Hello everyone,
I have recently finally ended my relationship of almost 5 years with my BPD partner. It is hell. I have been roped back in twice and feel even worse each time. Everything is out in the open now in terms of her having this disorder and the more I try the more it pushes her away. I have forced myself to give up and break all contact but its something I never wanted to do. I love her... .or so I thought. I loved the image of her. I am open to any and all advice on how to make sense of all this and how to recover from this abuse. I think she has cheated and at the very least is definitely with someone new now. SHe blames me for it all. Admitedly, I am far from perfect but I feel like I was pushed into acting the way I did out of desperation. I literally had no choice. We would talk about neverything she would admit to what she did and then literally the next day she would be lying acting shady running away ect as if we never spoke about anything.
Hi Venny, welcome to the family. I'm sorry that you're going through this. Since you're asking for advice mine would be to keep coming here and sharing with the family - we've been through the same and can understand, probably better than friends or family. You're ex sounds a lot like mine - she played the cheating/lying game with me, said she did/didn't/did/didn't and accused me of cheating with all sorts of people. I came on here and vented and listened and learned and in the process learned a lot about myself. I haven't seen my ex in 10 months now and the last communication I got was pretty much 5 months ago - Christmas texts saying how much I was loved and missed and too bad I couldn't stand by my words. I didn't reply and blocked her.
I've made friends, started living life, dated for a short while, and am now buying my own place. It's been a long 10 months and she is still in my head - I fight the urges to reach out all the time but I made myself a promise that I wouldn't go back and I intend to keep that promise. All of this is something I never intended to do. I thought I'd always be with her and if it didn't work out at least we'd be close friends. So much for that. Eventually I realized talking with her, texting her, thinking about her, trying to be friends with her, all of that, was just keeping me stuck in the "what if."
Time does make things better but so does confronting all the internal things - what drew you to her, why you stayed when the wheels started falling off. I did my own love bombing with her - I was hooked and had found my soulmate. I felt like I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and that I'd never leave her no matter what - and I said those things and made what I wanted very evident. We talked about marriage. But then the equation changed with the addition of emotional/physical abuse, threats, lies, manipulation, push/pull behavior and general crazy-making. Part of why I was stuck is that I couldn't forgive myself for making a mistake in judgement and doing all I could to hang on to my soul mate. I'd said I'd never leave her so what was I thinking? I couldn't leave, I had to stay, I mean I'd said so. Well, that mindset sure didn't work and in my opinion just made things much worse on both of us.
Sorry if I'm bouncing around here. I haven't been on in awhile so I'm kind of replying to you and venting a little at the same time. Sometimes when the ruminations kick in I'll read up on some of the posts as a reminder of where I came from and how far I've come in in a year. You need to celebrate the small victories starting with the most important one - you took the steps to protect yourself and got out.
Stay strong, find a good therapist and lean on the good people here who know what you're going through. It's a tremendous help.
