Eggshells

[kc sunshine]

Some eggshell questions for you all:

What were your "eggshells"-- the things you did to try to avoid triggering your BPD ex?
How soon into the relationship did you start walking on them?
What things did you fear that made you walk on them?
How did you learn not to walk on them, either during the relationship or afterwards?

[bus boy]

Hi Kc, my egg ehells started not long after we moved in with each other, 9 or 10 months in. After we started dating I practally lived at her place. After  we married it got worse and after she got pregnant it was unbearable. Anything could set her off in ignorance or sarcasm. Many times I would pretend I was sleeping so I wouldn't have to talk to her for fear of saying the wrong thing. Mostly it was my family that brought out her fangs. I wasn't allowed to talk about my family, I wasn't allowed to say nice things about my family, I wasn't allowed to defend my family if she was saying mean things about them, that was always. She set in place a set of rules about my family or she would leave if I broke them. I broke her rules and she left.

[JerryRG]

Great post kc sunshine

The first thing I remember is not waking her up or die.

Take the critical remarks and sarcasm and just don't say anything back.

Yes, after the pregnancy she became physically violent, screaming, throwing things.

Listen to her isolate me by telling me my time was spent with her and no one else, she just wanted me around to care for our son.

Waking our son up in the morning brought out violence, name calling and threats.

Eventually I felt like I was suffocating and any break from her was extremely welcome, why i kept going back? Needed that fix?

Before I threw her out it was impossible to be around her. Sucked all the fun and life right out of me.

[kc sunshine]

hahaha, "not waking her up or die"-- that one made me laugh.

For me, my friends and my exes were her big triggers. I tried to avoid triggering her by turning off my notifications on my phone or turn it off. Then that became its own trigger (the unringing phone) but whenever I talked or texted on it to try to make things more normal, she would get upset. In hindsight, I should have made it a boundary and explained why it was important to me. Maybe that would have worked. Dang.

[Larmoyant]

A massive trigger for my ex was me interacting with other people in the world, especially men. Men are everywhere of course so I began to stop looking around when we went out. I mean shops, bars, restaurants, art gallery, supermarket, etc, etc, everywhere! I just couldn’t risk it. I became quite terrified at times.

He punched someone for approaching me once, would ‘punish’ me by severely raging at me if he felt threatened, would often make me cry before going out, humiliated me in a restaurant once because he said I’d been looking at a man, called me terrible names, accused me of wanting his friends, going so far as to write to one of his friends asking if we’d been communicating behind his back.

He really was quite delusional about it. We were in a restaurant once and walked by three men sitting at a table. He said he’d overheard them saying that they couldn’t talk to me tonight because I had my boyfriend with me. They were strangers and I’d never been in that restaurant before. He’d also accuse me of liking ‘sleazy pubs’ insinuating that I was in some way sleazy myself which is so far from how I view myself that it made me feel sick. I now realise this was an attempt to stop me going out anywhere.

This I now believe is the manifestation of his fear of abandonment, but I didn’t know that then. It makes me feel sad. I couldn’t understand it as I thought he was the most gorgeous man on the planet. If he had access to my mind he would have felt so secure. I tried reassuring him, focusing solely on him. Nothing placated him and it never got better, in fact the longer we were together the worse it got.

I probably did all the wrong things to try to make it right. I now see that there are tools and strategies on the improving board that may have helped, but to be honest learning all of that seems so exhausting right now. I’m worn out from walking on eggshells. I would like to know what I could have done to help him though. I might post this on the improving board, but right now I just want to get well (depression), go out and look around at the world again.

[kc sunshine]

Wow, that sounds so tough Larmoyant.

I too wonder about what tools and strategies could have worked on both our exes and ourselves so we could that might have helped .