Second guessing yourself. Empathy.

[Depression = 72% of members]

Curious if anyone's relationship with someone with BPD has left you second guessing every action you take, how people respond to you, people's motivations, your own better judgement, and more. 

I've noticed how I always feel that I'm in the wrong somehow, and that I now have great trouble with knowing how others view me.   I can't trust my reads of others like I could before, nor can I let it go or simply push it away with a "if they're upset with me, too bad".   

In short, my confidence in my own mind and thinking is shaky at best.  I don't think it used to be.   Anyone else experience this? 

[mssalty]

Curious if anyone's relationship with someone with BPD has left you second guessing every action you take, how people respond to you, people's motivations, your own better judgement, and more. 

I've noticed how I always feel that I'm in the wrong somehow, and that I now have great trouble with knowing how others view me.   I can't trust my reads of others like I could before, nor can I let it go or simply push it away with a "if they're upset with me, too bad".   

In short, my confidence in my own mind and thinking is shaky at best.  I don't think it used to be.   Anyone else experience this? 

[Eyeamme]

I have been going through the same. I think we need to learn how to trust ourselves again.

[fromheeltoheal]

I did that too for a while, maybe a year after I left her.  Not hard to understand really, when you're with someone who doesn't have your best interests at heart and is dealing with their own sht full time.  Of course how much it affected us is how much we let it, but all of us here let it, so let's just move beyond it, yes?

As part of taking my life back I decided to trust myself on purpose.  What that looked like for me was to be quiet and still and listen to my inner voice, and even more strongly my inner feel, my gut feel, which is never wrong, I just ignore it sometimes.  So listen to it, intently, and believe that it has my best interests at heart, which it does, and insist on acting in accordance with it.  That can be as simple as asking "what's the right thing right now?" or "what's the next right thing to do?".  It takes effort at first, a redoubling of effort to take our lives back, which is the good news really, and it has a ripple effect: it allows us to see who the disempowering people are in our lives more clearly and remove them, one of the gifts of the relationship, on our way to our own bliss.

[Eyeamme]

I love that and agree.

[Grey Kitty]

Yep, I know that one.

I'm a year separated from my wife of over two decades. When it came to making decisions for myself, I'm still getting comfortable and it has been a long journey. There are two big patterns from my marriage.

1. My wife is vivacious, impulsive, even flighty (compared to me). She's the kind of person who can come up with enough crazy dreams and ideas to keep both of us busy for a year... .every day. Our pattern was that she would dream about something interesting, and mention it to me... .and 95% of the time I'd reject it out of hand as completely impractical. Once in a while we would discuss it further, and I would agree to some of them, and often work my butt off on them. [She is high functioning; besides having all these ideas, she also worked on and accomplished things]

This is actually a lot more of a mess than it sounds like--For starters, I rejected her ideas 95% of the time, and that hurt her and hurt our relationship. Next, I was completely off the hook--I didn't have to come up with any plans, dreams, or ideas for myself, or even think about what I wanted. All I had to do was thumbs up or thumbs down to her latest idea. (And deal with the possible fight if I voted thumbs down.)

2. If I did want to make a decision, even the smallest thing like what to cook for breakfast, or picking music to put on the stereo, I felt the need to ask for her approval before I implemented it.

I don't recall being shut down often in these situations. She actually was more likely to shame me for not being decisive than for picking the wrong thing. And even if I did get pushback from her on one of these things, I would (if it mattered to me) stand my ground. I think the way we dealt with it was pretty healthy.

However the fact that I had to ask about everything? No way was that healthy!



And a year out, I still struggle more with that second part. When I'm making medium to large life choices (Go forward with separation and ultimately divorcing my wife even though she is expressing some interest in reconciliation), or small ones. (Deciding to buy a set of metric sockets or just the 17mm and 19mm ones I need for this job, and what brand to get, and picking out a torque wrench to buy.) I *WANT* to ask somebody if I'm doing the right thing, rather than making my own choice, and going forward with it.

I ordered the tools today. (Background--I'm generally mechanical, but don't have a strong background with engines, and need to work on mine.) 10 days ago, I called a friend who is a much better mechanic to ask for advice about the torque wrench and sockets, and got some decent advice on what to buy. And that was after waiting a week or two before I realized I should ask a friend about tool selection.

In the last month, I've realized that there are a BUNCH of areas where I'm far stronger, far more capable than I thought I was. And that my interactions with my wife over the years had torn down my self-image and confidence. So far in the last year I've realized this is true about my writing, my cooking, my choice of eating healthy foods, my ability to meet people, my ability to flirt, and my ability to make decisions. EVERY one of those things I thought I was terrible at, or at least far worse than I actually was! There probably are a couple more I've made progress on that aren't coming to mind now, and I'm pretty sure there will be more coming.

Sheesh!

[balletomane]

I have been struggling with the fear that people dislike me, that I am a nasty person to be around and eventually people with discover it,  and that my friends might turn on me at any moment. These are beliefs that I did not have before my relationship with my ex, and they seem to be a reaction to how he treated me - my mind is going, nervously, "Well, if it happened to you once, it could happen again."

Things are improving now. Each time I take a small risk and express my honest opinion to a friend, or ignore the nagging thought that my flatmate secretly dislikes me and hang out with her after work, the fears fade. The only way to get through these thoughts is to do what you're afraid of and point out to yourself, gently and firmly, that the thing you feared didn't happen. I still get worried over things that never bothered me pre-relationship, but the worry is reducing and I can feel I'm getting better. It just takes time.

[SandWitch]

WOW awesome thread.  Before the relationship I often agonized over choices.  My then career field required many daily.  It was exhausting = doing the "right" thing for health and safety - mixed in with being fair and meeting everyone's needs (accept mine - oops).  I let many of my wishes be muted and often could not make a choice.  Granted I am pretty easy going but it got to be a habit - especially if conflict arose.  The stress of the dynamics and life made it harder to order my thoughts. 

[Michelle27]

Most definitely.  The strange part is during the relationship/marriage, parallel to the chaos building at home, my work performance improved.  Looking back, there was a definite lack of confidence in my abilities at home and I think I compensated by giving more and more at work (I'm a middle school music teacher) which resulted in better self confidence at work.  I remember getting through busy workdays with a smile on my face and then on the drive home when I didn't know what I would find as far as his mood, my stomach would tighten in knots and the anxiety would rise. 

Now that I'm out of the relationship, work is still going strong for me.  But in my interpersonal relationships, I'm second guessing everything.  Part of my healing was not just ending my marriage, but ending other "friendships" that weren't healthy for me.  In doing so, I know for sure it's the right thing, but I often find myself worrying about whether or not I made the right decision (and yet, I know it was).  I have a great friend who is on her own self discovery journey and we talk often about our paths and learning to trust our gut has been so important to both of us.  She was in an abusive marriage too (although no BPD) we both know there were gut instincts we both ignored.  We both think we would never have stayed as long as we did if we had listened to our gut. 

I think this is a healing process and it will take time as well as being (at least for awhile) to learn to consistently trust our gut. 

[thisworld]

No it didn't. It left me with the bitter knowledge that I ignore my gut and get hurt because of it afterwards. Some reactions of my BPD ex were so irrational that there was no way I could question myself. Some of his justifications etc (emotional affairs and that kind of stuff) were so ordinary that I'm trained in that discourse - the universal scenario of how we misunderstand everything and how jealous we are etc. Cliché. But I experienced what you are saying very strongly n my younger years when an older female friend that I loved and trusted a lot turned to me and gave us a complete rewrite of our friendship and her feelings for me - she was a bit NPD and maybe BPD I don't know. My approach to this has not changed: If people are consciously conning me, it's their problem and the shame belongs to them. I just need to work on myself and boundaries so it's not too late when I realize this. The rest doesn't bother me.