... But it is easy to forget or block out how bad things were when she was not putting on a performance.
...
Journaling helps. Even if you're keeping your notes very general, a short sentence or comment of why a fight started can help you remember how you felt and why.
I recall about a month or so before we finally got divorced, I was feeling like things were sort of getting better. We had her mom living with us and helping take care of our daughter & clean the house (which just took fights over childcare & housekeeping off the table, but things were otherwise the same).
I had been keeping a journal in my office at work. I did this because she would insist we don't fight anymore than "other couples" and also that we hardly fought at all. She would deny reality. Well, I went back and looked at some of the things that happened that month, and saw despite it "getting better" in my head, we were still fighting and then having weeks of silent treatment in "good" months. Yes, in a "good month" we would have only around 14 days blow-up fights and extended silent treatment for days. Bad months it was more than 50%+, between 16-20 days in any given month. There were no months without a blowout fight and at least a week of silent treatment. Most months were "bad" months.
That's no way to live. And that's even aside from taking care of your own needs, and the needs of your kids if you have them; you're spending all that time caretaking the pwBPD, just to minimize the conflict you'll have to deal with, and you're STILL miserable around half the time!
Interestingly, once earlier in our marriage I said to her that we were fighting "too much" and when she denied it, I said I was keeping track, and it was more than she was admitting. She got
really paranoid about that and demanded I stop keeping track of our fights. For months after that, she would demand to know if I was still keeping track of our fights and if I had stopped (I just lied and went along with it, because at this point, she wasn't being open and honest with me, and when I was open and honest with her, she treated me worse).
Another thought: It's creepy how
intentional their behavior can be sometimes. If you had to write out a how to guide on how to psychologically abuse and condition a human being, it would be similar to how pwBPD treat those closest to them: Isolate them from others; beat them down mentally & emotionally; control the information they process and see; reward them sparingly (make a big deal about how great the reward is), but punish them severely.
Stalin himself would nod approvingly at all this.