A story of hope

[Husband2014]

I got married in 2015.  I discovered my wife has BPD in late 2021. To say life was miserable is not an understatement.  I spent a lot of time here, went to therapy, read as much as I could and educated myself on how to handle the outbursts.  My posts are on here to kinda document the ups and downs of life.

Sometime in 2023 I broke through the fear of accepting the beatdowns and the tongue lashing.  I decided to draw boundaries wiyh simply walking away, leaving the house, not engaging in text message wars and sleeping in another room. As I drew more boundaries the lash ours got more and more intense in late 2023 to the point where she physically came after me hard. I left the house and made it very simple.  Go to therapy or I'm hiring a lawyer and go through this is court. 


Since then she's been in therapy for a whole year and also takes medication to control the uncontrollable rage.  We have had the most peacful year and even Christmas wasn't a nightmare like last years. 

There are still challenges ahead as her line of thinking is still very very very disturbed and polluted but at least the massive lashouts have been significantly diminished.  I still have to work through make her tolerate and accept my family again and that's probably going to be my next break glass moment.
I still don't talk to my family or even mention their names in front of her as she gets very worked up. Around simmer time I plan to muster up the courage to do this and see I can establish anothst boundary. 


I'm writing this partially to comitt myself to continue to break the fear of standing up to the tongue lashings and also hope it gives someone some else in my shoes the courage to break the fear barrier and draw boundaries.  My first step was telling myself over 1000 per day for over 4 months “she can't hurt me”.  My next step is telling myself 1000 times per day “I can do this” in order to integrate my family into our day to day life again.  Its hard but can be done. 

[PLEASE - NO RUN MESSAGES]

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[kells76]

Hi Husband2014 and welcome back 

Thanks for sharing your update with us; it's meaningful to the group to see what progress and change can look like.

To me, your story speaks to how change happens not through making the pwBPD think differently, but through you (the non-BPD) taking responsibility for your own choices and you deciding to work on yourself and your responses. While there are no guarantees that the pwBPD will change at all, it can and does happen that they change in response to you taking the lead and setting the tone.

Although you two still have a long road ahead, it's wonderful to hear that your relationship is much more peaceful than it was. I hope the two of you are able to rebuild from here, sharing some new neutral-to-positive experiences together.

It is hard - and it can be done 

Can you remind me if you have a therapist or counselor in all this?

[Husband2014]

Thank you.  Definitely a lot of ups and downs but you are more in control than what you believe.

My wife has a therapist that she has been working with almost weekly for the last 12 months.