Hi jambley,
I can tell that you're hurt, these r/s breaks are really painful. I'm sorry that you're going through this. It does get better and I know that it sounds invalid dating to hear that now. I just wanted to share some tips with how to speed up the healing process.
Tough love be is a 90's term, it was popular back then, I'll explain it with how I understand it, I's setting a lot of boundaries and not enabling a loved one is how I understand it. From a perspective of a non, a pwBPD can be incredibly invalidating / hurtful with their behaviours. A couple of points.
I think that our membership has 3/4 people that are depressive, some short term and some have long term mental illness like myself. Let's switch the perspective and look at it from a pwBPD's point of view with our knowledge, if I'm in a depressed mood, I can be self absorbed too.
Sometimes I have bad panic attacks, I'm battling that inside and it can be hard to get through the day or even the week with depression. Thankfully I have it under control for now, that could change. It can be hard for us to put ourselves into someone else's perspective, the same goes for a pwBPD when you have a lot of internal struggles. Another way of interpreting it is that it's toxic behavior.
Two wrongs doesn't make a right, and I can also respect that we can have angry feelings towards our pwBPD, in fact it helps us with detaching from unhealthy r/s's. You can have compassion with boundaries, ( tough loss be ) a simple way to explain boundaries is it keeps the good stuff in and bad stuff out.
Speaking of compassion, show yourself a lot of internal compassion with self love and self care, it's really important to take really care of ourselves especially when we're grieving loss and healing our emotional wounds. Take care of you first
