brownowl90,
I asked my best mate to read this thread cos he didn't seem to understand why I'm still not back to myself!
He said after reading it he felt I'm looking for a reason and that sometimes people just don't get on and you have to except that and its that simple!
It's not that simple. Unless your best mate has dated seriously someone with this kind of mental illness, he will never understand why it is so difficult to "get over" it.
Am I really just using the possibility she is BPD to ease my pain and give my heartache a reason!
What is difficult for you, I suspect, is you are trying to come to terms with who you THOUGHT was your girlfriend/wife, and who she is trying to present herself as, since the break-up. If your experience is anything like the common experience here, your uBPDex's personality is literally different; it is almost like you dated someone with multiple personality disorder. Except she is not aware of it herself.
Using the possibility that she has BPD will not really ease your pain. But it helps you understand why her behavior is so confusing to you. You are heart broken regardless.
After reading so many stories I'm confused. She does follow the criteria of broken family childhood and abandonment from her father, short relationships left after 2 years and leaving exs confused and with financial troubles! The stages of the relationship went from amazin love and pornstar sex to finding fault with everything I do then came the lies and the sudden abondonment and treating me like I never meant anything, then the new guy straight into honeymoon again!
Yes. One of the criteria for a BPD diagnosis is "a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. " Idealization = "amazin love and pornstar sex" and devaluation = "finding fault with everything" "lies and sudden abandonment" "treating me like I never meant anything."
The new guy starts of at "idealization."
Just on the other hand she has an answer and reason for everything which makes sense?
Because denial is not a river in Eygpt. She NEEDS to believe that she is normal. Because she does not have the emotional resources to deal with the possibility that she is mentally ill. You on the other do, but you need to start taking care of yourself. If this means getting a therapist to help you, then so be it. But if you focus too much on her, then you may be guilty of what she is doing = putting all the blame on the other person.
She is always the life and soul of every night out and party and has never self harmed or been violent?
Some people with BPD can be very charismatic. And just because you are not aware that she has ever self-harmed does not mean she has not (nor does not self-harming preclude the diagnosis). They self-harm as a means of avoiding. If they don't do that then they might use drugs or alcohol or over-spend. Or if they don't do that, then they just go through waves and waves of people (ie, relationships).
She says its just me who can't handle rejection and am spoilt and she tried to make our relationship work but slowly realised I wasn't the one for her!
She cannot see that what she did was as cruel and harsh as possible. This is her delusion. She needs to believe that you were the one who drove her to do what she did; if she does not outright mis-attribute her own actions to you. And she will try to convince everyone she knows that this is what happened. This is the "distortion campaign." And she is doing this in order to maintain the reality distortion field that keeps her from finding help for herself. Until she starts recovery, everyone that she ever loves will drive her to feel this crazy and lead her to destroy her relationships. And no one can help her until she decides to help herself.
We did argue a lot over the last year of our relationship but I put that down to a new born baby and money troubles and never really understood what we were arguin about half the time and would be frustrated by the fact that oneday everything was perfect and the next I couldn't do anything right!
You are still trying to justify her behavior in some kind of context that you can understand. And the problem is, you do not have borderline personality disorder, so you cannot assume that the reasons why she did any of what she did, are reason that you can understand.
The fact that you keep trying to understand it in your own terms tells me you are still trying to reconcile her behaviors. When the bottom line is that you have no idea what happened to the woman you fell in love with. You may think that believing she has BPD will "ease your pain." But if you accept that she has BPD, you may have to accept that the woman you fell in love with never existed.
Is my friend right? Have I used BPD as an excuse for simply getting dumped by someone who was simply not brave enough to tell me she didn't love me like she thought she did?
Your friend is trying to understand what happened to you in terms that he understands. He wasn't there when she behaved in a way that communicated to you she was head over heels in love with you. In his mind, and in the mind of any one who is not disordered, you cannot go from having those kind of feelings to having no feelings for the other person. So he must believe that she was simply not brave enough to tell you her true feelings. But they were her true feelings. Just like right now her feelings are also true. They are truly disordered. And because you are not disordered, you are still recovering from a broken heart.
But as I understand it, people with BPD completely disconnect from all the feelings they ever had for you and bury it deep inside along with all the other reams of feelings they have also buried. They do not go through grief because they cannot cope with such feelings. You are having a hard enough time coping with it and you are not disordered.
Am I alone in doubting my ex is BPD even though it makes sense and she meets most criteria and most parts of other stories could be mine?
No, you are not alone. I doubted my xuBPDgf had BPD for years after I found out about BPD. When I first logged on here over four years ago, it had already been almost ten years since I last saw her and it was still nagging at me that I didn't know what the heck happened.
The first year I read here, I only identified with one out of every thirty posts. And then I started to unravel my whole history with her. I had to read over our correspondences, my old journals. And even after having piles of evidence that she was disordered, I still doubted it. Because I was still in denial; because she was still the "love of my life." Now I can see clearly how she was clearly disordered. I don't know when it happened exactly. It was a process.
Ten years of trying to forget about it. Plus four years of detective work plus amateur psychology reading. And what did I get? Indifference. I don't care about her anymore. I don't hate her. But I don't love her. You just have to focus on your life and grieve over the loss of what you once cared so deeply about.
Best wishes, Schwing
