I may be slow getting started here.

[steelwork]

I've read a lot here and followed some of your stories closely, and I want to say hello. I'm not sure how much I want to say about my own situation. It's old news for me, I'm bored with the details, and some days it seems like a lifetime ago when he was still part of my world. I haven't seen him in 15 months, haven't spoken with him in a year, haven't had meaningful contact in nine months. But he's still haunting me, and I think of him many times every day, and here I am.

I don't know if he has BPD. I mean, it seems increasingly likely the more I read and he more I go over what happened. Strange things he said to me or stories he told, things that I took as charming eccentricities. Arguments that seemed to come out of nowhere and vanish into thin air. The power he seemed to feel I had over him, the pain I put him through without even quite knowing what he thought I'd done. Flashes of anger, quickly suppressed, until it was all over. Then I got three years worth of anger all at once, and a decisive shunning. Anyhow, I'm past the half-way point in life and gone through many breakups, but this was a different order entirely, and the stories I see here seem to capture that difference.

I can't guess what he was experiencing when we were together, but I know for sure it wasn't what I thought at the time. I've made a list of  for myself, which started out as a letter for him (that I didn't really intend to send), and when I looked it over I was amazed at how much I always knew. I've kept the list, and I add to it as new things occur to me. There was the narcotic rush of chemistry between us, his urgency to bond, to consume me. "I want to get you and hold you, smash you under me." His passion tracked closely with terror. "I'm losing you, always losing you over and over," he said. He talked about how scary it was to love me, even at the best times. 

I don't know. It's a universe unto itself, what we went together. Bizarre to think I may never see him again, that the friendship we promised each other would be inviolate is gone now.

I'm here, so I wanted to make myself known. I think I will write something on the thread for NC/detaching pep talks.

[Turkish]

What haunts you the most steelwork?

[steelwork]

Muscle memory of being with him, for one thing. I can feel him on my lips, you know?

I'll remember some snatch of conversation. Like one of the times we parted, when he told me, don't be silly, he'd never love anyone else. He'd lie to the next woman so he could keep her, but he'd know it wasn't true in the same way that he knew he'd loved me. Things like that. Or the things he said to me as he was replacing me, before I knew, that I understand now were goodbyes. I got rid of all the old emails and texts and stuff, but a lot of it's still there in my brain.

And I'm haunted by the feeling that I did not hold onto him tightly enough, and at the same time I'm frightened by the idea of what we would have become if I had. How much uglier it could have gotten.

And there's the usual stuff about imagining him with his new woman. They moved in together, I know that. So, like, I was at Ikea yesterday and I felt them walking beside me, picking out flatware and ugly throw rugs.

[steelwork]

Also I get really hung up on the distorted way he described things that went on between us. I get caught up in this kind of forensic remembering. Like, what did it mean that he said I was pushing and pulling, or that I had shut him out? I think it meant his level of anxiety about me was fluctuating, or his state of mind, and so he made it into something I was doing. Also, the fact that he used that terminology. Did he think I had a personality disorder? He said his ex wife was borderline, and he did a lot of other projecting, so maybe he's somewhere right now thinking I'm borderline too.

But, um, useless. It's nuts that I'm even thinking about what went on between us on this minute level, still, when the relationship is scorched earth.

[Turkish]

The "muscle memory" as you put it, is hard to deal with. I was lying in our bed this morning and thinking that it would have been nice to hold her, even her, and it's been two years... .then I started remenering the Saturday cleaning rampages. The times I held her tight in bed and she admitted to me that she was such a [b-word] to me, but I was her [b-word].

Relationship conflict is normal, but the splitting of us black and white is so confusing. It definitely sounds like he was projecting, whether he was borderline, or even if he had    unresolved from his marriage. His behaviors were still hurtful to you.

You've had a while physically seperated, but the emotions are still going. I'm glad you're hears to process them and have us support you, steelwork. 



Turkish

[steelwork]

Thanks for reading and replying. There were many moments of what I now see clearly as projection. Re. diagnosis: who knows? But as I said, it fits. In any case, he had the kind of sad, abusive childhood no one escapes from unharmed. He struggles (or did when I knew him) for insight. Goes to a T, in AA, etc, and he's very in touch with his pain. Not so much with the pain he causes. Looking back, I see how self-referential much of his love language was. I understood him. I accepted him. I was loyal and slow to judgment.

I wish him well, still wish I could have been a true source of security instead of what I was: a prize to be won. I just really wasn't emotionally available, for all that I loved him. Been doing a lot of work on myself, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't fantasize about second chances--but I don't think I'd take it now, even if it was possible.

I guess eventually my heart will catch up with my mind.