Need input on a situation please

[profplum]

I have been with my wife 16 years. In hindsight she has always probably been anxious, possibly BPD (never diagnosed but some of her behaviours fit in my opinion). Seven years ago she had a breakdown & was put on my medication for depression. We moved away from the city to the country to try & start afresh, made changes including her stopping work etc.

It worked a bit & she stopped the meds. Fast forward the last 2 years have been far the worst, without getting into excessive detail my wife has pretty much split me black, the house we live in black & a neighbour black.

In summary my wife had a minor altercation with a neighbour last Summer about noise. Pretty much every day since she replays the altercation & dwells on every detal of it. I suspect the neighbour didn’t give it a second thought & moved on with their life next day.

My wife believes our neighbour is evil & to quote deserves to burn in hell for ruining her life. The reality is they really have done nothing wrong. My wife acknowledges she has anxious tendencies & catastrophic thinking but refuses to seek as help as the problem is our neighbour, if the neighbour was gone it would be all ok is her view. Thus she won't seek a medical professional as to quote they can't make our neighbour go away.

My wife wants to me to “fix” things – this involves either

1   us moving so she never has to see the neighbour again – clearly selling a house & moving is a major decision, has costs & what guarantee is their she won’t develop an obsessive hatred of a neighbour somewhere else? we left the city because she didn't like that, now we are in the country & that's not working out either

2   me confronting the neighbour & telling him the way he spoke to my wife last Summer was unacceptable – I heard the altercation & the neighbour wasn’t out of order, furthermore I would prefer not to do any confronting anyway in case we do end up with a genuine neighbour dispute

Just the sight of our neighbour sends my wife in a total anxious & angry state (luckily he works away a lot so he’s not even round much).

What do you make of it – this weekend my wife sees our neighbour in the distance going about his business, my wife gets totally fired up & starts screaming at me I need to get things sorted out re. the neighbour.

I tried to validate by telling her I could see how much things upset her, the problem is then she always moves straight into asking what I am going to do about it (it’s always what I am going to do, she claims to be too anxious/unwell to do anything herself & besides if I loved her I would fix things according to her).

Knowing it wasn’t a time to converse when she’s wound up I said I was going out for a run & was promptly told to *** off & she wished she had never met me etc.

I steered clear of her all evening & slept in a separate bedroom. This morning I asked how she was, to get the response she was still terrible & I was evil because I did nothing to help & obviously wanted her to suffer. I have again backed off while she’s agitated but I don’t see how to break the cycle.

I can validate but then everything always gets bought back to her telling me I have to fix things & she refuses to seek any help or advice from me or anyone else. I know I can’t fix the environment around her easily & besides the real problem is her intolerance to things like neighbours. I have spent 10+ years fixing problems only for a new one to always appear.

Can anyone help pull me back from the abyss to think straight.

I want to work things out, I have read the tools, the books like Walking on Eggshells etc. they help but I still can’t see how to break the cycle unless I just walk away from this relationship, which isn’t the outcome I want.

I've probably not explained it well & missed out important points. However if anyone can give me some input it would be much appreciated.

Cheers

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[profplum]

my original post says she was put on my medication for depression

that was a typo she was put on medication for depression

i have never been on meds nor do i consider myself depressed, although out of my own choice in the last year have done some counselling on my own to try to make sense of the relationship

[Rockylove]

i have never been on meds nor do i consider myself depressed, although out of my own choice in the last year have done some counselling on my own to try to make sense of the relationship

  That's a good start.  Can you keep going?  Making sense of the relationship means that you'll need to make sense of your part in it.  That's always the difficult part.  When I realized that my own co-dependent traits (which I'd thought I'd licked) were seeping into my relationship, I had to take a step back and re-examine what my part was in all of this craziness.  It's not that I have a mental illness, but things I was doing certainly wasn't making my situation with my BPD bf any better either.

[zaqsert]

It sounds like this has been taking a toll on you.  Very understandable, and something that so many of us have gone through too.  I agree with Rockylove, your own counselling is a good start.

I have spent 10+ years fixing problems only for a new one to always appear.

I also spent many years fixing problems only for new ones to appear.  It wasn't until earlier this year when I learned about BPD that things started to make some sense for me.  Probably due to a combination of starting to understand BPD and also being just plain fed up with the never-ending problems and dramas, I decided to stop fixing every little thing that came up.  Around the same time, I also started to enforce by boundary of not being yelled at.  At first, the situation with my uBPDw got worse.  Maybe it was an extinction burst.  I wasn't sure how much longer I would be able to take it.  But then suddenly things started getting better.

In the past few weeks she has been acting civilly towards me.  She said she feels like we're more of a team and that she notices that I am helping out more.  Ironically, I thought I was helping less!  But in hindsight, perhaps I've ended up helping with things when she wants and asks for help, and not all the times when I thought she could use my help or might want my help.

I suppose only time will tell if this is a new, better phase of our relationship or if it is just another cycle through a good period.

As to how you might approach these conversations with her, I think I still need to work on my approach, so I don't want to steer you in the wrong direction.  Not too long ago she blew up at me because she felt I was using the term "your choice" way too much.  I'll have to review the tools here and figure out some good ways to let her know that I have faith in her to resolve some these problems herself.