Shaming

[Suassíos]

Hi,

I have had several days of trying to manage my husband diagnosed BPD which has now spiralled into a 36 hour prolonged angry aggressive episode.

The past day I have been at the receiving end of a tonne of spiteful remarks and lectures.

I’m a bit slow off the mark, and I know his therapist has brought up the subject of shaming with him, which I had never known much about.

So he came home from work and in a menacing tone with school principal type attitude said, or more like spat at me: “have you even walked the dog”. Even though he knew where I was all day and that it was physically impossible for me to have walked the dog, as I was taking care of my elderly parents and collecting and dropping from schools and after school sports. There wasn’t any time window. He had been due to walk the dog but didn’t do it as he was having a BPD tantrum.

Then several times today he did the shaming thing again, except these times it was “how dare you say I am x”, even though I had never said he was x. Followed by i can’t  live with someone who tells me what to feel” , then Grabbing his bag  heading for the door and telling me that for this reason our marriage is over, even though I never told him what to feel, jeepers I have enough going on without doing that, it hadn’t even crossed my mind.

So now I can reflect at this point that this is an episode of rapid cycle shaming, shaming for anything and everything that may have happened regardless of whether or not it is a good thing a bad thing or just one of those things that happen, and failing anything he can find, fabricating something new to match his need to shame me, so that he can feel ok about it.

At times there is insight and analysis, even today, eg “I am shaming you because I feel shame about myself”, and if I wasn’t so used to this now, I would think ah yes wonderful you are beginning to see what you are doing and so can correct it, but this is now going on for many years, and the delivery of the shaming has not reduced as the knowledge and awareness increases.

For me it feels even worse, he knows it’s wrong, this has been validated by several healthcare professionals, and yet he still does it.

Has anyone experience with this?

Why would someone shame someone?

How does someone think that fabricating a lie would be something to shame someone with! Aren’t they ashamed of the lie? It’s not a subtle stretch of the truth type lie, more an outright lie.

Help?

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[Cat Familiar]

A difficult barrier for partners of people with BPD to surmount is that the person we are dealing with is not a rational human being.

Certainly they can be…at times, but not when they’re upset.

Shaming, like other unpleasant ways that pwBPD can act out is one way of them offloading their troubling feelings on another person. It’s folly to think that they even care in the moment when they’re doing that, and can stop it because it’s hurting other’s feelings. In the midst of their dysfunction, THEY DON’T CARE.

That’s a hard pill for those of us who love them to swallow. But once you do, it’s freeing.

My husband seldom says anything unkind or negative towards me. What stopped this cycle was when his nasty words no longer had an impact upon me.

He would say “you’re self absorbed” or “you only care about yourself.” Those were triggers for me from childhood with my BPD mom. I got to the point of agreeing with him, since there was a grain of truth there and truly when he was being an azz, I didn’t care at all about his feelings.

My agreement disarmed him and what else was there to argue about when the person you were trying to engage, wouldn’t?

That said, it serves no purpose for you to stick around to hear these insults. Take a time out, do a task or something you enjoy, tell him when you’ll be back and hopefully in the meantime, he can cool down. If not, repeat this process. It serves no one to sit around and be an audience for nasty remarks.

[Suassíos]

Thank you for your advice. I am heartened to hear that the incidence of shaming decreased for you in your relationship. I am not very good at the ignoring or detaching. It seems to make things worse often, and there definitely are NPD traits here, when I have looked for information about how he has said off the wall hurtful things previously, he said he would have kept going with more and more extremely hurtful things until he found the thing that worked. But I could definitely try harder at ignoring and knowing it has worked for you will motivate me to keep going. Thank you & I hope all is well with you now.

[Trying123]

Hi Suassios!

I have many similar experiences with my husband unfortunately. He will project all sorts of hurtful things onto me: I don’t love him, I don’t care about him, I’m cheating, I’m lying, etc. None of which are true. Sometimes he’ll be specific, other times it’s just a general statement made in anger.

I also get told he’s leaving, he wants a divorce, he can’t live with a person like me anymore. It used to scare me, but now I know he’s just venting. He will still be here the next day. And if he ever did leave, well…. Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing either.

I have just begun to do my best to ignore or walk away. I need to work on validating better because my ignoring him does tend to cause some escalation.

Sorry I have no advice. Just wanted to let you know I understand what you’re going through!

[thankful person]

Hi Suassios, thank you for sharing your experience. This criticism and cruel treatment is something I am very familiar with too. A lot of it makes no sense at all. I have somewhat learnt to deal with it by opening my eyes to how delusional my wife is in truly believing some of these accusations. Where a sane person may say something cruel to hurt another person, a pwbpd (it seems in my wife’s case) is just so paranoid and threatened in believing the world is against them that they believe such things they are saying even though they don’t always make any sense. Have you heard the advice not to JADE (justify, argue, defend or explain)? It seems like it takes our power away but actually it’s the opposite. Once I accepted that you can’t reason with an unreasonable person then it became more about just doing what I could to help my wife keep calm and looking after myself, not believing that I’m such a bad person. Borderline means the borderline between milder mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety and more serious delusional conditions such as schizophrenia. There’s lots we can do without the pwbpd working to improve things, but then again there’s only so much we can do…

[Chief Drizzt]

Hi Suassios!

I have many similar experiences with my husband unfortunately. He will project all sorts of hurtful things onto me: I don’t love him, I don’t care about him, I’m cheating, I’m lying, etc. None of which are true. Sometimes he’ll be specific, other times it’s just a general statement made in anger.

I also get told he’s leaving, he wants a divorce, he can’t live with a person like me anymore. It used to scare me, but now I know he’s just venting. He will still be here the next day. And if he ever did leave, well…. Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing either.

I have just begun to do my best to ignore or walk away. I need to work on validating better because my ignoring him does tend to cause some escalation.

Sorry I have no advice. Just wanted to let you know I understand what you’re going through!

  I keep getting this with my wife - saying she is going to leave me.  She’s never said that before now - and its a bit unnerving - we’ve been married 33 years.  I’m in the same boat as you - after living with it for so long I’m not sure it would be a bad thing. 

[Suassíos]

Thank you all for sharing your experiences. I feel for you all and for anyone else who may be familiar with this pattern. It’s extremely difficult and very upsetting that you are dealing with this or have dealt with it in the past. I am sending you my support and my awe at your ability to have come through these experiences.

It’s heartening to have this community of people sharing what they have learned, but also very hard to hear how many people and families are suffering.

I will post on this thread if I gain any wisdom on this. I think you are right that it’s impossible to have a reasonable conversation with someone behaving unreasonably. I just don’t see how there is ever a “win” or “gain” for the pwBPD, I’ve read so much,  listened to so many podcasts, completed family connections and lived with this in my home, yet I genuinely can’t figure it, when I put myself in their shoes and imagine what it would feel like, I can’t see why they would want to be the source of so much harm, and there aren’t any “wins” in shaming someone

, I appreciate it may be following behaviours that were modelled at home when they were a kid. But my husband reports that he hated that behaviour and knew it was wrong, so why is he adopting it now? This started about 10 years ago and escalated 3 years ago and has been sort of  full blast ever since. But there were 10 years before that when it never happened.