Hi JRB,
I think you have highlighted an important point here:
I was moving 3 hours away for graduate school and she continuously said how much shed miss me and be "broken".
To a pwBPD, fear of abandonment and any perceived rejection is a huge struggle emotionally. It sounds to me like she was hoping that you would either stay or ask her to move with you. The fear of losing you may have been the trigger for her to enter into this other r/s alongside yours in order to protect herself from feeling alone and unable to cope by herself. I don't doubt that she loved you in her own way, to the best of her ability. The fact is, she lacked the emotional maturity and r/s skills to have a healthy r/s with you or anyone else. Her behaviour is driven by her ways of coping with her intense emotions (feelings = facts), the fear of abandonment and fear of engulfment. Having two of you at the same time was like a coping mechanism for her to safeguard herself against being left alone by either one of you and if either were split black the other would likely be split white. It gave her a safety net of sorts.
This could be part of a lifelong pattern of behaviour though, JRB and is not about you or anything you did or didn't do. Even if you had done things differently, something else could and likely would have triggered the same maladaptive coping in her. I know it's hard making sense of all of this, and deeply painful to find yourself in such a confusing and upsetting situation. At the same time, it's not necessarily possible to make sense of everything here. The reality is that a pwBPD has a massive emotional struggle which can be a constant battle. Her confusing mixed signals are a symptom of her own mixed up confusion of ever changing feelings and her personal struggle to handle these the only way she knows how. We cannot hope for a rational explanation for some of it, other than to accept that this is a complex attachment disorder and affects her in many ways that then manifest into the behaviour you've experienced.
How are you feeling in yourself at the moment? What would you like to resolve that might allow you to move forwards? Where do you feel you are at in the stages shown in the
Lessons?
It's great that you're posting about this and being open and honest here about your feelings and thought process. That's healthy as it's good to get this stuff out of your system. Don't knock yourself for that. It takes a strong individual to open up like this and seek support with things that are hard to deal with. That's what we're here for. To help one another through times like this where we can feel stuck. Don't forget that your post will be helping others also who may be in similar situations, so keep sharing as much as you need to.
Love and light x
