Engulfment breakup & recycling

[GreenEyedMonster]

I'm curious if anyone has had a similar experience and can shed some light on my situation.

Unlike many pwBPD, my ex was dominated by engulfment fears, with abandonment always being a secondary concern.  He would say to me quite frequently, "It is better to be alone than to be in a bad relationship," almost as a veiled threat.  He meant it.

His mother probably had BPD, and was an EXTREMELY engulfing (as opposed to abandoning) presence in his life.  She literally dominated every aspect of his life up until her death.  He said that when she died, his main response was a sense of relief, but also a sense of emptiness and loss.  He altered his appearance significantly after her death to show that he was in control.

During our relationship, he threatened to break up with me multiple times if I made any attempt to "control" who he was with, how he spent his time, etc.  I think in some cases he actually pushed the ticket and tested me to make sure that I would tolerate anything he wanted to do.

He also has abandonment fears, however, and is starved for love and attention.

Has anyone been recycled by a pwBPD who was dominated by engulfment fears?  I'm five weeks post b/u and wondering if this guy will ever come back.  My "replacement" is solitude, I think, but he must get lonely eventually.

[patientandclear]

Hi GEM:

As you may remember from another post, my ex and I didn't exactly recycle after we broke up -- instead we had a prolonged intimate romantic friendship or something (there isn't really a name I'm familiar with for what we were doing), after a long period of NC.  But I believe those very terms ("friendship" were a result of his extreme engulfment panic.  His mom, too, was extremely controlling.  Control by someone else in the SLIGHTEST degree is like kryptonite to him.  I mean the tiniest sense of being controlled.  Having to be close due to previous commitments and then finding he doesn't like a movie the other person likes.  (Seriously.)  Having someone else buy something for him (as small as a cup of coffee).  Borrowing something from someone else, or having any sort of debt or obligation.

Those tiny control aspects are triggers.  Then there's the big stuff, where someone he's close to shares a reflection about how maybe some decision he's making might have unintended negative consequences, and is he sure he wants to do that?  Nuclear engulfment reaction.  Or the really really big stuff (for us): when I conditioned my willingness to be emotionally intimate with him, on his willingness to not seek out other women as romantic partners.

I have come to understand that for him, much as he longs for intimacy, it is really the pursuit of intimacy he feels comfortable with.  Actually intimacy is like poison and the best feeling he ever has in life, I think, is when he manages to get away and escape from someone else's grasp.

That is a pretty serious relationship barrier.

[GreenEyedMonster]

I have come to understand that for him, much as he longs for intimacy, it is really the pursuit of intimacy he feels comfortable with.  Actually intimacy is like poison and the best feeling he ever has in life, I think, is when he manages to get away and escape from someone else's grasp.

That is a pretty serious relationship barrier.

I think my ex has this in common with yours.  He longs for intimacy, fantasizes about it.  But it needs to be *perfect,* like a fairy tale.  When it's not, it might as well be a pile of crap.  My exBPD would respond very negatively to even the tiniest thing I would request him to do.  I asked once if he would make a point of asking my opinion on things more, and he replied very angrily, "No, that's too hard."  Basically, his gut instinct was to reply to anything I asked for with "no," as if me asking for something were a threat to his autonomy.

I also feel like he gets a great deal of pleasure out of "escaping" women.  He seems to associate women with engulfment/annihilation, and he gets just as much of a "high" out of escaping them as he does out of being close to them.  His feelings on his own mother would vary by the day.  He was close to her and said she was his "best friend," but continually talked about how much better his life was since she was dead.  I think he's doomed to play out that conflict with every woman he meets for the rest of his life.

My ex has about a 3-5 month push/pull cycle.  He escaped his mother in those increments during her life, and that seems to be about how long the "high" of being with someone or escaping someone lasts.  By that point in our relationship, he was making noises about liking being alone, and I bet you anything that 2-4 months from now -- considering when our breakup was -- he'll be feeling really lonely.

[Lou12]

Yes my recycles begin every 2 to 6 weeks. When he returns he talks about 'how he's now ready to settle down'. That of course doesn't last long due to him engulfment fears. The crazy thing is I give him no pressure to settle down it's all in his own head. It's in his head because that's what he ultimately wants with me but he gets to frightened and convinces himself that actually that's not what he wants. I constantly get the tests to see how I react to things. Where as before I always told him how I felt when he asked as I thought (wrongly) that that was what he ultimately needed to hear. This time however I'm changing my strategy and I'm going to be a lot cooler and see how that plays out.

GEM I believe he will return once as you say he stops convincing himself that he's better off alone and feels lonely.

Mines just started posting FB pictures of him and his niece, that's tells me how his mind set is now and he's starting to want me and that life again!

X

[GreenEyedMonster]

I think my exBPD was basically horrified that I expected him to be at all responsible for my feelings.  I think it echoed his mother's abusive emotional dependence on him in his childhood.  He expected to be like a kid and do what he wanted, and I was supposed to be like his mother and care for his needs.  When I reminded him that his actions impacted my health, well-being, and emotions, he fled from that sense of responsibility.

He is repeating the exact same pattern that he followed with his last girlfriend.  He spent over a month (!) researching how to block people, hiring people to investigate her, and preparing for her to stalk him.  As far as I know, she never did.  She just got back together with her husband, which is probably what would have happened anyway.  Then, when all was said and done, he missed her.  And I think he still does.

It's like he's reliving his conflicted emotions about his mother's death in every relationship.  The woman is the best thing that ever happened to him -- his best friend -- but he takes equal pleasure in "killing" her by blocking her out of his life.  It's like he's reliving the sense of freedom he got when his mom passed away.  And then he'll relive the loneliness of her being gone.

So yeah, I do think I'll be recycled, probably in the next 6-10 weeks.

A good mutual friend of ours is hanging out with my ex this week.  I told her to be extra kind to him, so that he has no fuel to believe that there's a feud between us.  We'll see how that goes.