Hi coopyloopy (cute name)
I'd like to welcome you here. I read your post all through. Not so hard, you know; you have a long story to tell and you do it with equanimity and grace. How strong you are as a person comes through, as does your kindness and the care with which you approach the people in your life.
You've posted this in the right place. You have a long and difficult relationship that you want to improve - that is what this Board is for.
It sounds as if you've both made attempts over the years to get a handle on things and that sometimes this has worked, at least for a while. You say that a turning point was when you lost respect for him; that makes sense. He had relied on you (in every way, it seems) for so many years to see him truly, to be his champion, to treat him as an equal even when he was not behaving like one. To feel that tremendous support of someone elses' faith be removed, would be very destabilizing, particularly for a pwBPD who
needs that so much. Everyone has their limit, and at some point you reached yours.
The thing is I have never really told anyone the real extent of my problems. It's not that I'm a particularly private person I guess it's just embarrassing that I have got myself into this situation.
You have that in common with many of us. It's hard to keep others in the loop when there are so many things happening all the time. There is barely time to react to the situations sometimes, nevermind to process them and talk it through with someone who is going to listen carefully and without jumping to judgement.
I probably had a pretty low self-esteem too - infact I probably still do.
If you think that, then there is something concrete that you can work on. It's fruitful and good work.
But most of all he treated me like a queen - like I was the love of his life and he couldn't live without me. I guess he made me feel special and I had never really felt special before.
Again, this will resonate for many. Think about what makes you feel 'special' nowadays; both in the relationship and outside of it.
So I just carried on and pretended to the rest of the world (and myself) that everything was fine.
This is how we soldier on. Sometimes this works, other times it doesn't. You can stop pretending here, with us. That was a big relief to me when I got to this site and it allowed me to begin to see things more clearly; to give myself permission to be angry, to feel sad, lonely, pathetic, ashamed, strong, tough, confused... .whatever.
By that time the damage between J and me was done.
I had lost respect for him and he knew it. And boy did it make him hate me.
All the anger he had repressed with drugs. All the anger that he had felt for his son, all the anger he felt for his family was directed at me.
Becoming the target for anger that had been diffused or sprayed into different directions is hard. How long ago was this?
I didn't know how to react, Everything I did was wrong. Everything I said was wrong. If I walked away he would go wild, throw things, smash things and break things and he would just follow me around anyway, so I just had to stand there as he screamed in my face.
This kind of raging is terrible to bear. Please have a look at
this thread in our Learning Centre. Before things in general can improve, some of the most destructive behaviours have to be got under control.
I thought about leaving constantly but then things would become good again or he would threaten suicide or I would freak out about what would happen to him if he did leave.
This is a familiar pattern for many of us. It creates some bad habits and expectations for both parties. Normalizing bad behaviour is easy to do and it happens gradually, that does not mean that it has to continue.
He texts and calls constantly when I'm at work and I have no choice but to listen as he goes on and on. One day when I stopped answering his calls and he came to my work and followed me around screaming at me then screamed at my bosses and my workmates.
Did you discuss this event afterwards? There needs to be a boundary here - some things have to be off limits, like your workplace. You might like to have a look at this link:
https://bpdfamily.com/pdfs/fuzzetti.pdf, it's from the Lessons in the banner on the right hand side of this page.
But for some reason I still can't leave. I'm trapped. I still love him. I still care about him. I still want this family to work but I just don't know how.
Still loving him and wanting the family to work are good things. Feeling like you are trapped is not a good thing. Would you say it is more a case of wanting it to work for good reasons or feeling trapped, ie. you can't bring yourself to leave. What are the reasons you want to stay? What is stopping you from leaving (or what is making you feel 'trapped'?
I have spent hours over the years reading all the advice on how to talk to someone with BPD, how to lay boundaries, how to validate how to make things work but when it comes to putting it into practise i have just never been able to do it. I forget what to do, I freak out, and my mind goes blank and every time I just do the wrong thing and make it worse.
Can you recall a time when it did work? When you tried to put into practise some of the tools you had read about and managed to defuse a situation or bring yourself to a calmer place so you could deal with it afterwards?
There's theory, and then there's practise. As you know very well yourself. When dealing with difficult people who can become very irrational and are generally unpredictable, we have to be pretty clear about what courses of action are open to us and move through them systematically. Easier said than done, of course. But many members report success with the Communication Tools; although not overnight and not without instances where they just couldn't get it together in the moment.
It's particularly bad at the moment. He's not slept in our room for a couple of weeks, texts me awful things contsantly and barely acknowledges me while I'm home, unless he has a reason to yell at me.
But then he might wake up tomorrow and be fine. And we'll pretend it never happened.
Ok, well, let's see how we can not continue that one pattern. How you might begin to make incremental changes here that will result in better communication and more peaceful existence for you.
Do you think it would be helpful to describe one specific situation / incident, tell us how it unfolded, and then work out how else it could have been handled? Other members will chime in, don't worry.
It's good to have you here, coopyloopy of the cute name.
