How do I heal and or move on from this? Any advice or input appreciated. I just feel a blatant “what the actual **** just happened”
Hello and welcome to the family. I'm so sorry you're going through this and it definitely stings for awhile. How long ago did this happen? By that I mean when you received the DNA results.
Your ex is mentally ill and makes bad decisions because of it. I'm not trying to defend her, but she probably figured that you might be the father and rolled the dice. She probably broke up with you after feeling more and more confident that you weren't the father. Who knows. It comes from disordered thinking though. BPDs really get eaten up by guilt and shame, they don't know how to let go of it or move past it, so it just lingers and continually changes their thinking, their words, actions, etc.
Let's talk about you- how do you move on? Well, you're already doing it. At first, that could mean one day at a time because the pain cuts deep, it's an ugly betrayal. Like Pete said though, I'm sure she was saying the same things to the other guy too. This wasn't about you at all, it was about having no idea what to do when she really messed up several people's lives because of her actions.
My advice? Stay busy at work and get a gym membership. Get back into old hobbies or find new ones. Hang out with friends and family more, people that care about you. One day at a time, one week at a time, until it's no longer this huge thing in your mind. Everyone here healed at different speeds; for me, it was about 6 months before I began to feel normal again. But it also took that long to realize how messed up things really were in the relationship, so my mind had new things to analyze.
So take our advice- she didn't do this to you specifically. It would have happened with any guy she was dating at the time. She did it because she's mentally ill and she couldn't think her way through it because she was too emotional, too unbalanced. Even the, "You're harassing her" comment...that's true in a way. You said you sent one text, but that text was probably on her mind 24/7 for months and weighed on her like a ton of bricks. For you, it was a text. For her, it was torture because her mind can't let go of trauma (even when it's self-created) and she saw no way forward without losing a lot of respect from everyone around her.
At around the 1 year mark, I finally realized that my ex was sick and that's why she cheated on me. It's not a great answer, but its the best my mind was going to find. So try to save yourself extended heartbreak and listen to what we're saying- she did what she did because she's mentally ill. There's no other reason and she's probably not a bad person. She's just sick.
