Enlightenment

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

Good Morning All,

Just wanted to share how I have been dealing with the exBPD breakup over the past 10 days.  I am making some real progress within myself and I am hoping that sharing could help some others.

To preface, it's been 12 days no contact so far.  Completely no contact or even a temptation to contact her.  I don't want her to reach out to me either.  

All of the relationship drama aside and the pain that I am feeling because of this situational event, I really needed to understand how I got to this point in my life.  Not just ending up with a BPD but how has my decision making process affected the choices I have made in life both professionally and interpersonally.   I discovered that every choice that I have made up until this point in my life has been on the basis to avoid an emotion, fear.  That fear was simply rejection, nothing more.  That is absolutely why I have become a people pleaser and also the reason I have been unable to communicate my needs to others.  As a result, this is how the destructive path of lying started which I can trace back to my early teen years.   As I dug deeper within myself, I also came to the realization that I absolutely feared my mother.  As a child, and even as an adult nothing was ever good enough for her and I could only obtain love by doing things that she deemed "good."   At a very early age, I needed to survive, and if survival meant avoiding the truth, then that's what I had to do. It shaped how I was going to deal with uncomfortable emotions for the rest of my life.  For me lying serves 2 purposes, manipulation of others, and the avoidance of truth to appease others.  Appeasing was my reason for lying and I'm sure some manipulation was present at times as well.   I did not take it to the level of being pathological but small lies eventually lead up to big failures, and that's exactly what happened.  I believe the issue here was 2 fold, pleasing people, and not trusting my instincts and allowing them to a guiding hand in doing what was right for me. I avoided the emotions of fear, abandonment, rejection because I was shaped as a child to suppress those feelings to preserve love and acceptance from my mother.  I am grateful my father was not that way, but what I really needed, was her.  It's haunting me until this day.

I find myself thinking more and more about me and less and less about her.  Admittedly, I still do have that fixer temptation inside of me and I am slowly starting to accept that I cannot fix her, no one can.  I do care about her very much and can only hope that she can have her own moment of enlightenment for her own sake and the sake of her kids.

We are brought into this world as blank templates and rely on those around us to really shape who we are.  Its not hereditary, its a learned behavior that we are passing down from generation to generation.  I need to stop it within myself.  My kids need me.

[Warcleods]

Good Morning All,

Just wanted to share how I have been dealing with the exBPD breakup over the past 10 days.  I am making some real progress within myself and I am hoping that sharing could help some others.

To preface, it's been 12 days no contact so far.  Completely no contact or even a temptation to contact her.  I don't want her to reach out to me either.  

All of the relationship drama aside and the pain that I am feeling because of this situational event, I really needed to understand how I got to this point in my life.  Not just ending up with a BPD but how has my decision making process affected the choices I have made in life both professionally and interpersonally.   I discovered that every choice that I have made up until this point in my life has been on the basis to avoid an emotion, fear.  That fear was simply rejection, nothing more.  That is absolutely why I have become a people pleaser and also the reason I have been unable to communicate my needs to others.  As a result, this is how the destructive path of lying started which I can trace back to my early teen years.   As I dug deeper within myself, I also came to the realization that I absolutely feared my mother.  As a child, and even as an adult nothing was ever good enough for her and I could only obtain love by doing things that she deemed "good."   At a very early age, I needed to survive, and if survival meant avoiding the truth, then that's what I had to do. It shaped how I was going to deal with uncomfortable emotions for the rest of my life.  For me lying serves 2 purposes, manipulation of others, and the avoidance of truth to appease others.  Appeasing was my reason for lying and I'm sure some manipulation was present at times as well.   I did not take it to the level of being pathological but small lies eventually lead up to big failures, and that's exactly what happened.  I believe the issue here was 2 fold, pleasing people, and not trusting my instincts and allowing them to a guiding hand in doing what was right for me. I avoided the emotions of fear, abandonment, rejection because I was shaped as a child to suppress those feelings to preserve love and acceptance from my mother.  I am grateful my father was not that way, but what I really needed, was her.  It's haunting me until this day.

I find myself thinking more and more about me and less and less about her.  Admittedly, I still do have that fixer temptation inside of me and I am slowly starting to accept that I cannot fix her, no one can.  I do care about her very much and can only hope that she can have her own moment of enlightenment for her own sake and the sake of her kids.

We are brought into this world as blank templates and rely on those around us to really shape who we are.  Its not hereditary, its a learned behavior that we are passing down from generation to generation.  I need to stop it within myself.  My kids need me.