Always my fault

[Depression = 72% of members]

Every episode of disregulation of my partner turns into her slinging anger and disdain at me. Doesn’t matter who she is actually mad at. This time it was a conflict with our five year old who was acting out. Her emotional reaction escalated his. Then she took her anger out on me because I wasn’t “trying to emotionally connect with  to her”.
I am at the end of my rope. I don’t even want to go home or be around her in the days following these conflicts. I spiral into a bout of fear and anxiety. I feel the anxiety creep up each time she texts me about our relationship. We agreed not to text about emotions and she continues to violate that boundary.
Our last marital counselor refused to acknowledge her BPD characteristics. I am looking for a new one. I hate this. I deserve to be happy.

[tXres200]

Every episode of disregulation of my partner turns into her slinging anger and disdain at me. Doesn’t matter who she is actually mad at. This time it was a conflict with our five year old who was acting out. Her emotional reaction escalated his. Then she took her anger out on me because I wasn’t “trying to emotionally connect with  to her”.
I am at the end of my rope. I don’t even want to go home or be around her in the days following these conflicts. I spiral into a bout of fear and anxiety. I feel the anxiety creep up each time she texts me about our relationship. We agreed not to text about emotions and she continues to violate that boundary.
Our last marital counselor refused to acknowledge her BPD characteristics. I am looking for a new one. I hate this. I deserve to be happy.

[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.

[Me88]

Welcome, sorry you're here under these circumstances, but believe me when I say we all know these situations. Every issue or problem somehow becomes your burden to solve and you are now the 'cause' of the issue. In your situation it's like an adult child arguing with an actual child...then you get pulled in. And sadly, she probably doesn't even know what it looks like for you to emotionally connect with her. Like their emotions, what they want also changes moment to moment.

That anxiety and fear will kill you, literally. Stress this intense is not good for anyone. And yeah, I too agreed with my ex to not have novel length text arguments about how I'm 'not showing up' properly. And like yours, that never stops...for more than a few days. Do you know why your counselor can't see these traits? Good for looking into other counselors, not to prove you right, but to make some progress on your happiness and peace.

[SuperDaddy]

Hi @tXres200, and welcome to the BPD Family!

Here it has been similar. My wife would get stressed with our 2-year-old, and then in whatever interaction I had to have with her, it would end in her shouting at me. Once she was screaming a lot in the living room with our boy, and then from the other side of our home where I was working, I asked for some silence, and she immediately shouted back, cursing badly at me. From there, she began a huge outburst all by herself.

It's important for both of you to understand where this comes from. For instance, today I had a conversation with my wife where I could find out why she is allergic to criticism. Her narcissistic father was always trying to correct her in a meticulous way while always being rude and methodical. As an emotional being with ADHD, she wasn't able to fulfill his expectations; therefore, she got overly criticized (the invalidation environment) and felt like she was an all-wrong person all of the time.

It was important for us to have this conversation so that she understands that it's not just my fault, that she is overly sensitive and overly reactive. Usually she says that everyone else would react the same way as her if they were dealing with me, but I think the conversation we had today may make her gradually move into a different perception. All I have to do is to remind her, in calm moments, of her past feelings of "being an all-wrong person." That should stimulate her brain's ACC region.

- Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC): Essential for monitoring performance, detecting errors, and managing emotional regulation and attention. It helps signal when a behavior is inappropriate and needs to be stopped

Our last marital counselor refused to acknowledge her BPD characteristics. I am looking for a new one. I hate this. I deserve to be happy.

You should not expect that from this kind of professional and this kind of treatment. If you really want a marital counselor, make sure they are experienced with BPD. But I still would not recommend you to take this path and instead use individual therapy for each one. Even because only an individual therapist will be able to help you with your current distress, and from what you posted I can tell it is huge and you can't handle any more.

You can read a broader ongoing discussion on marital counseling HERE.

[cynp]

So many of us are living similar lives. I can often tell how the rest of the day will go with in moments of pwBPD comeing through the door. If they had a hard day they will amke sure i have a hard day. It dosen't matter that I have no control over whatsoever their work day. In some way i will suffer for it.

[Agg203008]

I can relate. My wife was out of town for 2 days and came home in a good mood. Told me how happy she is with our current relationship.  She left to go pickup her teenage son from a track meet.

When she got back she immediately started coming at me about how I did not spend time with him while she was gone. She said I am not being a caring and supportive stepdad. If I can not care for her kids then she can not care for me.

I come to find out that my stepson got very upset on the car ride home. She could not handle it and decided to take it all out on me upon her return.

Then when I would not apologize for not caring about him she stormed off to bed saying she needs someone that will be there for her.  They are like a light switch and can flip on/off instantly

[Rowdy]

Oh is this a common thing?

Whenever the kids did something wrong, my wife’s first reaction would be to shout my name at the top of her voice.
Whenever the dogs did something wrong her first reaction would be to shout my name at the top of her voice.

I would then start telling the kids off for doing whatever it was they were doing wrong, then get told off by her for telling the kids off. Crazy.

She’s got a salon, a business she started with her friend, so has got a business partner. She would do a 12hr day once a week and every couple of weeks that day would start with a melt down before she went to work because she would get dysregulated about the fact she would have a hard day. Her business partner doesn’t really pull her weight (my wife being a control freak makes that difficult anyway) so the amount of times I would try and deflect my wife having a go at me about her work that I had no control over, I would tell her that I would speak to her business partner about stepping up so my wife felt less pressure. She would then tell me not to as it would just make things worse.

After the discard and we were discussing the many reasons why we had split up (gaslighting, from her coming home once and I was watching tv, to me being from the posh end of the village even though the house I grew up in is worth about half what the house she grew up in is worth, to me correcting her spelling) she came out with the fact I never spoke to her business partner about pulling her weight. I said to her that I said on many occasions I would speak to her about it and she had told me not to because it would make things worse and she just said yeh I know.

There is no logic and you can’t win with them smh

[Under The Bridge]

They are like a light switch and can flip on/off instantly

I think this is one of the most frightening aspects of BPD - the instantaneous switch. In most conflicts, there's a lead-up to it but when you're painted 100% black in a microsecond, like a computer changing programs, it's massively stressful.

This is what made me stop pursuing my exBPD for good; not just the mood swings themelves, but the fact they happened in the blink of an eye. I actually became scared at the end that someone could be like this.

[ForeverDad]

Borderline, whether diagnosed or not, is evident as an emotional dysregulation.  One of the most noticeable patterns with BPD traits is that it impacts most those in the closest relationships.   Yes, spouses are often targets of their angst and dysfunction.  Other people on the periphery or with brief contact may notice something "off" but are not nearly so impacted.

One hurdle to overcome is that spouses or people with BPD traits (pwBPD) often can't or won't listen to those closest to them.  The baggage of the past relationship is too intense oftentimes for them to truly listen or even consistently listen to those closest to them.  The disorder is driven by inconsistent and easily triggered emotions and moods.

Here we have an assortment of boards that contain the collective wisdom and experience of past and current members.  Soak up the tools, skills and strategies here that are time tested and proven helpful even if not complete solutions.  They do build for a better, "less distressed" future.  One helpful board is our Tools and Skills Workshops board with many topics.

Also, the children are impacted as well since they too are core components of the family unit.  Even if they're not targeted consistently, they see and sense the dysfunctional behavior.  A concern is that the children may not realize how abnormal the discord is since they've known nothing else.  While we encourage you to continue with counseling for yourself to deal with your own distress, don't forget that the children would benefit from counseling too.  My own son started "play therapy" at a local children's counseling agency when he was 3 years old.

[SuperDaddy]

Hi @Rowdy ,

So she wouldn't take out her frustrations of work on her business partner, and instead took it out on you, right?

Here is some scientific evidence on that mechanism:

• In a 3-week intensive repeated-measures study, most reported aggressive behaviors were aimed at a romantic partner or ex-partner (about 48%) or other close ties like family/friends/roommates (about 39%). That means that when people with BPD report aggressive urges or acts in daily life, the targets skew heavily toward close relationships.
• A study on aggression found out that, due to insecure adult attachment (anxiety/avoidance), the attachment activation drives hostility in individuals with BPD, making them more likely to show aggression.
• A study on social-domain dysfunction (domain disorganization) concluded that regulation can look intact in one life domain (like work) but chaotic in another (like home).
• EMA/experience sampling studies found out that there is stress spillover. That means effective instability and stress in people with BPD fluctuate in real time. That makes it plausible that stress from one area (e.g., work) carries over into behavior in other contexts.

I was researching if any study points out a purposeful redirection of anger and blame to their intimate partner, only because it is safer. I didn't find that direct evidence. But it seems to occur automatically anyway. And it is comparable to what abused children do:

In abused children, blaming the non-abusive parent is usually explained by defensive attribution and attachment preservation: the child depends on both parents, but psychologically cannot afford to see the abuser as dangerous or hateful, so anger and blame are displaced onto the “safer” caregiver who is available, emotionally salient, and less likely to retaliate. This is often framed as displaced aggression, betrayal trauma logic, or identification with the aggressor, rather than personality pathology.

In BPD, the blaming of the intimate partner arises from chronic emotion dysregulation, rejection sensitivity, and unstable self–other representations, so stress is rapidly externalized and attributed to the closest attachment figure even when the trigger is elsewhere. The overlap is the same retargeting logic—affect seeks a safe container—but the difference is developmental timing and persistence. In children it is typically a state-dependent survival strategy under coercive conditions; in BPD it becomes a stable interpersonal pattern that reappears across contexts and over time.

[Rowdy]

Hi @SuperDaddy

Yes, that’s correct. Now, she isn’t diagnosed and I wasn’t even aware of bpd until 18 months or so after the discard, but everything in your post lines up. A lot of her behaviour lines up.

In her world, pretty much everyone at some point has been the victim of her poisonous tongue, but only in my direction.
She has not been horrible about our kids though, but the paragraph in blue about the children blaming the non abusive parent hits close to home as it would generally be me, the laid back parent, that would get grief from them, that couldn’t reason with them, yet they somehow would listen to her.

As for my wife, for years she actively pointed the finger at three people. Me her husband (in a relationship for 27 years, known each other nearly 40 years) her sister (that would regularly side with me during my wife’s unsubstantiated outbursts towards me), and her business partner (that she has worked with 30+ years and was one of her closest friends)

The first thing her sister said to me after we split up was “haven’t you stopped to think how much better off you are without her, she treated you…. no she treated us both…. like sh!t”
and “with her enough is never enough”

As for her business partner, she is about 15 years older than my wife. Therefore the vitriol my wife would spew about her was directed at me. That was until the discard.

After the discard, which I have explained on here, my sister in law stopped working for her because she was going off the rails and my SIL thought the business might collapse, since then my wife doesn’t really visit her or talk to her much.

Her business partner went radio silent on me, as has a few friends that either work for my wife or close friends of ours because no doubt I’d been painted black. However, after a few months her business partner started messaging me, telling me that my wife was being really horrible towards her.
As the break up was still raw some of this spilled over into arguments my wife and I were having which then led to me being blocked by her business partner because I had a go at my wife about her behaviour, which my wife in turn took out on her.

About a year later her business partner contacted me asking if I would do some work on her house. She had been stitched up by her boyfriend, who turned out to have been using several aliases and had been in prison and the national press for defrauding women out of hundreds of thousands of pounds, and she had to sell her house. I did the work but only charged her £20 for paint and gave her free labour. I was later told my wife hated the fact I did this for her.

Several months later, which brings things up fairly recently to date, I received more messages from the business partner saying my wife was yet again being horrible, belittling and nasty towards her, and directing it at her having to sell her house and downsize, mocking her.

Which led me to a kind of epiphany. I am no longer the outlet for her anger, her outbursts, because she walked out on me.
My SIL is no longer an outlet either, as she stopped working for her and doesn’t hear from my wife so much because in my wife’s words her sister is angry at her “because I had everything she wanted and I threw it all away”

So my wife is now under the roof of her boyfriends house, where he is paying for everything. He was her supplying drug dealer and drinking buddy. He has bought her a car. Throw in limerance and all that bollocks, so I doubt she is getting that dysregulated around him yet, although I have been told they argue a lot by his ex wife.

So therefore I can see her business partner as the path of least resistance. She has become the new outlet for her nastiness, because she is tied to my wife through the business, and it would probably suit my wife if she upped and left anyway.
I explained this the last time we communicated, about a month ago, and told her to just grey rock my wife and just say “ok then” or “whatever” whenever my wife has a moment.

I don’t know how things have gone since then, but saw my wife a couple of days ago and her tone of voice just sounds angry, she doesn’t sound like a happy person. This sound like BPD to you??