Thank you for all the thougtful responses and insights. I value this space so much. I understand that I did the wrong thing with my email and it was classic JADE. I guess her reaction should have been expected. To clarify about the boyfriend, I never expected him to open his finances up to me, just as I wouldn't open mine to him. I just thought it would start things off on as "normal" a foot if he/they addressed this situation with me in some way, like he and my daughter did with his dad and step mom. I'm certain it's not him who is avoiding the contact with me and he's just following my daughter's lead based on what she's telling him. He doesn't know that she has this disorder and from the outside looking in I'm sure he thinks my relationship with my daughter is pretty normal. I'm paying for school and supporting her in other ways that a lot parents do. What he doesn't know is why she even had an apartment rather than living with me. So at this point with her being pregnant, if I were him, I'd likely assume that the situation will eventually roll out in a way where I'll be stepping in offering additional financial assistance since I have the means, and I'd be helping with a new baby like his parents do. I just know I can't do any of that without enabling my daughter and putting myself in a situation of being held emotionally hostage. I've been expressing to my daughter for some time that she should get a part time job. Nonetheless she has remained jobless but I ended up buying into her rationalization that now that she's in school full time, M-F, all day, that it wasn't really necessary for her to have one. After all, the program is a year long, ending next September, and I had every intention of putting a tight timeline on how long I'd continue to pay certain necessary expenses like car insurance once she graduated and was unquestionably employable. I have no problem helping my daughter and I actually want to do nice things for her that enhance her life, but not at the expense of her not helping herself. Now this. I feel like it would be counterproductive for me to pull the financial support she currently gets from me so long as she remains in school, but I also feel that given her condition, she should finally get herself a part time job before I'd even consider lending any additional support that might be needed. I think that would be the responsible thing to do for herself and her child, and it would help out her boyfriend and THEIR household. I just don't know what to do and not do with this allover situation. There are no guarantees that she and her bf will even stay together throughout this pregnancy let alone long thereafter, and it's very important to me that she starts exercising some financial accountability and begins earning some of her own money as soon as possible.

Hi Rosie,


I hope that your dd gets the treatment that she needs and that your gs is able to get some therapy too. It must be so difficult to live with a parent who has displayed signs of mental illness for all of their life.

Hopefully the court case will lead to mandatory  appointed therapy with a trained therapist that she must complete who can see through the manipulation and recognise the signs of mental illness. 

Hi there!

I find all of this quite shocking, and I have to agree with pook075 that emotional cheating is also cheating.

Unfortunately, I'm still stuck in this relationship, even though THAT alone should be enough to make me leave.

Lisea and Diggydidog, what makes you both stay?

I would also like to mention that I suspect my partner now has a second Facebook account.

Since I last confronted him about his hurtful activities, his account has become very quiet. Only three new selfies, no other self-expression such as food or home décor.

I don't think he has managed to break his Facebook addiction, but has found other ways to contact his ladies.

By the way: I am never mentioned on his Facebook page either, and of course there is not a single photo of me or us together. He also presents himself as single.

Hallo an Alle!


I read this thread with great interest.

I do not live with my partner and we do not have any children together. I have a teenage son from a previous relationship who lives with me.

However, until six months ago, I was in a long-distance relationship with my partner, so I usually spent the weekends with him – he rarely came to stay with me.

I have to say that during this time, I had experiences similar to those described by SuperDaddy. When my partner is dysregulated, nothing helps, and in the confined space of 55 square metres, it is virtually impossible to avoid him. I remember one night when he came to my bed every two minutes, insulting me, gaslighting me and threatening me.

Yes, in that situation, I threatened to call the police. And yes, he then kept his distance.

But honestly, if that had happened in front of children and throughout the night, it would have been unacceptable. Especially since this usually happens over and over again because he can't calm down when he's dysregulated.

Personally, I'm grateful that I didn't let myself be swept away into moving in with him. Especially when children are involved, situations like this are highly traumatic.

My nervous system is also finding it increasingly difficult to cope with these dysregulated phases – and theoretically, I can just go to my flat and don't have to walk around the block for hours.
Personally, I'm grateful that I can just go to my flat and don't have to walk around the block for hours hoping he'll calm down by the time I get back. Honestly... I think it would destroy you in the long run. Even with separate flats, it's very difficult to set boundaries, because he freaks out at every boundary, no matter how calmly and lovingly it is expressed, and after the usual insults, accusations and shouting, he usually remains silent for days or even ends the relationship again. That would be unthinkable for me in a shared flat.

People with BPD traits (pwBPD) can and do quickly overreact.  You're thinking, But I tried to be reasonable and calm, why this extreme vitriol of rants and rages?  She lives in a different world, mentally.

Hers is a world of self-oriented perceptions, perceived slights, feelings, moods, no seeming awareness of consequences, etc.  On the other hand, your logic and reasoning are a total disconnect to her.  The problem is that hers is not a reasonably normal world view.

So approaching communication with JADE (Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain) are typically doomed except in rare moments.  Over on our Tools & Skills workshops board we have threads on JADE, DEARMAN, SET, BIFF and more.  Browse them and ponder the benefits of each approach.

There are also threads there on how effective Boundaries can work, somewhat.  PwBPD resist boundaries so boundaries are up to us.  How are boundaries ours?  Boundaries are our response to poor behavior.  At the most basic it can be illustrated as, "If you do or don't do ___ then I will do or not do ___."

So once you've informed them of Your Boundary, then you can proceed.  For example, if the other rants and rages you can say goodbye, end the conversation, hang up or leave until the other has reset or otherwise calmed down.  Does that make sense?  It's not intuitive but it's a better pattern that will have more success than in the past.

Frankly, all these concepts aren't complete solutions and may not work every time - BPD patterns often seem intractable and resist recovery - but they have a track record in our collective experience to work better and more often than what was tried before.

Sorry guys I'm still getting the hang of how to reply and respond effectively to everyone's questions and feedback. I think this is a common bx that others have experienced with BPD partners- an extreme need for validation and of course attention from these people they talk to. It hurts to read the way he talks to these women- kind and flirtatious just like he used to talk to me in the beginning.

I am not ready to end the relationship so I am trying to find a way to respond effectively to this challenging and strange behavior. I check his phone regularly because it helps calm my anxiety and fears that he could be cheating or meeting up with people. I DO NOT want him to find out that I know his password obviously because then I wouldn't be able to do this checking. I think this is fair and maybe a part of him knows that I do this - he can't be that naive I would hope. It's almost like he wants me to see that he is talking to other people as a threat that he might or could leave. But again of course he never does. I constantly reinforce the fact that he is engaging in this behavior and yet continues to accuse ME of cheating and I have explained projection to him. I think if you suspect something is going on in your relationship it's on you to investigate and collect evidence so they can't deny it. It's a protective thing from lying or manipulation.

Sounds very familiar.  My partner, another male, I suspect has BPD.  He has never come out and told me, but from the roller coaster ride our relationship has been for the last three years, I’m pretty confident I’m correct in my assumption. 

Lisaea1523’s post about the phone really resonates with me.  The Phones in our relationship have always been a very contentious subject from the beginning.  We met on grindr, and after a couple dates we were pretty much inseparable, and eventually he moved in.  I began to notice he was on his phone constantly.   Looking back I feel like he tried to hide some of the phone addiction from me at the beginning, but 3years in, anytime he has a free minute, outcomes his phone, and always scrolling through something, usually doing it where I can’t see his screen.  The whole first year I just stayed quiet about it and let him continue. Just a little bit of backstory, There is a 12 year age difference between us, I’m in my early 40s he is in his early 30s, social media has never been a big part of my life.  But because it was such a big part of his I felt like I was missing out and after the first year, it was beginning to feel like he was more into his phone than me at times.  I used to ask him what’s so interesting on there?  And he would reply, I’m just scrolling through some funny memes or entertaining videos on TikTok, made it seem like what he was doing was totally fine.   
More time had past and I just couldn’t help my curiosity any longer.  I wanted to know what he’s doing on his phone so much usually behind my back so I set up some parental controls on our home Wi-Fi network and added his phone to monitor. With that feature I am able to see every website he visits daily, weekly, and/ormonthly and how many minutes were spent on each.

I was shocked at my findings.  Yes there was enormous amounts of time, like hours, on Facebook, several visits to Instagram, snapchat, and twitter(x), tictok, and some days I would see visits to grindr and fetlife, a bdsm community site. 
I was shocked I didn’t know how to confront him about this without having an explosion in our relationship, because I knew somehow he would just turn it around on me like I was in the wrong for spying on him.  So I figured out his code and logged into his phone one night while he was sleeping.  I found some messages on Snapchat that said delivered, but they had already been deleted so I couldn’t read them. But they were sent to other guys that are only looking to ‘hook up’.  It was the same situation on fetlife, yet he must’ve forgot to delete one message because it was in an archived folder, but it was pictures of him, mostly selfies, and then a picture of me and him as the very last one at the bottom he Sent to some guy that lived within 10 or 15 minutes from us! ?
This  put me on guard.  I needed to know what he was up to. I continued to monitor for weeks, tracking the site visits. 
Now mind you, this is happening all while he is constantly being paranoid that I’m cheating on him and he was actively going through my phone periodically behind my back, trying to find what he calls ‘crumbs’, little hints or things that make him believe that I’m doing something I shouldn’t be.  He told me he had to do it just to ease his conscience and worry, I didn’t have anything to hide so whatever.

 In the next argument we had, was another time he had found something he thought was incriminating on my phone, but turned out to be nothing, blew it all out of proportion, screaming, and yelling at me for being a liar and cheating on him, told me I’m constantly manipulating him and gaslighting him, so I just whipped out my phone and I text him the screenshots I saved of his fetlife messages.  I said you’re so worried about me cheating on you,? Maybe you can help explain these messages and why you’re on Grindr?  There was a brief moment of silence and he screamed. I f’in hate you, and stormed off…. He knew in that moment he was caught red-handed.  He claimed he was just trying to find us an another partner that maybe we could have a threesome with.   Except we had never even discussed having threesomes, maybe it was brought up once early on in our relationship but It wasn’t something we both actively were seeking on a weekly basis.  And it definitely shouldn’t have been something that he was seeking behind my back. 
that’s just one occurrence , several other arguments have happened since stemming around the same issue and situations.  But I continue monitoring the daily Internet traffic behind his back because I feel like I have to now. 

I have since made an Instagram and a twitter(x) for myself, and he was on board with adding me as a friend, and when you’re friends with somebody, you can see the list of people that they follow and the list of people that follow them, this also proved  interesting because the list of followers on his Instagram looked like a bunch of his ex-boyfriend‘s from his past, several of them were local guys, and yeah, I was also able to see who likes his pictures and which pictures he likes, and he likes a lot of other guys photos too, just like hiiumma mentioned in their post about facebook.  I still haven’t joined Facebook only because I’m scared.  This is the one he spends the most time on, and I can only imagine.  But soon enough, I probably will.  What was interesting is the fact that after two years of our relationship, he still didn’t have any pictures of me and him on his Instagram, making it look like he was still single, that was on our second Valentine’s Day that I confronted him about that, then after a day or 2 he ended up putting a couple pictures on it, of us together, and in his words, did it to ‘pacify ‘ me.  It’ll be interesting when I make a Facebook to see what his relationship status is and how many pictures of us together are on that.

Now we are 3years in and I’m always on guard, there’s been times we've gotten into an argument, and I honestly wouldn’t put it past him if he went out and had a fling behind my back to make himself feel better about his emotions, I know he is always hyperaroused and constantly loves the ‘emotional cheating’ looking at other guys profile pictures on fetlife, , insta, and Grindr, it makes me feel like he’s just exploring his options In case our relationship fails so He has a back up plan or someone else ready to take my place.

Here is a prior post years ago which explains why I wrote that those of us parents and family members can't make much progress with those pwBPD close to us - the baggage of the relationships is quite a hurdle to overcome - but others trained and emotionally neutral sometimes can.

Hi,

I re-read my latest post and felt that I might have come off as too negative and stern.  It's probably because the situation I described was extremely tense, bordering on traumatic.

Anyway, if the time comes that your daughter decides for herself she's ready to get help, you might frame it in these terms:  We love you and are glad you're being proactive about your health and wellness.  Doctors are professionals, they know what to do, they help people manage overwhelming emotions/cope with trauma/deal with suicidal thoughts all the time.  We will support you on your journey to improve your mental health.  It's mature of you to prioritize that right now.  We know that this probably feels overwhelming right now, but this treatment program has good success.  Your doctor thinks it's a good fit for you.

It's just that with my stepdaughter, many of her decisions were tied to needing more money from her dad.  Historically, her dad basically wrote checks for anything she wanted--cars, apartments, tuition, international travel, expensive hobbies--in the vain hope that if she had whatever she wanted and were "set up" in various "new" environments, she'd be happy.  But what was really happening is that the bottomless ATM was enabling continued dysfunction.  She wasn't in school, she wasn't working, she wasn't in therapy, at least not consistently.  She was an adult but not functioning like one.  I felt she veered way "off track," she was miserable, and she was making everyone around her miserable, too.  And so her dad felt compelled to use the remaining financial leverage he had to get his daughter to focus on therapy, because the emotional leverage had been exhausted.  Basically, the threat of withdrawal of continued financial support was needed to get her to re-focus on therapy.  But my guess is her dad framed it more positively than as I described:  If you focus on therapy, don't worry, I've got your back and will pay the bills.  But for me to do that, you need to do whatever the doctors say this time.  That's the only way this is going to work.  You're an adult, you can choose to do whatever you like, and I respect that.  But if you want my continued financial support, you really need to focus on therapy right now.  I can't stand to see you continue to struggle so much.

Hi again,

I second Pook's analysis. In my experience with an adult BPD stepdaughter, her dad had arranged for a couple of intensive treatment programs, including one residential program.  At the time, my BPD stepdaughter seemed just to "go along with" getting treatment, without really being committed to working at it, because she felt she was "forced" to do the programs by her parent.   In fact, one time she characterized the situation as being "assaulted" by her parent to get her into treatment against her will.  Her victim mentality kicked in, and she continued to blame her family for all her problems.  She felt her parents had to change, not her.  And while it's true the programs helped stabilize her, the benefits were short-lived.  My BPD stepdaughter was allowed to resume her "normal" life (e.g. go back to college full-time), which in hindsight was basically setting her up to fail.  She did, over and over again.  Each successive failure made my BPD stepdaughter feel even worse about herself and sunk her deeper into a black hole of anger and despair.

Anyway, when did a residential program work for my adult BPD stepdaughter?  When SHE checked herself in--not her dad or mom.  Granted, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have been able to research nor select a treatment program all by herself--she just wasn't that high-functioning nor blessed with a genius-level IQ that some posters talk about.  She didn't agree with the BPD diagnosis in the first place.  But her dad, therapist and medical team knew about the various treatment options available.  She had been in and out of hospitals enough that it was clear to others what program would be a good fit for her.  In fact, her doctor had suggested a specific program in the past, but she declined to participate at the time.  My point is, only when my stepdaughter was the one who took herself to the hospital and asked for help, did the program actually work the way it's supposed to work.

Thus the inflection point was when my stepdaughter took an Uber to the hospital.  Her dad met her at the hospital and struck a "deal" with her, which was, for her to continue to receive financial support, she had to follow doctors' orders (and not decline to do recommended treatment(s) because she wanted to do something else).  She was free to go her own way--she was an adult after all--but then she wouldn't get financial support from her dad.  In essence, he refused to continue to enable her dysfunction.  Another nuance is that she agreed to allow doctors to share treatment information with her dad, especially because he agreed to pay the bills.  Previously she had denied the sharing of her medical information.  I don't know if this decision was intentional, or if she just checked the relevant box on the admission forms, mistakenly reasoning that since her dad was paying the bills, he had a right to know her medical information and confer with her doctors.  But at the end of the day, I think it was a big plus that her dad was able to know (in general terms at least) what was going on with his daughter's treatment plan.  At the time, which was exceedingly stressful by the way, I told my husband--This is a turning point.  Your daughter is deciding to get the help she needs.  The doctors know what to do, they are professionals.  Your job right now is to ensure she follows doctors' orders, whatever they are.  She needs to prioritize therapy right now, and everything else can wait.  I think he was relieved by this perspective, because he was exhausted from trying to fix his daughter.  Everything he had tried in the past hadn't worked, even if he tried his hardest and did everything out of love for his daughter.

As an aside, I think my stepdaughter actually warmed to the notion of getting help from "professionals."  It generally validated her narrative of needing help to get past traumatic experiences.  In addition, I'm pretty sure she was sick of getting well-meaning advice from her dad and me--there was too much emotional baggage attached to it.  Fortunately, with hard work, she turned her life around, and it looks much better today.  I'm not saying everything is perfect--she's experienced several setbacks, and she's estranged from all her family members, including her dad at the present moment.  But her dad keeps tabs on his daughter through a periodic dialogue with her therapist, and we know she's OK.  She's living semi-independently in an apartment with her pet and a roommate right now and working as a restaurant hostess.  That's significant progress indeed.