hi letthesunshinein and
I'm going to offer you some feedback and hopefully what I write can help you understand what happened in your BPD relationship in order to help you fully detach.
... .About 7 months ago he wrote again, and we started a passionate intense online relationship due to the fact that we were in different countries at the time. He filled a void in my that I never knew I had. A void I venture to guess came from not getting all the love I needed from my parents, family etc. So I was ripe for the picking... .
One of the major modus operandi of people with BPD (pwBPD) is the great effort they put into avoiding (real or imagined) abandonment. During the time that your relationship with long distant, he spent a great deal of time understanding you and becoming familiar with what you want/need in order to best insure that you would be so in love with him that you would be incapable of leaving/abandoning him.
This is why he isolated you from your friends and made you as dependent upon him as possible. Because the more you depended upon him, the less able you would be to leave/abandon him.
... .But then the weirdness started. The need to control EVERYTHING I did, said, went, dressed, cooked even! and the insults. And the obsessive need to overanalyze my past. The extreme jealousy that I had told him I had loved my bf 3 years ago. (I am only allowed to have love for him). And then the name-calling.
You see, he believes (or needs to believe) his fear of abandonment is justified. He believes that he feels the way he feels because of your actions. He feels the need to control everything because he is preoccupied by his disordered fear that you mean to leave/abandon him. Each time you acquiesced to his demands it would confuse him. Because when he is with you, it is clear to him that you do not intend to leave/abandon him. But when you are not around, he is tormented by this fear. This is because the source of his fear is his disorder and perhaps he cannot accept this.
... .2 weeks ago he drove me crazy by making up a story saying he "had proof that I acted the same lovey dovey way I act with him, with my ex" that I am a liar when I say i "love" him. I lost it and said how can you have proof there is no proof. the relationship was 3 years ago. No one would even say that to you, (he never wanted to meet my friends or family so no contact with them ).
This is why he is looking for any reason, even complete fiction, in order to justify how he feels.
I kept trying to leave him but kept accepting him back because I was IN LOVE for the first time in my life (I am 37 yo) But if he says he loves me more than anything in the World, then how can he say all these things to me? I started asking him, if I am so horrible, such a liar etc etc, then why was he with me?
He probably wants to have a deeply connected, intimate relationship with you. But his disorder keeps getting in the way. As I see it, until/unless he is able to recover from his disorder, he is incapable to having a deeply connected, intimate relationship with anyone.
Whenever I tried to break up, the insane attempts to re-engage. And then once I got back together with him after a couple days of NC, he would then bring up my past, my exes, my lack of being IN THE RELATIONSHIP (how dare I break up with him?) the constant criticism, the jealousy of my friends family even the fact that I had to go to work, how dare I cry in the Street, how dare I talk to my friends about him, how dare I ask him where he is (apparently I only wanted to know what he does because of the fact that he wants to know what I do, and I am only doing it to boost my ego , by asking him questions and expecting responses).
You see, when you tried to break up, it was no longer *imagined* abandonment but *real* abandonment he was reacting to. And so he would do everything/anything he could in order to avoid this abandonment. For a while it was to re-seduce you back into the relationship. And later he would abandon you first in order to avoid being abandoned.
Each time he got you to come back, he would still have to deal with his disordered fear... .the fear of *imagined* abandonment.
He said that he never knew he was this crazy, that loving me brought out this side of him he never knew he had. I begged and pleaded with him for us to go to counseling or something but he always said no one could help him.
I don't believe this. If he has BPD, there is a high likelihood that all of his past relationships were unstable and conflicted. It is quite possible that every one of his past relationships have caused him to feel what he has felt while with you. Perhaps he has even sought professional help before. And in the end, he refuses to accept his part in all of this. Why else would he so readily dismiss help?
You are in the right place.
Best wishes,
Schwing
