My (former, though he won't accept it) Boyfriend of 7yrs is BPD

[Depression = 72% of members]

For the past 7 years I've been in what I've come to realize was a very emotionally abusive polyamorous relationship my now 30y/o boyfriend.  I always joked that we worked because in spite of working together, being artistic partners, and him compartmentalizing HIS friendships and lovers to the point of outright pointless lies while living together for five years, we both traveled often and "spent enough time apart to stay together." Over the past two years I became sicker and sicker, and last year I was ultimately disabled and diagnosed with a rare neuromuscular disorder called Myasthenia Gravis. My case at that point was so severe it was (and is only just now barely no longer) life-threatening, causing sudden muscle weakness so intense I would lose all voluntary body control and have major falls, choke on my own saliva, and even lose the ability to breath on my own and require mechanical ventilation. The disease also causes complications with many common medications, including antibiotics, anesthetics, and more, so being in the hospital alone and unable to communicate was incredibly dangerous as such medications would be routinely administered to me, causing neurotoxic reactions that would then cause further life-threatening complications. I basically spent most of this year 60% in the hospital fighting for my life, 20% on the ground or floor somewhere paralyzed and in pain hoping someone would find me before I died, and the rest struggling to manage the coordination of my own care: doctors, billing, transportation of my mobility impaired body, etc etc etc. All on my own, because my partner... .was used to me taking care of him. And of course, since I wasn't, because I was sick, I was BAD BAD BAD.

So while I was fighting for my life in the hospital, he not only didn't visit, he also didn't call. Or pick me up from the hospital. Or even post on my Facebook. But he did spend a lot of time talking around town about how sad and difficult it was to live with a cripple. What a disappointment it was. How his life was so changed. How unfair it was. What a victim he was. How I didn't want visitors. How I didn't want calls. How I didn't want anyone to see me that way/basically how I should be left to do everything on my own or potentially just like, die, haha. 

He also, in spite of a discussion about how we should not enter into any *new* additional relationships (he still had several others to meet his needs, plus, I might add, in spite of all my issues, we were still intimate emotionally AND physically) at this time b/c of the intense needs of our primary relationship, took up with another woman (a BPD person who used gender-neutral pronouns during her affair with my partner but is back using feminine pronouns now, so I'm using the feminines) who openly mocked me on social media, performing impressions of my NMD-impaired speech, writing essays about how I was dying and my boyfriend was grooming her to replace me but she was using him; sending me pictures while I was hospitalized of him between her naked breasts, etc. When I heard she was kicked out of her rental room I told my boyfriend she was welcome to stay in our home for a period of one week to transition, because that is what decent humans do for the people that they are having intercourse with, of course. When I came home from the hospital, they made me sleep on an air mattress on the floor of my art studio while they shared my and my boyfriends' bed in our master bedroom, because "her anxiety disorder & BPD were so severe" she couldn't handle leaving the room. Once, my doctor told my boyfriend that I was in such immediate danger that I couldn't be left alone, not even for a moment, while we waited for a hospital bed to open; and that I should NOT be taken through the ER due to the issues mentioned before with medications. He also said that I was at extreme risk of infection b/c my immune system was so low and to scrub the room at home and self while tending me for the next few hours to make sure that I didn't catch anything, since a respiratory bug could easily kill me. My BF took me home, put me to bed, and said he was going to the gym. He came back hours later, unwashed, having gone to visit a woman he had just met that HE KNEW HAD A SEVERE UPPER RESPIRATORY INFECTION, with whom HE HAD SEX. It was less than 2hrs later that I was being rushed to the ER, my throat swelling shut. He literally did not care if I lived or died.

These are some of the most heinous actions he performed in his attempts to get me to dump him so he could be leave "the sick girl" and yet not be BAD somehow. Yet every time over the past six months I tried to end our relationship, he would cling harder. I demanded he seek professional help time and time again over the years, but never enforced such ultimatums until the summer. He began therapy half-heartedly, shopped doctors, collected medications, began abusing them in secret, took up disordered eating and self harm, started making suicidal threats to me. Finally I got my own health into a place stable enough where I was able to address his somewhat, put him in for full analysis, his behaviors escalated and I put him on Suicide Watch protocols; he broke the behavior contract we made at home and put my safety as well as his in jeopardy, so in accordance with our agreement he went and voluntarily signed himself in to the local ER for acute psychiatric care about a week and a half ago. We live in Florida, where there's this thing called the Baker Act (it stinks, look it up if interested), so he was held involuntarily in an awful State-run facility for 5 days where they not only abruptly discontinued the Adderall he's been on for a year, they overmedicated him to the point of drooling on himself with Klonopin and did not even notice that he passed most of his time in the cafeteria burning his knuckles on the faucet. He was dismissed with a rubber-stamp of "major depression" and scripts for Buspar and Zoloft.

Since coming home, we were able to collect his diagnosis from his psych--"BPD tendencies"--and I feel awful for missing the signs, as soon as she said it it was like a weight lifting off my chest, years of misunderstanding and feelings of malice from him clarified. And he sat bolt upright and said OH MY GOD as she read from the DSM. It could've been his OKC profile. Afterward, she told me privately that her actual diagnosis was that he is fully BPD, with Narc & Dependent tendencies, but she doesn't believe in telling BPDs up front that they are fully BPD right away since there is a stigma that the condition is untreatable and my partner in particular has expressed such reluctance to enter into the 30 day program that is being recommended and, frankly, seek any treatment at all, that she didn't want to say anything that might further discourage him from treatment.

I'm doing my best to arrange some kind of appropriate pro care regime for him ASAP. We're touring the residential facility tomorrow afternoon. They also offer a partial program, 9-3 daily, which I guess is better than me trying and obviously soon failing to sustain my day-watch. He's currently still on edge of full out crisis, like, before he went into the State facility he would be having screaming crying near(?)-psychosis fits multiple times daily that would last sometimes for hours, chanting "I'm bad I'm bad" and burning himself, denying himself water or food, fainting, picking his scalp till it bleeds, having unprotected sex with who knows who/what, acting/saying inappropriate things in public and at work, just... .not... .in a good place. Plus, all the suicide threats. Only to me, apparently, but that's enough, right? I don't feel comfortable leaving him unobserved until I know he has stable care, and I'm not about to put him back in the clearly incapable hands of the State since they were letting him mutilate himself.

At this point I feel sorta unreal. There's a weird relief in me that I don't even feel guilty for: I've just completely dropped everything I was starting to think of as "abuse" this year. Not that the wrongs have evaporated, but they've just become sort of uninteresting except in a clinical sense. They weren't done with malice. They were a function of his illness. From my very shallow understanding of how it works, I think it's actually kind of beautiful that he's held such a strong connection to me for so long in spite of his split thinking. I'm not proud to say that I'm relieved his actions are the result of a mental illness and not an abusive character, but I'm not ashamed of it either. It's just the way it is. Seven years is a long time and I've been through a lot, emotionally, and I know I'm entitled to my own feelings so it's cool. But the unreality comes in with the guilt that I'm not sure I'm ready to own yet, because it's too big:

He's lived three decades on this planet constantly trying to guess, as he explained it, whether people are loving him or hating him, because everyone is doing one or the other at all times with laser-like focus and he needs to be earning love love love love love OR ELSE. Have I really loved this man as much as I said/thought, if I didn't look closely enough or watch him long enough to see him struggling that way? In seven years together? For 30 years he's lived that way and *never knew that other people weren't thinking the exact same way.* For 30 years he's been suffering so much and no one, not his family, not his other lovers, not his friends... .not even me... .noticed. I feel unreal with the weight of that guilt.

I know that he can't ever be a primary partner to me. I need more than he could possibly give. But I don't want him out of my life, at all. Not from guilt, but from genuine affection and respect and connection. And should he choose to pursue some therapy to assist in interpersonal management, I don't preclude the possibility of a limited romantic partnership continuing in the future. The far future, likely, because he is quite unhealthy now, and needs to focus entirely on himself. And I am encouraging him to do so. He is very fixated on his romantic connections (including ours) and I have told him we are "broken up" but also that he just shouldn't worry about it, I'll always be in his life, but esp now with the BPD diagnosis and emphasis on abandonment fears I am stressing more the "always be in your life" and "discussing our relationship is a windmill, Don Quixote, let's talk about your treatment options and once you have a treatment regime we can talk about our relationship with a therapist present, remember?" ... .which I hope is the right tactic, it certainly seems to be working so far.

A part of me wants to drop him and focus on my own health now that I am slightly improved and push push push to improve more and just... .give myself that attention I feel I deserve after the hardest year of my life instead of looking forward to MORE insane struggles and hardships, all for the benefit of someone else, that will also be causing me further hardship since focusing on him is 24/7 right now and I have no income, no one setting up my healthcare, etc etc, so I'm neglecting myself... .but the only other option he has is his mother, who is hours away and facing early stomach cancer after just losing her father. Love is sometimes a light, but not often is it light when it is carried. And he needs someone or I fear he will just spiral downward, I fear it's far more than just fear of abandonment at play here, though my ego, of course, would take the soothing I guess were it so and it would be no small practical relief, alongside a huge heartbreak, to walk away I guess.

Such a gigantic long post. But since he pretty much alienated everyone I know over the last year, I don't really have anyone to confess this all to, ha!

[FartonmyHeart]

For the past 7 years I've been in what I've come to realize was a very emotionally abusive polyamorous relationship my now 30y/o boyfriend.  I always joked that we worked because in spite of working together, being artistic partners, and him compartmentalizing HIS friendships and lovers to the point of outright pointless lies while living together for five years, we both traveled often and "spent enough time apart to stay together." Over the past two years I became sicker and sicker, and last year I was ultimately disabled and diagnosed with a rare neuromuscular disorder called Myasthenia Gravis. My case at that point was so severe it was (and is only just now barely no longer) life-threatening, causing sudden muscle weakness so intense I would lose all voluntary body control and have major falls, choke on my own saliva, and even lose the ability to breath on my own and require mechanical ventilation. The disease also causes complications with many common medications, including antibiotics, anesthetics, and more, so being in the hospital alone and unable to communicate was incredibly dangerous as such medications would be routinely administered to me, causing neurotoxic reactions that would then cause further life-threatening complications. I basically spent most of this year 60% in the hospital fighting for my life, 20% on the ground or floor somewhere paralyzed and in pain hoping someone would find me before I died, and the rest struggling to manage the coordination of my own care: doctors, billing, transportation of my mobility impaired body, etc etc etc. All on my own, because my partner... .was used to me taking care of him. And of course, since I wasn't, because I was sick, I was BAD BAD BAD.

So while I was fighting for my life in the hospital, he not only didn't visit, he also didn't call. Or pick me up from the hospital. Or even post on my Facebook. But he did spend a lot of time talking around town about how sad and difficult it was to live with a cripple. What a disappointment it was. How his life was so changed. How unfair it was. What a victim he was. How I didn't want visitors. How I didn't want calls. How I didn't want anyone to see me that way/basically how I should be left to do everything on my own or potentially just like, die, haha. 

He also, in spite of a discussion about how we should not enter into any *new* additional relationships (he still had several others to meet his needs, plus, I might add, in spite of all my issues, we were still intimate emotionally AND physically) at this time b/c of the intense needs of our primary relationship, took up with another woman (a BPD person who used gender-neutral pronouns during her affair with my partner but is back using feminine pronouns now, so I'm using the feminines) who openly mocked me on social media, performing impressions of my NMD-impaired speech, writing essays about how I was dying and my boyfriend was grooming her to replace me but she was using him; sending me pictures while I was hospitalized of him between her naked breasts, etc. When I heard she was kicked out of her rental room I told my boyfriend she was welcome to stay in our home for a period of one week to transition, because that is what decent humans do for the people that they are having intercourse with, of course. When I came home from the hospital, they made me sleep on an air mattress on the floor of my art studio while they shared my and my boyfriends' bed in our master bedroom, because "her anxiety disorder & BPD were so severe" she couldn't handle leaving the room. Once, my doctor told my boyfriend that I was in such immediate danger that I couldn't be left alone, not even for a moment, while we waited for a hospital bed to open; and that I should NOT be taken through the ER due to the issues mentioned before with medications. He also said that I was at extreme risk of infection b/c my immune system was so low and to scrub the room at home and self while tending me for the next few hours to make sure that I didn't catch anything, since a respiratory bug could easily kill me. My BF took me home, put me to bed, and said he was going to the gym. He came back hours later, unwashed, having gone to visit a woman he had just met that HE KNEW HAD A SEVERE UPPER RESPIRATORY INFECTION, with whom HE HAD SEX. It was less than 2hrs later that I was being rushed to the ER, my throat swelling shut. He literally did not care if I lived or died.

These are some of the most heinous actions he performed in his attempts to get me to dump him so he could be leave "the sick girl" and yet not be BAD somehow. Yet every time over the past six months I tried to end our relationship, he would cling harder. I demanded he seek professional help time and time again over the years, but never enforced such ultimatums until the summer. He began therapy half-heartedly, shopped doctors, collected medications, began abusing them in secret, took up disordered eating and self harm, started making suicidal threats to me. Finally I got my own health into a place stable enough where I was able to address his somewhat, put him in for full analysis, his behaviors escalated and I put him on Suicide Watch protocols; he broke the behavior contract we made at home and put my safety as well as his in jeopardy, so in accordance with our agreement he went and voluntarily signed himself in to the local ER for acute psychiatric care about a week and a half ago. We live in Florida, where there's this thing called the Baker Act (it stinks, look it up if interested), so he was held involuntarily in an awful State-run facility for 5 days where they not only abruptly discontinued the Adderall he's been on for a year, they overmedicated him to the point of drooling on himself with Klonopin and did not even notice that he passed most of his time in the cafeteria burning his knuckles on the faucet. He was dismissed with a rubber-stamp of "major depression" and scripts for Buspar and Zoloft.

Since coming home, we were able to collect his diagnosis from his psych--"BPD tendencies"--and I feel awful for missing the signs, as soon as she said it it was like a weight lifting off my chest, years of misunderstanding and feelings of malice from him clarified. And he sat bolt upright and said OH MY GOD as she read from the DSM. It could've been his OKC profile. Afterward, she told me privately that her actual diagnosis was that he is fully BPD, with Narc & Dependent tendencies, but she doesn't believe in telling BPDs up front that they are fully BPD right away since there is a stigma that the condition is untreatable and my partner in particular has expressed such reluctance to enter into the 30 day program that is being recommended and, frankly, seek any treatment at all, that she didn't want to say anything that might further discourage him from treatment.

I'm doing my best to arrange some kind of appropriate pro care regime for him ASAP. We're touring the residential facility tomorrow afternoon. They also offer a partial program, 9-3 daily, which I guess is better than me trying and obviously soon failing to sustain my day-watch. He's currently still on edge of full out crisis, like, before he went into the State facility he would be having screaming crying near(?)-psychosis fits multiple times daily that would last sometimes for hours, chanting "I'm bad I'm bad" and burning himself, denying himself water or food, fainting, picking his scalp till it bleeds, having unprotected sex with who knows who/what, acting/saying inappropriate things in public and at work, just... .not... .in a good place. Plus, all the suicide threats. Only to me, apparently, but that's enough, right? I don't feel comfortable leaving him unobserved until I know he has stable care, and I'm not about to put him back in the clearly incapable hands of the State since they were letting him mutilate himself.

At this point I feel sorta unreal. There's a weird relief in me that I don't even feel guilty for: I've just completely dropped everything I was starting to think of as "abuse" this year. Not that the wrongs have evaporated, but they've just become sort of uninteresting except in a clinical sense. They weren't done with malice. They were a function of his illness. From my very shallow understanding of how it works, I think it's actually kind of beautiful that he's held such a strong connection to me for so long in spite of his split thinking. I'm not proud to say that I'm relieved his actions are the result of a mental illness and not an abusive character, but I'm not ashamed of it either. It's just the way it is. Seven years is a long time and I've been through a lot, emotionally, and I know I'm entitled to my own feelings so it's cool. But the unreality comes in with the guilt that I'm not sure I'm ready to own yet, because it's too big:

He's lived three decades on this planet constantly trying to guess, as he explained it, whether people are loving him or hating him, because everyone is doing one or the other at all times with laser-like focus and he needs to be earning love love love love love OR ELSE. Have I really loved this man as much as I said/thought, if I didn't look closely enough or watch him long enough to see him struggling that way? In seven years together? For 30 years he's lived that way and *never knew that other people weren't thinking the exact same way.* For 30 years he's been suffering so much and no one, not his family, not his other lovers, not his friends... .not even me... .noticed. I feel unreal with the weight of that guilt.

I know that he can't ever be a primary partner to me. I need more than he could possibly give. But I don't want him out of my life, at all. Not from guilt, but from genuine affection and respect and connection. And should he choose to pursue some therapy to assist in interpersonal management, I don't preclude the possibility of a limited romantic partnership continuing in the future. The far future, likely, because he is quite unhealthy now, and needs to focus entirely on himself. And I am encouraging him to do so. He is very fixated on his romantic connections (including ours) and I have told him we are "broken up" but also that he just shouldn't worry about it, I'll always be in his life, but esp now with the BPD diagnosis and emphasis on abandonment fears I am stressing more the "always be in your life" and "discussing our relationship is a windmill, Don Quixote, let's talk about your treatment options and once you have a treatment regime we can talk about our relationship with a therapist present, remember?" ... .which I hope is the right tactic, it certainly seems to be working so far.

A part of me wants to drop him and focus on my own health now that I am slightly improved and push push push to improve more and just... .give myself that attention I feel I deserve after the hardest year of my life instead of looking forward to MORE insane struggles and hardships, all for the benefit of someone else, that will also be causing me further hardship since focusing on him is 24/7 right now and I have no income, no one setting up my healthcare, etc etc, so I'm neglecting myself... .but the only other option he has is his mother, who is hours away and facing early stomach cancer after just losing her father. Love is sometimes a light, but not often is it light when it is carried. And he needs someone or I fear he will just spiral downward, I fear it's far more than just fear of abandonment at play here, though my ego, of course, would take the soothing I guess were it so and it would be no small practical relief, alongside a huge heartbreak, to walk away I guess.

Such a gigantic long post. But since he pretty much alienated everyone I know over the last year, I don't really have anyone to confess this all to, ha!

[RELATIONSHIP PROBLEM SOLVING]

RELATIONSHIP PROBLEM SOLVING This is a high level discussion board for solving ongoing, day-to-day relationship conflicts. Members are welcomed to express frustration but must seek constructive solutions to problems. This is not a place for relationship "stay" or "leave" discussions. Please read the specific guidelines for this group.

[AsGoodAsItGets]

You teuly are amazing thanl you.  Sharing your story provided a hint of serinity i hadnt felt and a long time.  You reminded me of what it is to be human through your challwge.    Wjat ever you decide it will come from good intentions.  Please keep poating, and vwnting.  Thanks again.

[unicorn2014]

Fartonmyheart, that was a beautiful and amazing post and I have a lot of respect for you for writing it. Welcome to BPD family.        I hope you find this site useful. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. The moderators and members would be happy to assist you.

[MaybeSo]

Welcome!

You will find a lot of support here.

The crux of healing begins with you and a focus on your own self-care. We know that putting focus on our struggling partners results in both people getting more ill.  I would encourage your enthusiastic shift in focus onto to your own healing as a gift to both you and your loved one. 

[FartonmyHeart]

I would encourage your enthusiastic shift in focus onto to your own healing as a gift to both you and your loved one. 

Yes! I have only just begun to learn about BPD itself, much less the BPD relationship dynamic, so thank you for writing this wise advice. I am working hard toward this goal now.

After doing more reading, more soul searching, and suffering through a humiliating episode of emotional crisis where my BPD ex had another very clear psychotic break (which triggered my own emotional outburst and immediate muscular failure, I've been working on the edge of exhaustion for days so I'm not surprised it happened but I was absolutely horrified that it did with him in such a state), I spoke with his psych and my social worker to help me clarify coping tools for shepherding him through this crisis to pro help and draw an action plan to get him into residential treatment.

Happy to say that things seem to be going pretty smoothly so far, though of course it has been only short time... .we have had several calm discussions about the future, we toured the residential facility and he has committed to beginning the intake process for the 30-day program on Monday (following his performance at an event this Sunday and a doctor's appt. early Monday AM),  and although he went out of my sight/hearing to do so, so really I have no confirmation that it actually happened, I'm pretty confident he actually did; he called his mother to tell her that he was committing to the inpatient program. Going to try and actually get intake paperwork started tomorrow to speed things along/keep momentum up/reinforce boundary.

Until he is under someone else's care, unfortunately, I can't shift focus off him; he's too erratic and in FULL crisis state still. In all practicality he really does need someone to ensure his safety and like I mentioned, when he was in State care, he was engaging in regular and quite intense/visually obvious self harm without any intervention on their part. Which raises serious concerns to me that are even more intense than the obvious  medication issues and environmental concerns (his roommate there was a repeat violent offender that attacked another resident unprovoked). Anyway, I just can't, in good conscience, leave him to the tender mercies of a system that would let him brutalize himself--potentially saying "we would totally turn a blind eye if you ran into the highway in front of our facility." Maybe there is some codependency at play there; if so, I think it is a forgivable amount, b/c in my mind no one but a criminal should be put in a facility designed for criminals. And there just isn't anywhere else for him to be right now.  

That said, I am looking forward to having some breathing room and focusing on me. Definitely going to need to find myself a shrink. I mean, I can't play and say it's going to be easy to just like, let go... .it's going to start hurting (*cough* more *cough*) soon I'm sure once he's actually inpatient. Cuz from what I understand from reading, and from my experience with "managing his depression" all these years and reminding him that "vacations from home always help," the object permanence effect will start to kick in for him. Buuuuuuut not me, of course. And I'm starting to notice the triangulation (? right word ?) among our community, how many people seem to think somehow that I villainously drove this sweet, blameless man to insanity with my demanding illness or wicked nature or something, which miiiiiiiiight start to get old, heh, but I'll deal.

Thank you all for your kind words and welcome. I hope in the coming days when I finally have time to truly engage in some self care and self awareness I can investigate this site and the forums more deeply. I am SO THANKFUL to have found this site and look forward to learning from ya'll's experience and reading whatever ya'll have to share. <3 <3