I do not. I was never one to record our fights. That's what she did, only my reactions of course. I would even tell her, 'why do I want to capture my partner at their worst?'. I deleted every single thing associated with her. I can see how it would help though. I know that I'm lucky, but it's been long enough to where I'm like 'was it that bad? maybe I was an aszhole. Did I really mess this up?'.....and I know that is a giant lie, but I'm so far removed from the craziness it doesn't seem 'that bad' anymore. Then to see a random picture of her looking happy and smiling, hair curled, nice outfit, her blue eyes. It crushed me for a bit yesterday. Truly don't know why she has that effect on me. I feel like such a loser hahaha

Do you have any bad memories of her?  Recordings of fights?  Texts or emails of her behavior?  Keep those around.  Whenever you feel nostalgic, and feel yourself slipping, look at the bad things and remind yourself how lucky you are to be free and away from that nonsense. 

Similar here. Been split now for approaching three years. I’ve been in a relationship for a year and a half and in comparison it’s great, no stress or drama. My weekly headaches I’d get living with my wife have gone. I socialise more, have picked up new hobbies and can do what I like, when I want.

I just tend to struggle with how my ex is still with the idiot she is with. How she is messing her life up and can’t see it. It’s not because I want her back, I was deleting stuff on my phone the other week and came across a video I had covertly recorded of her and how she used to speak to me and it disgusted me, and made me wonder how I ever put up with it.

The problems I have at the moment are two fold. Like Pook, our lives are similar on many levels, there are the dogs. My ex would always be looking for a dog because one was never enough to fill that void. So we got our third dog just a few months before she monkey branched. To start with when she moved into a house on her own we shared the dogs, so half the time they would stay with her which was great for my own autonomy. As she was struggling to survive on her own she moved in with her new supply. She would still come round and walk the dogs, about three times a week. Late last year, they went out and got another two dogs. He already has two. She has not been round to see the dogs or walk them for 6 months. That annoys me. They meant everything to her but now, out of sight out of mind.

The second reason is her health. She is now a grandmother to our 3 month old grandson. But that hasn’t stopped the pair of them and their drinking and I’m quite certain their drug abuse. Even on the night our grandson was being born she was off her face on what ever substances they were on, asked our youngest son to go pick them up from a pub, and then asked our son to go and get class A drugs for a friend, before creating a scene in the street at 2am calling my son a drunk driver and accusing him of being on drugs while she was off her face causing him to ring me at 2:30am in distress at his mothers behaviour, and telling me he wanted to drive off a cliff.

she has got skin cancer that she had an op on her nose about a year ago. That op failed and it has apparently spread and she is riddled with skin cancer on her head neck and shoulders, but appears to be doing nothing about it and continues to go off on holidays abroad to hot countries to, in my sons words, top up her cancer.

Why does this concern me, well, I believe that first operation on her nose the surgeon will have noticed the damage inside it due to years of cocaine abuse. They will then refuse to operate again unless she is clean, likely drug testing her to see if she is. Why has nothing happened in a year, is she failing drug tests or just avoiding the situation altogether, I don’t know.

I just can’t get out of my head how nothing makes sense. I struggle to understand how her relationship has lasted nearly three years when its foundation was built on cocaine and alcohol abuse. She was sleeping with me behind his back for a year, and he knows it. It’s a relationship built on her betraying me, followed by a year of her betraying him. She’s told our kids basically that she is with him for his money, which I knew anyway as when his marriage was breaking up he was coming round my house and discussing with us, my wife, how he can keep his money away from his ex. He was a partner in a building firm which has been dissolved and he was taking half what the business was worth, being drip fed it every month, and she was telling the kids he had plenty of money. However, he wasn’t going to work for nearly three years as that money was coming in, but has recently started going to work so that is obviously drying up. The cheap Range Rover he bought her broke down to the point of being a write off, as I told her would happen a year ago when he bought it for her, so she has been driving around in my sons old car for months, which I paid half for. His ex wants half the house, but he has their 16 year old son living with him so won’t have to give her half the house until he is 18 but when the time comes it’s going to seriously affect his finances.

Then there is the fact she has been on the phone a couple of times to our son crying about my new girlfriend. Assaulted me when I went on a date 3 months after we split up. Would text me first thing every morning for the first year we split up. Bumped into my girlfriend in a supermarket and knew it was her even though has never met her, but she keeps cropping up on my girlfriends Facebook page and I’m not on Facebook so she has clearly been stalking my girlfriend. None of that makes sense, tells me she is actually over me or with the man she is with because she is in love with him. It just smacks of her being desperate when she was in a situation of financial debt and saw what she thought was an easy way out of it. It also synchronised with the timing of me pleading with her to stop buying coke, and giving her the choice of getting clean or running off with the guy that was selling it to her. So yes, I do still think about her and it makes me sad, because to me it seems she has just impulsively jumped into a situation that is destroying her life and will likely kill her, which will affect our children and grandchild.

Thank you ForeverDad, that's what I'm hoping for and want to support, that he voluntarily removes himself from the situation as soon as possible and finds his own way. I'm trying to support his independence and confidence by encouraging him as much as I can, but I often feel like it's not enough, and like I have to do it behind his mom's back. He thankfully has a counsellor, so that's very helpful.

Kissing his forehead before you left and then months later having that become the thing he describes as assault, I want you to know that gap between what you actually did and what it turned into is something I recognize. My ex had BPD and wasn't diagnosed until after we broke up, and there were things he described later that I genuinely did not recognize as events I had been present for. You start turning it over trying to find the version where he's right, because the alternative, that the memory itself got that distorted, is its own kind of hard to sit with.

The part you said about always asking him to talk, never shouting, making sure he knows you're not cross, I did all of that too. And I don't think it's wrong to do those things, but I also spent a long time thinking that if I just communicated carefully enough, the confusion would stop. It didn't really work that way.

I can't tell you what's happening from his side, and I'm not going to. But what you're describing, knowing what you did and still finding yourself on a forum trying to work out if you're the problem, that disorientation is real. It makes sense that you're confused. Eight months in and you still don't really know what you are to each other, and now this. That's a lot to be carrying at 19.

Hi there,

You've come to the right place.  You must be at the end of your rope, dealing with this sort of dysfunction for over a decade.  Here you can learn all sorts of tips about how to cope.

First off, I'd say, if you're feeling exhausted, resentful, fearful and that nothing you do seems to work, that's a sign that you need to start taking care of yourself, first and foremost.  If you need a break, take it.  If you need therapy, get it.  You focus on taking care of yourself, because you're no good to your spouse if you're a basket case.  If you're walking around in a FOG of fear, obligation and guilt, you're not seeing straight, let alone making sound decisons.

I highlighted above what I consider to be a big red flag:  the relevations of massive traumas which weren't previously known or reported.  There are two aspects here:  the multiplicity of traumas, as well as their delayed relevation.  While experiencing trauma is indeed traumatic, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone, I would view your spouse's "relevations" with a healthy dose of skepticism, at least in terms of details.  The most likely scenario in my opinion is that your spouse FELT traumatized by her past, but that her telling of events is highly distorted.  There might be a kernel of truth (e.g. a past argument, a physical fight), but she probably conveniently left out her role in it; she might have even flipped the script, switching the victim and the abuser.  My guess is that she blames countless people for "causing" all the problems in her life.  That way, she's always a victim of "abuse."  But when she blames others, she abdicates responsibility for her own choices.  She embraces a victim mindset like her life depends on it, and she re-interpretes her entire life history with that distorted lens.  The  problem with this is, she feels powerless over her own life, which in itself makes her miserable.  And she won't take any responsibility for the harms she causes others.

Similarly, the pwBPD in my life experienced life as an unending series of "traumas" caused by other people.  I think the key is that it wasn't just one person or one environment, but the "traumas" followed her everywhere:  her childhood home, her teenage school, her college years, her work environment, her online persona, her various roommates, her romantic interests.  She thought the entire world was "bullying" her.  And here's an interesting observation.  The more stressed out or disappointed she was about her current life, the farther back in the "archive" she'd reach.  She'd dredge up some distant, insignificant and barely recognizable event from her early childhood and lash out at her family members with pent-up anger.  I think it was all just a distraction, a deflection, from the current situation or disappointment du jour.  She felt so much shame and disappointment in the present that she felt compelled to project it onto the people closest to her.  It was her brain's maladjusted way of coping.  Basically it looked like a full-grown adult throwing a tantrum over not getting what she wanted, and blaming mom/dad/sis/brother for ruining her life a decade ago, when they had absolutely nothing to do with her current situation.

Anyway, in my humble experience, I think it's counter-productive to dwell on the past with my pwBPD.  Why?  First, she just won't get past it.  She's not interested in processing what happened or learning from it, let alone overcoming it and forgiving herself or others.  Second, it just makes her relive some negative feelings.  It's as if she ENJOYS reliving the negative feelings, as a distraction from functioning in the present, and as an excuse to lash out.  Unfortunately, the more and more she thinks about a past negative experience, the more she embelishes it.  I think she ruminates on it so much that she literally wears a rut in her brain.  At each retelling of the old story, it's like she's showcasing her perfected rage.  So I try not to go there at all.  I might say something like, "Let's focus on today, OK?" or maybe, "You can't change the past," or, "It's a shame to waste mental bandwidth on ancient history" or, "It's probably best to talk about this with your therapist, she'll know how to help you cope."  My point is, in my humble opinion, I think it's counter-productive to talk about the past.  It's just too negative, there's too much emotional baggage, there's too much distortion of facts, and there's basically nothing you can do to change it.

But what can you do?  First, I think you can look for the FEELINGS behind the traumas.  You didn't really mention what your wife was complaining about, but my guess is that you can get an inkling of what your wife is worried about through her traumas and her projections.  As an example, if she feels constantly "bullied," that could be a sign that she feels inferior and very insecure.  If she's accusing others of being narcissistic, mean, manipulative, childish or lazy, in all likelihood, that's what she thinks of herself.  You see, she obsesses over her supposed flaws so much that they are constantly top-of-mind, and her concerns typically emerge as projections onto other people!

Once you have a better sense of your wife's feelings, I think you try to comfort her.  If she's sad, try to cheer her up.  If she's mad, maybe you give her a time out, so she can have time and space to calm down.  If she's anxious, you try to calm and console her.  If she's lonely, you give her some attention.  But, if she's treating you badly and being nasty, I'd say, put her in an adult time out.  That way, you both get some time and space to calm down, before you do or say something you might regret.  Besides, you don't want to reward her nastiness with your attention.  You deserve to be treated nicely and with respect.

Hope that perspective helps a little.

It's been almost 4 years for me, and I'm remarried in a fantastic relationship.  Yet from time to time, I'll still think of my ex over general life stuff and catch my mind wandering.   I think that's completely normal and I don't know if it ever fully goes away.

But yeah, I annoyed myself about an hour ago.  I thought of the dog I had before moving here...after the divorce/separation.  It was supposed to be a Husky but I think he was more wolf than anything- massive, massive dog that was over 6 feet tall on his rear legs.  My ex decided to pop by unannounced one day, let herself inside, and she met my new dog...who quickly threw his front paws on her shoulders and sent her tumbling to the ground.  He had no clue how powerful he was and he took her falling as a cue to pounce on her and howl.

I wasn't home for this but I've heard the story from dozens of others my ex told it to, and it always brings me immense pleasure since we were both huge dog lovers and my "puppy" was just playing.

These are helpful. I need this today. Feeling down.

It's been a year and 8 months. That's a long time. I was on Spotify sending my friend an album and the app had a list of 'people you know'. Her account popped up, and it was a picture of her, I'm assuming a recent one as she looked a bit different. I truly have not seen her in almost two years. Now I'm all sad. It's pathetic.

I've never had this sort of reaction with any ex. For some reason I miss that awful person. I'm an idiot haha That's all.

No problem at all.  This is a process and it takes time.  Hopefully everything works out and please continue asking questions as they arise!