This is great.  (Love FEAR.)  Thank you.

Hello, forum.

I've been wrestling through my marriage for years (and the entire relationship itself) for just shy of a decade. As I dive deeper into an understanding of what BPD is, how it manifests, how DBT works to create a pathway forward... I realize how thankful I am to have had the opportunity to read and learn from everyone else. I've been fortunate to have a good emotional support group that knows my silence means I'll reach out at some point. I have a good therapist who shifted her focus from me wanting to exit my marriage to figuring out the reason I stay, and what "love" means in context. I wish I had started this journey (pwBPD courses, reading, direct mindfulness) so long ago. I've read from so many of you the reasons you stayed. It feels so good to feel less alone.

I begin my first group coursework this Friday. As the male partner in my relationship, I've felt very confused by the emotional and physical abuse. Am I not supposed to be able to take this? Am I not supposed to just ride the storm? I realize that a partnership with a person with BPD isn't limited by gender or sexuality norms; it's complicated. No single thing is the root cause. I've practiced validation to the point that I've invalidated my own emotional existence. I've allowed boundaries to be confused with demands, living my life trying to rebuild an eggshell puzzle every day. I am so, so exhausted.

Reddit's pwBDP thread is a toxic environment. No shame to the people who found their exits, I just find more "aren't they crazy" and "so glad I left" empathizing than a real, honest look at why we stay in the first place. I recognize that leaving - if that's my path - is at constant war with staying.

So I'm posting here in anonymity because it feels good to finally admit... yeah, this isn't normal. Sure, I have things to work on and habits to change and pieces of me that can always improve... but this isn't normal. I am not in a "normal" relationship (let's define normal as non-abusive and moderately irrational at its worst, barring a few outliers). And this is hard. And my soul hurts. And my feelings hurt; they're in there, somewhere.

Thanks in advance for existing. And thank you retroactively for having provided so many opportunities for me to read, reflect, think and compare stories. This is hard.

That summaries me sometimes, especially when it's due to bad development.  For example, I'm using a government site to make an appointment that my wife and her son has to attend at the same time.  If I try to schedule them one at a time, I get a different error message saying I have to schedule them together.  But when I do that, I get an error message saying to schedule them one at a time.

I don't get mad because there's an error, I get mad because someone really dumb made a lot of money designing a system that is literally impossible for people to use.

That's what you're describing, but I'm guessing the person you're talking about reacts differently than I do.  I'll eventually walk away and cool off, and I'll try my best not to get into a discussion for a minute or two because I know my attitude isn't correct at that moment.  I clearly know what I'm frustrated at (the software) and who I'm frustrated at (the guy who made the software), and I can usually check my temper before anyone else sees it. 

But I'm not perfect and if my wife comes at me sideways over something at that exact moment, I'll likely say something that I instantly regret.  Then I'll apologize and talk out how some software developer I've never met is the one truly at fault!  =)

I’m curious if anyone has the experience of a person who is endlessly frustrated when things (physical objects, electronics, software, etc.) don’t work exactly as they expect.  They get incredibly angry, and then get mad at any suggestion of workarounds or fixes because they are not the way they wanted to do things.   

Interesting as I didn't have a name for "ACT" but did work with a T and also in 12 steps to be aware of my feelings and not judge them. Feelings have a purpose- they keep us safe. However, we aren't biologically much different than our early ancestors when we feel emotions.  Fear kept them safe from hungry bears or preditors. Now, we might have fear of a disordered relative - but they are not a bear and the danger is not the same. So we can still feel that fear but cognitively decide on how to respond.

12 steps (ACA, CODA) has an acronym for FEAR- False Evidence Appearing Real. I still felt fear around my BPD mother. This fear, and the trying to predict what she might do- was an adaptive response to her behavior. However, even if the fear felt the same as our ancient ancestors, the possible danger may not be the same, so I would do what I could to manage this- it's my own feelings. I could choose how much contact I could manage, have boundaries. For some people, no contact is the better choice.

If a fear is a constant anxiety- so much that it takes over too much- that becomes something to work on more, but accepting that we feel what we feel is a first step.

I can understand the concern for your sister being alone as a factor. When my father passed away, my BPD mother was an elderly widow and it didn't feel OK to me to go NC, but I had to have some boundaries with this.

You can also decide how to navigate your relationship with your sister according to what seems to be the most workable for you.

Thinking about Pook's, CC43's, and NotWendy's comments on the issue of advance strategizing in anticipation of how pwubpd might react

.... I see both sides of this. 

Most of my time since I was told about bpd has been working with a therapist to understand, react less, and hone my dbt skills.  That helped in terms of level of conflict and gave me some ability to pull out of conflict, but it also got me into the rut of spending a lot of time thinking about what the pwubpd might do and assessing myself for how good a job I was doing in handling them -- in other words, caretaking.  It's only the last couple of years that I've moved away from that approach, focused on my trauma response to this situation, and -- only recently -- started recognizing my caretaking behavior and having some mental shifts.  So that's the downside of strategizing.

On the other hand, it has helped me feel safer and, as CC43 and NotWendy guessed, I was reared for fear in my FOO.   Knowing I have some skills helps and I also can't judge my own nervous system.  So that's the upside.

The dialectic synthesis (I think, for me, at this moment): I've just taught myself about ACT through youtube videos of trained therapists and am trying to implement it -- accepting my fear, staying in the moment, defusing, understanding it in my context, etc. (Hoping to find a therapist who employs it.)

Thanks, all, for getting me to this point.

Zachira: No flying monkeys here.  Pwubpd is pretty alone.  That's a trap of a different sort -- pulls on the heart strings, especially since I know their childhood trauma. 

Have you yet had time with your children, or at least phone contact, assuming the temp order doesn't prohibit that?  Of course, you can't contact your ex directly or indirectly for now, but there needs to be some method to do this.  As previously mentioned, there is a distinction between spousal contact versus parental contact.

One seeming obstacle is that police and other professionals will not go beyond written orders.  The legal presumption during marriage is that, barring a court order to the contrary, both parents have equal but undefined parenting rights.  Among newly separated parents, that often allows one parent in possession to make it a "no man's land" for the other.  If you are denied parenting access by the other parent, yet there is no court order in place, then it is up to you to obtain a court order, at first a temporary one, to set guidelines on the details to enable such parenting time.

Most of us who were faced with a BPD spouse initially faced obstruction of our parenting.  That's where the court system stepped in to be the referee, though an astoundingly grudging slow one.

   Thanks!

I agree that worrying and thinking about the possible reactions isn't the most functional behavior- and it would be better to not do it, but, if we grew up with this- it had the purpose of helping us to feel safer. It also gave us a sense of control- which was probably an illusion but when we had no control over BPD mother's reactions, we could at least try to anticipate them.

It takes some time to "undo" some of this learned behavior and also it may not be possible to completely unlearn it, but we can recognize it and rationalize it which helps us to manage the feelings.

If this happens in adulthood in a marriage, the behaviors can still be learned and adaptive but also these experiences might elicit a childhood response if we also had a disordered parent growing up.

It's not a normal thing to feel we have to strategize with a family member but the backlash can be significant. It also can be unavoidable. We can learn to be less reactive to the person's reaction. When we told BPD mother about the trip to my father's family she was angry, upset, then refused to speak to us. By that time I had learned to not react or JADE when she was upset. A few weeks later she was speaking to us as usual as if nothing happened.

But sometimes the reactions could be worse- she could destroy property, "paint us black" to others. If she told my father we upset her, he might get angry too. So we did learn to avoid them if possible and even if it wasn't possible, it was how we tried to deal with that.

My advice is to learn as much as you can about "flying monkeys", the ones who enable disordered people. Some flying monkeys are similar to the disordered people and others can be innocent well meaning individuals. There are many articles and videos on the internet about flying monkeys.


Every summer, I spend time in the area I grew up where the deck is loaded with flying monkeys. What has helped the most, is to improve my boundaries, especially around limiting unnecessary personal disclosures that can be somehow used to give the disordered people easier ways to continue the smear campaign.