Balanced Perspective

I think these boards have been a godsend to myself and anyone who was found themselves involved with someone with BPD. An oasis of information in the middle of a desert. In the spirit of that outlook I offer the following as a different perspective to one idea here that brought me a great deal of struggle that maybe this can help others avoid.

One of the recurring ideas that I have seen emerge is that a relationship involves two people so therefore there have to be issues that caused the nonBPD to get involved with a pwBPD. I would suggest that it is not this clear cut. I think the behavior of a pwBPD definitely plays very strongly to the codependent mentality and specifically when there are instances where the relationship carried on over an extensive period of time there is a strong likelihood that there was at least some level of mutual dysfunction. In cases though where the relationship was of a shorter duration and the nonBPD was pulled into the cycles but then removed themselves it seems entirely plausible that there was not much they contributed to the entire situation.

Almost by definition BPDs are masterful manipulators who tend to seek comfort in partners who have strong personalties (and I say manipulator as a function of their behavior not necessarily there character). When you get involved with one and they are in the honeymoon period the things we later learn were mirroring and idealization would appear identical to a healthy individual in the early stages of a romantic relationship (exception being when it is over the top). When BPD becomes apparent later we learn that the motivation behind their behaviors came from an entirely different place than with a healthy individual. From the nonBPD's point of view it would appear identical though. Again I say this with a high functioning BPD where there are not other warning signs.

Once the first episode of splitting occurs we are suddenly confronted with a completely different individual and at a loss to understand what is going on. We still initially see them as the person we have a great deal of love and affection for and being the caretakers we are it is not in our nature to leave immediately. As the push/pull cycle begins to unfold though we increasingly being to realize that there is a very significant problem and this is not a phase or an isolated incident. In an effort to understand it all we begin to look for answers, If fortunate, sooner rather late, we can at least identify it as BPD. The initial break by the pwBPD, realization that there is a greater problem, the effort to educate ourselves and figure out it is BPD all take a bit a time. Unfortunately during this period we begin to experience the unfortunate mental/emotional/physical abuse. Armed with a diagnosis and true understanding of the magnitude of the situation many of us chose to create healthy boundaries and/or leave. However the pain and damage that we went through during the time we were simply figuring things out is still there to deal with.

As an example I offer my own case: I was introduced to my pwBPD by a mutual friend who had known her and her family for over 4 years. We took things very slowly when we started dating and the honeymoon period lasted for an entire year. It was not until several very unfortunate and significant life events all happened at once that the first episode of splitting occurred. Like so many others I did not know what happened and all I could see was that the person whom I loved and cared about deeply was in very bad shape. Not knowing what was behind it all I was not going to simply abandon her as quickly as the shift occurred. Things even calmed down quite a bit after the first episode and it almost began to appear to be no more than a person who had become overwhelmed with the life events I mentioned. As everyone here who has been through it knows, things do not ever return to how they were and the push/pull cycles began to play out very subtlety at first. As they did I realized that something was truly wrong and began to trying to figure out what happened in order to get some initial help. I was fortunate in the sense that my partner was very high functioning and had actually begin to discuss with me her own frustrations with the way she was behaving. So I showed her the BPD information I found and she was the first to acknowledge that it appeared to be what was going on with her. Since then she has aggressively sought out experts in the field and has fully immersed herself in therapy. At this point we both realize that she has a very long road ahead of her and there is much work to be done. She has already begun to see improvements but in no way is she functioning at what would be close to a normal healthy level for a relationship.

At this point our contact is extremely limited and controlled and I have established very clear boundaries. The things I went through after her initial split have caused me a tremendous amount of pain during what was already one of the hardest periods of my life. In the course of working through all of this I kept reading about the nonBPD needing to identify what allowed them to get involved with a partner with BPD. So on top of everything with her I added the stress of analyzing everything about who I was as a person, what I had missed about her and why I put myself in a position to experience her behavior. Looking back in hindsight and knowing about he BPD I can clearly see how the illness was behind many of her actions during the honeymoon period, but it does not mean that the actions themselves meant she had BPD. On top of the damage her disease had inflicted I was left feeling even more stressed that I had to find the things in me that resulted in I getting into this relationship. After much soul searching and work I realized that other than having a strong personality there was not much there. Do not get me wrong, I think I am far from perfect! But I simply started dating a beautiful, smart woman whose behaviors were completely normal and had no way of knowing that the thinking behind them was not. When things went bad at first I tried to figure out what was happening before immediately running away. And when we figured out what it was BPD and went into therapy I also began doing all of the healthy things I needed to do to respect and protect myself.

I realize every pwPBD manifests the illness in different ways and that every story has many different nuances. Without a doubt anyone who finds themselves in one of these relationships needs to take a long, hard look at their own roll as part of the healing process and to help insure that they do what they can to avoid repeating what they have gone through. It does not seem objective to assume though that going into the analysis that there must be something about them that played a significant roll in it occuring at all.

I welcome thoughts and comments!



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