Hi obiwan,
I have a rather adventurous personality. Meaning I live in the moment, trusting that everything will be fine, if problems arise, I'll find a way how to deal with them, I have lots of endurance. You can guess I love hitchhiking, the thrill of not knowing who will be the next driver I'm going to share vivid/fun/deep/personal conversations with keeps me standing at the street, thumbs up, pumping myself up with good mood and refining my strategies.
Well, I certainly had a great time living like this, I had rich conversations with all kinds of people but I felt I was missing something. I wanted to live with and for family or group of people who were living connected with each other, nakedly exposing how they feel and what they need and supporting each other. Growing together, brotherhood, nurturing, companionship, belonging. But I was so obsessed with myself, egocentric and careless that I would be dissatisfied being around the same group of people, getting bored, feeling like I need to move on. And more and more I became aware of that was my problem.
Empathy.
When a fellow student would tell me how she'd been run over by a police car (officer drove away, left her there on the ground), following head injury and suffering partial amnesia i realized how weird I was that I was NOT shocked or feeling upset or sorry for her. I could just spend the day skateboarding or making music. I could not connect to her, but I realized thats what I wanted. Compassion, empathy, being connected.
When it comes to improving day-to-day life with a person with BPD, I don't have much experience - I was in a brief relationship with someone who was told by a psychiatrist that he had "borderline traits", and I also had a friendship with someone who suspected she had BPD. So I'm hoping other members will chime in on that. However, the personal growth and development aspects of your post are interesting to me.
Do you think it is possible that you have used adventure, hitchhiking and spontaneity as a protection against deeper levels of emotional intimacy and connection with others?
I ask because although your adventures sound as though they have been enjoyable and personally enriching, and you learned a lot, when you tell it there seems to also be a sort of "off switch" quality about it... ."Well, I've been here too long, getting bored, gotta go!"
If you find this to be the case, your most important practice may be to learn to stay with the discomfort that arises at those moments, and not quickly shunt into whatever your usual distraction is. Find out exactly what it is that's scaring you.
I have observed in people I know that sometimes, when their parents were consistently unreliable in terms of providing empathy and emotional support (this may not have been the case for meeting the child's physical and intellectual needs), they take on an "I take care of myself, everybody else takes care of themselves" or "I keep my expectations low so I am never disappointed" mentality about emotional intimacy and the degree of soothing they both expect from and provide to others.
Right at the time when I wanted to make a change in my lifestyle I met my future wife who was obviously to my interest the absolute opposite concerning empathy, she had already two sons and they loved me. I knew whatever I was missing concerning empathy, I couldn't have found a better person to learn from.
After a year we both got completely lost. For too long it was a horrible time for her, for me and for the children too. A book from Marshal Rosenberg helped me enormously to gain insight into empathy and applying it, living it. But I know that I am not the right partner for my wife. But as I hate my self-centered and careless personality, I'm more that willing to change, but as the my brain is hardwired it will be quite tough to realize this change.
This is interesting too. What was it that made you think, at least early on, that you "couldn't have found a better person to learn from"? :)id she seem to express empathy herself, or was it about how she expressed emotions?
I am not ready to declare definitively that you are in fact "careless".
As I alluded to in my previous response, I believe that some people learn fairly early in life to "shut off" their emotions as a survival strategy.
I'm guessing you mean
Nonviolent Communication. I think it's a great tool, more of a philosophy than a set of "skills", the shift into looking at everything that you and everyone else does as attempts to get needs met, and feelings as indicators of unmet needs.
Empathy, however, as you may have realized, is more than just using the right words. I suspect you will find that "change" is more than just learning a new set of skills. I will say more about that in my response to the next segment of your post.
Basically I want to take my responsibilities personally:
- being realistically aware of my own capabilities; being aware of your own limitations; not being tempted by vanity or self-importance
- holding myself responsible for my actions; not soft pedaling my own faults; not letting myself off the hook
- being a thinker, analyzer, evaluator, ruminator; always playing things over in my own mind before I act
- anticipating problems; when the worst happens, being prepared to deal with it
I think you would be very interested in Harville Hendrix' books. I have read the one for single people,
Keeping the Love You Find, but he has one for couples too called
Getting the Love You Want. I can't comment on that one because I haven't read it but my understanding is that it goes by the same concepts. Basically, the processes of attachment and socialization in childhood leave all of us with our natural life energy limited, stunted or repressed to some degree. And what he calls the "Imago" partnership (the one that starts of with both partners head over heels for each other, fascinated with each other's differences, and yet those very differences seem to be the thing each person dislikes most about their partner in the end) is an unconscious attempt to reclaim their essential aliveness. And that relationship conflict, rather than being a sign that partners are "not right for each other", can be the precise ground on which personal healing and transformation can occur, in which each partner can come to "re-inhabit" their true, full selves.
You sound very self-aware, ready to do the work and having a pretty good idea of what it will require. That's necessary. And if you and your wife have a particular relationship "dance" that you do, and you "change your steps", it may well result in her changing hers. However, if you're going to have the type of personally transformative intimate relationship that Hendrix and other therapist authors (e.g. Robert Augustus Masters, John Welwood) believe is possible, your wife will need to be willing to change as well. That may not be something you can or should try to answer right now, but I am curious and hold it as an important concern that will likely come up for you as time goes on.
eeks
