6 Months Post Relationship

[Depression = 72% of members]

“Your new life is going to cost you your old life. It’s going to cost you your comfort zone, and your sense of direction. It’s going to cost you relationships and friends. It’s going to cost you being understood and liked. But it doesn’t matter.”

Brianna Wiest

At the six month mark, I think this quotation successfully encapsulates everything that I experienced.

The intense feeling of vulnerability, the hyper-vigilance, barely scraping by each day on a handful of hours of sleep per night, and the obsessive compulsion to research anything related to BPD down to the Planck length, has dissipated to nothing.

I think that immediately going into hard NC (Moved to another province, changed my telephone number, blocked her everywhere) right after the relationship’s rupture was extremely beneficial in the long run, as was knowing when to quit the preoccupation with the relationship post mortem so that I wouldn’t become stuck in the past.

This isn’t to suggest that I’m firing on all cylinders again, but I’ve advanced to the stage where where I’m functional. However, the world looks very different to me today, almost unrecognizably different.

As the old song goes, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out” and the most unpleasant post relationship discovery was the number of friends who disappeared in a puff of smoke despite only giving them a précis of my situation. My social circle was winnowed down to two.

My relationship was eight years in length, so when I eventually found my bearings again, my only reference point for my identity was eight years in the past. It was like stepping into an ill-fitting suit that is no longer in fashion, so discovering who I am now, and in which direction to take my life, occupies most of my attention.

I do have a great deal of compassion for my former partner, as she is perilously under equipped to deal with life. However, it was madness to ensure her well-being at the complete expense of my own.

Before anyone suggests codependency, I just think that if you make a commitment to someone, that commitment also extends to when your partner isn’t doing well, and you are morally obligated to endure.

However, and as we all eventually discover with BPD, there is a very well-defined limit after which they have to acknowledge their obligations too. I only left when it was obvious that remaining by her side was mutually disadvantageous.

So, if you’ve recently stumbled onto this website, and your head is spinning like mad after your brush with BPD, I’m here to assure you that healing occurs at a pace that is imperceptible, but that you will get past this bottleneck in your life with a little patience.

[Augustine]

“Your new life is going to cost you your old life. It’s going to cost you your comfort zone, and your sense of direction. It’s going to cost you relationships and friends. It’s going to cost you being understood and liked. But it doesn’t matter.”

Brianna Wiest

At the six month mark, I think this quotation successfully encapsulates everything that I experienced.

The intense feeling of vulnerability, the hyper-vigilance, barely scraping by each day on a handful of hours of sleep per night, and the obsessive compulsion to research anything related to BPD down to the Planck length, has dissipated to nothing.

I think that immediately going into hard NC (Moved to another province, changed my telephone number, blocked her everywhere) right after the relationship’s rupture was extremely beneficial in the long run, as was knowing when to quit the preoccupation with the relationship post mortem so that I wouldn’t become stuck in the past.

This isn’t to suggest that I’m firing on all cylinders again, but I’ve advanced to the stage where where I’m functional. However, the world looks very different to me today, almost unrecognizably different.

As the old song goes, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out” and the most unpleasant post relationship discovery was the number of friends who disappeared in a puff of smoke despite only giving them a précis of my situation. My social circle was winnowed down to two.

My relationship was eight years in length, so when I eventually found my bearings again, my only reference point for my identity was eight years in the past. It was like stepping into an ill-fitting suit that is no longer in fashion, so discovering who I am now, and in which direction to take my life, occupies most of my attention.

I do have a great deal of compassion for my former partner, as she is perilously under equipped to deal with life. However, it was madness to ensure her well-being at the complete expense of my own.

Before anyone suggests codependency, I just think that if you make a commitment to someone, that commitment also extends to when your partner isn’t doing well, and you are morally obligated to endure.

However, and as we all eventually discover with BPD, there is a very well-defined limit after which they have to acknowledge their obligations too. I only left when it was obvious that remaining by her side was mutually disadvantageous.

So, if you’ve recently stumbled onto this website, and your head is spinning like mad after your brush with BPD, I’m here to assure you that healing occurs at a pace that is imperceptible, but that you will get past this bottleneck in your life with a little patience.

[SaltyDawg]

Augustine,

   Thank you for the update, it sounds very devastating, where you have picked up and pretty much started a new life with no-one left but two friends - a very scary prospect indeed.  Thank you for sharing about your 'new beginning', your pause on life was 8 years, whereas, mine spans more than two decades, and what you shared really scares the F*** out of me and makes me want to try harder with my uBPDw, provided that she can come to the realization that her facts

   While I was silenced by my wife's ultimatum and reinforced by our couple's therapist as a 'flying monkey' I did follow your story (in silence) as it was very insightful to me.

   I will understand if you don't want to briefly go back to an article you read; however, I found it very fascinating as I believe my uBPDw, is also an uOCPDw too and I found your following post to be quite fascinating...

Apropos, I just happened to be reading an article yesterday on this very topic.

It isn’t uncommon for partners of borderlines to also have a PD. 56% of them in these couplings, in a recent study. 

Borderline preferences fall into two camps: Cluster B, and C.

Cluster C contains Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive-Compulsive personality disorders. 

Borderlines are drawn like bees to honey to Narcissistic, and  Antisocial personality disorders as well. 

It’s interesting to note that the Cluster C group are the least likely to leave their partners, are high in conscientiousness, and the least prone to infidelity. 

NB: I’m not implying that anyone here has a personality disorder, by the way.

I am wondering if you still have notes on this particular article as I would love to read it?  Let me know one way or another, as your posts in the past have been very helpful to me.

I wish you the best of luck.

Be sure to continue to do self-care whatever that looks like for you.

Take care, with self-care.

SD

[Schlaff]

I only want to chime in to say one thing here. You pre-emptively rule out codependancy, and I wanted to just add a little anecdote from my experience here.

When I first posted my story, people mentioned codependancy, and I immediately thought it didn't fit, glanced at the definitions and discarded the idea. It still doesn't fit, but! It was helpful to me to dig deeper on it. Am I actually codependant? Is it something similar? Is there something there to learn? Turns out that even though that exact label wasn't quite right, there was (and is) a thing worth examining, namely that I am very conflict averse/avoidant.

Always thought that was just a 'good thing', and generally it is. We should all get along, right? But I often am *too* averse to directly addressing conflict, and I am certainly always gonna have to be vigilant about setting boundaries, which I was a complete failure at, haha.

Anyways, I feel like that term has some negative connotation attached to it, and you might be exactly right that you aren't, like I found. But there might be something to learn if you dig deeper on it.