Verbal Diarrhea and Selective Hearing

[mssalty]

I’m curious if a person with BPD tends to have to explain and justify everything. 

If my SO spilled something on the couch, rather than say they spilled something on the couch, they’d spend twenty minutes setting up the events for why they spilled it on the couch. It often seems like they’re constantly thinking people are going to say something negative about even the most basic of stories or events and therefore need to provide full setup. 

The flip side is that my SO tends to have very selective hearing based on what they want to hear.  If a counselor said “you and your spouse need to work on communication”, they’d say “the counselor said YOU need to work on communication.”   

My SO has other issues with OCD and irrational anxiety and often will justify their anxiety using something someone said while ignoring the other things they said.  If a mechanic said “I’ve never seen an issue like this, but it’s easily fixable” they’d say “they said they’ve never seen anything like this and it won’t be fixed.” 

Just recently my SO claimed I said something to someone else and I think they realized I was so adamant I never said it, that instead of trying to gaslight, they backed off. 

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[SuperDaddy]

We all make some mistakes every day. Perhaps small most of the time, but we always do. That's what makes us humans.

And some humans make mistakes more frequently than others due to circumstantial reasons, such as stress, impulsivity, or being under intense emotions. So the BPD disorder tends to make them more erratic than the average person, especially if they are under constant demand, such as when taking care of multiple kids. The same can be said about other disorders such as ADHD.

My wife has both BPD and ADHD, so she makes so many mistakes at home, but it is so hard to bring it up without triggering her, so usually I just bite my tongue and stay quiet. Because when I talk about something very specific that she did wrong or can be improved, she interprets it as a personal critique and begins to react poorly by interrupting me with excuses and justifications, by raising her voice, by showing contempt, and finally by counterattacking. She then insists on doing some personal critique to me on something else that wasn't the topic of the conversation, as if we were in a predatory competition to define who's the worst person.

You can see my point; they often feel like horrible people too easily. All of the rest that you said looks like examples of the specific tactics of defending and counterattacking that your SO usually makes use of against you, including the part that looks like selective hearing. If you think about the worst possible attacks that can be done and said, then what you describe is not that bad. But over time it can get worse if you eventually start to counterattack too and the core issues aren't resolved.

I think the core issue is the unstable sense of self. If you say they are a duck, they can't ignore that because it makes them really feel like a duck. Unless it is a clear and well-intended joke and they are in a good mood to get the joke correctly.

I don't quite know how to deal with it yet. When I use humor, it may work, but it's hard to make progress using jokes, and sometimes there is serious stuff that I don't want to joke about. One example is the number of hours our baby watches screens per day. This has been increasing. I got quite angry when I saw the baby using huge headphones watching drawings in the dark, just like his mom does. So I wasn't in the mood at all to make a joke about it.

But maybe we can use a different tactic that doesn't require humor. What if I give it a deep thought first to anticipate how she will feel during the conversation and provide her with some validation on who she is before going into matters? For instance, I could validate that she is a good mother and wants the best for our son. And after she acknowledges that, maybe she will hear me about the screen time.

Another tactic I might have to use is to add notes on the wall with reminders of what we have agreed on in previous conversations, if it's really a legitimate agreement. Sometimes she just says yes to get me off her back, so that's not really an agreement. Other times she truly agrees but soon forgets about it completely and follows her impulses again. I should also take pictures of those agreements just in case the paper gets lost.

I hope those ideas give you some inspiration to improve your situation as well.