Letting her define me

[mosaicbird]

Still sifting through the tangled mess that was my relationship with my exwBPD... .  I think the people in my life think it's a waste of time - what's done is done - but for me, it's the most valuable treasure trove of my own twisted thinking, dysfunctional relating style, and damning evidence of my own disordered self that could possibly exist. And to some extent I've turned it into an internal litany of "Look, I'm a terrible person. I destroy everything I touch and am 100% to blame for it all. I am a monster after all", which, objectively, is ridiculous.

But anyway... certain things still pop out at me, things I wasn't allowed to talk about or bring up when I was with her, because she would say I was blaming it all on her and not taking responsibility for my own actions. (Repeat x1000, and reverse it just as often. The whole relationship reminds me of an infinity mirror.)

One of those things is how she would invariably dismiss and negate any mention or hint of my true self, the one that I buried and around which all of my defenses are built up. Even though she would beg me constantly to open up and let her in, let her see who I really was beneath the distance, dissociation, and walls - even though she told me on multiple occasions that she wished she could go back in time to comfort the child I'd been and show me love (!) - whenever I did, she would kick me right in the face and tell me I couldn't be that person.

A memory popped into my head this morning, of something that happened near the beginning of our relationship. I was 18 - had moved thousands of miles away to be with her (and, yes, to escape my own BPD mother... hahaha, good job) - and I was telling her that I'd like to be a social worker specializing in elder issues (something that stems from my authentic self). BAM. She, who can't stand elderly people, told me that would be a horrible fit for me and that I would hate it. That I had no idea what I was talking about, and was kidding myself to think I would enjoy it.

There are many instances of similar conversations occurring. She told me that she couldn't stand my idealism. That it was misguided, immature, and that I needed to grow up and get my head out of the clouds. True, in some ways... .  but to react so angrily whenever I showed compassion for people (other than her), I believe was inappropriate.

When I started delving into family of origin issues a few years ago, and finally started realizing that the person I'd become contrasted starkly with how I felt, deep down, she was incredibly unsupportive and dismissive. When I would talk about how my nihilism was a direct reaction against my inherent idealism, and that my mask of invulnerability and coldness was a direct reaction against my vulnerability and empathy, she said, "I don't believe that. I've never seen any evidence of those things in you, so they can't be true."

And I rebelled, on the outside, got angry... .  but inside, I was always accepting her vision of me as the truth, integrating into the role further and further, reflecting/becoming/being what she said I was. "Okay, you say I'm cold. I will be. Okay, you say I'm invulnerable. I will be."

I've had this line from one of her poems about me running through my head... couldn't figure out why, until today.

"How beautiful it will be

to crush you until you become me"

I was attracted to her because she seemed to sure about herself, so strong. So much someone to whom I could anchor myself and stop drifting, stop being lost. Even now, I long for her to come back and define me. Tell me who to be, give me something/someone to mirror. Even realizing this, I long for it.

Perhaps my saving grace has always been the rebellious streak that makes up part of my true self, the part that cries out to me to PLEASE... .  just let me be me already.

I don't know where the heck this post is wandering off to. It wasn't supposed to go here, but the more I type, the more I feel desperate and long for her to come back and show me that light. I just don't know if the light was hers or mine.

[Clearmind]

Hmmm mosaic - how your post rings so true for many of us. And beautifully expressed.

I recall when I first separated from ex how I felt like I would be searching for 'me' for ever. I had been in many enmeshed relationships and when my therapist asked me "Who is Clearmind?" (ironically) I had no clue how to answer her.

After much discussion with my T - I had deduced that I felt that I am someone who is useful - my BPDf required me to be useful because my emotional needs never suited him.

I felt useful if I was useful - if that makes sense. When I was discarded by my exBPDbf - my very being - who I thought I was - 'useful' - was not useful at all - I had failed. I crashed and I had spent so much of my time fixing, getting praise, fixing some more - that what I thought was a renewable resource was not.

So Who Am I? Who Are We? I know now I don't need to be useful to be valued, I don't need to be defined by those around me. When I stopped fixing i.e. being 'useful' I felt bored for a while - in the midst of boredom finding myself - I found freedom - freedom to define who I really am. I had the space now, being single, to find me - without the magical thinking of a BPD r/s.

Defining who we are is more simple than I thought - I didn't have to skip to page 9 of my resume to find myself.

Who I Am is a person who is happy and content with the little things - clear out the FOG and the little things are really special. I live in the present - not the past or the future - I am confident at protecting myself, I know I can move through things a lot easier than I use to, I am proud of my achievements.

Extracting ourselves from out from under our Borderlines takes a little effort - for me however - I had to extract myself from under the tight hold my father had on me - or so I thought. And to a lesser extent my enabling mother.

Who Are You Mosaic? Rather than what you like to do? Your beliefs? look in the mirror at look at you!

What you loved about your exBPDw, is what others see in you - she mirrored you

[mosaicbird]

Who am I... That questions invokes so much anxiety in me. I'm so afraid of being told I'm wrong. Of all the "shoulds/should nots" I've heard and absorbed in my life, of all the times I was negated and diminished and punished and made to feel that my very existence was wrong and unwanted. And I'm afraid of believing I'm something I'm not and having it collapse in on me like it has so many times before.

The funny thing is... .  at our last break, when I was struggling with the abandonment and the fact that I knew she was bad for me, but still longing to go back and undo my betrayals, undo the actions I took that forced her to that point... I knew that I had to let her go in order to move forward. That holding on to her was hindering my growth... .  and that change and growth would cause me to lose her. I couldn't change while holding on to her, and I couldn't hold on to her if I changed. Letting go, losing her... .  Unbearable. I know she replaced my mother/grandmother as the central figure in my life. I let go of them emotionally long ago and used her to fill that absence. Replaying my childhood with her... demanding she love me unconditionally and never leave, no matter what I did. It hurts so much to have their abandonments played out again through her. To feel, again, that I'm worthless and that I shouldn't exist. Even though it was my own unthinking cruelty and constant dismissal and rejection of her over the years that led to that point.

Who I am/was, underneath it all, is this: Weak, vulnerable, loving, impulsive, imaginative, idealistic, empathetic, observant, intuitive, funny, protective, loyal, adventurous, easily amused and delighted, generous, wild, and horribly open and trusting.

Why was that bad? Why was I always punished for it? Being told I was too affectionate, too loud, too hyper, too unrealistic, too demanding... .  Why did every compliment or expression of approval have a "but" on the end of it?

I don't know how to be "me" and survive. Survival meant/means being the opposite.

[MaybeSo]

The childs instinct is to enter the room and announce "TA DA... .  here I am, it's me!"

When this is met with being ignored, erased, criticized, humiliated, skepticism, derision, anger, disgust... .  

The child is shamed, and the burgeoning sense of an authentic  self goes underground, and only safe masks are exposed for protection.

As children we had no choice, the mask was needed to survive. Our survival depended on those caregivers approval... The dependency was REAL.

But not anymore. We are no longer dependent on the approval of others for our very existence,

though it may feel as if we are.  And so it takes courage to remove the mask, knowing that

some people are whole enough and secure  enough to embrace who you are and honor your

individuality, and some will not. Those who cannot, are announcing their own insecurity and their own woundedness, it's not personal to you.

I can see from your writing there is a lot of beauty there under the mask.

[mosaicbird]

The childs instinct is to enter the room and announce "TA DA... .  here I am, it's me!"

Ah... .  yes. So true. And so true how all of my reactions are still that of a child. What a terrible way to live, this eternal cycle of reacting and then punishing myself for those reactions. Reinflicting the same wounds, over and over again, and daring/pushing the people around me to do the same and reinforce my beliefs. Here I am, an "adult", still wandering through life in a fully armed tank, not knowing any other way to live. But despite so many attempts, I could never kill that child off, never get her out of me. Instead... .  I gave her/her pain complete access to the controls. How backwards, and how cruel to continue to punish the most vulnerable, authentic part of myself.

Thank you, MaybeSo and Clearmind. This forum has been so, so helpful. I finally understand what's going on in my head, and from here on out my responsibility for my actions is tripled, because I can't go back to pretending that I don't know what's wrong or that I haven't seen what my actions do to others. Not after this. It seems like there's a point when that defense against self-awareness cracks, and you have a choice. Rebuild it and continue to live in the dark, or push through it to whatever waits on the other side.

I've lost so much, yet I'm still alive in here... .  And I want to fight to stay that way now. I'm not invisible. I'm not a non-entity. I don't need to prove my existence to myself by hurting others (that love = pain belief). I will continue - I have continued, even through this latest abandonment - to exist, somehow. I don't want to lose this. There are so many tools available to help me, and I don't want to feel helpless against myself anymore, even though it would be easier and comfortable. I think I want to grow up now. 

[Grey Kitty]

This is reminding me of a book on personal growth that I read a couple years ago and still look to now and again.

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

Good stuff about how you define your world, and what you can do to bring more good into it for everybody.

[Clearmind]

The child is shamed, and the burgeoning sense of an authentic  self goes underground, and only safe masks are exposed for protection.

---And so it takes courage to remove the mask

Great post MaybeSo and so so true! Its so interesting that as adults we find it hard to say "TA DA... .  here I am" - fear of being judged, fear of being diminished really holds us back.

As a child I learnt to adapt to an ever changing environment. I was malleable – there was little room for any stable sense of self because my father’s moods would change in on a dime – with that I had learnt to also shift to fit – to avoid abuse. As an adult I learnt to adapt – I had no clue who I was – I was reliant on others to define it. This lead to me being very unhappy and my surroundings were very invalidating.

My r/s break-up mirrored my childhood which was the reason it hurt so much.  It allowed me to finally grieve my childhood. While at the time I felt I had lost my entire world – what it did in fact was strip me down so to speak – to a complete raw state - I was then able to re-build a stronger, more stable, authentic sense of self.

There is a lot to be said for pain – it really does lead to growth. Your pain mosaic is a good thing – it means you are awake and alive and more aware of what you need to work on and work through. Your partner was a mask to this pain – that mask you developed from your childhood – to protect/shield you – when our partners leave – we now need to learn to bring our self above ground – no longer hide behind the mask of childhood conditioning. As a child, I was not permitted the range of emotions that are everyone’s right to have – especially anger! I had to locate that anger and let it out before I could really move forward. This is part of the grieving process.

Life for me, post break-up, post realizing my father is uBPD – was hard I will admit – life felt risky, my actions felt risky, I felt so so very vulnerable – almost childlike – this is a path I had to go through to come out the other side to become a  person who could now balance their own emotions, make myself happy and not need a BPD or other energy suckers to mask my pain.

[mosaicbird]

I've been doing some more reading this weekend - primarily Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide (obviously not a practitioner, but I like to get in depth with these things) - and I'm seeing a very obvious pattern in my interaction with my ex, and that is that she seemed to function in many ways as an external reinforcement of the Punitive Parent schema mode (which has always been very active in my mind), and I think that would explain to some degree why she could trigger intense, destructive rage in me in a way nobody else but my mother can. My ex was very punitive and frequently implied that I deserved to be hurt or punished emotionally for my sins against her. (In fact, she once told me that I had to seek "absolution" from her, whatever the heck that means in an interpersonal relationship! That did not go over well.)

Sad to say, in the week when our final break-up was going on, I wanted nothing more than to crawl back, beg for absolution and forgiveness, and accept whatever lies she wanted to tell me. Nothing - sanity, pride - mattered more that sense of utter desolation and despair at being abandoned by her, and the desperate desire to just get her to acknowledge me again and look at me... .  

Part of what that experience did for me is show me, quite vividly, that my false persona and my masks are useless in close relationships. If I let someone in that far, let them access my true emotional self, they can still tear me apart behind the walls. So all the mask has served to do in that context is cause immense damage both to my relationships and to the people I try, in my broken way, to care about. Operating this way has not actually protected me in my adult life, even if it has enabled me to hide the pain from myself and others.

Hence, though it is exquisitely uncomfortable, painful, and terrifying, I am trying now on a daily basis to stop dissociating from my emotions and let them exist in my consciousness for as long as I can stand it. I always used to say, "I can't let myself feel these things and survive my day-to-day life," and I'm still not sure how to get past that, because I do not have a natural emotional barrier to separate myself from the world and from others, and I feel raw and assaulted and besieged and overwhelmed by everyone else's moods and emotions constantly if I don't cut off my emotional experience from myself completely.

I'm in the process of trying to find a therapist I can trust and who can help me learn the boundary management (okay, boundary establishment!) and emotional skills that I don't seem to have developed properly during all the years I spent locking myself away. (I have sporadically kept a journal for the last 10 years, and the patterns and different facets of my mind/self have been fairly stable and recognizable over that entire time, so at least I'm not dealing with something for which I don't already have a somewhat coherent map. This is why schema modes are so fascinating to me, because they essentially describe something I'd already mapped out in similar terms in my own mind.)

Anyway, onwards I go. I am determined to finally start defining myself by what's inside me.

[KE151]

This is the single most valuable thread I've ever read. I'm learning these things about me at a very slow pace and this helped me forward quite a bit. Thank you mosaic for sharing, you're a star.