Boundaries regarding sleep deprivation

[JWstillhoping]

Looking for help and suggestions with sleep interruption. The situation is that my BF (upwBPD) has woken me up again. He was awake when I said goodnight at 11pm. He woke me up at 2am, with yelling about a fight we had 5 years ago. I won't even get into the details of the old fight - he just believed I was in the wrong and decided to bring it up now. It's almost 3:30am, and he's still trying to tell me everything I'm doing wrong.

I am saying it's not the time to talk, let's talk during the day. He drank a lot tonight, so that makes matters worse. If I were all alone, I'd leave and go to a hotel or something. But we have a young child who is sound asleep in his room. I cannot leave him alone with unstable dad.

This seems to happen once a week or every other week. I have to be up by 7am for work. When I say I'm exhausted, he always justifies why he kept me awake. Then points out that it isn't every night, I should not be so tired.

How can I set a boundary here when I'm not willing to leave our child at home to get out of the situation at night? My requests to let me sleep are met with anger and justification. Please any tips/suggestions would help me a lot. Thanks for reading.

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[Meili]

Sleep deprivation is a horrible thing that impacts every part of our lives. There is an interesting read here on Sleep interruption and deprivation---- how to handle that might be of help.

[pls]

JWstillhoping, I understand how hard it is to deal with that type of behavior. The only thing that has worked for me is totally ignoring my H and pretending to sleep after I've told him I am not going talk to him while he's in a rage. It's hard to tell if that situation is going to happen early enough to leave and stay in a hotel. I have a son as well so have been in that same situation. It's gotten better when I take that stance.

[JWstillhoping]

Meili, thanks for the link. I will read this article & hope it helps!

pls, thank you for the response. I have tried that before, but sometimes he will actively wake me, and it's hard to pretend after that point. But you're right, a clear statement that I won't talk when he's in a rage (and sticking to it) may have helped. Then pretend to go back to sleep. I appreciate knowing I'm not the only one who has gone through this.

[NotThatGuy]

In my experience, setting limits and boundaries only works if I'm willing to enforce them and hold to them.  So if I say, "I'm not going to talk about it," I have to then not talk about it.  If I say, "I'm not going to stay here while you attack me with global negative statements," I have to not stay there. 

If there's a place in your house you can sleep, and have your child be safe, you can try that-- another room, a study, ideally with a door that closes and/or locks.  You can say, "I know we need to talk about this, but I can't do it now.  I need to sleep.  I'll sleep here with you if you'll let me, otherwise I'll have to go somewhere else to sleep."  And then, if you have to, take yourself off to another room, ask him to leave you alone, lock the door if you have to-- put in ear plugs if you have to-- and go to sleep. 

If he keeps doing this, you may need to make plans to remove yourself and the child to a place you can get a night's peace.  You'd probably want to give him some warning about that, in a structured conversation.  Start by validating his feelings of urgency about middle-of-the-night issues, acknowledge that you need to talk about this stuff, state your limits about being awakened and about how he speaks to you, and tell him that, if it keeps happening, you'll take the child and go for 1-2 nights, and set a time to talk about it with him when the crisis is past. 

That probably seems extreme, but sleep deprivation is a big deal.  If you can't get enough sleep, you can't work, you can't parent effectively, and you won't be able to cope appropriately with his behavior.  So its important that you do what you need to do, in order to get enough sleep most nights. 

[dacoming]

Is this a BPD symptom... .depriving the non of sleep?  Wow!  I'm seeing on this board that several others go through this.  My wife has done this so many times to me over the years and it absolutely infuriates me!  There were times where she kept me up the entire night with no sleep and then I had to go to work. Since she does not work, she'd laugh and go to sleep then.  I would try to go into another room and lock the door; she would take apart the handle and come in to harass me more... .I go to another room, she follows me.  Eventually I said enough is enough!  Every time she tried to do that, I would leave the house for the night.  Sometimes I'd drive somewhere and sleep in the car, others I slept in my office at work.  This made her very angry as she would always say that I'm opening the door for bad things to happen (i.e. her leaving the house too and cheating) and I'm disrespecting the marriage. "I should not leave the house just because we have a disagreement... .I should me a man and try to fix the problem."  Notice how there's no mention or acknowledgement of her actions that caused me to leave in the first place.  I talked to her several times and told her how angry this makes me and pleaded with her to stop the behavior. 

Fast forward to now, she has gotten a lot better about that and has not kept me up all night in a long time.  However, she still has a habit at times to start discussions or arguments when I'm getting ready to go to sleep.  For the most part though, she doesn't go too long.  A couple nights ago, she woke me up because she was scared, then she wanted me to rub her back because she was in pain.  I did it.  As she often does, she was laying in a position to make it hard for me to rub so I had to keep resting my arm.  She felt I was probably trying to do something to her on the under so she started a debate... .which led to her bringing up old stuff and debating about the same things over and over for over an hour.  My temperature was starting to boil but I kept calm and eventually she stopped.  Then she decided to look up the transactions on our bank account and talk about that which I turned over and ignored.  Who does that at 3am in the morning?  No consideration!

[SettingBorders]

Hey JWstillhoping,

that really sounds bad and I'd recommend rather having a plan in your sleeve for case you really need to leave the house with your son one night. Your husband is acting very disrespecting treating you like an object that has to serve his feelings. I'm very sorry you have to go through this.

My boyfriend also starts discussions at bedtime. No raging, just provoking answers with statements that drive me crazy. These last months I can manage it better and stop it at the very beginning by telling him that I'm tired and that I won't discuss this now and then putting in ear plugs to listen to radio plays I have on my mp3. It helps me to re-focus on something else, to calm down and eventually fall asleep.