Hello and
-- we're glad you're here and felt ready to reach out and share your story. BPD relationships can be unintuitive, confusing, and high intensity, so it's good you're getting support.
Your relationship progression will sound very familiar to members here: the incredible "honeymoon phase" full of passion and "twin flame/soul mate" connection, followed by an increase in confusing behaviors, negativity, hostility, and conflict.
It can be confusing when "generally normal" relationship advice either doesn't work or makes things worse. For example, advice to "talk it out later", have deep/long relationship discussions, explain yourself/your point of view, etc, typically don't make things better, and can be like adding fuel to the fire.
This is because pwBPD (persons with BPD) can struggle with all three of the following:
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high emotional sensitivity (while you might not even pick up on someone outright insulting you, the pwBPD can respond to even an innocuous statement like "do you think you'll be on time tomorrow" with a huge sense of shame, guilt, pain, embarrassment, agony, and self loathing)
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high emotional reactivity (while you might react to something emotionally painful at a 4/10 -- upset, talking about it for ~20 minutes, taking time for yourself, calling a friend -- the pwBPD might react at a 10/10 -- yelling, screaming, suicide threats, blame, violence)
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long return to emotional baseline (while you might "get over" a conflict or argument in an hour or two, the pwBPD may take days or more to get back to a stable place emotionally. This comes up a lot when one partner wants to "talk through" a conflict sooner than the other is ready... it can reignite the conflict)
It can take a lot of skillbuilding and learning of new tools to manage conflict effectively with a pwBPD, so that we stop making things worse.
A good place to start is our
Tools and skills workshops, especially the
Relationship Skills section with articles like
Listening and being heard in BPD relationships. I'd encourage you to check out those links, then let us know here what stood out to you or seemed to apply to your situation.
...
Today, a relatively minor transgression turned into a full blown situation, and we have not spoken since, as this person has requested solitude.
What happened? Can you walk us through who said what?
Knowing how these conflicts typically go can help us see areas you can make changes that could help. Not easy stuff... but worth it.
Looking forward to hearing more from you;
kells76
