Why is it so hard to watch them walk away

[VIDEO: "What is parental alienation?"]

My comparison is like an alcoholic. Anyone with An alcoholic or any other addictive behavior.  To watch them self destruct.  Make bad choices seemingly.   Walk away  or refuse when offered help or love.  Exhibit bad behavior potentially.  Why is it so difficult to detach. When on paper or if someone else were to tell you they were in a relationship like this it would be a no brainer. 

She left me. She is living with girl ten years younger to make ends meet. She's frequenting bars now.  She's not doing anything to demonstrate stability or advance her life or goals.

Should be simple right?  Let them go. 

[Scopikaz]

My comparison is like an alcoholic. Anyone with An alcoholic or any other addictive behavior.  To watch them self destruct.  Make bad choices seemingly.   Walk away  or refuse when offered help or love.  Exhibit bad behavior potentially.  Why is it so difficult to detach. When on paper or if someone else were to tell you they were in a relationship like this it would be a no brainer. 

She left me. She is living with girl ten years younger to make ends meet. She's frequenting bars now.  She's not doing anything to demonstrate stability or advance her life or goals.

Should be simple right?  Let them go. 

[Lonely_Astro]

Trauma bond.

They get into our heads.  We become enmeshed with them.  We are co-dependent (or, at the very least, start to become).  It seems simple, but it isn't.

[thisworld]

She left me. She is living with girl ten years younger to make ends meet. She's frequenting bars now.  She's not doing anything to demonstrate stability or advance her life or goals. 

I find peace and solace in the phrase "Live and let live." Alcoholics, addicts and mentally disordered people are all unique individuals entitled to their life choices as much as the rest of us, and actually isn't life is so full of wonders and surprises that we may never know what will bring recovery?

My ex is an active heroin addict with BPD. Our time together was ideal in many senses to continue with recovery after rehab (which he dropped). He didn't do that. Rescuing now would be enabling him. He is half homeless right now but maybe this encourages him to recover - or it does. How do we know what is good for them or not until they do something good themselves? Isn't it only after that that we may look retrospectively and say "Oh, so that was a good thing in the sense that it led this person to recovery?" In my ex's case, what I thought was good was obviously not encouraging (positively or negatively).



 

[izabellizima]

I have a hard time walking away... .it reminds me of addiction. As in they are the drug and I am the addict.

When I am with her I feel tormented at times, I feel comforted as well... .when she leaves I am so lonely and sad. I try to find things to fill my time but nothing helps. I want her near. My brain doesn't approve.

Co-dependence. But why them? Why did I not have this with my other nonBPD exs?

[cootkilla]

this is what I keep telling my counselor, the relationship I have/had feels just like an addiction ( so does the withdrawal (divorce))... .For me, when we were good it was pure joy... .I think became addicted to pure joy and this was the only way I have ever really felt it.  Hard to let go, but also she took the joy away and created pure hell and there became way more pure hell.  My T says is like going to the casino and she changes the payout patterns (joy/happiness) every time, which creates the worst addictions.

All my prior non bp relationships seemed to be almost boring but that is not the right word... .the intensity of the high or the joy /happy feelings, which in my case joy came from our senses of humor... .somebody finally got me and knew me without having to say a word... .Oddly,  the same level of intensity is same the level of misery that was created when she started accusing me of being everything that is wrong in the world(hating her/cheating/stealing just to name a few),  Question was, how do I hang on to this thing "that has made me happy" ( that i really need) and but is now making me hate myself and her all the same time.

I am having to face, what is it about me that made me need this woman to affirm me to be happy and if i cant figure that out, then I'm doomed to repeat it. 

little long and rambling but hey I'm stuck inside my head 24/7... never stops

[Lonely_Astro]

I have a hard time walking away... .it reminds me of addiction. As in they are the drug and I am the addict.

When I am with her I feel tormented at times, I feel comforted as well... .when she leaves I am so lonely and sad. I try to find things to fill my time but nothing helps. I want her near. My brain doesn't approve.

Co-dependence. But why them? Why did I not have this with my other nonBPD exs?

Heroin mixed with nitroglycerin is how I liken my relationship to her. I knew it was bad for me and that it was going to blow up at some point, but that didn't stop me.

[Anez]

I have a hard time walking away... .it reminds me of addiction. As in they are the drug and I am the addict.

When I am with her I feel tormented at times, I feel comforted as well... .when she leaves I am so lonely and sad. I try to find things to fill my time but nothing helps. I want her near. My brain doesn't approve.

Co-dependence. But why them? Why did I not have this with my other nonBPD exs?

Heroin mixed with nitroglycerin is how I liken my relationship to her. I knew it was bad for me and that it was going to blow up at some point, but that didn't stop me.

Feel the same way, Astro. But at some point I was like this is going great and it's gonna be something awesome ... .and then it abruptly stopped and here I am still feeling that addiction to how she made me feel and what we used to do.

It's brutal.

[jc1010]

this is what I keep telling my counselor, the relationship I have/had feels just like an addiction ( so does the withdrawal (divorce))... .For me, when we were good it was pure joy... .I think became addicted to pure joy and this was the only way I have ever really felt it.  Hard to let go, but also she took the joy away and created pure hell and there became way more pure hell.  My T says is like going to the casino and she changes the payout patterns (joy/happiness) every time, which creates the worst addictions.

All my prior non bp relationships seemed to be almost boring but that is not the right word... .the intensity of the high or the joy /happy feelings, which in my case joy came from our senses of humor... .somebody finally got me and knew me without having to say a word... .Oddly,  the same level of intensity is same the level of misery that was created when she started accusing me of being everything that is wrong in the world(hating her/cheating/stealing just to name a few),  Question was, how do I hang on to this thing "that has made me happy" ( that i really need) and but is now making me hate myself and her all the same time.

I am having to face, what is it about me that made me need this woman to affirm me to be happy and if i cant figure that out, then I'm doomed to repeat it. 

little long and rambling but hey I'm stuck inside my head 24/7... never stops

I know exactly what you mean here, Cootkilla. The highs of the relationship is what I think about a lot of the time. And I ask myself how did she not feel those same highs and love the feeling of them as much as I did? I guess it's because she needs them. I ask how she can just move on to bangin some dude ten years older than us who teaches yoga, three weeks after the break up? I guess it is because she immediately looked at all those highs as nothing when i made the initiative to end it. She wrote me off and made me look like a true terrible person in her mentally ill immature mind. Sure, I sensed something wasn't right, but when i lost all those highs? sh!t i wanted her back.

And i'm sure if i hadnt made a move to try and get her back, she would've tried for me. I'm glad though that she said no and i had to dig myself out of a freaking train wreck and get my life back together. I had to look myself in the mirror and tell my self to get help. I couldnt live like this anymore so i started seeing a therapist. And i've done so much self improvement.

The only thing is that during this self-improvement phase that went on in november-december, I didn't even know she had BPd, nor did i know what it was. And this was two months ago!

And during this time where I started focusing on making myself happy, she would drunk call me. She would text me, and i already knew she was bangin this dude even though she had no idea that i knew. But i fed into... .like a f*ckin drug. I thought that if I could prove her i wouldnt leave her and that i would be a friend to her, she'd enter back as my gf. But when she got the responses out of me, she'd disappear and not hit me up for weeks. It drove me nuts! Thats when i logged into her fbook and saw (know it was really creepy but i had to know) how she was talkin to this dude-- calling him these names and like they had been together for years!

I told my therapist and my T told me to look up Bpd. I was shocked. It was her. I read about it more and more everyday. It helps to know people out here know what this is like. To have someone support you and give you these highs- like youre on top of the world and then to find out that it was all just so they could get there needs... like you were just another average joe like the rest of her ex bfs? sh!t that iss cold man.

But i stopped playing in to her check ins- which made me feel like she still really cared about me. She left me a voice mail ten days ago. I knew at this point (found out what BPd was and that she had it like 2 weeks ago) that she was using me. She said on the voice mail- she was checking in. I wasnt gonna respond but i textd her the next day-----Like a f*ckin addiction! impulsively i said 'hey got your message, thanks for checking in, im doing good, hope youre doing well"

I felt like it would have been so mean had i not responded. So i did and she didnt respond. So a week later (this past sunday) I blocker her number. I deleted her off instagram, all the other accounts i already had blocked. And the funny thing is izabellizima and Lonely_Asrtro? It is hard! I feel guilty for making this switch on her from playing into the friend game to planning on not talking to her for the rest of my life. It's like a drug that makes you feel guilty for not wanting to respond to or feed into. We were real good friends before we went out, and i feel like she's gonna hate me so bad for this move i've made, especially for not telling her. But hey, im starting to heal and its going to get to a point where those times i was like getting high (happy high) with her or thinking about those happy highs, is going to be like - wow im so glad i got clean and saved my life. Thanks for posting, people we are on this road together. And once we overcome this, man will we come out wiser, happier, and being able to handle anything. Thanks again guys and gals

[Lonely_Astro]

I feel guilty for making this switch on her from playing into the friend game to planning on not talking to her for the rest of my life. It's like a drug that makes you feel guilty for not wanting to respond to or feed into. We were real good friends before we went out, and i feel like she's gonna hate me so bad for this move i've made, especially for not telling her. But hey, im starting to heal and its going to get to a point where those times i was like getting high (happy high) with her or thinking about those happy highs, is going to be like - wow im so glad i got clean and saved my life. Thanks for posting, people we are on this road together. And once we overcome this, man will we come out wiser, happier, and being able to handle anything. Thanks again guys and gals

Essentially, we did get 'high' from having contact with them.  They triggered that 'feel good' reward sensor in our brains and we were soo happy to get whatever small amount of affection they'd give us that we all were willing to put up with the abuse for just one more 'score'.  Just like a junkie will pimp themselves out to get that high just one more time, I put up with her abuse so I could experience her "love" just one more time.  Everything was just one more time with me when it came to her.

I had went NC for a couple of weeks at the beginning of the new year and had slipped back to talking to her for a few days.  "Just one more time", I thought.  I can talk to her just one more time to make sure she was ok.  I could talk to her just one more time to make sure I was ok.  I needed her to feel like I was ok.  I was slipping back toward depression because I wanted her to pay attention to me just one more time.  Then came the roses delivered to her desk and left where I would intentionally see them.  For me, that's when it all changed in my mind.  I hope my replacement (which, technically and if she was being truthful, is her second since me and we just 'ended' late December officially) fairs better than I did.

Good riddance, J.  And if I ever get the opportunity, I plan to tell it to her face.

[Rmbrworst]

It's hard because I built my hopes and dreams on this person.  He was supposed to be in my future, he was supposed to be my best friend and my lover.  He was supposed to be my companion. 

And he walked away and now acts like I'm a ghost.

It's hard to watch the person you thought you were going to grow old with , turn their back to you , and walk out the door as if you never mattered.

In fact, I think it's ridiculous how so many people say "Just get over it."

That's not how it works.  I wish it was that easy.

These experiences we have gone through are going to change the fabric if our being for the rest of our lives.  The events that take place after a BPD breakup are life changing events.

That's why it's hard ... .