How to stop idealizing her?

[peacefulmind]

It's funny; I dreamed about her last night and the night before - and I've hardly had any dreams about her in the 9 months since the b/u. I don't remember the first night's dreams, but I do remember last night. We were getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, but then began thinking we might rather stay home. I was aware during the dream that we were acting normal (even at one point, sexual) with one another; but I was also aware that she was in the process of deciding whether to leave the r/s (and had been in that "grey zone" for a while.)  I was debating whether or not to bring the topic up to finally resolve it one way or the other; in the dream I had the same anxiety in the pit of my stomach that I felt in our actual r/s.  What stood out the most to me in the dream is that I couldn't decide if I should bring it up - I think because I was afraid to hear what she had to say. That indecisiveness in our actual r/s (especially towards the end) is what disturbs me the most about my own behavior; I'm normally a pretty decisive person.

As I laid in bed this morning and thought about the dream another thought popped into my head; her habitual lying takes on a whole new meaning in light of my first realization (that her different parts had different goals and desires).  I've always viewed her lying as something she did TO me; something purposefully manipulative so she could "have her cake and eat it too."  I think I've viewed it that way because that's the only reason I can imagine that I would lie under similar circumstances. Viewing her lying as a symptom of her internal battle - of the conflicting desires of her 'parts of self' - is another lens to view it through.

The dream sounds exactly like my experience of my relationship. After a number of breakups and distance episodes I became increasingly fearful about confronting my ex. In the beginning of the relationship I would get distressed and go right to her with my concerns, but I got conditioned to not do that. She would sometimes simply deny what I was saying about the change in her towards me, and sometimes she would validate my sense that she was thinking about leaving. Either one was horrible. As time went on she was less and less engaged, I was less and less secure, and I started the eggshell walk about then.

Like you, I find that I project my own dynamics and reasoning on her: I think "Now if I did that it would mean I did not love this person," whereas her behavior might have meant something totally different for her. I find that I feel better when I tell myself that I don't understand what her experience was in the relationship. I tried many times to find out, but she could never articulate her experience, that was why she couldn't resolve anything. She just acted out and dealt with the fallout later. Or just walked away. I believe that my partner wants to be able to create a permanent, committed relationship and function well within it. If she could do that, I believe that she would have gone farther with me.

This is picture perfect how I found it when the devaluation started. I felt the distancing and the slow decline in activities we used to do together. Instead, they were replaced by new routines that I also liked, but retrospective, I can see how those suited better his/her way of wanting to control me, and make sure I wasn't going anywhere. Reading your post has really helped me understand some of the contradicting and conflicting things I've been going through lately, thank you, and thank you to everyone who has made their valuable contribution as well.

[Achaya]

Sometimes when I would ask about her mind state relative to me, my ex would say, "It depends upon who you ask?" I don't know how she finally decided to leave me. I think she makes impulsive decisions at some point after a lengthy period of hopping from one viewpoint to another. It was obvious after she left me the breakup note that there hadn't been much advance planning. Maybe none at all.

[peacefulmind]

Sometimes when I would ask about her mind state relative to me, my ex would say, "It depends upon who you ask?" I don't know how she finally decided to leave me. I think she makes impulsive decisions at some point after a lengthy period of hopping from one viewpoint to another. It was obvious after she left me the breakup note that there hadn't been much advance planning. Maybe none at all.

It seems that pwBPDs act in very different ways after the black painting. Mine told me he/she needed space, but not a BU. I tried to the best of my ability to give space (given my co-dependency and trust issues, I had a hard time with this, I recognise now... .), but after silent treatment for a long time, I just couldn't do it no more. I can understand that space is sometimes needed for every couple, but you don't do that after you've been in a lengthy relationship, and you don't do it if you're each other's so-called best friends. Guess the friend thing was only a one-way street :/ Another thing is, space can be given, but that doesn't mean that you stop talking to each other. You may reduce the "healthy" love-bombing on each other, you may reduce the amount of times you talk a day, but you most certainly do not stop communication completely. I was never left a note, I was just silent treated until I reached out one last time and got shot down again. It was painful and I couldn't wrap my head around it anymore. I had to end it and that was the hardest decision I've ever had to make. Looking at it from the distance I have now, it shouldn't have been so hard, because my gut feeling is telling me my ex-BPD already had found another person at this point - the ST was just to uphold our relationship on various media, but it was hidden for most people except the closest ones. It was such a joke, and when I found out, it tore my heart even more apart. My ex had most likely already spent time with the next person in line in the long ST I endured... .Sadly... .

[jhkbuzz]

Sometimes when I would ask about her mind state relative to me, my ex would say, "It depends upon who you ask?" I don't know how she finally decided to leave me. I think she makes impulsive decisions at some point after a lengthy period of hopping from one viewpoint to another. It was obvious after she left me the breakup note that there hadn't been much advance planning. Maybe none at all.

WOW.  Just, wow.

[Olivia_D]

It seems that PD people seek empathetic fixers / healers. We have the capacity to genuinely love another. We feel as-is we can nurture them and love them through it "for better or for worse." For me, I take the failure to help someone as a deficit in myself. If I were X, Y, Z or did A, B, C this "could" have worked. If I were prettier, smarter, more patient, et cetera. If I continue to put my wants and needs on the perpetual back burner this might have worked, etc. Notice that all of the I should have, could have, would have puts 100% of the responsibility and work in a relationship on me. In some way, if  I take 100 % of keeping it together or fixing it, it somehow gives me a false sense me being able to cure something that clearly not within my control. I could have been a runway model with a Nobel Peace prize and that wouldn't have made him healthier. I am not perfect but I honestly and genuinely made a true effort to develop a real loving connection with another person. His receptor was broken. That is very sad. Sad that the love he so desperately wished to have may always elude him due to fear. It seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy which he orchestrates. I wish it weren't so but I can't help him, Lord knows I tried.  I have to remind myself that my heart was true and I can't tear myself down for trying. Ridding myself of self-doubt is a huge challenge.

[apollotech]

"I found that the only thing that helped me truly knock her off of that pedestal was time and space, and absolutely no knowledge of how she was or what she was doing. Sounds like you need some room to breath and figure things out in a more clear way."

Achaya,

I think valet is correct, you are going to have to get some time and space away from her to put her and the relationship into the proper perspective. It never was about you or you not being good enough; she told you that as all of her relationships have followed the same pattern. You weren't in all of those relationships, but she was.

[DyingLove]

Sometimes when I would ask about her mind state relative to me, my ex would say, "It depends upon who you ask?" I don't know how she finally decided to leave me. I think she makes impulsive decisions at some point after a lengthy period of hopping from one viewpoint to another. It was obvious after she left me the breakup note that there hadn't been much advance planning. Maybe none at all.

I never gave this much thought but:  It was either right before or right after sex, I had said to my ex something to the effect of:  "who are you now?" referring to a different personality... .I didn't know anything about BPD at this time and I was just saying it in a playful way, because I knew at the time that she was moody and during sex, she just wasn't exactly the same "in the kitchen" kinda woman.  She jumped and asked me what I meant, almost like I stumbled upon something.  I realized to sort of alarmed her at the time, but I didn't give it any more power at the time.  As you can see, I never forgot this... .It' sticks right up there with her comment: "I have a habit of pushing people away".

I am SO VERY HARD trying to STOP thinking about her.  I don't know why it's so impossible!  She just keeps popping up, and yesterday, mothers day, was an absolute killer.  That is an occasion that I should have been with her... .out to morning breakfast with the family, the little one (9yo) at home regardless of if she was with her biodad or not. Just so many things and feelings surrounding what she took away from me.  Of course there is always the thought if she is having fun and smiling without me or with someone new.  I do not want to be affected by those things.  I don't think about my ex wife, nor the loss of GF's in the past. I don't want this either.  Does it make sense?

[Achaya]

Valet and Apollotech, I agree with you about the separation time. I went NC with my ex just last Tuesday, after we had finalized all the business of the BU. I have to say that I was very relieved immediately. I had been nonstop anxious about having any contact, because of my conflict between the painful longing for her and the fear of how she would be with me, so obviously out of the relationship. Imposing the NC on the relationship has helped me move from bargaining to depression. I still go back to fantasy conversations that are all about bargaining, but when I am in reality I know that this is a hopeless relationship.

Dying Love, it takes a long time to get over a normal relationship if it is a deep one, and usually they aren't ended when the bloom is still on the rosebud. I had a relationship with an NPD guy several decades ago that was of the type we have been discussing on this board. I was wildly in love, but he kept a lot of distance, had sex with other women, and would vanish altogether for a couple weeks at a time sometimes. He finally dumped me after 4 years. I obsessed and longed for him for years. As much as 20 years later I would have dreams about him filled with grief, longing, and a desire to heal the breach at the end (he ended it on the phone, devaluing me). On the rare occasions when I would talk about him to a friend, I would be surprised and embarrassed to find tears in my eyes. Finally, after 25 years he called me one day. We had several phone conversations in which he expressed his regrets about how he had treated me and told me the truth about how important I had been to him. He explained that he had freaked out and "run away" because he was scared of his feelings for me, which were intense and ambivalent. He also told me some things about his current life that let me know it wasn't vastly different from what had been going on when we were in our 20's. (Drinking, drugging, married with gfs on the side). The whole picture he gave me enabled me to let go. I saw that the love I thought we had when we were together was real. I also saw that he had never had his act together, and although he was doing MUCH better when we spoke on the phone, his lifestyle still wasn't one that I could respect. I meanwhile had established a stable, healthy life, and couldn't imagine sharing the same activities we had done together as graduate students, partying together and so on. What he said during our phone conversations released me from the ego hurts he had inflicted long ago, healed the rift in our friendship, and also showed me that he wasn't really what I as a mature person wanted from a partner. All the bad stuff I had seen in him when we were young, which I had mostly dismissed, was still in him, and had sabotaged his life.

The question is, how do we move on from these people if we never get the healing phone call? If we don't someday see our ex as failing in life and in relationships with others? I am looking inwardly for solutions. I think that part of it is that we need to trust our feelings more. I "knew" when I was first together with the man just described that he reciprocated my feelings for him, and I also "knew" that he was abusive and disturbed. I just couldn't really take in all that I knew at the time. I didn't want the bad parts to be true because it would mean he wasn't willing or able to commit to me. I couldn't trust the good parts because of my low self-esteem, and because the episodes of devaluation played into that. I believed the devaluation because that fit what I already thought about myself. The last part was the reality that a fragile and beautiful connection was stomped on and trashed at the end. Now I have the possibility of a real friendship with him but I no longer want it.

I have had no contact with this man since he called me years ago. I still think about him sometimes, especially now that I have just been dumped again by someone I fell so hard for. But I don't long for him at all now, don't have sad dreams about him, and am able to keep all the good I had with him without any longer taking his other stuff personally.I hope that you and I can both reach that place of peace with our most recent exes, and can move on to healthier partnerships in the future.

[ZeusRLX]

I still think of my pwBPD ex as the Love of my Life who left me.

It still feels to me like she abandoned me because I wasn't good enough. I think she probably does think that, at least part of the time, maybe most of the time now. But why do I have to think it? Why do I have to think that she was right to reject me? (I do actually think she was right to end the relationship, because it was unhealthy, but that isn't the same thing as leaving because I wasn't good enough).

How do I stop being my ex's idealizing mirror?

You still think that because you spent a lot of time in an intimate relationship with someone extremely sick, acquiring some of their patterns/ideas as a result.

The most helpful thing is... .he has a very serious disease, BPD... .that is the ONLY reason things got as bad as they did and the reason she left.

Your part was allowing that disease to manipulate you but other than that, nothing else.

Don't try to look for any cause in yourself for her leaving... .nothing you did caused her to do the crazy things she did and to leave... .BPD did.

Realizing that there is no cause and relationship between your actions and him leaving is very enlightening.

But there is a cause and effect relationship in allowing a person like her into your life and that would be a serious question for you and for all of us to consider so that we don't do it again.

But it takes time. I thought of my first as the lost love of my life for 6 years.

Now I see her as what she is.  A disease that misled me and made me mistake a sick fantasy/manipulation for true love.

[jhkbuzz]

The question is, how do we move on from these people if we never get the healing phone call? If we don't someday see our ex as failing in life and in relationships with others? I am looking inwardly for solutions. I think that part of it is that we need to trust our feelings more. I "knew" when I was first together with the man just described that he reciprocated my feelings for him, and I also "knew" that he was abusive and disturbed. I just couldn't really take in all that I knew at the time. I didn't want the bad parts to be true because it would mean he wasn't willing or able to commit to me. I couldn't trust the good parts because of my low self-esteem, and because the episodes of devaluation played into that. I believed the devaluation because that fit what I already thought about myself. The last part was the reality that a fragile and beautiful connection was stomped on and trashed at the end. Now I have the possibility of a real friendship with him but I no longer want it.

I think you already may sense the answer to this question, Achaya.  It's a "both/and" - you both have to understand the disorder of your ex (to make sense of what you've just been through) AND examine yourself to see why you end up in these types of r/s's. I'm doing the very same thing.

I think it's possible to give yourself closure - I'm making a lot of progress doing it in my own r/s. I am seeing more and more that what my ex did in our r/s with me wasn't really personal - it was the progression of the disorder. I can let go of the hurt and work on forgiveness at the same time I put up boundaries to keep from getting hurt by her in the future. The fact that she is disordered doesn't give her a free pass to emotionally devastate me ever again.

My feelings of love for her have been harder to deal with, but as my understanding of the disorder grows and I really see her as she is - and as more time passes - my feeling for her lessen.  I don't think there's any way to hasten this process.

More importantly, I'm looking at why I overlooked the red flags in the beginning of our r/s. There are several reasons: I was deeply unhappy in my own life and she was a welcome distraction; she had a daughter and provided me with the opportunity to raise a child and have an instant ""family";  I enjoyed being a "fixer for some of the problems in her life (and she enjoyed my fixing, at least in the beginning). I'm sure there's more but as I take on more and more of my "part" in things I feel less out of control and more grounded.  I have been involved with two undiagnosed personality disordered women, and my biggest task is figuring out why this is the case.

I'm glad you got that phone call from your ex, but it really is possible, over time, to give ourselves closure if we look do the healing work on ourselves that is probably long overdue.

[Achaya]

I have to admit that one of my attractions to these disturbed people is that I am fascinated by the complexity of their stuff. I have always loved a puzzle, and I am confident enough to want the really challenging ones. I noticed in the last six months of my last relationship that I was not as interested in my partner's stuff as I had been. I was beginning to experience it as rather boring and irritating, an elaborate excuse for her unwillingness to enjoy all that we had together. Maybe this was another reason why she left me, because I was losing interest in her disorder. I would have been very happy with an ordinary lover who just wanted to enjoy her life with me, but she didn't enjoy any aspect of her life so that wasn't possible. This is another factor I will keep in mind in the future: with some people, the most interesting thing about them is their stuff. The person herself/himself is much less developed to the extent that their stuff is big and interesting.

[apollotech]

Achaya,

"I still go back to fantasy conversations that are all about bargaining, but when I am in reality I know that this is a hopeless relationship."

That's normal; we all do that. It's clinging hope that he/she will come around and everything will get better and be normal. With time and acceptance (your rational thoughts) that unfounded hope will dissipate. Your recognition that the relationship was unhealthy is a sign that you're on the right path towards recovery. It is hard to let go of someone that we love. Our entire lives are based on doing just the opposite of that---if you love someone you bring them into your life. Unfortunately, a pwBPD has a very difficult time accepting the parameters of said intimacy---too close, engulfment, too far away, abandonment. It's a no win scenario as stability cannot be established. Emotions and energies are consumed in maintaining the relationship rather than growing it.

[Achaya]

Achaya,

Emotions and energies are consumed in maintaining the relationship rather than growing it.

I think this is a very profound insight!