Thank you.

 in other ways I never quite recovered from those final years of mostly verbal abuse.[quote author=ForeverDad

This caught my eye and made me sad.  Wishing you continued healing.

I know these folks have an illness, but the damage they cause to those of us who try to be there for them can be shocking.. 

I didn't keep records but that was certainly a pattern in my marriage as well.  When things are unstalbe so frequently, intimacy is lost.  And I don't just mean sex- I'm talking about alone time, us time, quality time in all its different forms. 

For instance, there was a long stretch in our lives where we'd go to a local park and walk a few miles each evening during sunset.  We'd talk, laugh, and life felt so simple back then because we could work through things together.  That's every bit as important as fooling around, and in many ways I missed that type of closeness even more.

Several takeaway observations from this.  One is to keep your notes and journals safe, away from the access by the other person, both physically and electronically.

Another is to resist deleting your journals and details, believing the patterns had improved.  When dealing with BPD traits, the less-bad times often are followed by a predictable resumption of the roller coaster cycles.

I recall that one of my journals were the three calendar years printed in the back of my checkbook register.  Yes, those.  I circled the dates we had intimacy.  In the decade before we had a child, intimacy was quite frequent, even as she was going downhill.  Afterward, in the few final years, it was weeks and sometimes months apart.  To me, that was as bad or even worse than the increasingly frequent ragefests.

I have had several highly dysfunctional relationships: long term boyfriends, close family members, and friends. At some point, I hit rock bottom and knew I could not do it anymore no matter what price I had to pay to end the relationships. Part of the difficulty in getting to rock bottom was the realization I was going to have to face all the pain I had avoided in being in these dysfunctional relationships. For a long time after ending these dysfunctional relationships, I was in many ways more pain than when I was in these relationships. What will be the last straw, can be very different for each person. The costs in ending a highly dysfunctional relationship can be huge. In my case the most painful ending of a dysfunctional relationship was with my sister with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). I am still shocked beyond belief of how many flying monkeys she continues to recruit, especially close family members and family friends, to cause me pain and problems. What do you expect will happen if you end this relationship?

That otherworldly look some have described here during rants may be an indication of dissociated states.  They may even later deny the incidents ever occurred but they must be aware of them at some level because they seem to learn how far they can push us in their ragefests.

Here are a couple of my older posts:

It was simple; not only was she not changing but she was getting worse and seemed to be nearing the stage of violence, though she never used it - mainly because I ended it before she ever might.

That final day, I really saw someone who was so out of touch with reality, with the jet-black demonic eye pupils which signified she was totally disconected from reality and was capable of saying and doing anything - maybe dangerously.  She said things she'd never said in her previous meltdowns and just seemed to have escalated massively.

I realised this is the person, the chaos and mental strain I'd have to deal with forever if I stayed. Fours years was enough for me to be able to say 'I've treated her great, loved her and went farther for her than I've done for any other person, but the price is too high'.

Never saw her again, though I later learned she came looking for me. Many years later I spoke with her sister in law who confirmed she hadn't changed one bit so I've never regretted my decision to end it. We all have a 'can't take no more' limit, it just depends how much and how long we endure.

Journaling helps.  Even if you're keeping your notes very general, a short sentence or comment of why a fight started can help you remember how you felt and why. 

I recall about a month or so before we finally got divorced, I was feeling like things were sort of getting better.  We had her mom living with us and helping take care of our daughter & clean the house (which just took fights over childcare & housekeeping off the table, but things were otherwise the same). 

I had been keeping a journal in my office at work.  I did this because she would insist we don't fight anymore than "other couples" and also that we hardly fought at all.  She would deny reality.  Well, I went back and looked at some of the things that happened that month, and saw despite it "getting better" in my head, we were still fighting and then having weeks of silent treatment in "good" months.  Yes, in a "good month" we would have only around 14 days blow-up fights and extended silent treatment for days.  Bad months it was more than 50%+, between 16-20 days in any given month.  There were no months without a blowout fight and at least a week of silent treatment.  Most months were "bad" months.

That's no way to live.  And that's even aside from taking care of your own needs, and the needs of your kids if you have them; you're spending all that time caretaking the pwBPD, just to minimize the conflict you'll have to deal with, and you're STILL miserable around half the time! 

Interestingly, once earlier in our marriage I said to her that we were fighting "too much" and when she denied it, I said I was keeping track, and it was more than she was admitting.  She got really paranoid about that and demanded I stop keeping track of our fights.  For months after that, she would demand to know if I was still keeping track of our fights and if I had stopped (I just lied and went along with it, because at this point, she wasn't being open and honest with me, and when I was open and honest with her, she treated me worse). 

Another thought: It's creepy how intentional their behavior can be sometimes. If you had to write out a how to guide on how to psychologically abuse and condition a human being, it would be similar to how pwBPD treat those closest to them: Isolate them from others;  beat them down mentally & emotionally; control the information they process and see; reward them sparingly (make a big deal about how great the reward is), but punish them severely. 

Stalin himself would nod approvingly at all this.

It's complicated.  For me, I had a gut feeling about a year and a half into our marriage that it was hopeless (I was married four more years after that though, or 5 1/2 years total); her behavior was just so angry, unhinged, and what I found most troubling, completely nonsensical.  Because I could not understand what her problem was, I had no idea what I could do to keep her happy.  I knew the best case scenario was a life of caretaking her emotional needs to minimize the fighting and screaming matches.  But I still did not know about BPD, and did not even know what it was. 

at that point, if you said to me "I have a magic wand you can wave and make your wife disappear, and you just raise your kid as a single dad" I would have done it.  But there was no magic wand and I received some lousy legal advice that a divorce would ruin me, so I decided to put forward a good faith effort to fix it.  We tried marital counseling, on and off over the next couple years.  She went to counseling, and then I went to counseling (without telling anyone) for a few visits to see if I was going crazy.  Her behavior was that awful to deal with. 

Around this time, I learned about BPD, and behavioral disorders in general, and as I read more about them and compared the symptoms to the things my wife did and said, I began to realize how hopeless it was.  From then on, it was only a matter of time before I pulled the plug. 

We nearly got divorced about a year after I learned about BPD (4 years into our marriage) after she threw out divorce as a threat and I was like "Okay, great, let's end this," but she begged me to call it off, and I did.  However, after that, I think she felt more secure in her belief that I would not leave no matter how awful she behaved toward me.  But I had in the meantime got better legal advice, and understood what the path ahead looked like if we divorced, e.g. what joint custody of our daughter would look like, how much I'd have to pay in child support, how our assets would be split, etc.  and was okay with it.  I made preparations for an end of it, and was ready to leave the next time we had a blowup fight.  That was more or less inevitable, and when it happened and she threw out the "we're getting divorced then" as an ultimatum because I refused to take responsibility for her behavior in starting that fight, I moved out, called my attorney, and filed for divorce.  I think she was honestly shocked it really happened.  Her behavior over the next couple weeks ranged from more threats and anger, to sadness, to begging me to reconsider... you could see the whole 5 stages of grief play out, but in random order. 


I don't think so.  To rebuild affection would first require her to atone for the things she did and said, and how she behaved for at least as long as she put me through them, and in a way that I could trust was genuine, not just an attempt to win me back because she felt like I was the best option for her. 

Basically that would require a pwBPD to not be BPD, and that's virtually impossible.  She would have to become a completely different person. 

Yes! Maintaining your boundaries is an act of love for yourself. Letting them down would accomplish nothing for your sister or your family but just hurt you. Family dynamics are so odd. My parents knew there was something wrong with my sister’s behavior but also shrank away from seeing it for what it was. And my mom wanted me to play that savior role that is actually impossible to play.