Just finished writing this and boy, is it long! Sorry for the length. I haven't had anyone to talk to about this who has any clue what we've been going through.
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Thank you for your reply!
His therapist specializes in MBT and is diagnosed as BPD, herself. I see ways in which that can be both positive and negative. It is early, and I feel like she is just now starting to get a sense of what everyday life is like for him and for us. I feel VERY blessed that he is willing to go to therapy - he is remarkably self-aware, but the potential for splitting on his therapist is something I am, at the very least, on the watch for, and at most, I kind of expect it at some point. He has been in therapy before, but it was before I knew him, and it was for ADD at that time.
Thank you also for the direction to the information on the right side of the page. I was a longtime member of another forum, but it has been years since I participated in one.
I will start with this, though some might be redundant to my first post:
(I'm sorry also about length - once I start typing... .and there is just so much to say in regard to this - both of our histories, past events, current events, what next... .)
What type of relationship are you in? Marriage
Years together: 15
Age: I'm 37, he's 52
Married: Yes, 13 years in June - my 1st, his 3rd
Children/ages: 1 from previous marriage - no contact (a saga unto itself)
How Many Times Have You Broken Up: 3 prior to marriage, none since, though he has threatened to pack up and leave maybe a couple of times (early on) and expresses fears to me on occasion that I would be better off without him.
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
What are the top reasons you want this relationship to work?
We love each other and believe in trying to grow together and toward each other even when things are at their worst, and we recognize that neither of us is perfect. We acknowledge problems, try to deal with them, and move forward. In all, it is a great marriage, but at the same time, there are very serious challenges.
What do you like most about your partner?
The same degree of passion that drives his anger also drives his passion for things he loves. He tries every day, to be a better him. Even when he fails, he keeps trying. He is smart, funny, and fun to be around most times. We both feel like we fit together well and our individual strengths seem to counteract each others' weaknesses. We both want the same things from life (mostly) and they tend to be simple things.
What are the top challenges facing your relationship?
He has not held a job for more than two weeks since the day I met him. It is difficult for me to share my troubles with him because he gets angry about people mistreating me - he splits when I am just trying to vent. I am not inclined to share much as it is (I have my own issues, just like he does), but the person I love and trust most in the world will have an episode if I tell him something someone has done that upset me, to the point that it's not worth telling him about it. I have my best girl friend, with whom I discuss much, but it's not the same relationship as a spouse.
He also recently confessed to me that he kinda checks out when I talk about things that are important to me but not important to him (like my appreciation for Pink Floyd, enjoyment of crochet, etc.) I don't require him to be interested in the same things I am interested in, but he will talk for hours about things he finds interesting and be quiet and dismissive when I talk about something I am interested in, if it is not of mutual interest to him. I hope his awareness and confession of that will mean a change of that in the future - he is good about addressing problems and trying to improve - but it is alienating to know that ultimately, he just doesn't care about those things.
What do you find most difficult?
Things have been more rollery-coastery lately.
His inability to find or maintain employment is the most practical problem we face. His impulsive spending and complete lack of understanding of the value of money (by his own admission). Finding a way to share things with him that doesn't send him into an episode (if it's negative) or complete detachment (if he's not interested). Hyper-religiosity has claimed most holidays excepting Thanksgiving and most religions, denominations, and world-views. He splits so completely on so many things, I wonder what is going to be left. He has often tried to reassure me that he will never split on me, and 15 years together would support that, but I don't know - mostly I do trust him in that - I think I'm more afraid he would leave after splitting on himself than splitting on me, and if he did so, it would be beyond anything he split on before.
I am not afraid of what would happen to me, practically speaking, if he suddenly left - I have always been able to get and maintain employment, paid my bills, and was quite content living alone during my first several college years, and I am not worried about the prospect of finding another relationship - I don't even think about that. Whereas I am easily capable of taking care of myself, he is completely dependent on me. He is aware of that, and it bothers him, but it is where we are. That said, he also would not stay in any relationship out of dependence. He can and has left others and almost left me a few times.
I REALLY fear what would happen to him if he finally split on me or split on himself over me. While he is not suicidal, per se, he has often wished he was dead, and as I mentioned, he will attack himself to the point of injury (and/or destruction of property) when he is having an episode. The level of his guilt when he gets to that place... .wow. Sometimes that's worse than the episode.
Lately, since entering therapy tends to bring up one's most painful moments, what has been most difficult has been not knowing which husband I would be waking up to, coming home to, etc. I leave or go to bed and everything is fine - I come home or wake up and the entire house seems greyer from his state of mind - anger, resentment, guilt, and the all-too-often underlying fears of abandonment and rejection.
We are here right now because his mother, sisters and brothers got together in Nevada last summer, kind of a "This might be the last time we can all be together in the same place" kind of thing, and NO ONE thought to invite him. He was an afterthought by all of his family until his absence was brought up by one of his siblings' spouses, and no one seemed to have a good reason why he was left out. Well, I think I would split, too! He called his mother to talk about it three days after I left my job (a job I loved for four years and then came to dread (another saga)) last September. He said, more or less, this wasn't the first time he'd been utterly forgotten, she said she didn't want to hear any more, he said "Then, you won't" and hung up. Shortly thereafter, I had a voice mail on my phone from his mom, "What's wrong with him?" Uh, gee, can't imagine.
He and his mother are a great deal alike, so it might be that we know where the BPD came from. (Likely). His father was KIA in Germany in 1963, about three weeks before JFK, so we know very little about him, and his mother basically never had anything good to say about him. Hubby was 16 months old when his father died. His mother then had to move the family back to the US from Germany and raise five kids by herself. She took a job as a bartender, worked nights, never saw the kids off to school in the morning and was at work when they came home, so the kids kind of raised each other. That always works out so well... . Another very long and sad story.
I am not blaming her for how she handled losing her husband and raising five kids alone, BUT how she handled it resulted in certain consequences for herself and all five of her children. All of the rest of them think Hubby should just get over his issues and stop talking about it because none of them seem to remember any of the things he remembers going through. VERY frustrating.
It is utterly invalidating to him to treat him that way, but even just the last two months that he has been in therapy has improved his state of mind enough to want to try to find a way to talk to his mother again and try to establish a realistic relationship. I am hopeful for that - despite the problems, I miss my mother-in-law. Hubby is close to one sister, less close to the other, and the two brothers have been pretty distant to all of the family for longer than I have known them.
How would you categorize your partner?
(BPD traits? NPD traits? ASPD traits? Etc? )
BPD for sure. He is convinced that he has NPD and worried about ASPD a great deal, but his capacity for empathy is far too great - it's more the other way around. Often, his splitting involves injustices done to others who are, for whatever reason, unable to stand up for themselves. He feels deeply and experiences things on a far more emotional level than even I do (actually, I have a bit of a flat affect and don't respond much to initial stimuli until I get time to process it). He takes things to heart beyond what is healthy. When he splits, he tends to make pronouncements about how things are going to be. He has a "lecturing professor" side - he will explain to me in minute detail anything he finds worthy of discussion or explanation and can talk for hours about science, nature, faith, Biblical concepts and passages, etc., and he cannot understand why others are not more interested in these things. Countless analogies in the interest of making certain he is not misunderstood.
How would you categorize yourself?
(NPD traits? BPD traits? Low Self Esteem? Codependent? Depressed? Etc? )
I have my own issues that started at birth - I was born without a thyroid, a gland that controls your metabolism - how your body processes food into energy for every single cell in your body. At age seven, my parents were killed in a car accident, which I survived and have PTSD symptoms from, even 30 years later. My pediatrician neglected my thyroid medication adjustments from age 7 to 12 until he died of colon cancer and another doctor took over my care and found the problem.
I was an only child, raised by my maternal grandparents. I suspect my grandmother may have had BPD or something along those lines. She was very controlling, to the point that she had me convinced I could not sleep in a bed by myself until I was 13 years old. (I slept with her from age seven because I was in a body cast for months after being released from the hospital after the car accident, and it was much easier to just be in there with me - nothing sexual or inappropriate was involved). I was a good kid but still over-controlled and over-protected.
My grandfather was a loving and generous man, but my grandmother despised him (like you would a loving and generous man ), so I was not allowed a close relationship with him. They have a son, my uncle, who is also totally screwed up - they both seemed to despise him for some reason. I do not have a relationship with my uncle because, lo and behold, he came to our house a couple of times, split, cursed us both out, and Hubby sent him packing. My grandparents have both since passed on. My uncle and I have not spoken since 2006.
My paternal grandmother is in assisted living in our town, and I am much closer to her than to any other person in my family. We are more alike in our ways - independent, stubborn, and fairly self-confident. I got my neuroses and anxiety from my maternal grandmother, something my mother's teenage diary supported in her own experiences.
I have looked at many different aspects of my life and personality and find traits that overlap between PTSD, ADD, OCPD, Aspergers, and AvPD. Both of us are prone to the occasional deep depressive episode, something we have both been going through over the past year (close to two years, truth be told), though for different events in our respective lives. We have both felt quite alone in our struggles, even though we have each other.
Hubby does not have anyone else with whom he feels a strong enough connection to discuss such serious matters. I am grateful for my good friend, D, and I am hopeful that hubby's time in therapy will result in that for him either by her or by opening up opportunities to relate to others. Everyone needs multiple sounding boards. Trust is an issue. And understanding and compassion for someone with such a serious and debilitating condition
Is anyone in therapy? If so, what?
Hubby is in MBT with kind of a side of DBT, and he has expressed a desire for me to be in therapy, though at the time he mentioned it, it was out of a sense of unfairness that he was in therapy to improve himself and his problems, but I was not doing the same for myself and my problems. I did see a therapist in 2006 when I was dealing with my maternal grandmother's failing health and all of the complicated crap I felt, but with no job and no health insurance at this time, I'd kinda like to stick to one therapy bill per week for the time being. Having come out of this recent depressive episode has also alleviated a lot of the more prominent symptoms of whatever the heck is going on in me.
What are your goals at bpdfamily.com?
My goals here are to try to understand better the person I am married to; to understand my role in the relationship and outside of it, as well; to better understand my personal role in the world around me; to better handle the challenges of a BPD relationship, and to just feel some camaraderie with others who have been through their own trials. I hope also to be able to bring my own experiences to the table and help someone else.
As I look back now, I am surprised by how many friendships/relationships I have had in the past with people who have/had BPD traits.
If you stuck with me through that whole post, I salute you! If not, I certainly don't blame you!
Best,
CT
