I’ve been married to someone with BPD for just over a year.

[Depression = 72% of members]

I’ve been married to someone with BPD for just over a year.  To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m joining this group to improve my marriage or to simply sooth myself while I decide if I have the tolerance or will to endure this life with her.  To preface the situation I have to explain first that I have bipolar disorder and I can’t afford medication or therapy right now.  I’ve been doing pretty well for the past few months and plan to start taking better care of myself soon as health insurance may soon become a reality for me.  

Both her and I have a child from a previous marriage.  My son has Tourette’s Syndrome and possibly some OCD and her daughter struggles with some schizoaffective behavior.  Together we are quite a cocktail of mental illness.  We all get along quite well.  My wife and I have been dealing with mental illness for most of our lives so we are able to provide a stigma-free zone for our kids.  

I’ve read a few books on BPD and have tried to validate my wife as much as possible.  But, I know I’m not putting up boundaries.  I always eventually cave in and admit my guilt to every argument and validate all her insights as facts, just so we can move on with our day/night.  I find it is easy to prostrate myself right up front and let her steer the relationship, basically.  However, in practice I suck and all the things I just said.  I’m too sensitive and bullheaded to allow her to just control everything.  

So there’s a dichotomy of me listening well, validating her feelings, trying to be as affectionate as I can (I struggle badly with physical affection, always have) and we get along really well for as long as I can keep it up.   Then, sometimes when she explodes with anger, I let everything train wreck.  I purposely don’t validate her and I keep my distance.  The longer I do this the longer the train wreck.  Within days there are threats of cheating on me, admissions of not liking my son very much, regrets of marrying me, divorce threats, and so on.  I always end up giving her what she needs to end the escalation of awfulness between us when I can’t bare the anxiety filled environment any longer.  

 I think I encourage these train wrecks because I am not 100% certain that I want to have to work so hard in a relationship just to maintain a minimal level of respect and calmness.   It’s exhausting to have to be so careful with everything I say or do.  She has so many triggers that I find that I have eliminated many things from my life to avoid conflict.   I don’t want to give up on us as a married couple but at the same time, I don’t know if I can handle it.  I’m so prone to anxiety and depression already that I fear that being with her is like having a trigger machine stuck in the on position with me all the time.  

Anyway!  Hello everyone, I’m happy to have found this group and I hope to make some connections to people with similar struggles soon.

I’m having a rough day today,  I didn’t set an alarm to wake her up for the gym Thursday morning and she’s been furious with me ever since.  I obviously don’t care about her health and well-being.  I don’t support her goals to lose weight and feel better about her body issues.  I’m day 2 in my attempt to just leave it alone after I apologized and validated her feelings.  I didn’t admit fault this time, I just told her to have a good day and I’ll see you later.   Today it’s a full on attack on me.  Bill, my ex, my son, etc.  

[Steeplechase]

I’ve been married to someone with BPD for just over a year.  To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m joining this group to improve my marriage or to simply sooth myself while I decide if I have the tolerance or will to endure this life with her.  To preface the situation I have to explain first that I have bipolar disorder and I can’t afford medication or therapy right now.  I’ve been doing pretty well for the past few months and plan to start taking better care of myself soon as health insurance may soon become a reality for me.  

Both her and I have a child from a previous marriage.  My son has Tourette’s Syndrome and possibly some OCD and her daughter struggles with some schizoaffective behavior.  Together we are quite a cocktail of mental illness.  We all get along quite well.  My wife and I have been dealing with mental illness for most of our lives so we are able to provide a stigma-free zone for our kids.  

I’ve read a few books on BPD and have tried to validate my wife as much as possible.  But, I know I’m not putting up boundaries.  I always eventually cave in and admit my guilt to every argument and validate all her insights as facts, just so we can move on with our day/night.  I find it is easy to prostrate myself right up front and let her steer the relationship, basically.  However, in practice I suck and all the things I just said.  I’m too sensitive and bullheaded to allow her to just control everything.  

So there’s a dichotomy of me listening well, validating her feelings, trying to be as affectionate as I can (I struggle badly with physical affection, always have) and we get along really well for as long as I can keep it up.   Then, sometimes when she explodes with anger, I let everything train wreck.  I purposely don’t validate her and I keep my distance.  The longer I do this the longer the train wreck.  Within days there are threats of cheating on me, admissions of not liking my son very much, regrets of marrying me, divorce threats, and so on.  I always end up giving her what she needs to end the escalation of awfulness between us when I can’t bare the anxiety filled environment any longer.  

 I think I encourage these train wrecks because I am not 100% certain that I want to have to work so hard in a relationship just to maintain a minimal level of respect and calmness.   It’s exhausting to have to be so careful with everything I say or do.  She has so many triggers that I find that I have eliminated many things from my life to avoid conflict.   I don’t want to give up on us as a married couple but at the same time, I don’t know if I can handle it.  I’m so prone to anxiety and depression already that I fear that being with her is like having a trigger machine stuck in the on position with me all the time.  

Anyway!  Hello everyone, I’m happy to have found this group and I hope to make some connections to people with similar struggles soon.

I’m having a rough day today,  I didn’t set an alarm to wake her up for the gym Thursday morning and she’s been furious with me ever since.  I obviously don’t care about her health and well-being.  I don’t support her goals to lose weight and feel better about her body issues.  I’m day 2 in my attempt to just leave it alone after I apologized and validated her feelings.  I didn’t admit fault this time, I just told her to have a good day and I’ll see you later.   Today it’s a full on attack on me.  Bill, my ex, my son, etc.  

[RELATIONSHIP PROBLEM SOLVING]

RELATIONSHIP PROBLEM SOLVING This is a high level discussion board for solving ongoing, day-to-day relationship conflicts. Members are welcomed to express frustration but must seek constructive solutions to problems. This is not a place for relationship "stay" or "leave" discussions. Please read the specific guidelines for this group.

[pearlsw]

Hi religispill,

I am really touched by your thoughtful post and I hope you are able to find some much needed support here. I must say your post gave me a lot to think about and gave me pause to reconsider about how I have interacted at times with my own partner. I thank you for providing us all the chance to rethink and explore improving in such important and complicated areas of our lives that often get overlooked.

I am sorry you were having such a hard day when you posted! Be assured you are not responsible for anyone else's happiness in life. Sounds like you already know a bit about validating and when to do it or not! Besides the tools here I try to incorporate the standard Fair Fighting rules. In his white phases he is refreshingly open to giving some effort, it is a long educational process though. Does your wife put any effort in on such things or are you carrying the burden of better communication mostly alone may I ask?

Take care! Hope others will join us here soon with their insights!

 

[Tattered Heart]

Hi religispill,

Welcome

Sorry that things have not been going so well in your relationship. You've found a great place for support and advice. You have quite a bit on your plate!

You mentioned that you do try to validate your wife. Can you share an example of how you validated and it went well? or when it did not go so well?

One thing I always try to look is what is my responsibility and what is the responsibility of my pwBPD. When I begin to take responsibility for things that are his responsibility then I am beginning to Enable,no Supporting him.

Although its too late to change the situation with the alarm clock, it's not too late to start looking at what's yours and what's hers in regards to this situation. A conversation might go something like:

It's really frustrating to get up late and I can imagine that you are irritated that you missed your workout. It's important to me that you get to your workout in too because I know it helps you feel better. To prevent this from happening again, could you set your own alarm before bed and I'll set mine for the time that I need to get up?

She might get frustrated or even angry at this point. But stick to your resolve. "I know this is a change in pattern. I think it will be better this way though. I will help remind you to set your alarm for a week until you get used to doing it." Just be sure to validate her feelings and also to not be invalidating .

Can you share an example of something else you might need to begin looking at responsibility and how you can shift that responsibility back to her?

[Steeplechase]

Thank you very much for the reply.  I was hoping someone would have something to say. 

I haven’t quite read all the tools and resources this place has to offer yet so I’m not sure what the Fair Fighting Rules are and what a white phase is yet.

My wife does put effort into trying to regulate her emotions.  She is actually doing quite an amazing job considering that she’s working full time, going to college courses at night, volunteering at a rape crisis unit at a hospital a few times a month, and raising a daughter.  When we first met she was unable to handle working full time without feeling like she was out of control most of the time.  In the weeks when we started dating she was very intense, passionate, and critical.  We would get into remarkable discussions via txt that would go on for days (still do to an extent)  We both enjoy philosophy and debate so there was never a shortage of interesting topics to regard and expand upon. Of course, there were also intense raging fits where we’d break up.  This is all before it was clear that we were actually a couple!

She had a full psychologic analysis done after an emergency room visit x-ray revealed a lesion on her brain.  Luckily there was nothing conclusively wrong with her.  She tested with very high intelligence (which I already knew and was part of my attraction to her) and with an open diagnosis of BPD to be confirmed by a psychiatrist.  I remember when she told me this on the phone after getting her results.  I looked up the personality disorder when I had some time.  The behaviors I noticed in her were symptoms of BPD.   

After another week or two of seeing each other almost every day and her changing her mind about us over and over  I decided to walk out and be done with it.  I told her about how this rollercoaster was a little too much for me.  That I really liked her a lot but I felt like I was being given mixed signals and the confusion was too much to bare.  She raged, was pretty mean verbally and super critical of me, my life choices, my behavior, and so on. 

As I open the door to leave I decided that I would try and mention the BPD thing.  Just say what was on my mind so I didn’t feel like I left her without trying to at least help her see something obvious that she may have been oblivious to or unwilling to accept.  I sat on her bed and told her I thought she was suffering with BPD and that she might consider getting some help.

I was escorted out as a gaslighter and thought that would be the last time I’d see her.  I was affected deeply, I had this overwhelming sense of release but also loss.  She really got under my skin.,  I loved the intensity of our time together.

The next day she reached out to me to thank me for being honest.  It turns out that she spent a lot of time researching BPD and decided that I might be right and that she had best do something about it.  She quickly went on sick leave from work and joined  full time outpatient program for mental health group therapy.  She excelled and accepted her BPS.  She did the work, started on medication and seemed to really be fully invested in her recovery. 

Our relationship recovered and I did my best to support her however she needed it. She ended up quitting her job and moving in with me shortly after.  There’s a lot more to the story but this is essentially it as far as her efforts go.  She quit the meds after a few months in favor of libido over a greatly reduced rage tendency and after about a year got back to work/school/etc.

Work certainly triggered a lot of strong emotional chaos, as did many other things.  In short, she fell off the wagon in her recovery.  I mean, she made a ton of progress and leaned a lot about herself, but in the end she swung back to frequent raging and difficulty regulating her emotions. 

It’s now as bad as it’s ever been, well, worse actually.  Only now she has the excuse of having done the ‘work’ and being aware of her problems.  She’ll rage terribly at me and then validate her behavior by siting her progress with handling the disorder.  We both then agree that she’s come a long way and is doing a great job keeping it under control.  I think she’s made better choices in life since confronting her BPD but she’s completely out of control emotionally again.  And now, when I bring up how she reverted back to raging and being super impulsive she accuses me of gas lighting her and puts all the blame on me for her raging.

[pearlsw]

Hi again religispill,

You can do a search for the term "Fair Fighting rules" and they will pop right up! They are standard communication rules - not something particularly designed for BPD issues. By white phase I refer to my husband's extreme black and white thinking. He is either in a white phase where he sees me as WONDERFUL or a black phase where he sees me as AWFUL - the cause of all his problems in life. It is hard because he is never just down the middle and balanced. The longest he has probably ever gone without a breakup threat (of one type or another) is about a month and a half in the whole time I've known him. So, I sort of break life up between white phases and black ones.

The more you read here the more tools you'll pick up. One that is of great help is simply to depersonalize a lot of what they say. I know this is not easy. Some weeks I'm the best thing since store bought pita bread, other weeks I'm the cause of ALL pain and suffering. Before I came to this site I thought I was the only person on the planet who had been broken up with by one person over a hundred times! I had never even imagined such a possibility! But, thank goodness, I am not alone! We can help you make sense of this stuff and provide a space for you to talk and think it all through!

[Steeplechase]

Tattered Heart:  On the validation stuff --
•   She often quarrels with her sister about politics, religion, etc.  and her sister recently told my pwBPD that she was a know it all and she tries to make everyone feel stupid all the time by bragging about how smart she is.  I told her that she most certainly isn’t a know it all but, she is very intelligent and I thought her sister was pressing her buttons because she had the weaker position in the conversation.  I told her that a huge reason that I loved her so much was because of how intelligent and thoughtful she is.  That went well, she calmed down and we had a nice long talk about, well, I don’t remember what exactly.  Something deep 
•   Another time she was feeling really anxious about some behaviors of her’s being very similar to how her Father acted.  She was terrified of her father and was very scared that she’s be like him.  Instead of listening to her and validating her, I tried to assure her that she was nothing like her father.  That was of course a bad thing to say.  She became more anxious.  I went on to tell her about my own experiences with my Dad and she blew up and started screaming at me.  I wasn’t listening to her, I was telling her that she was wrong and then moving on.  I should have been listening until she was done talking about it.  Instead I got a long, rage filled lecture about how terrible I was at listening. 

One thing I'll say about living with someone with BPD -- you become a much better listener!


I need lots of help finding direction in this relationship.  I fear that I've become trapped in an unhealthy cycle of enabling her behavior by always caving in.  Anytime I try to stand my group and hold up boundaries the attacks become so intense and always outlast my tolerance. 

I think I need help pushing the responsibility back on her to recognize that her short fuse and abusive words are not going to be tolerated anymore.  That I'm not going to accept it anymore.

[Steeplechase]

Thanks PearlSW!

I looked up the Fair Fighting Rules and am planning to address this with my pwBPD once we get out of this Black stage.  Today she hates me because I didn't want to go get drunk with her.  My god, drinking with her is the last thing I want to do.  While drunk I would be defenseless to her aggressive mood.  We had the worst fight we've ever had a few days ago and I'm still shattered emotionally, have barely slept, not eating well.  And so on.  A night out with her?  I can't.  Even though, yes, she took it personally and immediately concluded that I will never want to do fun things with her again. 

In fact, I make everything between us some neurotic obstacle course.  Oh, I'm neurotic, but I am starting to allow myself to accept who she is and where she is with her BPD treatment.  That means not feeling like I'm torturing her because I won't respond to crazy flurry of mean txts.  I need to take care of me first.  I can't fix her. 

*sigh*

[Tattered Heart]

A night out with her?  I can't.  Even though, yes, she took it personally and immediately concluded that I will never want to do fun things with her again. 

So was it really about you going drinking with her or was it about her feeling like you didn't want to spend time with her? I've learned that in most situations our pwBPD gets upset when they feel rejected.

How could you have validated her feelings of rejection but also let her know that you want to do things with her, just not going out drinking? Give it a practice here with how the conversation could go.

SET might help you with saying this.

[Steeplechase]

Hi Tattered Heart!

I think it was definitely about her feeling abandoned and that I don't want to spend time with her. 

Here's the actual convo:  her comments*   

let's go get drunk*

Ha, ok

I'm serious*

): Ok, when?

Tonight*

 I'll have a few but I don't want to be hungover tomorrow


awww come one*
on*

Hangovers suck

you're no fun*

I'm 41, I'm too old to be fun

you aren't kidding*
If it's ok, I'll just go with DeAndra after work*

Why do you want to get drunk?

 um I've had a rough week*
Does it bother you?*

I'm worried that you'll drink and drive. But, I understand wanted to get drunk.
Wanting

I feel like you don't like doing stuff like that with me*
Anymore*

that's not true.  We have fun when we drink
I'm just not sure I'm up for it tonight. 

yea... .*
well I'm definitely not up for just sitting around doing class work and then watching stuff tonight*
I do that all the time*
and I guess if you don't want to do stuff like that with me anymore it's fine*

I understand you are feeling like I don't want to go do stuff with you, but I really just don't feel like drinking, or getting drunk.  I feel like it's a bad idea for me right now

Fine*

now, smoke some PCP, that's more my speed


I know it's all hilarious*

I'm sorry, you're upset.  I didn't mean to tease you

I want to have fun with my husband, we don't seem to do that often*
and everything always becomes a thing*
and it just sucks*
nothing is easy anymore*
I knew you wouldn't want to*
so I almost didn't ask*
and I wish I didn't*

are you angry at me for not wanted to drink tonight?
wanting

I'm disappointed*
I feel like we don't do anything*
we have kids every weekend and we don't see each other much during th eweek*
I miss when we wanted to hang out together and do random things*
I miss having fun*
and I feel like you don't like doing anything unless you chose to do it*
and it just sucks*
and I feel like I say all these things a lot*

We can still have fun having a drink or 2 though right?  We don't have to get wasted.

it's fine*
my plans are  made*

ok
I'm sorry if I upset you. 

no you aren't and it is what it is*
maybe one day we'll hang out together and have fun again*



and... .end scene. 

I could have addressed her feelings of abandonment better.  I feel like not wanting to get drunk was a reasonable boundary for me since it's the truth and if I just went to the bar I'd be uncomfortable and maybe even resentful for feeling obligated to drink when I didn't want to. I was thinking of coming up with an alternative solution but she mentioned how she feels like I don't want to do anything unless it's my idea.  She's been drinking and smoking more than usual.  I don't want to encourage that but, I don't want to seem like I'm selfish and only go out with her when it's my plan.

What could I have done better?