Contemplations from a shaky place of peace

[Depression = 72% of members]

I haven't been back here in a while but today the urge to express myself was overwhelming. So here it is.

I filled out the last piece of paper I have yet to file with the court that will finalize the divorce from my UstbxBPDw. After my inability to cope with her behaviors I found solace and support in this place. With my subsequent decision to end the relationship for good I felt like this forum wasn’t such a great place for me. I didn’t really want to be in a ‘BPD family’, I wanted nothing to do with BPD. It seemed like coming here and reading and posting will just keep the emotions and behavior patterns I am so unable to deal with continue to be a destructive part of my life.

So instead I focused on my work and my practice of yoga for the last 3 months or so. I ignored as best I could all of her fiercely angry and slanderous emails and texts and just worked on getting on with my life. Slowly the anxiety attacks from my last interaction with her started to fade but still to this day I remain stuck in a highly introvert and introspective mode, permeated by a fluctuating level of depression, that’s just bursting to figure out how to express itself in a meaningful way to the outside world.

In all this time I relentlessly watched episodes of ‘House MD’ cramming almost all 8 seasons of the show into four months of time and finding him to be an odd combination of myself and my ex. My part being his inability to express his love and positive emotions as they are buried under layers and layers of disillusion and mistrust and his inability to reconcile relentless rationalizations with his emotions. Her part being his trauma induced destructive behavior when it comes to all his relationships in life, culminating with the season 7 finale that seemed to eerily reflect the potential of where my relationship could have gone if I didn’t put a hard stop to it.

I purposely leave out details here for people who don’t want the show spoiled, but the ones who know the show and read my intro post will surely be able to spot the similarity.

In any case, as I continued through my recovery, I have been in close touch with an old high school friend who has been instrumental in helping me to get out of the relationship as his visit triggered my UstbxBPDw’s major meltdown that lead to our final separation.

He has a beautiful family, wife and kids, and it appeared that his advice was just the kind of outside perspective I needed to remove my own veil of ignorance and addiction from my deep suffering in my relationship. It felt like a chance to look at things with a thorough grasp on reality and so I always trusted his advice and judgment of my situation.

Then, a few weeks ago, he told me about troubles in his own marriage and the lack of sexual intimacy after their children were born. He told me how they continued on together raising great kids and working for years on trying to find solutions to their troubles. With great joy he told me how they recently had overcome the problems, how he had a better relationship than ever with his wife now. I was happily looking forward to hearing his stories of reconnection and rekindled love.

So I was told that the solution was to open up the marriage and find a Dom and Domme and explore each one’s desires with strangers in separation from the partner.

After contemplating this for a little while I fell into very deep depression and wondered how I could ever have listened to someone with such skewed views of human connection, love and sex. From my perspective the human experience revolves around the ability to open and become vulnerable in all of our relationships, the height of that being a deeply loving relationship that may express itself in sex on a physical level. In itself being nothing but mechanics, any gratifying sexual experience clearly indicates some kind of deeper underlying relationship to the partner it is being performed with. The depth of the relationship is being expressed in finding fulfillment in simplicity, the lack thereof being found in desperate attempts trying to enhance the experience through extremes of harmful excess or drugs.

The more I realized the disconnection between my friend’s choices and my own values in life the more the depression took its toll. I encountered the deep appreciation again for my UstbxBPDw perspective on life and people, her intense ability to see into the depth of every soul that would cross her path. That ability a result of a lifetime of trauma and expressed as an incomprehensible jumble of manipulative and destructive behavior as well as deep and astounding levels of wisdom and clairvoyance.

In that sense I see truth in all the slander she wrote about me but also an intense expression of her inability just sit and deal with the fear and frustrations resulting from all the dualities of life.

As I am preparing to go on a weeklong meditation retreat and trying to reconcile this intense relationship in the grand scheme of my life I realize that, after having been together for over 4 years, my relationship with my ex was destroyed in the first year.

We met when we were both on a path to find ourselves, at a time where we both followed a genuine desire to connect with life’s experiences through meditation, stillness and opening to even the most subtle of perceptions. After all we were introduced to each other by a friend who was a teacher and practitioner of a specific school of meditation and we both made great strides stepping into the mysteries of exploring inward.

It seems now that it was then which was the time to step out and go further … I am not quite sure how … like sell everything and travel to Tibet or India and really get into it. But the crushing responsibilities of a western lifestyle, her kids, my career, her jealousy, my emotional detachment, her trauma, my addictions … it all came down with crushing force to destroy the opportunity of a lifetime, or at least the fantasy of that.

Life is the challenge of dealing with irreconcilable opposites. If there is a God his idea is to throw each and every one of us into an ocean filled with opposing streams of desires, emotions and rationalizations and then seeing with how we deal with it.

Can we do it with awareness and connection or do we give in to distractions, facades and mistrust? Can we do it with patience, virtue and love or do we succumb to fear, lies, anger and destruction?

My choice, my life. Her choice, her life. What's yours?

[Subotai]

I haven't been back here in a while but today the urge to express myself was overwhelming. So here it is.

I filled out the last piece of paper I have yet to file with the court that will finalize the divorce from my UstbxBPDw. After my inability to cope with her behaviors I found solace and support in this place. With my subsequent decision to end the relationship for good I felt like this forum wasn’t such a great place for me. I didn’t really want to be in a ‘BPD family’, I wanted nothing to do with BPD. It seemed like coming here and reading and posting will just keep the emotions and behavior patterns I am so unable to deal with continue to be a destructive part of my life.

So instead I focused on my work and my practice of yoga for the last 3 months or so. I ignored as best I could all of her fiercely angry and slanderous emails and texts and just worked on getting on with my life. Slowly the anxiety attacks from my last interaction with her started to fade but still to this day I remain stuck in a highly introvert and introspective mode, permeated by a fluctuating level of depression, that’s just bursting to figure out how to express itself in a meaningful way to the outside world.

In all this time I relentlessly watched episodes of ‘House MD’ cramming almost all 8 seasons of the show into four months of time and finding him to be an odd combination of myself and my ex. My part being his inability to express his love and positive emotions as they are buried under layers and layers of disillusion and mistrust and his inability to reconcile relentless rationalizations with his emotions. Her part being his trauma induced destructive behavior when it comes to all his relationships in life, culminating with the season 7 finale that seemed to eerily reflect the potential of where my relationship could have gone if I didn’t put a hard stop to it.

I purposely leave out details here for people who don’t want the show spoiled, but the ones who know the show and read my intro post will surely be able to spot the similarity.

In any case, as I continued through my recovery, I have been in close touch with an old high school friend who has been instrumental in helping me to get out of the relationship as his visit triggered my UstbxBPDw’s major meltdown that lead to our final separation.

He has a beautiful family, wife and kids, and it appeared that his advice was just the kind of outside perspective I needed to remove my own veil of ignorance and addiction from my deep suffering in my relationship. It felt like a chance to look at things with a thorough grasp on reality and so I always trusted his advice and judgment of my situation.

Then, a few weeks ago, he told me about troubles in his own marriage and the lack of sexual intimacy after their children were born. He told me how they continued on together raising great kids and working for years on trying to find solutions to their troubles. With great joy he told me how they recently had overcome the problems, how he had a better relationship than ever with his wife now. I was happily looking forward to hearing his stories of reconnection and rekindled love.

So I was told that the solution was to open up the marriage and find a Dom and Domme and explore each one’s desires with strangers in separation from the partner.

After contemplating this for a little while I fell into very deep depression and wondered how I could ever have listened to someone with such skewed views of human connection, love and sex. From my perspective the human experience revolves around the ability to open and become vulnerable in all of our relationships, the height of that being a deeply loving relationship that may express itself in sex on a physical level. In itself being nothing but mechanics, any gratifying sexual experience clearly indicates some kind of deeper underlying relationship to the partner it is being performed with. The depth of the relationship is being expressed in finding fulfillment in simplicity, the lack thereof being found in desperate attempts trying to enhance the experience through extremes of harmful excess or drugs.

The more I realized the disconnection between my friend’s choices and my own values in life the more the depression took its toll. I encountered the deep appreciation again for my UstbxBPDw perspective on life and people, her intense ability to see into the depth of every soul that would cross her path. That ability a result of a lifetime of trauma and expressed as an incomprehensible jumble of manipulative and destructive behavior as well as deep and astounding levels of wisdom and clairvoyance.

In that sense I see truth in all the slander she wrote about me but also an intense expression of her inability just sit and deal with the fear and frustrations resulting from all the dualities of life.

As I am preparing to go on a weeklong meditation retreat and trying to reconcile this intense relationship in the grand scheme of my life I realize that, after having been together for over 4 years, my relationship with my ex was destroyed in the first year.

We met when we were both on a path to find ourselves, at a time where we both followed a genuine desire to connect with life’s experiences through meditation, stillness and opening to even the most subtle of perceptions. After all we were introduced to each other by a friend who was a teacher and practitioner of a specific school of meditation and we both made great strides stepping into the mysteries of exploring inward.

It seems now that it was then which was the time to step out and go further … I am not quite sure how … like sell everything and travel to Tibet or India and really get into it. But the crushing responsibilities of a western lifestyle, her kids, my career, her jealousy, my emotional detachment, her trauma, my addictions … it all came down with crushing force to destroy the opportunity of a lifetime, or at least the fantasy of that.

Life is the challenge of dealing with irreconcilable opposites. If there is a God his idea is to throw each and every one of us into an ocean filled with opposing streams of desires, emotions and rationalizations and then seeing with how we deal with it.

Can we do it with awareness and connection or do we give in to distractions, facades and mistrust? Can we do it with patience, virtue and love or do we succumb to fear, lies, anger and destruction?

My choice, my life. Her choice, her life. What's yours?

[goldylamont]

Subotai i feel like you may be being a bit judgmental about your friend's sex life with his wife. i mean it may be something totally different from what you would enjoy, but if it's working for he and his wife and making them happy perhaps it's not such a bad thing. did your ex wife cheat, or perhaps involve another man during your r/s? i know for me when i was raw, any time i heard about infidelities or people sleeping around it really triggered me. because it made me think about how easily my ex could/would have done it to me (i don't have hard evidence she did). it actually must take an incredible amount of trust, vulnerability and love to take someone as your life partner yet be able to step outside and experience sex with others. it's not really my bag of tea now, but i can't judge others if it's working for them. i feel as if your reaction to hearing this from him may indicate your attachment to having a happy and monogamous r/s with your ex wife, the loss of which is traumatizing. knowing that what your friend is doing is not for you is good, but i think it may be good to figure out how hearing that turned into somewhat an idealization of your ex's abuse towards you? she's insightful and great in many ways, i'm sure. yet, she's also abusive and incapable of leading the life together that you wanted. i truly hope over time you get less negative communication from her as i know it's painful.

[Tausk]

Hello Sub:

I'm glad you're here.  It's so very very hard.  I'm glad you're meditating.  My mindfulness practice has been a cornerstone of my recovery. 

However, I'm confused as to what you are asking?   You describe you friend's sexual life with his long term wife as a basis for your own disillusionment.  You speak a bit about your own introspectiveness. 

For me, I had to learn about the Disorder.  I had to depersonalize the Disorder.  I had to grief the interaction.  And I had to learn about my FOO issue, my maladaptive schemas, and why I invited the Disorder into my life and lost my soul to the Disorder.

Do you understand why you invited the disorder into your life?

In support.

T

[Subotai]

Thank you both for the thoughtful replies.

goldylamont,

yes, i am certainly judgmental about his choices. But I do respect him and if that works out for him that's cool. But when it comes to my personal values, ones which I thought him and I might share as we go back so far, I find that perhaps I should have helped him out of his marriage as opposed to him helping me end mine.

I had numerous acquaintances with open relationships and from what I have seen that never ended well. But more so than being open to others, what really triggered me was the willingness to explore separate from each other. If the exploration of outside sexual relationships is a shared experience between him and her, something that directly deepens their openness and knowing of each other, it's a completely different story.

Here I see the first unconscious steps towards eventual separation. It's just a matter of time.

I believe my stbx did not cheat on me, but as I understand her condition more now I will never really know what was and was not true of all the things she spoke of. Early on in our relationship she was pursuing a friendship with a guy who wanted her for sex. She ended that when it caused strive in our relationship. Deep down I feel like infidelity was not an issue with us but I will never really know.

I sure hope that my reaction to his choices didn't cause idealization of my ex's abuse, but you are correct that it brought back a powerful memory of how her and I shared a philosophy on life that is hard to find with another. And yes, she is incapable of building a functional life and that's why I am ok with the separation and I try not to look back.

Our shared philosophy is probably that which I miss the most due to the loss of her and the one thing that makes me most anxious about pursuing new relationships in the future.


Tausk,

I'm not really asking anything directly, that was mostly rhetorical. This post was just a way for me to manifest my thoughts into something more tangible. I figured getting other people's feedback is a great way to expand the thought process and goldylamont's reply is a perfect example of that.

In some way the question in the end is mostly for myself to remember to always choose love over fear, compassion over anger, trust over mistrust, acceptance over judgement. It's what all religions and philosophies ask us to do despite our nature and environment usually encouraging the opposite. It's the path to the top of the mountain of human consciousness. The place to strive for but impossible to reach.

Yes, I do understand why I invited the disorder in my life. It was absolutely necessary for me to break through many of my emotional barriers and inhibitions. The lessons I learned in these years have surpassed anything else in my life when it comes to delving deep into the psyche and learning about who I am when circumstances push me to my limits physically, emotionally and spiritually. As painful as the experience was, I wouldn't want to have missed any of it and I don't really regret anything.

Thank you for the support.