15 years, 3 kids, such a mess

[Family Court Strategies: When Your Partner Has BPD OR NPD Traits.]

Hi everyone,
I broke up 4 months ago with my partner of 15 years, which I suspect to have BPD.
Our last year together was devastating and I am trying to heal. As advised on this site, I want to share my story, hoping this will help me and others.
I am not an expert in personality disorders, so as I said, I am not sure if she really is a pwBPD or if she is just messed-up after a long and unhappy relationship, as she says. Perhaps you guys can give me your opinion.

Anyway, we met in college. At that time, she had been in a relationship with a friend of mine for 4 years. About a year later, he got offered an internship abroad for about a year. She also had an internship in another country for a couple of months. They spoke about separating but finally tried long distance. I emailed them both regularly, to get some news and joke around. According to her, I wrote her more that he did. She found my emails sweet and funny and she fell in love with me.

When she got back, she wanted to spend time with me. I was going through a romantic disappointment and she was really supportive. I loved spending time with her, but I wasn’t in love. She tried really actively to seduce me, but she wasn’t my type and she was committed to a friend of mine. She tried harder. And after a couple of months, I gave in. We had sex. Several times. Passionately. She said that I was a bowl of fresh air, and that it didn’t mean anything, that she didn’t want to leave her boyfriend.

When he got back, I realized what we did and I was ashamed. She wasn’t. We never told him what happened, but she broke up with him and told him that she was in love with me. He was hurt, but surprisingly, he said that we would be great together.

But I didn’t want to be with her. I wasn’t in love, I was ashamed of what we did and I had a feeling that we were just both too broken emotionally at that time to make it work. During two years, we stayed close friends and hooked up from time to time. She calls it our "passion years". If I was reluctant, she, on the other hand, was positive that we were made for each other, and that I was just too afraid of commitment. And at some point, I just thought "well, she might be right, I don’t think that it’ll work out, but we might just give it a try". Probably not the best way to start a healthy relationship.

At first, it was pretty nice. I enjoyed our discussions, our common love for music, our cuddling and love making. She was empathetic, nice, funny, really supportive. My love for her grew. And I have to say that the love and admiration she gave me was really validating for someone like me with self-confidence issues. I felt like I was the best man in the world. It was huge, absolute. According to her, she had never been attracted to another man for the next 14 years. She saw only me. In all her dreams and fantasies, it was always me (or multiple mes).

But all this love was also a little bit too much. She was really needy, demanding, jealous. She wanted fusion. She felt betrayed when I wanted some time for myself. She felt betrayed when we disagreed. And the reasons for those disagreements were usually some childish or over-the-top statement that she would deliver with a lot of confidence, regardless of how weird the statement was. There was no place for doubt. Otherwise, she would crumble down. She had a strange relationship with reality and truth. She began attaching to my actions intentions that I didn’t have. If I tried to clarify that what she perceived were not my intentions, she would say "well if that’s what I felt, then it is true".

She was also pretty emotionally unstable. She would start fights for apparently no reason, couldn’t cope with frustration and criticism. She’d had crippling anxiety attacks and sudden bouts of anger during which she would shout at me, insult me and sometimes be physically violent. She would sometimes feel angry or depressed because she felt that I was smarter than her, or better at guitar, or singing, or cooking, or whatever.
I, however, had no place to express my feelings. Whenever I raised my voice, she would freak out and start packing her things, saying that she was scared of me, and that I was violent. And if I tried to stay calm, I was called a passive aggressive.

A lot of things were too difficult for her to manage. Work (she gradually reduced her work time to 2.5 days a week), home budget, paperwork, taking car of our kids (we have 3 wonderful children), tidying the house. She would leave all her stuff in plain sight (her papers, her clothes, etc.). She said that if she didn’t see them, it was like they didn’t exist. So I took charge of a lot of things. And when we disagreed on those things, she would call me a control freak.

With time, her needs grew. She wanted us to go up to bed at the same time every night, that I told her "I love you" and hold her and kiss her a certain amount of times per day. She wanted that I massaged her head every night to help her fall asleep. That I spend less time at work.
She complained about feeling empty, lonely, misunderstood. It broke my heart, so I tried to be more present, to listen more. And that’s all I could do. Listen. Each time I gave an opinion that was contrary to hers, she got angry. Each time I tried to speak about my day, she managed to turn the discussion back to her. The harder I tried, the less supportive she got.

After a particularly bad couple of years (the pandemic, a serious illness for our son, two episodes of pneumonia for her, a lot of work for me), she just suddenly got attracted to another man. He was a friend of ours that we knew for 4 or 5 years. We used to be neighbors. He got divorced a year earlier and when we saw him at a barbecue, he had just broken his foot. She proposed to help him with several things (heparin shots, grocery, etc.) and she kissed him. She told me about it. I was really upset. I told them that I was really sad and asked them to stop whatever was going on. They promised they would. But they did not. They had a secret relationship for a month. During that time, she insisted on going out for walks alone. She said that she kissed him because she was feeling down and that she needed to gain strength. And I encouraged her to do so. Not knowing that it was just an alibi to go and have sex with him. She lied a lot during that time.
Then, after a month, she discovered that he kept sleeping with other women. She dumped him, was really upset, and told me she had an affair. "I dated him for a month", she said. I don’t really call that dating...

After the initial shock, I told her that we all make mistakes, I admitted that our relationship wasn’t in a great shape, and that if she was willing to save it, I was willing to forgive. The summer that followed was horrible. She kept crying, saying that she fell in love with him really fast and that she loved us both. Other times, she would mock him for his low sexual prowess and call him a manipulative narcissistic. She kept switching between « I can’t live without you » and « I want to be with him ». She told me that she wanted to be with me while secretly sending him messages like « Just give me three months ».

Her ex-lover interfered. He told me that it was all her fault, while sending her confusing messages. Finally, at the end of the summer, she told me that she couldn’t resist and went to see him. I couldn’t go anywhere because I had to watch for the kids. She came back 15 min later (his ex wife had arrived with their kids) and I stormed off, called a friend, and went out to have a couple of drinks. On the way, I passed in front of her former ex-lover’s appartement. I rang the intercom and told him we had a few things to discuss.

That must have freaked him out, because during the evening, he sent both of us a message saying that all this mess was because of her, that is was ridiculous and that she should forget him. When I went back home later, she was calm. She told me that all of that was indeed a mistake, a big mid-life crisis, that she needed help. I told her that if she wanted me back, we would have to see a therapist and that she would have to win back my trust. We went to therapy, focused on setting up boundaries. She kept saying that she was a bird and that I was her tree, that I rooted her. But she never really tried to win back my trust, and the emotional compensation that I expected never came. She timidly said that she was sorry, but never wanted to talk again about her destructive behavior. And she stayed emotionally distant. The wonderful empathy was gone. She made insensitive jokes about sordid details of her affair. She had sudden outbursts of rage, stating that I didn’t respect her boundaries. I lost my grand-father, an uncle and a good friend during those months. But she just couldn’t give me any support, while I was doing everything I could to make her feel better.

A few months later, I started noticing dubious behaviors again on her part (hiding to text, coming home late, etc.). I asked if it was happening again. She promised me that it wasn’t the case, that my trust issues were really detrimental and that I should see someone to deal with that. But the evidence accumulated, and when she came home late one evening (I knew that she hadn’t bee working late, I had called her office), I decided to break up with her. I confronted her. She kept lying, saying that she never saw him again, that all was fine between us, until the weight of the evidence was too heavy to deny. She confessed that she had seen him three or four times in the past months. She said that I should have let it go, that she didn’t want to leave me but that confronting her was too violent and that we were over (yes, darling. I was indeed breaking up with you...).

I later discovered how things went down. She came to she him one day, announced. She apologized for her behavior during the summer and tried to kiss him. He refused. They saw each other a couple more times and planned to have a secret relationship again. He wanted to be sure that it was her decision, so he had nothing to be blamed for. I apparently confronted her before they began anything. "Well I probably would have chosen to leave you at some point", she told me later. I doubt it.

The breakup was extremely painful. She varied between being unapologetic and unsensitive to humane and kind. She said to everyone that our relationship was violent and that her behavior was just a way to put an end to it. She said that if she said all those bad things about her lover after their "breakup", it was all my fault because I was needy and she wanted to make me feel better (the truth is that she was really pissed off that he ended their relationship... Distorsion of facts). She also said that I was a wonderful person and that we had 15 wonderful years together, that I saved her. I really don’t know how she can say all that.

I went through all the phases of grief, from bargaining, apologizing for things that I didn’t do, to anger (I had never felt rage before; it isn’t a nice feeling) and depression. I wanted to understand how she could do all that, I wanted to see remorse, I wanted closure. I am starting to accept I will never have it. "Well, I didn’t love you enough anymore, what else was I supposed to do?". Yeah, that was the only solution. I am starting to accept who she is. And discovering borderline personality disorder helped me a lot.

I think she knows there is something wrong with her. She’s known for years that she has a dysfunctional family. She has an emotionally detached father (abusive according to her) and a very present and intrusive mother that she calls every day and that validates everything her daughter says. She now claims that she isn’t made for traditional relationships, that it just wouldn’t work for her given her emotional baggage. She doesn’t want any boundaries when she’s in love. She wants passion ("whereas you want to build something", she says, with slight disdain), but not intimacy, which is too painful for her. I don’t know if a relationship with a polyamorous manipulative narcissist will make her happy, but I guess it is a way to accept who she is... I know she isn’t a bad person. She is just overwhelmed with her own emotions. She just desperately wants to be happy.

Now, I know it takes two to dance. And even though I think I never accepted her projections, never shut up about things I disagreed with, I have withheld negative emotions and got more and more passive-aggressive and dependent during the years. I was too willing to forgive, even though things went way too far. I have to accept my part of co-dependency and addiction to her. I never want this kind of love again, but I know it’s addictive, and I could probably relapse. I am in therapy to get over the ruminations and work out how I got myself into this mess. If I accept my part in this failure, I know that I wasn’t violent or abusive, and that I truly loved her and tried my best to make her happy while knowing that it couldn’t really come from me. All my friends and family confirmed that I was really dedicated and patient. And I will certainly not take responsibility for being abused, betrayed, lied to and manipulated. I really didn’t know she could be so destructive and messed-up.

My concerns now are about our kids. We managed to protect them from most of the drama, and they don’t appear to be traumatized at all. I know she is really loving and attentive, even though she always says that she is not a good mom. But she behaved so cruelly to me... Could she do that to them? Is there anything I should be particularly careful about? Is she really a pwBPD? It’s hard to find the right co-parenting distance.

Anyway, that’s my story. Thanks for reading me and thank you in advance for all your insights and advice.

[BKDamon]

Hi everyone,
I broke up 4 months ago with my partner of 15 years, which I suspect to have BPD.
Our last year together was devastating and I am trying to heal. As advised on this site, I want to share my story, hoping this will help me and others.
I am not an expert in personality disorders, so as I said, I am not sure if she really is a pwBPD or if she is just messed-up after a long and unhappy relationship, as she says. Perhaps you guys can give me your opinion.

Anyway, we met in college. At that time, she had been in a relationship with a friend of mine for 4 years. About a year later, he got offered an internship abroad for about a year. She also had an internship in another country for a couple of months. They spoke about separating but finally tried long distance. I emailed them both regularly, to get some news and joke around. According to her, I wrote her more that he did. She found my emails sweet and funny and she fell in love with me.

When she got back, she wanted to spend time with me. I was going through a romantic disappointment and she was really supportive. I loved spending time with her, but I wasn’t in love. She tried really actively to seduce me, but she wasn’t my type and she was committed to a friend of mine. She tried harder. And after a couple of months, I gave in. We had sex. Several times. Passionately. She said that I was a bowl of fresh air, and that it didn’t mean anything, that she didn’t want to leave her boyfriend.

When he got back, I realized what we did and I was ashamed. She wasn’t. We never told him what happened, but she broke up with him and told him that she was in love with me. He was hurt, but surprisingly, he said that we would be great together.

But I didn’t want to be with her. I wasn’t in love, I was ashamed of what we did and I had a feeling that we were just both too broken emotionally at that time to make it work. During two years, we stayed close friends and hooked up from time to time. She calls it our "passion years". If I was reluctant, she, on the other hand, was positive that we were made for each other, and that I was just too afraid of commitment. And at some point, I just thought "well, she might be right, I don’t think that it’ll work out, but we might just give it a try". Probably not the best way to start a healthy relationship.

At first, it was pretty nice. I enjoyed our discussions, our common love for music, our cuddling and love making. She was empathetic, nice, funny, really supportive. My love for her grew. And I have to say that the love and admiration she gave me was really validating for someone like me with self-confidence issues. I felt like I was the best man in the world. It was huge, absolute. According to her, she had never been attracted to another man for the next 14 years. She saw only me. In all her dreams and fantasies, it was always me (or multiple mes).

But all this love was also a little bit too much. She was really needy, demanding, jealous. She wanted fusion. She felt betrayed when I wanted some time for myself. She felt betrayed when we disagreed. And the reasons for those disagreements were usually some childish or over-the-top statement that she would deliver with a lot of confidence, regardless of how weird the statement was. There was no place for doubt. Otherwise, she would crumble down. She had a strange relationship with reality and truth. She began attaching to my actions intentions that I didn’t have. If I tried to clarify that what she perceived were not my intentions, she would say "well if that’s what I felt, then it is true".

She was also pretty emotionally unstable. She would start fights for apparently no reason, couldn’t cope with frustration and criticism. She’d had crippling anxiety attacks and sudden bouts of anger during which she would shout at me, insult me and sometimes be physically violent. She would sometimes feel angry or depressed because she felt that I was smarter than her, or better at guitar, or singing, or cooking, or whatever.
I, however, had no place to express my feelings. Whenever I raised my voice, she would freak out and start packing her things, saying that she was scared of me, and that I was violent. And if I tried to stay calm, I was called a passive aggressive.

A lot of things were too difficult for her to manage. Work (she gradually reduced her work time to 2.5 days a week), home budget, paperwork, taking car of our kids (we have 3 wonderful children), tidying the house. She would leave all her stuff in plain sight (her papers, her clothes, etc.). She said that if she didn’t see them, it was like they didn’t exist. So I took charge of a lot of things. And when we disagreed on those things, she would call me a control freak.

With time, her needs grew. She wanted us to go up to bed at the same time every night, that I told her "I love you" and hold her and kiss her a certain amount of times per day. She wanted that I massaged her head every night to help her fall asleep. That I spend less time at work.
She complained about feeling empty, lonely, misunderstood. It broke my heart, so I tried to be more present, to listen more. And that’s all I could do. Listen. Each time I gave an opinion that was contrary to hers, she got angry. Each time I tried to speak about my day, she managed to turn the discussion back to her. The harder I tried, the less supportive she got.

After a particularly bad couple of years (the pandemic, a serious illness for our son, two episodes of pneumonia for her, a lot of work for me), she just suddenly got attracted to another man. He was a friend of ours that we knew for 4 or 5 years. We used to be neighbors. He got divorced a year earlier and when we saw him at a barbecue, he had just broken his foot. She proposed to help him with several things (heparin shots, grocery, etc.) and she kissed him. She told me about it. I was really upset. I told them that I was really sad and asked them to stop whatever was going on. They promised they would. But they did not. They had a secret relationship for a month. During that time, she insisted on going out for walks alone. She said that she kissed him because she was feeling down and that she needed to gain strength. And I encouraged her to do so. Not knowing that it was just an alibi to go and have sex with him. She lied a lot during that time.
Then, after a month, she discovered that he kept sleeping with other women. She dumped him, was really upset, and told me she had an affair. "I dated him for a month", she said. I don’t really call that dating...

After the initial shock, I told her that we all make mistakes, I admitted that our relationship wasn’t in a great shape, and that if she was willing to save it, I was willing to forgive. The summer that followed was horrible. She kept crying, saying that she fell in love with him really fast and that she loved us both. Other times, she would mock him for his low sexual prowess and call him a manipulative narcissistic. She kept switching between « I can’t live without you » and « I want to be with him ». She told me that she wanted to be with me while secretly sending him messages like « Just give me three months ».

Her ex-lover interfered. He told me that it was all her fault, while sending her confusing messages. Finally, at the end of the summer, she told me that she couldn’t resist and went to see him. I couldn’t go anywhere because I had to watch for the kids. She came back 15 min later (his ex wife had arrived with their kids) and I stormed off, called a friend, and went out to have a couple of drinks. On the way, I passed in front of her former ex-lover’s appartement. I rang the intercom and told him we had a few things to discuss.

That must have freaked him out, because during the evening, he sent both of us a message saying that all this mess was because of her, that is was ridiculous and that she should forget him. When I went back home later, she was calm. She told me that all of that was indeed a mistake, a big mid-life crisis, that she needed help. I told her that if she wanted me back, we would have to see a therapist and that she would have to win back my trust. We went to therapy, focused on setting up boundaries. She kept saying that she was a bird and that I was her tree, that I rooted her. But she never really tried to win back my trust, and the emotional compensation that I expected never came. She timidly said that she was sorry, but never wanted to talk again about her destructive behavior. And she stayed emotionally distant. The wonderful empathy was gone. She made insensitive jokes about sordid details of her affair. She had sudden outbursts of rage, stating that I didn’t respect her boundaries. I lost my grand-father, an uncle and a good friend during those months. But she just couldn’t give me any support, while I was doing everything I could to make her feel better.

A few months later, I started noticing dubious behaviors again on her part (hiding to text, coming home late, etc.). I asked if it was happening again. She promised me that it wasn’t the case, that my trust issues were really detrimental and that I should see someone to deal with that. But the evidence accumulated, and when she came home late one evening (I knew that she hadn’t bee working late, I had called her office), I decided to break up with her. I confronted her. She kept lying, saying that she never saw him again, that all was fine between us, until the weight of the evidence was too heavy to deny. She confessed that she had seen him three or four times in the past months. She said that I should have let it go, that she didn’t want to leave me but that confronting her was too violent and that we were over (yes, darling. I was indeed breaking up with you...).

I later discovered how things went down. She came to she him one day, announced. She apologized for her behavior during the summer and tried to kiss him. He refused. They saw each other a couple more times and planned to have a secret relationship again. He wanted to be sure that it was her decision, so he had nothing to be blamed for. I apparently confronted her before they began anything. "Well I probably would have chosen to leave you at some point", she told me later. I doubt it.

The breakup was extremely painful. She varied between being unapologetic and unsensitive to humane and kind. She said to everyone that our relationship was violent and that her behavior was just a way to put an end to it. She said that if she said all those bad things about her lover after their "breakup", it was all my fault because I was needy and she wanted to make me feel better (the truth is that she was really pissed off that he ended their relationship... Distorsion of facts). She also said that I was a wonderful person and that we had 15 wonderful years together, that I saved her. I really don’t know how she can say all that.

I went through all the phases of grief, from bargaining, apologizing for things that I didn’t do, to anger (I had never felt rage before; it isn’t a nice feeling) and depression. I wanted to understand how she could do all that, I wanted to see remorse, I wanted closure. I am starting to accept I will never have it. "Well, I didn’t love you enough anymore, what else was I supposed to do?". Yeah, that was the only solution. I am starting to accept who she is. And discovering borderline personality disorder helped me a lot.

I think she knows there is something wrong with her. She’s known for years that she has a dysfunctional family. She has an emotionally detached father (abusive according to her) and a very present and intrusive mother that she calls every day and that validates everything her daughter says. She now claims that she isn’t made for traditional relationships, that it just wouldn’t work for her given her emotional baggage. She doesn’t want any boundaries when she’s in love. She wants passion ("whereas you want to build something", she says, with slight disdain), but not intimacy, which is too painful for her. I don’t know if a relationship with a polyamorous manipulative narcissist will make her happy, but I guess it is a way to accept who she is... I know she isn’t a bad person. She is just overwhelmed with her own emotions. She just desperately wants to be happy.

Now, I know it takes two to dance. And even though I think I never accepted her projections, never shut up about things I disagreed with, I have withheld negative emotions and got more and more passive-aggressive and dependent during the years. I was too willing to forgive, even though things went way too far. I have to accept my part of co-dependency and addiction to her. I never want this kind of love again, but I know it’s addictive, and I could probably relapse. I am in therapy to get over the ruminations and work out how I got myself into this mess. If I accept my part in this failure, I know that I wasn’t violent or abusive, and that I truly loved her and tried my best to make her happy while knowing that it couldn’t really come from me. All my friends and family confirmed that I was really dedicated and patient. And I will certainly not take responsibility for being abused, betrayed, lied to and manipulated. I really didn’t know she could be so destructive and messed-up.

My concerns now are about our kids. We managed to protect them from most of the drama, and they don’t appear to be traumatized at all. I know she is really loving and attentive, even though she always says that she is not a good mom. But she behaved so cruelly to me... Could she do that to them? Is there anything I should be particularly careful about? Is she really a pwBPD? It’s hard to find the right co-parenting distance.

Anyway, that’s my story. Thanks for reading me and thank you in advance for all your insights and advice.

[tvda]

Damn. That almost sounds like you were the partner of my exBPD. And I was the other man in this situation, to be honest.

Very busy today, but I'll definitely reply tomorrow evening. I wish you strength and courage.

[BKDamon]

Thanks a lot tvda,

Really looking forward to your reply!

[Rex31807]

I'm sorry for what you are going through. I am in much the same position except there aren't any children involved. One part of your post sounded like my life before the split. "She wanted us to go up to bed at the same time every night, that I told her "I love you" and hold her and kiss her a certain amount of times per day. She wanted that I massaged her head every night to help her fall asleep. That I spend less time at work. She complained about feeling empty, lonely, misunderstood." Word for word that happened in my relationship too. Except if she felt I wasn't rubbing her right she would get mad and it would cause a fight. It got to the point where I spent all my time doing things for her up until the moment I would fall asleep. Then it would start over at 5 AM. The routine would be to let the dogs out, make coffee, make her breakfast, put all of her work items in the car with to go coffee and bottled water. Make her lunch and put it in the car. Then I had to wait for her to leave before I could go exercise.


Does she have fear of abandonment?  If so, it could impact your children as they become adults. My x's daughters have no outside life outside of their Mom and they could very well be on the way to becoming co-dependent like I was.

[weatherthestorm]

Thanks for sharing BKD, the great thing about this forum is that sometimes you read stories that are almost word for word the struggles and challenges you too have dealt with. It hurts to know other people are suffering the same   trauma, yet it provides comfort knowing your not alone.

My ex udBPD never cheated that I am aware of, but literally every other thing you said is exactly what I experienced. We were married just over 10 years, 3 young kids (8, 6, 2).  Our couples therapist told me in our last session during our 1-on-1 time to look up this website and see if I can relate to anything. Before that I didn't have any clue what BPD was but I knew my wife was struggling with something. Finding this site and reading about BPD was like being hit in the face with a ton of bricks. After 12 years together I FINALLY could understand what was happening at home. But I couldn't fix it.

I started individual therapy and my therapist helped me understand that in order to make it work  with a partner with BPD, they have to take responsibility for their actions. They need to accept there is an issue and seek therapy. Absent of that there is not much I can do. I was never good at boundaries, if anything I enabled her. But like you I also fought back.

I told her Oct 25, 2020 I wanted a divorce. I moved out Jan 2, 2021, and   the divorce was finalized June 10, 2021. Our 11 year anniversary would have been June 18.

I am 8 months from when this started and 6 months from moving out, and it is still very raw. I have never cried this much in my life, and while I'm struggling i'm allowing myself to grieve. I've read on here that separating from a pwBPD is no different from a trauma survivor, we have been through so much pain and we need to heal. The challenge for me is my ex was high functioning, so outside of the home our friends and family don't see her the same way. Sure there are subtle things they could pick up on, but they have not lived through the storm I did. But when you ask do you need  to worry about your kids, I would say yes. I know that she dysregulates with them just like she did me, and I feel very guilty about this. When I was in the home I could provide cover, I could move them to another room, I could protect them. Now I can't do that. My therapist tells me that the best I can do is provide a normal and stable home environment the 50% of the time they are with me. I'm trying my best. I'm not a perfect father, but if anything I am consistent and not afraid to admit when I am wrong. Hence the extra crying lately...

Where  are you at in the process now? Have you moved out? Filed for divorce? What is the current custody plan with the kids?

Best of luck in this process, I can tell you being divorced from a pwBPD still has its challenges with co-parenting and support requirements. But day-to-day my life is much less chaotic and conflicted. I'm still healing, but there is a future!

WTS

[Couper]

While your overall story is different from mine, lots of the single instances you cite are identical.  Our timelines are about the same, too (I'm in 14 years all total now).  Two kids, both school-aged, not yet teenagers.  If you stated, I missed it -- roughly, how old are your three and I will share with you the developments I have seen in my uBPDw's interactions with them as they have grown.  It's dynamic, it changes over time.

[BKDamon]

Thanks a lot Rex, WTS and Couper.
It’s really helping to hear that other people went through similar things that I did. I wish you strength and I know a better life is ahead.

I guess she has fear of abandonment, yes. It might not be obvious in her everyday life, but it is at the core of her personality.

She has moved out of the house and lives a block away, which is pretty convenient for the kids. We weren’t married but in a civil union which was pretty easy to dissolve without the need for lawyers or anything. We have a 50/50 custody plan. Our kids are 10, 7 and 4.

So far, she has been pretty fair about all this. I guess she knows that given that she almost cheated on me twice, it’s not in her interest to appear too greedy, or something like that. It is important for her to show that she is not after my money, which I believe is true.

I’m with you WTS regarding the importance of providing a stable environment for our kids. No one’s perfect, but I’m pretty sure I can offer them stability. It is indeed more stable since my ex left. I told her not to hesitate to ask for help if she ever feels overwhelmed with the kids. I’ll try to be careful about signs of dysregulation or co-dependency, even though I don’t really know what to watch for.

It really feels like a trauma. It really is I guess. Her two betrayals, the fact that she invited someone into our intimacy without my consent, against my will even, was pretty shocking to me. I’ve had dreams of people breaking into my house while I was asleep, things like that.

My ex is also pretty high functioning, so I guess her friends just see her as petulant, although a little unstable. Our long-time friends and our families, however, are more aware of who she is. I went to see some friends from college a couple of weeks ago (we moved to another city after graduation), and it’s one of them that mentioned BPD. I did some digging on the internet after that and found this site.
It’s funny (for lack of a better word) but we had a couple of lectures about personality disorders in college, and when they described BPD, everyone said to my ex "hey, it sounds like you!". It was kind of a joke back then, but I now realize that it might be true...

[MintyBat]

I am really sorry for what you went through. I know it will take time, but I hope you find happiness. It sounds like you are on the right track, and I encourage you to keep doing what you can to heal. Also, remember too that you are god enough. Regardless of what she did, it says nothing about you and everything about her. You deserve better than her.

[Couper]

Your two oldest are just about a year younger than mine.  As I'm sure all situations vary, all I can do is tell you what I've observed here and what I expect to see coming down the road.  Some of this is with the benefit of hindsight as it took me some time to recognize what I was dealing with here.

When they were very small and I would lavish attention on them I could sense her jealousy.  In fights I had brought it up a couple of times and she admitted to it.  When they reached the "terrible-twos" she would respond to them like a two year old instead of taking a leadership position.  She'd make the situation all about herself, having a tantrum or meltdown, and how hard-done-by she was, almost as if they were stealing her thunder.

I'm very fortunate in that my kids absolutely love each other, they are best friends.  They have their moments, but nothing like the rivalry between most siblings.  When they were 4-to-6, she would absolutely unload on them if they didn't want to clean their rooms or were otherwise being obstinate, sort of like she was mirroring them.  All parents have their moments of frustration, but she almost never takes a parenting role.  Not to anyone but myself, but I refer to her as my "third child".

My kids seem to be maturing in spite of her.  I would even go so far as to say they have exceeded her level of maturity.  What I see now is how she'll turn on them instead of accepting responsibility for her actions (and day-in, day-out, she will never in a million years accept responsibility for her actions).  Here recently we were all in the kitchen and in an innocent way my daughter made a comment about how my wife was driving and hit a trash can or something like that and my wife absolutely turned on her -- "Yeah, thanks a lot saying that in front of daddy" just like I'd expect two children to do if one was keeping the others' secret.  That rattled me.  I don't like seeing that and it was a sign that their relationship has changed yet again.  She has since done that with a couple of other things.

What I expect my kid's next change in their development to be is that they are going to recognize that someone doing that to them (expecting them to cover for their mistakes because they won't accept responsibility for it) is not appropriate and then I'm going to have to find a way to start explaining some of mommy's "issues" to them.  What I also expect is, if they go through an unruly teenage phase, I'm going to have three teenagers on my hands.  Time will tell.

I have always tried to drill into my kids a high level of personal responsibility and I can see it starting to take hold.  My wife has always dismissed personal responsibility as someone thinking they are better than her.  At some point they will recognize that they are willing to accept the consequences for their actions but... mommy does not.  I expect that is when there will be some more 'splainin' to do.

I'm curious to know if you have seen a similar dynamic taking place.



    

[BKDamon]

Thank you, Mintybat. I wasn’t perfect, but I know I have nothing to be ashamed of in the way I treated her all those years, quite the opposite. And I clearly did not deserved being treated like that. So yeah, I deserve better. Thanks for this opportunity for self-affirmation.

Thanks again for sharing, Couper.
The dynamics are a little different with my ex and my kids. I would say that the main issue is that she over-anticipates their needs quite a bit, and probably over-react to their actions and emotions. When they’re sad, she’s even sadder. When they’re cranky, she’s angry. When they’re restless, she’s overwhelmed. When they throw a tantrum, so does she. It’s not always like that, of course, it really depends on how tired or moody she is.

She is usually really loving and attentive, but there has been times when she would tell me that she was so tired that she didn’t feel anything for them anymore. And other times, when things were too difficult to handle, she would just shout "the f**k up!", or leave the house, slam the door and let me deal with the situation. She won’t be able to do that anymore, so I hope that she will find a mature way to manage. Since she doesn’t have to take care of them half of the week, I hope that it gives her enough time to rest emotionally.