In my personal opinion, I hate how people are diagnosed for most mental health disorders.  There's a list of generalized symptoms and if you have enough of them, you get the label.  The problem is, many of those traits will overlap for different disorders.  Also, what's just a temporary thing versus an actual pattern/trait?

My BPD child has been diagnosed with bipolar and recently autism.  Are all three correct?  Who knows.  It does make me wonder though if the diagnoses are even helpful in the grand scheme of things.

So in a one-year relationship, he:

- Lied to you many times
- Lied about you to others
- Cheated on you (many times)
- Was hospitalized for mental issues
- Found a new love (in an old flame)
- Lied to her about you
- Lied to you about her
- Showed no remorse or appreciation
- Avoided you after helping him

That list is just from two of your posts, so I'm guessing it's only a small snapshot of the full picture.

Going back to your first post- what part of that list makes sense to anyone?  It just doesn't.  And it will never make any sense until you add the one thing that all of this revolves around.  He's sick.  He's mentally ill.  He means well but self-sabotages every relationship in his life.  Then he runs before he can get hurt.  But it still hurts, so he jumps head-first into another relationship right away.

This is the story of a BPDs life.  It's the same toxic, abusive cycle.  And its heartbreaking because I'm sure underneath the mental illness, he's a pretty good guy.  But you can't look at one thing without the other- they're a group package that comes together.  That's why his past relationships have failed.  That's why his future relationships will fail.  It's sad but unfortunately, it's the honest truth.  He's sick and he's the only one that can help himself.

You are not crazy and this is not your fault.  There's nothing you can do right now to "fix this."  

I will give a piece of advice though; his current relationship will also fail and he'll be looking for someone to quickly replace her with.  He might come back and say all the right things, do all the right stuff, and you'll think that it's true love destiny that you're together forever.  But the same cycle will repeat once again, just like it always has in his life.  You'll have a whole new list like the one above.

Right now, your focus should be on healing from this relationship and finding your way forward.  It doesn't make sense right now because this comes in stages, but I'm telling you now where you'll eventually end up- he's mentally ill and none of this was personal.  He does the best he can while fighting mental illness and it causes chaos in all his close relationships.  That's not your fault and in some ways, it's not his either.  Again, he's sick.

I hope that helps!

I think at this point,  I just feel so confused. I have no idea who or what to trust. I do believe he loved me. I know i loved him. I think I want to believe that he would be receptive because he seemed to have serious moments of clarity in the past. It just feels like everything got so insane for a minute there. I am in therapy and have been going to support groups. Just,  at the end of the day, he is still the one I want to talk to about all of it. And due to the relationship, I have cut many people out of my life in order to help cut down his triggers. So I'm feeling especially isolated. Many of the friends I do still have don't really seem to understand it. They tend to make me feel worse. Reading posts on this site have helped me a lot so that is why I am here now.

Me too.  Sometimes I feel like a doormat and it drives me crazy. Recently, I lost it and texted her that what she was saying was  BS.   It felt good for a minute and then bad when she reacted and I felt like maybe I should apologize.  (I didn't apologize.  It was BS.)  Probably didn't make much difference one way or the other. 

Hi wannabeamomma,

Sorry no I havent heard of anyone posting about DID. I wonder how the therapist came up with this diagnosis as from my limited understanding DID and Bpd are quite different and surely it would have  been something you would have picked up on by now.

You are right. Also, if I were to react I don’t want to deal with the fallout. She is meaner than I’ve ever been and has more energy than I do. Based on things she’s already done to me and other people tell me loud and clear that reacting a) isn’t worth it and b) threatens my safety. She’s already proven she’s willing to cross the line whereas I’m definitely not.

It’s just frustrating that I have no voice in the old typical way - reacting. I DO have a voice in that I have the ability to keep myself and my household safe from her without reacting in a way I might have years ago. I still just find it difficult to sit by while she lies on the internet and to people we both know. I’ve been doing just that for years now but it still aggravates me.

Hello all,
I (25M) broke up with my BPD, OCD, autistic ex (21F) back in June after 8 months together, and through those 8 months it was a huge rollercoaster. I had never felt closer to someone before in my life, and we ended up becoming very close and I had some of the best times in my life in that relationship. I had never been with someone who was so loving, caring, thoughtful, funny, and frankly attractive. Over time however, things began to creep up such as a lot of codependency from her side, and needing me to quash her feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, jealous, sadness, and over time I began to feel like I was in a relationship with someone who was mentally a child and I began to realize that I had become a therapist for her whenever she split, and had to ground her almost every time we were together for some reason or another. It would usually be over something silly, like not knowing how to use chopsticks in a restaurant and thinking the employees would make fun of her. I had attempted to set boundaries at certain points regarding being her therapist, and they'd be respected for a bit, but something would happen and I'd break them and then it was like they had never been there.

She was/still in therapy the whole time we were together however it seemed like there wasn't much progress being made there in terms of her self-soothing as it just seemed to get worse overtime. We had planned a big trip, and about a month before we were supposed to go, I had all but decided that we should break up but selfishly I wanted to go on this trip and decided to do it after the trip. However over the course of the trip, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and we mostly had a good time, save for some reassurance every now and again. When we returned home, I debated my decision and ultimately decided to let it ride. After a couple days she got upset with me for hanging a phone call up early, and all of a sudden everything clicked. For about a day or so I didn't reply to her texts and she texted me and told me how she knows how poor she's treated me, and that she knows she has to get better and she can't lose me but at that point I had kind of just become numb and I met up with her and broke things off and enforced no-contact. During no contact, she had a lot of car trouble which she needed my assistance with as she wasn't able to afford to get her car professionally fixed which I assisted with. Every few days she would text me late at night telling me how much she missed me, and one night at 3AM she texted me that she had had a really strange night and missed me and that text drove me crazy for a few days until I replied and told her I needed to block her number and that I was sorry.

2 months on, and I go back and forth on my decision. All I think about is how amazing she was to be around, and how she cared about my hobbies and interests, and got into them herself, and I loved her hobbies and interests and she got me into hers. I miss her so much it aches, and I've attempted to dip my toe into meeting other people but I just don't click with them the same way I do with her. I keep thinking about what she said about wanting to be better for me, and I keep rereading this letter she gave me the day we broke up about how much she loves me and cares for me and wants to be the best version of herself for us. And I feel like I didn't sit her down and tell her that we were at a boiling point until it was too late, and that maybe I should give it another shot.

I feel like her case of BPD is very mild compared to a lot of others that I've read, she never called me names, hit me, was unfaithful, made rash decisions, threatened to harm herself or anything of the like, and I'm just unsure if putting hardline boundaries and really sticking to them and being honest and open whenever I'm overwhelmed from my side, and her working hard on her need for self reassurance could in fact fix most things and make the relationship as good as it could be.

Thank you for the welcome.  I do understand that it may be counterproductive.  I have written many letters at this point.  I myself suffer from C-PTSD which i had before I met my pwbpd. I have never before come into contact with anyone with bpd as far as I know. This was a whole new experience for me.  Incredibly wonderful to start, quickly got tumultuous. Felt like I wanted to try to help him but things just kept getting more chaotic. My own trauma responses made gray rocking almost impossible. I would need to talk about it after and it almost never worked even though he said he would be able to. I made mistakes and I lied once to try to avoid a fight. That was stupid of me but is hard to believe the outcome would have been much different if I had been honest. I later found out that he had been talking to other women. Women he said he broke up with because he never really felt much for them.  I also found out that he told our coworkers that I had assaulted him. Which is horrible for many reasons and also untrue. I myself had been assaulted about a year prior to meeting him and had been vulnerable with him about this. So it blows my mind that he would say something like that about me. I feel the need to call him out but to also apologize for being so reactive when we would fight. A mutual friends called the cops on him and they took him to a hospital for holding. While he was in there, i took care of his dog. When he got out,  i didn't get a thank you. He refused to be at his apt when i dropped her off and made me kick in the door and break the frame since it was still messed up from the cops. He has another ex who started out being kind to me and quickly switched to saying i was the crazy one amd blocking me. To be fair, I did lash out at her because she also lied about her intentions and had been trying to get back with him the whole time we were together.  To be honest,  I DO feel crazy. It's all so complicate and messy. I oscilate between hating him and wishing we had never met and wanting to make things right for my part in it.

Hi,

I wish you wouldn't feel guilty.

You sound like an empathetic person.  But I'd ask, is your empathy crossing over into being toxic for you?

Are you absorbing your sibling's negativity too much?
Are you enabling your sibling's own toxic behavior?
Are you ignoring your own needs to keep the peace with your sibling?
Are you not holding your sibling accountable for their own harmful actions?
Is your sibling overstepping your boundaries designed to protect your own well-being?
Is your sibling always blaming you for things they did?

I'd say, you focus on you, and let your sibling be responsible for them.  My guess is you have little to feel guilty about.  Maybe you feel "guilty" because you've created a nice life for yourself.  Instead of guilt, I'd suggest framing it as being a role model for you sibling of what a healthy adult's life looks like.  Maybe some of your healthy habits will eventually rub off on them.

Boy do I hear you!  Being lied about without JADEing is so hard! What I ask myself is what my goal is, what I want.  Nobody's stopping us from defending ourselves.  We just have to know the consequences and ask ourselves if that's what we want.

I don't know whether the anger ever goes away, but I know that in general our feelings come and go and come and go and change in intensity and frequency.