a year later, it feels last week

[VeraTrue]

Hi everybody. Thank you all for being here. Nothing made sense about my nightmare relationship and her sudden discarding of me until I began reading your stories, which are basically my story. She did all the things I've learned about there... .idealization/devaluing, suicide attempts, cheating, lies, chaos, push/pull, the most incredible alcoholism I've ever witnessed, bulimia... .all the things. I thought she was the love of my life and that we were battling her symptoms together. I spent months constantly terrified that she was going to kill herself, and that if i didn't do everything exactly right, she would. I thought she was dying in front of me more than once. And she would have, if I hadn't found her and handled it. She was the "quiet" kind of borderline, the "anger-in" kind. So I missed BPD as a possibility when I researched her symptoms, as she was never ever mean to me or outwardly angry. But in retrospect I see she controlled every moment passively with her waif aspects. Then, suddenly, it was if I didn't exist, as if our relationship had never existed. Now I know I was alone the entire time, playing a role in her delusion, her pattern. It was all so real to me. I have honestly never felt so much pain when she basically ghosted me... .finally dumping me over text while posting pics of her and my replacement (from inside the long-term residential all-inclusive affordable rehab program it took everything to get her into) on social media. I really didn't know what heartbreak was until she showed me. She just let me bleed out from all the bullets I took for her. I destroyed myself to save her, to keep her alive until actual treatment could be found, and she couldn't be bothered to even say goodbye. My body collapsed and I have PTSD that just won't go away. I haven't been able to work since. This woman left me eviscerated and nobody in my life really understands because they haven't been through anything like this. It's not a regular breakup. It's a holocaust in my life. So thank you for coming here, and helping me see I'm not crazy, I'm not the only one, and this experience has a centering, explanatory reality... .that I fell in love with a profoundly mentally ill woman who's mental illness activates and plays out within intimate relationships. It's not my fault that it happened and it isn't my fault that I'm not better yet.

[hopealways]

Hi Vera and welcome.

You have come out of an extremely abusive relationship, take it easy on yourself, you need time to heal.

The waif borderline, which is what you describe, can take the worst toll on you. 

Look past the fantasy that you created of her and see the relationship for what it was: a wakeup call for you to deal with the issues that made you 1) drawn to her 2) remain with her and 3) continue to think about her.  With insight into this disorder as well as help from a therapist you can come out of this a healthier and happier person than before and thrive.

That is the lesson I have learned from my ordeal.

Hang in there.

[Fr4nz]

Hey Vera,

we perfectly understand you, we all endured similar, devastating patterns with our BPD exes... .don't beat yourself and keep posting on this forum! It greatly helps to understand what happened during the r/s, what was your role in the relationship and how you can use this unique, dramatic experience to build a better version of yourself.

Do you go to a therapist? It greatly helps to heal.

A big hug

[VeraTrue]

Thanks for your responses, guys. Yeah, I'm in therapy. So much therapy. For many months. The ways in which I was drawn to her... .well she seemed stable from the outside. Job, home, a recent long-term relationship that had been "stable." I believed her as explained away the rotten way she ended it, and her remorse for that. I thought that it must be OK since the ex and she remained friends. Now I know she was keeping her ex on simmer (probably still does) just in case she needed to recycle her. Of course our attraction seemed magical, destined, once-in-a-lifetime... .so terribly confusing and frightening to her waifness.

She had a rebound in between her long-term ex and me. I believed her when she said she was only with this other woman because she thought she couldn't have me. I was disturbed by the Plan-B aspect of this, but apparently not enough to stay away. I was already thinking in terms of sympathy for her low self-esteem, trying to convince her I was normal and not some super hero, and that she was lovely too, blahblahblah. Now I know. Idealization. Waif-ing. My rescuing, triggered.

When they ended I wouldn't date her for several weeks, while she pursued me. But her interim relationship, while over, wasn't clear. They'd left it "open" while this other girl moved far away... .what the heck? (Oh right. The simmer just-in-case thing.) She told me that she officially ended it via messaging, but the girl has since let me know: that was a lie.

Her first suicide attempt was in the early days of our dating, after months of back and forth drama and frustration of building tension and longing. She'd told me she loved me months prior (but claimed she was black-out drunk and didn't remember) before she even got with this interim girl. I thought it was all a case of unclear communication, bc I wouldn't say it back to her as long as she was with someone else. Now I know she was doing save-me waif chaos and I was playing a role in her movie. It was a boiling the frog thing. Slowly bringing things to a boil while I just got used to it. Normalizing. By the time I found her that first time, I already loved her. Now I know who I loved was a mask and a manipulation, a delusion, and I was being deceived by basically a gifted improvisational method actress with a storyline to play out.

I stayed because I fell for her waif hook, suicide. And she really did want to die. Actually dying was to her an acceptable move on her part in the drama, a storyline she could relate to and made total sense to her to actually create and see through. But she left clues, if I didn't follow them, I'd get the "You let me die" ending for failing her tests. She once acknowledged that it would be the ultimate abandonment. In her more lucid times she could actually see and acknowledge the messed up things she was doing and how I was experiencing them. But... .she continued to do them. And I continued to believe her frailty in deciding these things.

I didn't want to control her. But I did, when suicide was on the table. One drink set a pattern in motion that ended with her death, and I knew that. So I controlled. Because she wouldn't. When each episode resolved, I would attempt to give back the control to her. She kept refusing it, by being more and more passive. It was so confusing. I wonder if this seemed like abandonment to her. And she would slowly devolve back into another episode. After more than a few such ordeals (including self-mutilation and multiple suicide attempts... .and these were real attempts, that without intervention would have killed her. If I stayed at work that day, she'd be dead.) I told her I couldn’t keep up the pattern, and her terrible medical care wasn't working and we needed to find a better source for treatment because I wasn't willing to let her die. I told her I needed her help, for her to recognize that her treatment wasn't working and to take responsibility for her recovery because I was trapped in this impossible situation of choosing between her life and mine, because I was going to destroy myself if things didn't change. She asked me to help her find good treatment and I said yes. This time I didn't give control back, I held it for weeks until I found and introduced her to the program. In the transition week, she started to shut me out emotionally. I could not understand why she didn't want to talk about how we would proceed with such a huge change. Now I know, she already knew she'd drop me the second she didn't need me for survival. Less than a week into her new program she was ghosting me and posting her replacement pics. I had needed her help to know that it was OK, that she was actually safe and I could let go. I knew she wouldn't tell the therapists about hiding razors and the like. But she had already split me black I think, unbeknownst to me. It feels like she was telling her rehab people one set of things, and telling me another, because they all treated me like I was some kind of control-happy stalker. I thought I was her girlfriend and I acted like it, wanting to know when I could visit and how I could support the process as she had asked me to do.

I continue to think about her because in the aftermath, nothing made sense. It was like I had to mourn every possible explanation and find peace with all the possible storylines. Because for every storyline, there was a conflicting possible one. I circled for the longest time, not being able to settle on a reality and just mourn that reality. This is the cruelty of non-closure, as I'm sure you all know all too well. It was like widowhood, this disappearance of someone I loved to my core... .but she herself had chosen that pain for me by her vanishing. My pain was simply not a factor in her operations. She told me in the pathetic breakup text exchange that she never meant to hurt me and I didn't say it but I thought, "Well that would require giving a f***. You'd have to think about me to try to hurt me." I wonder if this is why physical, outward-rage abuse can feel like love to people. Hate or fear is not the opposite of love, apathy is. Maybe the fact that she cared about me so much as a lifeline/food source/hero felt like love to me... .but in that paradigm I don't get to exist as a person, there's only room to be a role-player in someone else's opera. I didn't get that hers was an inward-raging, passive manipulation/control form of emotional abuse. She succeeded in getting me to accept that paradigm through the suicide plays, knowi