hard to separate the person from the mental illness

[bus boy]

I have posted a lot, do deep therapy, read many posts on here and read lots about BPD & npd. But still, for a non, it is still difficult to look at my ex, who I sometimes feel had a deeper darkness, as a person with a mental illness someone who can't help them selves.  I have times where I can very clearly see and feel for her, there are times I despise her. Sometimes I'm mad at me for once again letting her manuplate me. Just when I think know I have her tactics figured out she moves the goal posts. To put so much time and energy into controlling my access to s9, her waking moments seem to be spent on destroying my relationship with s9. Today I have been reading on abandonment as I have often done and can't figure why I am split so bad, I've done everything in my power to prove I'm right here, she keeps me at arms length in s9 life and says in family court I'm never there. Very hurtful and baffling. But the abandonment issue,  my ex BPD/ npd  wife came from a very sexual abusive background. I will never know if she was abused. My T says she has no doubt my ex was molested. My ex's grandfather  molested all his children and got his hands on most if not all his grandchildren. My ex, her mother and siblings spent almost every weekend at the home of the molester. My ex's mother didn't drive so her father would drop them off for the weekend and return home where he would run the roads drunk. If he did stay with the family he would be drunk all weekend with his molesting father in law. Now I feel this was the root of her abandonment. Why am I split so bad? Why are her parents put on such a pedestal, they can do no wrong. They 100% free reign with s9. Her mother knowingly and willingly exposed her kids to a sexual child preditor. The harder it tried to show it was safe the harder she pushed. She seems to do everything normal on the surface, job wise and life wise, s9 is involved in different activities. She doesn't want me recognized in his life in any way what so ever. And is getting worse. I don't mean to make this a post about coparenting, I am trying to show the difficulty in detaching from being split so black. There is absolutely nothing I can do right. If I was a jail bird, a gambler, a bar fly if I was a bum and didn't work or support my family than I would deserve to be treated this way. I work extra side jobs to supplement what I pay in child support, I've given extra money in the past, I was off work for a year after 3 major brain tumor surgerys and still gave extra and never missed a payment. The extra I make on the side goes to s9 when he is with me but she still relentlessly pursues me for the meger  scraps I make extra. I guess I feel I'm being treated like the person who abandon her, I often feel like telling her I wasn't the one who knowingly exposed her to a sexual molester. I've tried in the past so hard to get her to come for counselling but that only created more abusive anger from her and threats of violence from her mother.

[Meili]

I know, from personal experience, how hard it is when the other parent acts in such ways. I'm really sorry that you're having to go through all of that. It makes me mad that she's doing that to you!

They split us black to hide from their own pain. It's far easier to blame us and make us out to be the evil, damaging demon than it is to address the real roots of the problem; their minds.

Protecting yourself in all of this should be paramount IMHO. Setting and enforcing boundaries with regard to the extra money isn't a bad plan. Keeping a diary off all of your time with S9 and the times that she's denied you access or whatever may help too at some point. Another healthy boundary that might help is to keep LC and make sure that it's nothing more than business - that it only has to deal with S9.

The benefit of the last one is to keep her thoughts out of your head. That way you can focus on you and what you need to do and worry less about what she is thinking.

[jhkbuzz]

I'm so sorry, you are in a terrible situation that is really, really painful. Many of us have been where you are; it's astounding, frustrating and heartbreaking when you're acting with integrity and trying to get a non-responsive partner to see you.

Your frustration is palpable. Mine was, too. I know that in my own r/s I took the lions share of the responsibility of figuring out how to make things work. My ex came from a dysfunctional childhood as well; her father abandoned the family, her mother was depressed/suicidal for much of her childhood; I suspect she was molested - and she told me she was raped in college. Terrible, terrible stories that brought out my fierce protectiveness and made me want to take care of her.

I look back now and can see some really misguided assumptions I had in the r/s. That she needed my care (she's an adult and she doesn't). That my love for her could "make up" for the wounds she suffered early in her life (it couldn't). That my behavior in the r/s somehow "triggered" her mental health issues (that's impossible). That once in a committed r/s there is never any reason (barring physical abuse) to back out (but emotional abuse can be just as damaging and life-threatening).

... .(I) can't figure why I am split so bad, I've done everything in my power to prove I'm right here

I recognize some magical thinking in your post - because I had it too. I thought if I just worked harder and acted with integrity and did the right things and was self-sacrificing that she would finally see me and recognize how much I loved her. It never happened - I was also split black and treated with contempt. And this had little to do with me; she often loathes and hates herself and projected that onto me. Your integrity can't overcome her mental health issues.

You are looking for validation from someone who has a personality disorder, someone who is often emotionally dysregulated, has disordered thinking patterns, and cannot validate your kind actions because doing so would bring up all sorts of painful, shame-filled feelings about herself that she cannot bear.

Your actions, perceived by a non-personality disordered person would be perceived correctly; as the actions of a kind, caring parent to s9- regardless of the fact that the r/s is over.

Trying to get validation from her is like repeatedly slamming your head into a brick wall.  Ask me how I know.

[fromheeltoheal]

Hey bus boy-

I'm sorry you're going through that, it is very painful and challenging.  First, you can't separate a borderline from the disorder, they're one in the same.  You mention your ex came from a very sexually abusive background; that could have been the catalyst for the disorder, or not, we can't know, but point is order becomes disorder so early in a borderline's development, within the first few years of life, that it literally gets hardwired into the personality, before cognitive thought is possible, it's 'who they are', just like all of us, although most folks go through a more ordered development.  And of course it's not black and white, ordered or disordered, it's a grey continuum, with the behaviors, and how they affect us, being the result of those developments.

BPD is a shame-based disorder, and borderlines don't have the ability to soothe their emotions, make themselves feel better, in more 'normal' ways, so they use tools they're developed because they work, time-tested over decades, one of which being the 'painted black' thing: offload all the shame and the blame onto you, solely to feel better, make you evil, and abandon you, so you go away and take all shame and blame with you, so she doesn't have to feel it.  And that may or may not have anything to do with reality or include rational though, and there's no amount of effort on your part that can change it.  And in that changeable ocean of emotions she's floating on, there may be times when she's nice and kind, relative calm between emotional storms; we all do that to some extent, sometimes a victim to our emotions, sometimes calmly and serenely in control of them, borderlines just float on a very different ocean, much more turbulent.

If you've been reading a lot you probably know all that, the important part being to focus on what you can control, which is you and your emotional state, and as you shift the focus from her to you and your son, and how you're going to build a life, somehow, with your son in it and her minimally in it, it will give you a sense of power, of taking your power back.  Take care of you!