How worried should I be?

[K Kup]

I’m not going to bore you all with lots of history that you probably would recognize all too well, but the basics are that I left my partner of 10 years about 9 months ago and have been trying to maintain contact ever since. Up until three weeks ago, I thought it was going well. With some pressure off, we could connect without conflict. But things took a very sharp turn and I’m reeling with the revelations. 1) that she is BPD/NPD as disclosed by our mutual therapist, 2) that she regularly and exclusively vilifies me to said therapist and has for at least the last year+, while presenting a relatively agreeable side to me, and 3) that she has been expressing outright hate for me during the time after we broke up to this therapist. I mean real, deep, aggressive hate, not just pissed off. Using that phrase repeatedly. She hates me with a passion and calls me a bitch and cunt to this therapist regularly. All the while, we see each other once a week, I support her in her business as I can, I watch her dog, we have pleasant conversation, and I think we are moving on to a new way of relating to each other.

Now things are in a rapidly deteriorating state starting 3 weeks ago when apparently I triggered her in more ways than she could handle with indicators that I was moving on and asserting myself, and setting some boundaries. Three weeks ago, I didn’t even realize she had BPD or NPD and was so cowed by years of emotional abuse that I didn’t even recognize that was what it was. I still have trouble identifying myself as a victim of emotional abuse and minimize her awful, destructive, intimidating and gaslighting behavior to myself, just as I hid and minimized it to others for years and years.

Now, she is threatening to destroy sentimental items that I left at our shared home (with her ok) by using them for “target practice”. I went to pick them up tonight while she was out of town because I have been feeling an increasing concern about being unsafe. I thought just emotionally (probably more minimizing). But she had changed the locks. Just two days ago, I had an online therapy session and she joined the session without my knowledge or the therapist’s. It was probably an honest mistake about scheduling at first, but she lingered on the line listening until we reset the session due to puzzling audio interference. She then was extra enraged about me telling the therapist I was feeling unsafe and said she should have stayed in the line for the whole session. It is such an astounding violation that she stayed on at  all!  Now the lock change and statements that “She’d better not come to my house”.

She has been emotionally anbusive and intimidating, though never physically abusive. But she is a whole new level of unhinged now and has an arsenal of guns. She has gotten close to suicide many times snd is a cutter. She lets her rage become physical with objects like kicking things and throwing things. My instincts are telling me there is danger, but I’m having trouble trusting my instincts after they betrayed me for so long. Am I inflating the risk of violence or being too dramatic?  Or am I minimizing the risk and not listening to my lizard brain?  My trust in myself is just so damaged right now, I don’t know what to think. I do know my lizard brain gave me a panic attack for the first time in 12 years last week and I’ve been so unsettled emotionally and even physically. Can I get a reality check from anyone who has been in a similar situation?  I just don’t know what to think and my emotions are so jumbled.

[ThanksForPlaying]

It's not just your own instincts, right? 

It sounds like your therapist is trying to disclose some things to you - maybe even quite directly in therapist-speak.

Don't let the 'new' revelations become a sticking point. For example, now that (1) she is diagnosed BPD ... this doesn't really change what you've been dealing with for 10 years ... it only gives a label to it.  It was already stressful for you, and will continue to be stressful (and probably physically dangerous).  (2) vilification and (3) hatred are also 'new' things that are difficult to understand, but you've been dealing with other things that you are already saying are unacceptable to you.

Use these new revelations as motivation if that helps, but also ... it sounds like you've seen plenty of things yourself, regardless of whether these new things are true or not (they are true).