At this point in the story, my BPD ex broke up with me but we were still living together. She didn't have any money. I didn't want her to be homeless or lose what she had. We both agreed to continue living together on the condition that we remain respectful and present with each other. She said she was going to get a job and contribute to the bills. We split the household chores.
I was going through hell. I spent all my time journaling, reading and listening to music just to try to find something to hold on to. She, on the other hand, seemed to be on cloud nine. She spent all day in bliss, talking with her online friends non-stop. She did not put any effort into finding a job even she told me that this was one of the things that made the relationship unbalanced.
I just observed and wrote it all down in my journal. I didn't confront her about much at all. We did have some conversations which usually ended up with her telling me how I was a POS and her online friends cared for and supported her in all of the ways that I did not. I noticed something different in her when she would say these things. She had a sadistic enjoyment in it all. She wanted to punish me and she got some kind of high off it whenever she thought she was twisting the screws in. I stayed mostly silent and observant during these moments even though I was beginning to understand that something was wrong in all she accused me of. I didn't want to show my hand just yet. She thought I was under her control and she was loving it. I let her continue to think it and I watched her behavior.
She really should not have listed my lack of knowledge about her mental diagnosis (DID) as one of my faults. It was the beginning of her undoing. I called up one of my best friends and the professor who taught my Abnormal Psych class. I explained what was going on and asked her what I was missing about DID. My professor listened and asked questions. She said that my BPD ex's behavior was not like DID at all. I remember saying, "There is something missing here. There is a void." By the end of the conversation, my professor was telling me that it sounded like BPD to her. The void that she referenced was the fact that my ex had no core self. My professor friend told me to practice stillness. She said that if I was still and the love was true, it would remain. She said if the love was not real, it would decompensate before my eyes.
At this point my ex had gone on a trip with her mother and was gone for about 3 days. I spent time alone and thought about how I could practice stillness. I always chased after my ex so I just decided to stop chasing her. When she returned from the trip, she ran into my arms and talked about how much she missed me. I hugged her back but did not pull her into my arms like I normally would. She knew in an instant that something was different with me. As I talked with her mother for a few minutes, I watched my ex out of the corner of my eyes. She looked like a child who had lost her mother in the middle of a grocery store. She seemed so scared. She knew that I was different and she didn't know how or why or what it would mean for her.
At first I didn't get the whole BPD thing. My ex didn't show some of the typical signs of BPD. After I found out about the waif BPD type and read about Gunderson's three levels of emotional functioning with BPD, it started to click with me. We spent the majority of our relationship in the first level of functioning. There was at least the appearance of talking about the problems and making an effort to improve. She was submissive and did not express her destructive feelings. It wasn't until I started working on my own psychological baggage and I asked her to get a job that things started taking an obvious downturn.
Now armed with knowledge, I started stand up to the things she accused me of. I failed at it horribly. She would accuse me of doing or saying something awful. I would try to defend myself and state what I really did and said. For example, she would say that I didn't thank her for something she did in the house. I remembered that I did thank her. She would tell me that I must have said it in my head and not out loud. She was very skilled turning things around to fit her narrative that I was the villain. She would recount the things I did and exaggerate everything that would seem bad and she would omit any part of the story that might make me seem like a reasonable person. I couldn't win those arguments.
But I started getting wise to it. I started writing "Thank You" cards for the things she did. It was only a matter of time until she accused me of not thanking her for something that I wrote a card for. I pointed out that not only did I thank her but there was empirical evidence of it. Caught in a lie, she would backtrack and say that she wasn't mad about not being thanked but about some other aspect of my behavior in the incident.
After a few rounds of this, I started realizing that it wasn't really about my behavior or even about what really happened. What she was stating as truth was warped to fit the image of me that she had. The image was not shaped by what I actually did; she needed to fit me into some mold she already had in her mind.
I also realized that as long as we were arguing about specific things that happened, she would win. She had a lifetime of experience with these types of arguments and how to twist them and I was completely out of my depth. Another thing that I realized was that this was probably was why she was so submissive during the relationship. By forcing me to be the one to make decisions, I was the one left to carry the blame. The cards had been marked and my hand had been dealt before I even realized we were playing a game.
I changed my tactics. Instead of arguing about specific things or actions, I started talking about what lies underneath the actions. This gave me an advantage because it was something she wasn't expecting and she did not have her defense already planned out in advance.
I started out talking about triangulation. I explained the concept of the Karpman Drama Triangle (
https://bpdfamily.com/content/karpman-drama-triangle) to her. I talked at length about how I had been in triangulated relationships most of my life and that I recognized it as a pattern with me. I usually play the Rescuer but have played every role at least once. She listened and nodded in agreement as I described the different roles I've played.
At the end of the conversation, I told her that I thought that the situation with her online friends was triangulation. She was the playing the victim role, the online friends were the rescuers and she wanted me to be the persecutor. She went into an absolute narcissistic rage.
At first she said that I was trying to trap her by springing this on her at the end of the conversation. I explained that I had been talking about how triangulated relationship patterns through my whole life and this just fits the pattern.
Next she asked how she could be playing the victim role for her friends when she just told them what had been happening. I replied back that if she described my behaviors to her friends in the way that she described them to me (exaggerating the worst and omitting the good), then what she was telling them was not accurate. When she recounted my "horrible" behavior to me, I at least had the benefit of being there when it happened and knowing what I said and did. Her online friends would have no way of knowing that the story she was telling didn't match reality.
I told her that I wasn't saying that I was right, only that I recognized the pattern. I said that I may never know for certain if it was triangulation. I told her that she would know if it was triangulation if her impulse was to "run to your friends right now and tell them all the horrible things I said about you and about them so that they can assure you that I am crazy and I don't know you or them." I said, "If that's your impulse right now, it's triangulation." Her eyes narrowed to slits and I saw the hatred boiling beneath her eyes. She knew that I was right and I knew that I was right. She hated me for it.
I ended that conversation by saying that the reason that I was telling her all of this was to say that I was not going to play the role of the persecutor. I was stepping out of that drama triangle because no good outcome can come from it. Her rage stopped but there was still a seething anger here that you could feel physically. But she never used her friends against me in an argument again. She knew that I saw through it. I disarmed that weapon and she was pissed because it was her favorite weapon.
She broke up with me because she said our relationship was unbalanced. In her eyes, she did everything in the relationship and I did nothing. When I tried to restore some balance, she would go into a rage. One time I mentioned that my friends made me realize that our relationship was still unbalanced post-breakup. They told me that they would not be capable of living in the same space with the person who broke up with you and not constantly be fighting. They said that they could not continue to provide them a place to live. When I told my ex this, she went into a rage and starting imagining all the horrible things my friends had said about her. I said that my friends had said something good about me (that I was kind and patient), not something bad about her.
I wonder why she had such a reaction to that, especially considering that she spent months telling me about all the things her online friends had said about me and about our relationship. Hypocritical much? I think that she was angry that she was no longer in total control of my self image. Other people were in the mix now and these people saw the good in me when she was intent on convincing me that I was completely awful.
She still wasn't looking for a job a month after the breakup. I was still paying all the bills. A couple of days after the triangulation conversation, I mentioned a job opening to her. She gave me the reasons about why she couldn't work at the places that were hiring (either health or anxiety reasons). She blamed me for why she didn't have a job because she needed someone to "kick her ass and make [her] get a job" and I didn't do that. I stayed positive and mentioned a couple of places that she could check for job openings. I told her that I would like for her to have a job by the end of the month. That gave her more than three weeks to find something. I thought that was generous since a month had already gone by with no effort from her to find a job.
When I said this to her, she looked like a small child who was in trouble. She looked scared. Days later she brought this up and said that I interrogated her about her efforts to find a job, threw around ultimatums and physically intimidated her by standing over her. I did none of those things. What I did was set a boundary and this is how she interpreted the boundary setting. I think that she wanted and planned to continue to live in my home with me paying all of the bills and doing half the chores while she got to spend everyday doing only the things she wanted to do. I set a boundary and let her know that we were not going to continue to exist that way and gave her plenty of time to adjust.
Some days later, I brought up the laundry list of things that she told me was wrong with me and the relationship - things like how long it had been since I took her on a date or brushed her hair. She admitted that her online friends told her that these were the signs of a normal relationship and that this was now the yardstick that she was using to measure me and our relationship. The thing is that she didn't do those things either. She never once took me on a date. She hadn't brushed my hair since the first year of our relationship.
So I asked her, "When you were going through this list of things that should happen in a normal relationship, did you spend any time considering whether you had done those same things?" She went into a rage again and asked me what I meant. I said, "Do you judge yourself by the same standard that you judge me?" First she gave me all the reasons why she couldn't do those things but her reasons were ridiculous and she could tell it.
She switched gears and asked me to tell her all the things that she did wrong in the relationship. I told her that was not my purpose and I was just asking about her standards. She started crying and went on a long list of the things she thought she failed at (she didn't keep the house clean, she didn't do the laundry or the dishes until she was forced to, etc).
Strangely, all the things she said that she failed at were the same things that she said that she did right when she was telling me about how she did so much more in the relationship than I did. I was beginning to see how she really felt about herself and I just listened. After she got through her list of self-hatred, she asked me if she had mentioned all the things that she had done wrong.
I replied, "My purpose here is not to make an account of wrongdoing."
She yelled, "Then why did you bring all this f**king s**t up?"
I said, "Because those were the standards you put on me. I just wanted to know if you judged yourself by the same standards and you've answered that."
She grabbed her phone, said, "I'm leaving," and went outside for about 15 minutes presumably to talk to her online friends to find out what to do next. When she came back in she was calmer initially but went back on into a rage in a few minutes. She talked about how she couldn't make good decisions or be normal because she had DID. She couldn't make a decision when we got into a relationship together because her mind too messed up, but I should have known better. I should have known that we weren't ready for a relationship. I should have known that the relationship wasn't going well. She couldn't get any perspective on anything because she threw all of her energy into taking care of me. She punctuated each point by telling me that I should have known better and slamming her hand down on the table.
I told her that I should have known better but I wasn't thinking well at the time either. I could only follow my gut instincts and so I did. My gut told me that I loved her and felt safe with her and I just wanted to be surrounded by that. She really didn't have a reply to that.
I think it wasn't long after this that she left the house for the second time and was gone for about four days. I'm not sure what the intent was here. It could have been to scare me by showing me that if I didn't stop bringing this stuff up, she was going to leave for good and I would be alone. It could have been that she was running from me because I was beginning to see through the illusions and disarming all of the weapons that she used against me.
If it was intended to intimidate me, it didn't work. I found that I felt better and more at peace when she was gone.
