Hello and welcome to the family!  I'm glad you're off the Reddit boards because those are toxic for everyone involved.  Hate brings more hate, and who's right or wrong when everyone is there to complain and talk junk about other people?  That's the world we live in these days but it certainly is not for me.

I'm glad you posted in the "conflicted" section because you certainly do have options.  Your spouse is sick and communication is difficult.  The relationship is also unfair to you at times (maybe, a lot of the time).  But as communication improves, so does the relationship and the explosive moments.

I will never tell someone to leave or stay, unless someone is in obvious physical danger.  Then they run!  But otherwise, the place you're in is the time to put in the work to see if this is a "solvable" problem.

What's that look like?  I have multiple BPDs in my life- an ex wife and a daughter.  We were married for 23 years and I had all the moments everyone here describes.  But at the same time, I also realized why those patterns repeated and it had nothing to do with who was right or wrong, or even love.  It was all about disordered thinking when my BPD had unstable emotions.

Stay with me for a moment.  Have you ever whacked your finger with a hammer?  Or slammed your hand in a car door?  In that exact moment, how did you react?  Did you logically say, "This hurts like mad, but it will be okay in a few minutes...."  Or did you say a curse word, kick something, and lash out in pain?

Mentally, that's what your spouse is going through whenever she's disordered.  Her feelings bring her to that place of explosive rage or endless despair.  Just like when you whacked your thumb and wanted someone to understand your erratic behavior in the moment, your spouse's disordered thinking in the moment expects you to realize she's in crisis and treat it like a life or death scenario.

That's not what she says, mind you...that's what she feels.  Please catch this because I've said it a few times.  Disordered thinking comes from out of control emotions.  You fix one and the other fixes itself.

The conflict part comes from her being in crisis, doing her best to hide it from the world, and you thinking that this is just an ordinary conversation where things are normal.  So she asks you where the ice cream in the freezer went, you say the kids ate it yesterday, and she has a full blown mentdown because she's been wanting that all day and it proves that you've never loved her and that you lied to her about something in 2003 which proves everything she's ever thought!

Disordered thinking comes from unstable emotions.

What you should do (what we all try to do) is ignore the words and focus on the emotions.  Is she sad, depressed, furious?  What would a regular human do when they see someone anrgy?  They'd calm them down.  If they're sad, cheer them up.  It's learning to do this in the moment that makes all the difference in the world and changes the fundamentals of these relationships.

Now, it's one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do and nothing about this is intuitive...but it's the blueprint.  Soothe the emotions, the disordered thinking goes away.

Others will say your spouse is nuts, she needs meds and therapy, she needs to do better.  Sure, all that is true.  But you can't control any of that.  It's up to her.  So you focus on what you can control and that's what I just walked you through.  I hope that helps!

Hi and welcome - nice to see you posting

Yes, 'normality' is the last thing we get in a BPD relationship - the best we can hope for is periods of 'near normality'as we walk in a massive minefield carefully minding our step.

It's good to see that people can make a life out of it though, especially if the one with BPD recognises they have a problem and commits to therapy. Every case is different and everyone's limit is different and sadly, sometimes there simply is no other option than to end it, for the sake of sanity and health.

Ironically, we stay in the relationship because it isn't normal; we're meeting someone who, at the start, seems so utterly perfect for us that we can never envisage anything going wrong. It's a big emotional high and it takes a strong hold of us. Of course, once the idealisation phase wears off and the BPD kicks in, we're already hooked on the line and are now in the 'push/pull' cycle which takes over.

My own relationship lasted 4 years but was getting worse, she never accepted she had problems and the whole world was against her so ultimately there could only be one ending, as I wasn't prepared to accept such a life of ever-increasing conflict.

Feel free to post further - we're all in this together

Welcome to BPD Family, a peer support group of people who have "been there, experienced that".  We're not here with legal advice, that is provided by lawyers, solicitors and other professionals.  But our peer support includes collective wisdom based on many years of hard-won experience.

Please browse our various boards, each one focused on a variety of things we have to deal with.  For example, our Tools and Skills workshops board has a variety of topics that are necessary to know but not very intuitive.  Examples are identifying practical boundaries and using communication skills such as SET, DEARMAN, etc (and why logical JADE so often fails).

You mentioned your marriage is approaching a decade.  If you're in the USA, one positive - in the midst of a world of hurt - is that both spouses of a 10+ year marriage can benefit from the higher of either spouse's income history once they reach retirement age.

You haven't mentioned whether you have children together, so I'll add this just in case... There are many reasons to ponder whether to divorce.  One that is not so intuitive is how the children would be impacted.  A common perception is that the marriage must be held together at all costs for the sake of the children.  Yet the opposite might be true... If a person decides the marriage has failed due to serious mental health and behavioral dysfunction, the children are impacted...

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.