First time introduction, 8 years of life with BPD SO

[Finn]

Hey everyone,

My first post here, I just figured out that my life for the past 6-8 years is pretty much textbook example of living with a BPD partner.
Most things I read here seem familiar in a way or another.

I found out about BPD a month ago, stumbled to this page and the forum few days ago. Please bear with me as this post will be bit messy. I'm not sure how to start, I'd want to tell everything at once, tell others the ways I have found help and stabilise life overall and read about everything you have experienced and found out.

I constantly need to remind myself that the things I have experienced and gone through are not normal, a healthy relationship should not be like this. It's been really chaotic and difficult for me to live through the past years and learn how to survive in this emotional rollercoaster mess.

We got three kids, oldest is six and youngest is just a year old. I've somewhat managed to protect them from my partners behaviour and she has only at times exploded towards them. I mainly take it from her but as the kids grow I'm sure they will both understand more and be in the line of her aggressions and at times really crazy behaviour, I've seen this happen now towards the six year old few times and this has made me worried about the future.

To summarise I'll just list few things that come up: I've had knife pointed to me, taken plenty of kicks and hits (not with a knife though), hidden knives and sharp things, replaced maybe four tv's, a dozen phones, tablets and laptops which have been thrown to me, changed broken doors and fixed holes in walls, been told she will take the kids and I'll never see them again, been told hundreds of times she will kill herself, told she will kill me or wants to kill me, few times that she kill the baby as well, stayed up nights, slept outdoors & slept on the floor, taken care of the kids daycare and daily routines, laundry, cleaning, pretty much everything except the cooking alone for longer period of times, lost several jobs, lost a lot of friends, lost more money than I want to count, been blamed for everything, then being adored few hours later.
This list can be expanded to be pages long.

Things got better when I managed to get the family to move to a stable environment and organize a daily schedule that we follow. I take a lot of really bad talk, emotional cruelty, and blaming from my wife still every week. I avoid topics I know she cannot handle, avoid situations and even smallest reminders that could lead her to emotionally unstable situation. Everything is crafted so that she doesn't get stress or feel threatened. I hide magazines and advertisements that I know could get her triggered, avoid some movies, tv-shows, even some people.

I'm still trying to find a way to live with this and get a structure that allows some stability and planning. I need to make a living with the little productive time I have which has lead to some compromises on my career and work choices. I take kids to daycare and school in the morning, then head for the library to work or meetings if I have those. I do software development and IT & security consulting but I have manage my work like a freelancer as I just don't know what happens the next day or night and am I able to actually show up at 9am in meeting. Having a normal workplace and commitment to that is not even remotely possible option. I've had times I've slept just few hours every night throughout a week as wife has been going through some sort of crazy episode. It usually starts in the evening, leading to mostly sleepless night, and then the next day is pretty much ruined for me while she sleeps it off and I try to work. Repeat this for few weeks and I've probably been able to work less than what normally I could do in one day.

This has been my life for around 8 years now.
I don't know how I got this far, but here I am, still alive and I do have the most amazing kids and also my wife, even though I now write about all the bad things, is amazing when she is stable. Those moments make me try to find a way.

[PLEASE - NO RUN MESSAGES]

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[Tattered Heart]

Hi Finn,

Welcome to the board ,

You have been through quite a bit! I'm glad to hear that a lot of the physical violence has decreased. Is this something that you still experience or was it a thing of the past?

I hope you can begin to find answers here. It's like a breath of fresh air to find out that what has been going on in your house has a name, but it's also scary because now that you see it, you either have to choose to continue to living the like you have been living or to make changes. The hard part is that you can only change yourself and not your pwBPD's behavior. So while you are getting healthier, they may just stay the same. (or you may be one of the lucky few who have a partner who begins to get better).

It sounds like over the years you may have let some boundaries slip. That's totally normal. When someone lives in an emotionally abusive environment, we develop coping mechanisms to protect ourselves. Unfortunately a lot of the things we do to protect ourselves actually make things with our pwBPD worse. We have a lot of lessons on the right side of the page. You can learn so much from these lessons. To start you off though, here is a link to one of our lessons on boundaries.

https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=61684.0