Welcome back,
WhoMe.
I'm sorry for the circumstances that brought you back here. It sounds like you're in a good mental place. You've come to a place of acceptance. That's vital for detaching and moving on. I'm glad you feel more relieved than upset.
I have come to realize no matter how well you know the disorder, you will never get it right.
This is the truth. You can never overcome another person's disorder.
It is so frustrating to love someone like this. But it's even more frustrating to understand why I would ever take her back.
It is frustrating. But don't beat yourself up. Yes, maybe you "knew" better in the rational part of your brain, but you did what you felt was best at the time. There's no shame in loving someone.
This is a wonderful opportunity to learn who you are and what you need and want in life. Treat this as a gift, as lessons learned, instead of as a frustrating misstep.
But now it's my time again to reflect what got me back in this relationship. I think it comes from my childhood and always having to prove my worth and my love to my mom. I could never make her love me or accept me for who I was. And she still doesn't. Her love was performance based. Just as it is with my dBPDex.
You're doing great work, reflecting on yourself.
Conditional love from a parent is traumatic to a child's psyche. I'm so sorry you had to grow up with that. The attachments we make in infancy/childhood certainly affect the relationships we choose as adults. If what you always knew of love was "performance-based," then it makes sense that you would continue to seek out those familiar types of relationships.
Like you, I realized that my relationship with my exBPDbf reminded me a lot of my relationship with my mother. This led me to start really looking at my FOO impacts, and I've learned a lot so far... .and am still learning and processing.
Member
2010 has a lot of helpful posts on using our BPD relationships to discover our own core wounds. This is one of my favorites--
Borderlines seek to attach to a person that represents the false self they wish they could have. False selves are how we wish to appear to others. They are anything we can think to protect our real self from harm. The false self is what we think makes us distinctive, different, and therefore special. You will find your false self crushed when it is mirrored, reflected back to you in your highest glory and then discarded as worthless by another person who has no self of their own, and must borrow yours.
A false self hides your inner child for protection against thoughts that you are insignificant, are unworthy, unlovable, etc. It involves your earliest survival instincts to attach to your first object, Mother, who sets the mood for abandonment (neglect, absenteeism) or engulfment (smothering, doting). The false self was what we had to come up with to please our caretaker -- by determining what was valuable to her -- and guarantee our survival (bond). Years later, as adults, we select people to hear the same message we learned as children -- and we attract them with our false selves -- because the false self is what we used initially to help us with the parent.What parallels can you see with your relationships with your exgf and your mother?
