating/attracted to someone else. She then started to say that I knew she wasn´t comfotable with those comments about other people´s physical features, and yet I never stopped making those kinds of comments. The reality is that I just said that once, and I always told her how much I liked her and what i liked about her. But still, I started to doubt about my own reality, because I couldn´t remember saying those things, like at all.

The conversation followed. At that time I wanted to work things out, and so I told her that. She said that I had disrespected her when I told her what I thought about her behaviour (I wrote it in another post), that I never listened to her. The reason I never listened, according to her was that when she got mad at me for something she was making up, I should be able to know why she was angry. That her getting mad is enough for me to know (i.e. I have to be  a mind reader). I said that i wanted to make the effort to work things out, and her response was

"Is what I´m asking even an effort!!!?"

And I also said that, according to what i said about her behaviour, that if it were the other way around, she could be honest with me, that I wouldn´t get mad at her for telling me how she felt about my behaviour in case it were necessary. Well, she responded me calling me names and saying that I was justifying disrespecting her.

It was like talking to a 5 year old. The conversation ended with her saying the following:

"I´ve been thinking for a while if I am the problem, because this has happened to me many times"

I couldn´t believe what she just said. But then she said

"No!!!! Both of us are the problem!!!"

I haven´t heard from her since that day. Like I said at the beginning, I felt relieved. I was feeling guilty, carrying a baggage for what I said when I communicated to her that her behaviour was not ok, that she needed help and that I wasn´t responsible for her emotional state. After that, I saw that she kept making things up, even worse than when we were together. So clearly, it was never about me, even though she kept putting the blame on me for her making everything up. However, I felt like in her mind she had rewritten the whole story. One week before the break up she told me she was very happy with me, that I treated her very well and she wanted to be with me forever, but now she was saying that I was just "attentive", just that. That I didn´t listen, that I said things that bothered her even though I knew those things bothered her, that I had failed her, etc. I was the bad guy, even though I gave everything I had, I tried over and over to make her feel loved, heard and understood, losing myself in the proccess. I started to think I was a failure, that I was a monster. Weeks went by and I didn´t know anything more about her and kept wondering what was the point of that phone call, because I couldn´t understand anything. At all.

Now I don´t the place I stand anymore. I don´t even recognize myself when I look in the mirror.

What do you think about all this? I need some guidance. I´m at a lost.

I understand. I helped my wife open her business. I helped it grow by opening another branch of the business. I then put all my time and effort into opening yet another business, and it is sad when all that seems to be thrown away.

But you have to look at things differently. There shouldn’t be any other reason why you love someone, other than it just being love. Any other reason, like status, or where our partner can provide us a place to live, just becomes a transactional relationship, and that isn’t a good basis for a relationship.

Another thing that is truly hurting me is that I feel like I've thrown away an opportunity, that I lost a smart woman with a good career. A woman that had asked me to move in with her eventually, an opportunity to live in the Capital, a big city. Don't know how to really cope tbh with lots of things. I keep checking her socials (can't see much, I'm blocked everywhere). She used to tell me she was goth but didn't really have anything gothic going on about her, it seems that now she has actually gone goth and that kinda made me jealous too, cause why not do it when I was there? I truly spend my days wondering if they really will last, since it's long distance too. But so were we.

Hi All
First post here, so bear with me.
Background - 20 year marriage.  BPD wife (trans woman) is my spouse.  I suspect she also has PTSD but neither have been diagnosed.
She's had episodes throughout the marriage, but this last one is different.  She's told me:
 - she's not sure she "loves me that way"
-she's not sure she wants to be married
-she says we rushed into the relationship (we dated 3 years before getting married)
- she has now become secretive with her phone
 - she has now "made friends with another woman via multiplayer phone games, and has told me she's not giving it up
 - she's changed the lock screen on her phone when after 20 years, she always said she had nothing to hide.
 - intimacy is non-existent and hasn't been for a long while
 - she does not want to talk to me, touch me or be touched.
 there's more but I honestly can't keep it all straight.

Now normally, I would ride this out.  I've been telling her "I love and miss you. I'm here if you want to talk.  You matter to me" etc etc, and trying to give her space.  I know there's a big black hole of pain in her head and she's not having an easy time.  I still bring her food and coffee and stuff.  I tell her to be safe when she leaves in the morning - just reinforcing that she matters to me.
Her usual protocol is to cocoon in bed.  Get home from work, jammies, in bed and stay there.  Weekends?  Never leaves the bed.  Plays that game ( my god, how I hate that game and the woman she's talking to.....it's killing me). Maybe takes a gummie.

Today, she suddenly decided that she was going for a drive.  Someplace where she could hear the ware and birds.  Then she left.  We have a phone app that is a tracker (she put it on everyone's phone) that she has turned to location off for her.  She didn't tell me where or for how long she was going.
I'm terrified.
I feel like she's going to come back and tell me it's over and she's moving out.
The other side is that this will just continue.  I 'm so very lost.  I love her so much and I am more than willing to do therapy, work on how I can be her anchor again and all around be her person.
I don't know what to do.

Thanks to both of you for replying...
I'm sorry to hear all of that, Rowdy. Honestly you've had it pretty rough and it sucks. Perhaps I can find solace in the fact that I wasn't actually married to her, although the plans were there. I really wanted to marry her, and she did too. I've been reading a lot on BPD these past few weeks and it's a bit scary, there's people who have it or have had it worse than me, and even though it's not a competition maybe I should be happy. But I can't really be happy, I miss her. I genuinely thought I was her only guy in the world. The way she made me feel, I genuinely thought I was a Prince about to become King one day. But I guess some Princes don't become Kings. I truly thought our story was different, unique, I thought I really was the love of her life. I never struggled to move on from relationships too much, to be fair I have had more flings than relationships. It was easier for me to move on from another ex of mine of 6 years, and that relationship was beautiful and she was the gentlest soul to me all of those 6 years, I think of her from time to time but it's different. Maybe it's different because of the way my exwBPD kept coming back, told me all those thing on how she'd "manifest everyday for me to come back to her" and when I actually did, even though things weren't great during the last months, she's let me go. She's let me go and gave a "win" to a guy who never liked me simply because my opinions were different than his and I'm not afraid to voice them. And yeah, honestly I never thought she'd cheat on me, because that's truly what she did, even though she's convinced herself she did nothing wrong because she told me "If it happens after, it's not cheating". Part of me is still protective towards her because I have a gut feeling something bad will happen because of this guy, he is fake, he is not stable, I just know it. I mean he's the kind of guy who would get mad at video games, when there was nothing to be mad about.

I'll try and keep you guys updated, thanks for the replies again. For now, I'll try and keep up with my gym and stick to my diet (struggling with this), but I do miss her. Again I really thought our story was worthy of a romance book, but I guess a book doesn't necessarily always have a happy ending. I need to focus on my life now because honestly I'm quite behind in life and this is also killing me, perhaps if I had a better life I wouldn't feel as defeated.

Going to be quite hard these coming months especially december there's a lot of video game stuff coming out and the thought of her playing them with him instead of me is quite excruciating, she really seems to think this guy is the love of her life, maybe it's harsh to say but I hope it's just the idealisation phase and it'll all come crashing down. Karma gave me my dose once, I hope it does its job again here...

Ok, strap yourself in.

First things first, my relationship was 27 years, married for 22 (still married) and I was not aware of bpd when I was in the relationship.

So, going back over 10 years, my wife and I are driving back from a long drive to get some furniture, car is rammed with flat pack boxes. About 10:30 at night, we make it back to our village and a guy walks out of his drive to go to the pub across the road. He had let his 12 week old puppy run out in the road and I nearly killed it. Flat pack went through my windscreen, he offers to pay. I go to see him the next day and feeling partially guilty suggested we pay half my insurance excess each, but leave feeling that the guy is arrogant, generally a bad first impression.

Skip forward to 2019. A friend of my wife’s gave her the contact details of this guy, the same guy, that was the husband of her friend. The reason being so my wife could buy drugs from him.
I ended up being dragged around their house one evening for a bbq. My impression of the guy didn’t really change, he seemed a little more friendly but I still had that doubt about him in my mind.

Skip forward to July/aug 2023. My wife is on holiday with her best friend and her best friends mum. Messaging me all the time, ringing me every night, telling me she misses me so much and doesn’t ever want to go away on her own without me. Then her friend (the one whose husband sells her drugs) messaged her to say she had been caught out cheating on her husband.

It is around this time that I had started pleading with my wife to stop buying coke off this guy, and asked her to stop drinking so much (she would drink a couple bottles of wine, or 3/4 bottle of gin a night) as I knew it was destroying us.

My wife said she needed to be there for both of them, as he didn’t really have any friends to talk to about the breakdown of his marriage. He would then start coming round my house all the time to talk to my wife. By now I was beginning to see the guy for the toxic person he is. He never called his wife by her name, he would only call her ‘it’ or ‘cunt’ and would tell us the things he had done, like thrown all her possessions on the driveway, throwing a shoe at her head, putting her sat nav in the microwave….. that sort of nonsense.
I would generally get up and go into another room, play my guitar, anything other than listen to his bull.

On Sunday evenings we would invite my sister in law, her daughter and her husband for dinner, as well as our two sons. My wife then started inviting this guy and two of his children to join us. My eldest that doesn’t live with us didn’t say anything, but later on told me he couldn’t stand the bloke. My youngest used to eat his dinner as quick as he could then go upstairs to his room, because he couldn’t stand the bloke. My brother in law didn’t like him either, because one of his children is autistic and he would call him a retard. It was at this time he started coming out with lies that were so outrageous you could google search what he was saying to catch him out. These are things that have some truth to what he comes out with but just don’t add up. A couple of times I actually wanted to punch him straight in the face the crap he came out with annoyed me that much. I even caught a look from him one night that was pretty much a confession that he was up to no good.

He had been constantly messaging my wife, and his messages were so illiterate my wife would ask me to read the message because she couldn’t understand them. He messaged one afternoon while our niece was round and she saw that he had messaged, and asked her aunty if he was her boyfriend, which my wife laughed off and denied. Around this time she became more secretive with her phone, and stopped asking me to read the texts. She would quite often pop out and say she had to go and see him because he was in a bad way.

At the time I had my suspicions, certainly on his part, but thought my wife was more intelligent than to get involved, that she could see him for what he really is. Then I would come home some days in the afternoon, to find him in my house drinking and taking cocaine with my wife. He then turned up with a large quantity of it and asked my wife to stash it because he was worried his wife was going to tell the police he was dealing drugs.

It eventually came to a head one weekend. A client of his had offered the use of his holiday home in Monaco, so he flew out with his two kids for a week. On the Sunday my wife was out and rang me asking to find her passport, as their friend wanted to go out there and stay with him because he was apparently in a bad way. I looked but couldn’t find the passport. I didn’t want her to go but thought if I told her as much it would make things worse, and she found it. She then came home and found the passport and within a couple of hours she left with her friend to fly out to Monaco. She became very distant and difficult to reach on the phone, and was basically ghosting me. I’d messaged telling her I was worried about her. She eventually rang me later in the evening and started an argument that I told her I wanted to speak to her about when she got home.

I’d told her that I had my suspicions but she denies anything was going on. When she came home the first night was frosty, the second night led to me leaving home. She was still adamant nothing was going on, that she had no feelings for this guy whatsoever, but within 2 weeks she was seeing him. She would get in her car drunk out of her mind to go and pick him up and sneak him in the house, when my son had gone out.

I’d spoken to his wife. She left him because he lies so much. Because he has been a coke addict for over 30 years. Because he is controlling and abusive. Because he didn’t even sleep in the same building as her. A friend of hers told me he would demand sex and if she refused he would drag her down the stairs on her back by her hair. He is abusive to people on public Facebook groups, and everything my gut told me about the bloke has been confirmed by various people that know him.
He tried to intimidate my sons friend into paying him some money that his dad owed him, but had passed away.

But he likes to drink, and he likes to get coked out of his head, and so does my wife. He also has a bit of coin in the bank, and my wife is quite badly in debt. There is much more to the story, I’ve written about it on here already, I’ve probably forgotten a fair bit of it too. .

I'm so sorry.  Truthfully, you should be searching for another job since this isn't going to go away.  In some ways it keeps everything fresh because she's using her position to get to you however she can.

I'd have another conversation with HR and tell them about the physical & mental abuse.  If you put it in writing and they do nothing about it, then it's a potential hostile work environment lawsuit down the road.  Once it's in writing it doesn't go away and HR knows it's serious at that point.  If you were to go that route, mention in writing the first few instances of asking to be separated from her and who you talked to.  Then state your current grievance.

I don't see how you stay there and move on at the same time.  It's so tough and unfair.

Hello and welcome to the family.  I'm so sorry you're in this mess and hopefully we can find a few words of wisdom to help you through this.

The BPDs in my life are an ex-wife and a daughter, but in hindsight I always suspected my mom as well since she would explode over the tiniest things.  And I realized that even though she wasn't diagnosed, the principles you'll learn here work whether someone has BPD or not.  So let's talk through a few of those.

First, someone with BPD has trouble with boundaries- like your mom blaming things on you and then wanting to be best friends the next day.  That's not how life works, and you need to start making that clear.  If she berates you on the phone, tell her she's being unfair and explain that you have to go and will talk to her another time.  You don't have to be mean about it either- it just has to be consistent.

For instance, she calls and starts ranting about your childhood, maybe give her one warning...mom, I don't want to talk about this.  If she continues, tell her that you're not having that conversation and you have to hang up.  That's a boundary and it's so critical to deliver it in a very predictable way every single time.

Now, your mom doesn't like boundaries, so she will not respect your wishes (at least at first).  She'll call, text, and email with suicide threats, because when she does that, you come running to give her the attention that she needs.  So that brings us to boundary #2, if mom says "suicide", you dial 9-1-1 and have her taken off in an ambulance.

Again, you do this each and every time in a very predictable way.  You scream, I'm getting off the phone.  You threaten suicide, then I'm sending emergency response.

Your mom will try to blame you and make this all about you- but go back to boundary #1.  You're not doing that anymore.  You can explain to her though that you're only reacting to her behavior and you've made your intentions very well known.  You want a relationship with her but it has to be reciprocal.  All the decisions are hers to make- be nice and have a relationship, or be ugly and have no relationship.

Again, I'm so sorry you're in this position and so many here can relate since it's very similar behavior patterns.  You mentioned until you were mid-20's, all your mom's venom went to your dad.  A better way to say that is she's needed someone to blame her entire life in order to remain a victim.  You left, just like your dad left, and you got the same amount of blame for putting yourself first.

Please continue to share and ask questions.  Hopefully this helped as a starting point.

First off- I'm so sorry.  My breakup with my BPD ex-wife went pretty much the same way.  We'd get together and things were good.  Yet somehow, the next day, she's telling me that I'm a horrible person who always betrayed her and she'd bring up things from 20 years ago. 

It's so hard because it just doesn't make any sense.

Here's what happens through a BPD lens though.  You make contact, they get excited, things are going good, and then a little voice in the back of their head says, "You're playing with fire...remember when she did this, this and that!?!"  So they start having conversations within their minds examining all the evidence...most of which is not being recalled accurately...and they come to the conclusion that this person they loved so much is out to ruin their entire existence.

Why?  Because BPD is a serious mental illness and the people who see the worst of it are the people they love the most...because that's also the people they'll have the most conflict with.

Him saying he loves you is absolutely true- that was his way of trying to say goodbye in a kind way.  It's heartbreaking because he's his own worst enemy and everything he said was to chase you away so he didn't have to face his internal fears.  He probably didn't mean 90% of it...that's just how a BPD protects themselves.

At least you know now what future interactions will bring.  Please understand that this wasn't you, this is 100% a mental illness thing.  I'm so sorry you're hurting and I hope you can find what's next quickly.  Please continue to talk this out!