Do you ever reflect on how you got here relationship wise?

[mssalty]

I’ve recently been reflecting on my relationships.

The realization that one of my parents was probably somewhat of a narcissistic personality with similar BPD traits.  While they were fully functional, I spent a lifetime trying to please them and smooth over their lack of concern for others and manage their relationships with other people in my life. 

The realization that my relationship with that parent may have made me look for people who need caring/help.   

Noting that I was afraid to really date or be with someone in grade school because of how that parent reacted and might react (plus observing how they acted with my sibling). 

Realizing a lack of self esteem and feeling worthy wrecked a chance at a relationship in high school. 

Realizing being free of my parents in college allowed me to pursue a relationship and fall hard for someone and feeling truly like a real person for the first time in my life. 

Going through a horrible breakup with that person and feeling like I was unworthy of love, and having the same parent not being supportive or understanding beyond stating they wanted to hurt the person and telling me I needed to get over it.   

Falling into a relationship with someone who made me feel somewhat like I did in that relationship, and then experiencing all of the bewildering mind(bleeps) that are being in a relationship with someone with BPD and not knowing why. 

Finding out fairly recently that my first true love apparently has a pattern of narcissism and mistreatment of others while hiding behind a compassionate facade. 

Looking at my current long term relationship and realizing I don’t know who I am, and that maybe part of my problem is never establishing my own self esteem or identity when I am with other people.  Maybe that’s why I am constantly feeling this way. 

Anyone else done this? 

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[ForeverDad]

I had already graduated high school (over 5 decades ago) and I had a crush on a local girl but it took me a while to recognize she she wasn't interested in me.  Many years later I heard she had married and moved away but she had mental health issues of some sort.  It could have been me but by happenstance.

Then when I did get married I thought I'd met a perfectly normal woman.  Yet a week before the wedding I realized something was abnormal about her family and I came to believe I'd saved her.  Until over the years it became obvious they'd really twisted her up into mental knots.  What tipped her over the edge was when I transitioned from husband to husband and father.  Her stepfather had messed her up that much.

Sometimes you can't predict how your choices will turn out.  Everyone is imperfect.  How is it our own issues left us relatively sane while our ex-whomevers' issues turned out to be indicators of eventual mental health disasters?

[mendingway26]

Yes, and the way you laid it out - the pleasing, the smoothing-over, then noticing you look for people who need caring - reads like the textbook arc so many of us share here. One thing that struck me in your post: you describe a lifetime of managing other people's emotions, and then say you don't know who you are in relationships. Those two things are the same thing. When your role in the family was 'the one who keeps everyone okay,' you never got the unstructured time to find out what you like, what you want, what you'd choose when nobody needs anything from you. Identity isn't something we reflect our way into - it gets built from small acts of preference.

Something that helped me was to stop treating the reflection as a search for the moment it all went wrong (that tends to slide into self-blame pretty fast) and treat it as data-gathering instead. Two questions that produce more usable answers than 'how did I get here': 'What did being the caretaker give me?' - because it did give something: a sense of purpose, being the irreplaceable one, feeling loved conditionally is still a form of feeling effective. And: 'What would I do this Saturday if nobody's crisis needed managing?' The first one makes the pattern make sense instead of just making it shameful. The second one is embarrassingly hard to answer at first, and that difficulty is itself the measurement.

The fact that you can now see the thread from your parent to your choices means the pattern is already losing its automaticity. Thanks for putting this into words so clearly.

[mendingway26]

Thank you both for these replies — this is exactly why I posted here.

To the five-decades story: what stays with me is the line about realizing something was abnormal a week before the wedding and believing you'd "saved" her. That savior reflex is such a quiet trap — it dresses dependence up as love and hands you a role before it gives you a relationship. The fact that you can narrate it with that much distance now says a lot about how far you've traveled.

And the "those two things are the same thing" point landed harder than I expected. The unstructured time observation especially. I've been the one keeping everyone okay for so long that silence feels like a job vacancy. Lately I've been trying to sit with small unstructured stretches without filling them with someone else's needs — it's uncomfortable in a way that feels oddly promising, if that makes sense.

A question for both of you, since you've clearly walked this further than I have: when you started finding out what you actually like, did the people around you resist the change? I keep half-expecting that the relationships built on my "keeping everyone okay" role won't quite know what to do with a version of me that occasionally says "actually, I'd rather not."