Here, we don't apologize for processing our feelings and emotions.  Everyone here arrived a complete wreck in need of support and a community who would understand what unique things they're facing with a BPD in their lives.  For me, that was 3 or 4 years ago when my BPD ex suddenly walked away.  I was a complete mess and genuinely appreciate all the voices that made me feel normal.

Not that I was okay, mind you, but because people could relate to me and understand exactly what I was going through.  Before finding this site, I really thought that my problems were unique and nobody could possibly understand.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was very wrong.

So please keep venting, sharing what feels relevant, and continue to ask questions.  Some people post here just to write and get it recorded on paper (well, virtually anyway).  All of it is perfectly okay.


With BPDs, they say and do things in the moment to gain sympathy however they can.  Why?  Because they're crushed in spirit and can't stand their emotional state.

For example, my BPD ex told others that I abused her.  But then I thought back and she told me that all of her ex's before we got married abused her as well.  She painted those guys as horrible people and it suddenly sunk in that she's described me that way as well, even when we were still married and everything was good.  If she was off, she'd bad-mouth me so others would feel sorry for her.  And to be honest, I doubt she thought anything of it in the moment, like those lies don't stick around for years or decades.  

Many of her relatives seemed to dislike me and I never understood why...but now I get it.  People talk and stuff like that lingers.

My BPD daughter (yes, I hit the BPD jackpot) does the same thing- when you cross her (or she perceives it that way), she's going to talk incredible amounts of trash...some of it that she doesn't even believe.  It's an emotional release to say horrible things I guess.  When my kid was around 10, she told a neighbor that I had been abusing her for years.  The police and social services came, interviewed and checked out my kid (plus interviewed her younger sister), checked out our house, and left without saying another word.  I didn't find out until years later what that was actually about.  Yet I'd bet a dollar that the old neighbor still hates me decades later.

It is wildly frustrating and completely unfair, but hopefully you realize that this isn't actually about you.  If your person was single, he'd say that stuff about his boss, his mom, his neighbor, or whoever he felt was "ruining his life" in the moment.  If he was with another woman, he'd do the exact same thing....regardless of how good or bad that person was.

That's just what BPDs do when they're disordered.  And because they feel terrible in that moment, they never see a reason to go back and tell the truth to the person they lied about you to.  Heck, most of the time I think they forget about it, even though their words live on and cause chaos down the road.

hotchip,

I had a uBPD ex-h. He passed away of natural causes through poor lifestyle choices and his refusal to get care for a serious heart problem. He claimed he was going to unal!ve himself many times when he thought I was going to leave him. He used it like a control mechanism to get me to stay. He was not the type who would go through with it.

It's natural and healthy to try to deal with the aftermath of these overwhelming relationships.  You can try self-help like a 12 step program (Al-Anon or Codependents Anonymous) or attending services for whatever faith appeals to you until you are able to get therapy.

In my case I told myself that I'm in charge of myself and my own life. I have a right to not help anyone but myself. Adults are obliged to take care of their own lives. I am not a babysitter and I will not put up with moochers and freeloaders. 

In my ex's case, his behavior was intentional.  I had a dBPD mother and I'd guess her's was not.

Regardless if intentional or not, the controlling behavior makes you feel you have no personal agency. I needed distance from the relationship and build up trust in myself (self-confidence)  that I would not allow myself to be used by a disordered, unscrupulous person again.

The above mental exercise is excellent to remove yourself from your subjective emotional turmoil and do your best to look at your situation objectively, also known as Thinking Outside the Box.  This variant of Time Travel enables you to gain a more complete perspective about all the factors and issues.

A similar concept is to imagine a good friend is mired in a problematic relationship identical to yours.  Picture that and then ask yourself... What would I recommend to my friend?

Usually both threats and suicidal talk are made in private scenarios, typically without witnesses.  When you do try to reach out for emergency services, the other is very likely to Deny, possibly even Project it onto you.

So, if at all possible have witnesses, as hard as that is.  An alternative is to (unobtrusively) record the threats or suicidal talk so there is documentation of what caused you seek help.  Otherwise, predictable Denials will result in little or no action.

I recall one time when I and my spouse had just left my cousin's home and she got triggered and started hitting me on the head as I drove down the highway.  Well, I "missed" our exit and the next exit just so happened to be the local hospital's exit.  I drove up to the ambulance entrance and reported what was happening.  She of course refused to get out of the vehicle.  Staff declined to take enforceable actions - adults have rights to decline services after all and I didn't have proof of what I reported - and so I was told the police would be called if I didn't leave the ambulance area.  I learned my lesson.  Have some sort of documentation to get action.  This was before smart phones existed, so I bough a digital voice recorder.

(I really apologise for spooling all my thoughts into this mammoth thread. I am looking into affordable counselling options - there are a few cashflow issues, which also I believe exacerbated problems in relationship with uBPDx - I plan to be in formal telehealth counselling to address codependency issues by August.)

One thing which I am still sort of processing. I've mentioned the toxic and harmful action I did, when I shouted at uBPDx to '________ing kill himself' (and then immediately retracted it).

Something that happened after this was that uBPDx called and spoke to a number of his friends and people he and I knew in common, telling them I had said this terrible thing, and most/ all of them counselled that I was unstable and abusive and encouraged him to cut me off.

It was absolutely his right to share a seriously harmful thing I had done and seek outside support. But I have resentment that in the weeks and months beforehand, as I've mentioned upthread, he had been sharing suicidal thoughts and ideation with me sometimes multiple times per day, like at least a hundred times. I had told him that this was very hard for me, and he had brushed this off and continued to do it, and I had tried to connect him with other mental health resources eg access to publicly funded healthcare and he had ignored it, and suggested looking things up online and he ignored that too.

i don't think it was intentional or conscious, but from my perspective, it almost felt like being 'set up'. Like, I know that '________ing kill yourself' is a terrible thing to say, but I also know I would not have said it if it hadn't been said to me and in my presence again and again and again and again in the weeks preceding.

And I never did say it again, after that incident. but he continued to pour his darkness and suicidality into me, and to ignore or resist any other forms of support or treatment (besides occasional meditation, and only after I insisted).

it made me angry because when he was calling his friends and they were telling him/ he was telling them how terrible I was - it showed me that he actually did have other relationships, he did have other options for support. pouring all of that darkness and trauma and suicidal ideation into me was a choice.

Why was that choice made? I don't know. But it wasn't just a lack of support or lack of control. It was, I think, about conditioning me to accept a particular role in the relationship as his externalised emotional regulation. And indeed, he continued to blame me for his mental state and to target his spiralling and suicidality at me for the duration of the relationship.

My situation was similar in some ways. When I first met uBPDx, he was very mentally ill, but also in a situation re finances, immigration etc which would tend to make anyone unstable. It made sense that providing him with a high level of personal support for a period might be what he needed to break out it. That said, over time, I found that offering him what he said he needed - a break from paying rent by crashing with me, some space from a difficult interpersonal situation, the change to take a holiday - didn't make things any better.

The dependence on me increased over time, as did the anger and blame when I didn't meet all his needs. He was also resistant to seeking alternative avenues of support. For example, I sat with him for some hours to help with the admin process of getting access to healthcare, and when he got it, he never bothered to use it. He read and talked about psychoanalysis in an academic context - psychoanalysis for other people - but never even Googled BPD despite agreeing with me that he met the DSM criteria.

Maybe a lesson we can take from this - it's not wrong to help a person in crisis. But if the crisis never ends, and if the crisis-haver does not take reasonable responsibility for their own health, not seem to understand or take into account our own needs - it's not our obligation to empty ourselves out trying to please them. It's not even going to solve the crisis.


NotWendy, this is a great metaphor.


Pook, I am not in the US, but here as over there emergency services are very ill equipped to deal with mental health crisis and can often be quite harmful. I would not call the 911 equivalent unless it was a truly extreme situation. That said, if uBPDx were to get in my face and tell me he was thinking of hurting himself, today, I would take him to the emergency room, explain the situation, and leave him there. If he refused to go with me, then I would leave him on his own. I wish I had done this at the time.

Hello and welcome to the family.  I'm so sorry you're going through this and so many of us here have pretty much the same story.  It's so heartbreaking.  I a very glad you found us though!

Question- how would you contact the ex?  And what would you hope to achieve?  It's good to have some sort of plan before just winging it.

For the psychiatrist, you may have the best of intentions in wanting to reach out, but they will not talk to you about your ex and they probably won't listen either.  Their loyalty is to her and protecting her privacy, so that conversation wouldn't go the way you'd expect it to.  And just because nobody has mentioned a diagnosis, doesn't mean that they're completely in the dark.  There are telltale signs of mental illness and I'm sure they're picking up on it.

My bigger question is how you're doing, how you're coping, etc.  It's such an incredibly hard situation and I hope you're keeping your mind busy with other things.  In time, this feeling will pass, so try not to focus too much on the "right now".  I promise it's temporary and part of the healing process.

I'm sorry for all you've gone through with your ex. Her splitting and isolating you from family and  friends is exhausting and abusive.

About contacting her therapist and her ex, you should be clear about why you are doing this. Is it for closure of the relationship for you? pwBPD discard partners abruptly and without explanation.A relationship with a pwBPD causes trauma and PTSD. It's more painful and confusing than a breakup with a normal person. 
 
 I can understand why you'd want to pursue this but is it helpful for you? Healing begins when you have your own support and go no contact or strictly limit contact.

Contacting others about your ex keeps you tied to this person, thinking about them, ruminating on the relationship. It can lead to re-establishing contact with them and maybe returning to the relationship with the usual push and pull, splitting, chaotic behavior, and out-of-the-blue outbursts. 

I'm guessing her ex is certainly aware that she is difficult though he might not be aware of BPD. Her therapist may may not know though.

My uBPD ex was seeing a psychiatrist. He was not aware of my ex-h's personality disorder and violent behavior when I told him and showed him an arrest record. My ex was very good at appearing calm, friendly and reasonable. The psychiatrist immediately dropped him as a client. That gave me the sense he completely fooled the doctor.

Your ex's therapist may be unaware of her problems. You may not be believed and it may come back to haunt you if her therapist tells her. They are not supposed to but you never know.  Things slip out. Telling them seems like touching a hornet's nest.

Hello.

It's been 15 days since my ex broke up with me, once more and this time apparently forever. I am having a very hard time getting over it even if I know this is the best for my mental health. After a lot of research along the last six months, I have come to the clear conclusion that she is BPD, and quite probably NPD too.

We have been together for almost three years and our daughters are best friends since ages (we are divorced). Soon after we started dating, some things started to look weird, and to make it short, I bent myself over backwards along the three years to accommodate to her demands, mostly related to extreme jealousy, and I have ended up quite isolated, also at work (I am a teacher). I could tell you countless absurd exampled of her jealousy: colleagues, shop clerks, neighbours, students!! and even a female voice cheering in a video of my son's handball match (she assumed it was the voice of a mum I was "on" with). The examples are countless and absurd to anyone's eyes except hers. No.matter how much I tried to reassure her, it was totally useless, and I passed.evry other week from being the man of her life to a ________er who only made her suffer on purpose. I passed from hero to vilain continuously along this time.

The drop that spilled the glass was her demand to block and explicitly write to my distant 4th degree cousin in Miami (we live in Europe - Luxembourg, but not together) that I would not want to be ever again in my life in contact with her. My "fake cousin", as she calls her, happened to visit Madrid when I was there on a weekend - I am Spanish and my kids live in Madrid so I fly there every two weekends to be wirh them. We met around 15 minutes with my brother's family and my kids. I have never felt attracted for my "fake cousin" or anything of the kind, but my ex of course thinks differently and even assures that I told her once that I found her attractive (I never said this ever iny life). By the way, she was also sure that I felt attracted to my brother's ex wife once I showed her a picture. She was sure to know better about me than myself. Not only related to women but also about any other field, she always knew better than me (kids, work, money...)

I cut ties in the past with a lot of female friends (and even a couple of male friends) to calm her down and as a stupid way of proving my loyalty, but this time she went too far. I tried to explain to her how doing what she required as proof of loyalty made no sense and in addition it would create havoc in my family, and it would be in her worst interest in front of my parents, brother, aunts..., doing something like that to my cousin (who would actually flip out if she knew this, as some.work colleagues would flip out as well if I ever told them that mentioning a conversation with them or exchanging a text created chaos in my relationship). She slapped me (not first time), threatened me that she would call my parents herself (also not first time she threatened to do so) to tell them the kind of _____ person I am, asked me to say goodbye forever to her daughter (who is like a daughter to me and I have taken on holidays with my kids so many times) and leave her appartment. Luckily her daughter was not aware.

This all happened after spending the greatest 5 days with her in a kind of honey moon in the Netherlands and after planning next summer holidays together and with our respective kids. Totally unexpected out of nowhere. Or not exactly, because a innocent comment about greeting a female friend of a friend that I came across at my school sparked the fire some days before... Always any contact with women taken as a "public humiliation".

I know objectively I should run away. I felt ashamed to share some of these things with my brother and friends, even with my psy, but it was therapeutic opening up and having people who genuinely care for me that what I described was not only normal but psychologically abusive.

I know all this, but I can't help feeling like _____ after all the time, energy and love invested. She often told me she was never like this before, but she also told me some weird story about her previous relationship.

The idea of contacting her ex has crossed my mind so many times and now more than ever to try to understand if this was her pattern too in previous relationships, contrary to what she states.

I have also read that telling her about her probable BPD condition may result very negative, and I wonder if contacting her psy might be a good idea. I don't think she is aware at all about it because, seen from the outside, my ex seems the most beautiful, calm, balanced and fair person. Nobofy could believe what I have lived when just the two of us. The incredibly good and the incredibly bad. A horrible roller coaster that became more and more chaotic in time.

Thanks so much for reading and for your help. It helped putting all this in writing. I could hardly believe it if a friend told me, but all my research confirms.so neatly all her BDP traits.

Best regards

Hi there,

It must feel difficult indeed to be constantly on edge, isolated and doubting yourself.  Usually when I reply on these boards, I'll try to explain some BPD dynamics to illustrate that her behaviors aren't your fault, so you don't have to take her words or actions to heart.  But this time, I'm going a different direction and will reflect on some aspects of your post that are somewhat unique.

First, you're living in you're partner's home.  It's not really yours, and that could make you feel like you're alienated from yourself.  It sounds to me like you're a bit stuck, maybe even trapped.

Second, you haven't proposed, even though you've been committed for a decade and you're living together.  I'd say you haven't proposed because you don't want to.

There are situations in life where you can feel like things are happening TO you, rather than actually deciding something.  Your situation might be that way:  you might have moved in with your partner out of convenience, because it was economical, it could be fun, and because it would let her stay close to family.  But it might not have been something you really "decided," meaning with true intention.  Then time passes, and staying together represents sliding--not deciding--creating some relationship inertia.

And now you're feeling stuck and torn.  Maybe you're "comfortable enough" in your partner's family's home.  But here's the thing.  First, it seems to me like you're in a sunk cost fallacy situation.  That's a cognitive bias where people continue an endeavor, project, or relationship based on past invested resources—time, money, or effort—rather than current or future benefits.  (Maybe you can tell I was a CFO in a former life.)  And here's another CFO-type quandry I sometimes faced:  bosses (like CEOs and boards) tend to discount the cost of NOT doing something.  It's like nixing an investment proposal because the up-front costs to implement the project seem like a lot, while the company is running well enough today.  But that's when I'm prepared with another analysis, which is, What are the risks if we DON'T make this investment?  Have you considered that?  Because if you don't make a critical investment in the company (or in this case, yourself), you could be wiped out in the future.

So I guess I'd ask you to try an exercise.  Imagine you could talk to yourself from five years ago.  What would you say to him?  And now switch to the future:  Project your future self out five years from today.  Based on your history and your current trajectory, what are the "worst case," the "status quo case" and the "best case" scenarios?  And what do you think is the most likely scenario, based on what you know today?  Maybe you have some "optionality" in your scenarios, but if you do, how would you assess whether the scenario is working for you?  What would trigger a course correction?  Now, what advice would your future self give your current self? 

How about this (which is what I tend to do):  Imagine what a realistic but "best case" scenario would be for your life in five years.  Write it down, mull it over, tweak it if you want, think about it for a week.  Then my advice would be, you go make it happen.  Sure, it might require some time and effort--maybe five whole years of effort--but the results would be worth it, right?

Here's the advice that my current self would give to my young adult self:  "Bet on yourself, and you go make things happen."  I'd advise, Bet on yourself, because the only person you can control is you.  And I'd say, Go make things happen, because being active and intentional creates a live worth living.  How does that sound?