Besides my son I regret...

[How to communicate after a contentious divorce...]

I regret ever meeting his father.

What are some strategies you use to deal with a BPD person in your life to avoid pointless drama?

Also ways that can work so I'll never have to see him again but not cutting him out of our sons life (I'm only considering supervised visits and bother more for now due to the fact he's unstable in his personal life)

[Dontknow88]

I regret ever meeting his father.

What are some strategies you use to deal with a BPD person in your life to avoid pointless drama?

Also ways that can work so I'll never have to see him again but not cutting him out of our sons life (I'm only considering supervised visits and bother more for now due to the fact he's unstable in his personal life)

[catclaw]

Hey!

I really wish you the strenghth to go on right now.

From my personal experience (I'm not in the US though), people with a say will always try to get you into conversation with your ex for your son's sake. This is horrible because with some peopme you can't just "make it work", but we always have to keep the door open a little bit to show cps, therapists and (future) courts that we were and still are willing to co-parent with dh's BPDx.

Right now, maybe stick to e-mails? We've done this for quite a while now. Get someone in the boat like a sibling or a close friends to check your replies for JADE. I did this with dh and we hardly ever get any mor rants via e-mail.

Keep your epectations in mind. You expect your ex do behave a certain way and if he doesn't, it understandably upsets you. If you keep your expectations on a minimum, there will be less disappointment. E.g. i used to get really upset when ss came back from mom eow and did nothing but eat candy, play video games and somehow still managed to catch a cold in her appartment and now receiving cough syrup or anything. When i started to expect exactly that, it got better. I will not be able to change their weekend routine, so i will have to change the way i see it.

Hang in there 

[Dontknow88]

Hey!

I really wish you the strenghth to go on right now.

From my personal experience (I'm not in the US though), people with a say will always try to get you into conversation with your ex for your son's sake. This is horrible because with some peopme you can't just "make it work", but we always have to keep the door open a little bit to show cps, therapists and (future) courts that we were and still are willing to co-parent with dh's BPDx.

Right now, maybe stick to e-mails? We've done this for quite a while now. Get someone in the boat like a sibling or a close friends to check your replies for JADE. I did this with dh and we hardly ever get any mor rants via e-mail.

Keep your epectations in mind. You expect your ex do behave a certain way and if he doesn't, it understandably upsets you. If you keep your expectations on a minimum, there will be less disappointment. E.g. i used to get really upset when ss came back from mom eow and did nothing but eat candy, play video games and somehow still managed to catch a cold in her appartment and now receiving cough syrup or anything. When i started to expect exactly that, it got better. I will not be able to change their weekend routine, so i will have to change the way i see it.

Hang in there 

Hello! Thank you strenghth is exactly what I need!.

My son is a infant so he's with me for now. I will surly try just emails cause talking on the phone never works. I just can't see our son spending time with him in the future like weekend visits, we do live in different countries. He can come here and visit his son whenever he wants but I can't let him go with. It's sad but sometimes I wish he would be the kind of guy that leaves us completely alone. He's making everyone miserable (once he said everyone has to feel the way he dose and he will make that happen) I will try minimum contact. Thank you

[catclaw]

You should document everything. The things he says are very scary and you really should write everything down. Also the content and situation of phone calls, save the mails, texts, anything that proves that he's unstable. We haven't needed our documentation at this point but it makes you feel safe to have it.

I totally get the wish that he just leaves. In my family there have been lots of parents who just left and it left the kids devastated and they blamed it on the parent who stayed. Personally, i hope that one day ss sees how life can be in a stable vs an unstable environment and have a choice. If he goes back to unstable, at least he will have known what to strive for if life doesn't work out.

[david]

I communicate through email only. It makes documenting so much easier since it is all there. I thought my ex would behave herself because of email only. I was wrong. She doesn't now but she used to raise her voice by capitalizing sections of her emails.  The first time it happened I thought she just hit the cap key by mistake but after rereading it I realized she did it on purpose because of the content and context.

[Dontknow88]

You should document everything. The things he says are very scary and you really should write everything down. Also the content and situation of phone calls, save the mails, texts, anything that proves that he's unstable. We haven't needed our documentation at this point but it makes you feel safe to have it.

I totally get the wish that he just leaves. In my family there have been lots of parents who just left and it left the kids devastated and they blamed it on the parent who stayed. Personally, i hope that one day ss sees how life can be in a stable vs an unstable environment and have a choice. If he goes back to unstable, at least he will have known what to strive for if life doesn't work out.

Thank you for your advice I will try my best

[Dontknow88]

I communicate through email only. It makes documenting so much easier since it is all there. I thought my ex would behave herself because of email only. I was wrong. She doesn't now but she used to raise her voice by capitalizing sections of her emails.  The first time it happened I thought she just hit the cap key by mistake but after rereading it I realized she did it on purpose because of the content and context.

He contacts me threw Facebook chat, dose it matter that it isn't time stamped ?

[david]

I only communicate through email. This took some time to establish. Ex would call me. I would not answer. If she left a voicemail I sent a reply through email repeating what she said and then my response. That was a little time consuming but it was only a few weeks and she switched to email. I did explain early on that I thought email was the best way to communicate so we wouldn't misunderstand each other.
I got rid of text mail, etc. so the only form of communication was email.
Later I had it put in our court order that all communication was to be through email and only about our boys. She still sends me all kinds of emails. I only respond to ones that pertain to our boys. The rest I save just in case.
Several years later I got texting again. She found out and brought it up at a co parent counseling session. I told her I preferred email only and would delete any text she sent without reading it. She sent me a text later that day. I deleted it like I said. I have a flip phone and rarely use texting anyway.
My ex unfriended me from her facebook account and to be honest I rarely use it.

[Thunderstruck]

DH has been slowly cutting back on conversation. When he first left uBPDbm it was calls/in person/google chat/texts/emails. As her conflict ramped up (from being abandoned), he scaled back communication one step at a time. It took nearly half a year until he was email only. Email didn't work with us, though, because it was too easy for DH and uBPDbm to fire off responses to each other which would escalate into back-and-forth arguments.

So now we use Our Family Wizard. I think it's helpful, but DH would prefer to use a program that he wouldn't have to pay for.

Don't JADE! That has been a hard lesson to learn. I think DH and I still get stuck in the JADE trap sometimes. Let's face it, you can tell them the grass is green until you're blue in the face but they will still insist it's purple! We are trying to walk the line between appearing to be reasonable/cooperative (in case one of these messages are read in court) and trying not to escalate conflict. It's tough.

[ForeverDad]

Regarding communication, it's largely about boundaries.  Allow too many exceptions and you and your boundaries are likely to be perceived as weak and enabling discord rather than reasonable and cooperative.  Once you allow a crack in the door into your boundaries or your non-parenting life you risk Ex squeezing his foot and more into your life.  So try to keep topics just to parenting or co-parenting.  Life will throw curves and you'll sometimes have to bend and make exceptions but keep them to a minimum and firmly managed.

Trying to JADE (Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain) seldom works because too often the disordered Ex isn't listening or reasoning.  Sometimes we're mystified why the discord is worse for us than what others experience with the person.  Well, as I read it explained in posts long ago, the Ex can't get past his perceived emotional baggage of the ended close relationship.  In other words, the closer a person is to a pwBPD, the more evident the BPD traits (and more overwhelming the impact).  BPD is a mood and emotional dysregulation disorder where emotions and feelings of the moment crowd out facts.