Something to consider is - why is this spiralling downward when you are trying so hard to be a good listener and show compassion? Why are these behaviors (criticizing you, accusing you) increasing?

The advice on this board is to validate the feeling while not validating what isn't valid. How does one do this?

For someone with BPD, feelings feel like facts. You aren't a narcissist. However, she feels you are, is convinced that you are. What you are doing is being more patient, more kind, more explaining that what she's accusing you isn't true. You are trying to prove her wrong.

To her though, that feels invalidating, and when invalidated, she escalates. You defend more.

To change this, you would need to take a risk and do something different. Look at what you are doing now. Is it helping? No, whatever you are doing now isn't helping. However, you know the outcome of what you are doing now. It's predictable. Doing something different- you don't know the outcome, it's risky, but - there's a possibility of change there- maybe for the better, maybe not, but it's not getting better with what you are doing anyway.

A counselor advised me to substitute something absurd for the accusation, in thinking only. It helps to tone down your emotional reaction. What if, instead of narcissist, your wife accused you of being a pink elephant. What if she was listening to videos about you being an elephant, telling you that you have elephant eyes, and tusks. Would you defend yourself and try to prove to her that you aren't an elephant?

When your wife accuses you of being a narcissist (elephant)- she feels that and so it's a fact to her.

"You have dead eyes and zero empathy"-  instead of explaining how you are listening, try " that must feel so hurtful to think I don't have empathy for you". This is validating her feelings, not admitting to not having empathy. Then she will probably reply with more hurt feelings. "yes it's horrible, it's so hurtful" and you can say something similar like "that must feel really bad".

When she threatens to move to another city you can say "It must be really hard for you right now. I'd be sad if you did that".

Also, for your own emotional sanity, you can't be listening to this all the time. You need to find some time for yourself. Even if you fake it- "I have to run an errand, I'll be back later" - the errand is going to your car and driving somewhere - the park, the coffee shop, wherever you find some quiet.

The hope may be in changing your responses and so, trying something different can allow for that chance.

Hi ,
You are definitely not alone.  My adult son went NC on me over 5 years ago because I refused to give him money for drugs( he is also bpd, too). It is not you.  I agree with the other posts-it is a sort of coping mechanism they use. 

Hi MM,

You've come to the right place.  Please feel free to share if you're comfortable.  Even if you're not comfortable, my guess is that if you spend some time reading through the posts of parents on these boards, some themes will resonate.

I can relate to your situation as I have an adult stepdaughter with BPD, and my husband and I don't always see eye-to-eye on what to do.  His role has mainly been one of provider and fixer, and he has operated in a FOG of fear, obligation and guilt for years now.  Because of this, the household has been incredibly tense sometimes, and my husband has had a tendency to take out his frustrations on me.  His daughter seems to cycle back and forth between loving him and hating him, but honestly I think she hates him 99% of the time.  Nevertheless she maintains contact, seemingly only when she wants something, namely money, housing, insurance, co-signing and logistical support, such as moving her in and out of various living situations.  I see a cycle of enablement, but by the same token, she has turned her life around with therapy, and her life looks relatively healthy now, ruptured relationships notwithstanding.

Right now my BPD stepdaughter is estranged from her entire family.  That's sad, but by the same token, she has operated independently from her dad and me for the last few months.  I'm wondering if she has finally carved out an adult's life for herself.  But I know not to get my hopes up, because experience has taught me that BPD is fraught with periods of instability and self-destruction.  I try to stay cool, level-headed and also loving (as much as possible), hoping for the best but bracing for the worst.  I suspect it's only a matter of time until she runs out of the money her dad had given her, including the proceeds from the sale of the car she was given.  But for now, I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt.

It would help to know whether or not your son is living with you.  In my experience, the absolute worst scenario is for you to enable him to be NEETT--short for Not in Education, Employment, Training or Therapy, while he's treating you like crap.  That set-up is basically rewarding him for being dysfunctional, and it's not sustainable unless you're loaded and can tolerate his abuse indefinitely.  My biggest issue with my husband has been allowing his adult daughter to live in our home, on and off for years, while NEETT and not helping out one bit.  What happens when a person has no purpose or responsibilities and does nothing except ruminate about negative thoughts?  Eventually they feel like nothing, alienated from the world.  In my stepdaughter's case, that invariably led to feelings of hatred, depression and emptiness, passive-aggressive behaviors and outright hostility.  Daily marijuana use of the self-medicating kind only worsened her problems by an order of magnitude.

Meanwhile she adopted a victim mindset and blamed her family and former friends for all her woes, eventually accusing them of being "toxic," "bullies" and "abusive."  Her life became a dismal trail of fractured relationships (not just one or two, but many), which was ironic because I think she craved closeness and belonging more than anything.  She lashed out, broke down, teetered on the brink of despair.  Fearing for her very life, her dad bent over backwards to "save" her, basically by giving in to all her demands, while implicitly accepting blame.  And so the cycle of enablement continued.  But she had become an emotional terrorist, because in her world, the incentives were all mixed up.  The worse she acted, the more money and concessions she got.  She made adult-level decisions, but her dad shielded her from facing the natural consequences of those decisions, in the name of protecting her and keeping her alive.  Sound familiar?

Hopefully she will.
I think it's difficult to be seen as the "bad guy" but if someone is in victim perspective- that's how they feel. Hopefully you can hold on to knowing it's not true. You are not being a jerk in this situation.

Clarification:  if she can see that past relationships failed because she could not be monogamous, she might begin seeing her role in this.   

Another big blowup yesterday on Friday the 13th, and today is a miserable Valentine's day. She has been dysregulated 5 out of the last 7 days. Yesterday was going well until two things happened: first, I received a couple of self-help books in the mail (one was a narcissism workbook), and second, she listened to another one of those creepy, AI-generated "Carl Jung" YouTube videos titled "Why The Narcissist Can't Recover After Betraying a Super Empath."  She ridiculed the books as worthless, and decided to eat dinner alone at 4:30 pm, an hour earlier than usual. Then she listened to the video and sent it to me. After we had both returned from our separate after-dinner walks, she went into a rage after hearing that I had not yet listened to the 40 minute (shorter than most) "Carl Jung" video. She carried on loudly for quite some time, and said some very ugly things to me. I sat down and listened to it. Pure black and white: she is the faultless "super empath" (sounds rather narcissistic to me), and I am the terrible monster narcissist with zero redeeming qualities. The narcissist will drain the super empath of all her energy, and after they go their separate ways the super empath will undergo a painful but wonderful transformation to a fully integrated, powerful human being, while the narcissist will coldly go on with life, afraid to look at their evil ways or work on growth, while looking for new victims to feed on.  This sort of tripe is poisoning her mind. She is obsessed with the reinterpretation of our marriage (she's the victim, although she projects that back on me) and dumping all her pain on me (she says I'm vomiting all over her!).  We spent the remainder of the evening staying away from each other, and exchanged some text messages. Hers were dysregulated; mine were as empathetic and respectful as I could make them.

She is threatening to move to another city. When we are together and she is chewing me out, she says I have "dead eyes" and zero empathy. In reality, I am doing my best to listen carefully, stay calm, and not JADE. When I explain to her that I am listening, care deeply, but am trying to remain calm because escalating the emotions on both sides only leads to further hurt, and that I'm trying to be present and caring, she gets angrier and repeats her "dead eyes" allegation. Seriously, there's no way to strike the right balance; it's "lose-lose" in most cases (I could give many "lose-lose" examples) and I've tried to gently point this paradox out to her but it just flies over her head.

I guess I'm just venting. It's a dreary, rainy Valentine's day, and another day where she feels little besides anger and contempt for me. I have expressed many times my desire to stay married, but she is just so incredibly upset and there seems to be no repair or recovery in sight. I do think our marriage is in a death spiral, but I'm always looking for some shred of hope amidst all the chaos and gloom. Thanks for listening.

That’s the way I see it right now.  She is going to do what she wants - my boundary won’t stop her.  I just hope she can see that I have valid reasons for my boundary and that I am not just being a jerk.

Wendy - in a sense I am - intentionally.  Me saying “I don’t agree with this” with no further discussion always means that the same thing will be brought up over and over.  Reinforcing that boundary over and over hasn’t met with success.  My hope here is for W to think about reasons to choose monogamy for herself so that maybe future conversation will be different and more productive - less “black and white”.  I doubt the conversation will change from “you are controlling me because of an antiquated sexist belief”, but at this point it is worth a shot.  My hope is that she discusses what I said with her T this week.

Maybe she can think  - “Gee, he does do all the work already - and if I find other partners he has no reason to stay married.”

Or maybe she has some insight that that her issues have gotten in the way of having a healthy relationship in the past and will similarly impact future relationships.  She is capable of that insight, but I don’t expect behavior to change.  She did decide to do laundry and dishes last night.  She’s likely to see this as transactional, though - she will do housework for a week and then expect me to be okay with extramarital relationships, but if it all gets her to consider other viewpoints than her urges, I call that positive.

Hi DesertDreamer,

You said you don't ever remember feeling as anguished in your life as you have been in this relationship. Do you think that's because you are away from your country or because of her disorder?

I have been in all kinds of difficult relationships, but they never made me as anguished as major events in my life, such as the loss of a job or a kid being sick. I think that's because I protected myself. As soon as the relationship stopped working for me, I stepped away from my partner and kept myself busy with other stuff.

But in your case, as an immigrant with limited language/social know-how, it will be very difficult to make yourself happy. Being dependent on your wife, who suffers from BPD, is pretty bad, because it should be the other way around. For the relationship to work, it should be guided by a partner who is in good mental health status. However, it seems like your migration was more of her choice, which makes her the one who was leading the relationship. The problem with that is that when the partner with BPD has control of the relationship, their behaviors tend to get worse, especially the abusive ones.

So I think you only have two realistic choices. Either (A) you toughen up and overcome your current situation until you get your citizenship status, if that's feasible, so that you can get a real job, or (B) you get money to buy the flight tickets back to your home country.

Btw, I don't know which country you are living in, but there isn't any place with better job opportunities than the US.

I think on your part, the only thing you can do is to see how far she takes this. Unless you are watching her 24/7- she still can choose to engage online, meet someone when kids are in school and you are at work. There's not a way to completely control this. It would be up to you to decide your response to what she does.