3 generations of mental illness and it ends here...

[Karmajoy]

I found a good therapist and I’ve been more depressed than ever since I started putting the pieces of this long puzzle together.  After years and years of self-help books and time spent on the internet, she summed up my husband; he’s borderline.  Not only have I come to painfully realize this, but we both come from a long line of the mentally ill.  I can only recount to our grandparents, but it may go back further: borderlines, narcs and one very passive aggressive one, badly abused as a child.  So, it’s no wonder we ended up together.

We’ve been together 27 years.There were red flags and I ignored them.  He wasn’t a very nice person.  One of his sisters told me when he finally introduced me to his family that they were shocked he had a girlfriend because they thought he was gay and because he was such an ass.  I wish I had run then.  What she meant, as I’ve come to understand is that he has severe emotional intimacy issues (and seems to only know to use sex as a way to control me) and is borderline.  I tried to break up with him and he threatened me in a very loud and horrifying voice. So, what did I do? I married him, and so goes our cycle. Threat, obedience, resentment, drama in our lives, etc.

Two weeks into our relationship it was my birthday.  He asked what I wanted and being the 22 year old that I was, I said, “Oh, nothing” and so what did he get me? Nothing. Not a card. Nothing. Then he said we might as well go out to eat. I said I’d go and get dressed and came back out five minutes later and he was asleep on the couch.  That was my first birthday with him. It speaks volumes about both of us.

Part of why we have last so long is because our lives, especially mine, read more like a Mexican telenovela. It’s like a roller coaster we can’t get off of.  He actually may enjoy the drama, but I seem to be the one vomiting from it.  We are estranged from our parents, so we’ve raised our two kids alone, far from family, no friends. We had money issues for a while but no longer. We’ve both had cancer and we had infertility problems.  One of our children has developed a chronic medical condition and requires surgery. When we aren’t working on finding relief for her, we are getting different opinions from doctors and dealing with her depression and now anger. Aside from this we’ve both been depressed and I have PTSD and now I know along with being an ass, he’s borderline.  I really do admire how so many of you talk about your spouses and can separate the behavior from the person. I can’t.  One time when I was a stay at home mom, he came home and I proudly showed him how I had arranged the spices in alphabetical order because I had read about this making cooking so much easier (from a magazine). Stupid in hindsight, but I was so proud. He took one look at the cabinet and shuffled the spices around and laughed at me. Ass!

I think I married him, like most women, thinking I could fix him.  I thought he was shy about sex and needed to build his confidence. Wrong.  He uses any kind of affection as a control system. It suffices to say that I’ve had it. We don’t touch at all.  I found out that he was the golden child to his narcissistic mother (whereas I was the rejected child). He hates his 80 year old mother (Mommy Dearest), and rages at her on the phone. As the therapist explained, “Of course he doesn’t want to be intimate with you. Who wants to sleep with his mother?” So mystery creepily solved there. 
 
I wish I had the compassion and patience that so many of you have but having grown up with two nut jobs for parents, a narc and a borderline, I often found myself telling them how to behave and giving them ultimatums. 

And so, like many of you married to borderlines, I feel my life is over in a way. I’m here to make sure my kids turn out okay, 18 and 21, or at least guide them to a good therapist.  I know what to watch for and I look out for them. I wish I had had some guidance when I was 22 and trusted my instincts and run because it’s been a nightmare.

At 49 I am not the same person and neither is he. Gone are the days of raging, only since January though, when I finally thought to tell him that if he raised his voice to me again, I’d call the cops. He stopped cold turkey.  For the first 20 years, he never raged, which is why I didn’t recognize the borderline in him. It was all passive aggressive. He had an answer for everything and it was a crazy making time. He would tell me what to do, what the outcome would be. End of discussion.  I argued for many years about being controlled and finally he ran out of things to control (how many children we had, where we lived, etc.), or I gave him or he finally got the message, after dozens of hours of complaining.

I said to my therapist that he is like a Doberman. He likes order and is serious. He’s a good dog so long as he’s got a job to do, a purpose, something to keep him busy.  I am a Chihuahua.  Nobody listens to me, takes me seriously or even considers me a real dog. They think all I do is yap, until I bite them in the ankle or just walk over and take the bone away.  I am ready to be Chihuahua that takes the bone away, but I am just too tired.

I have researched it all. At the 20 year mark, he realized I didn’t love him and the discard began. He has raged for 7 years, every six months threatening to divorce me and make my life a living hell. He’s threatened to take all of my money (projecting, I believe, because I would be entitled to most of his in reality), etc. He’s raged in front of the kids. He’s made the house an uncomfortable place, all the while our daughter has been ill with a chronic disease.  We’ve gone so far as a divorce mediator only to have him threaten to turn the kids on me (he is super dad and my therapist says that this a form of splitting and control and so long as they don’t turn on him, he will continue), and resort to all kinds of manipulation (bringing back childhood trauma of my parents bad mouthing each other and taking each other to court all the time).  I looked into staying married for financial reasons, having separate bedrooms, selling the house and buying separate houses or buying a mother-daughter house and having our own parts of the house.  Nothing satisfies him. I got a divorce lawyer and went over the finances. He hasn’t put enough away in retirement and will have to work longer, if we divorce. I can hear the victim violins right now…

So, I think I’m stuck. I feel like a single mother with two kids I want to be there for, I love, I care about, I want to see succeed and one adult son who I have to live with.  We barely talk, maybe 10 minutes per day on weekdays. He works very long hours and often comes home, says a few things if anybody is home, eats, then goes to another room and watches baseball. On the weekends, lately since he can’t seem to get  a rise out of me (though I am sure he’ll keep trying) he avoids me, to such extremes that he chain sawed so many trees and bagged so many grass clippings, he claims he got sun stroke. He’s 52 years old and is so immature he has to stay outside to avoid me? It’s actually very sad.

I think the deal is, though everything is unspoken, since real conversation could include him raging and then I’d call the cops on him, all he wants is for me to live with him. He, fortunately for me, doesn’t seem to need to be around me much.  When we do sit around and talk, it’s about work or the kids, never the elephant in the room, which at this point, I’ve had enough. I’m not a therapist.

I do have a lot of freedom. I spend a lot of time alone. I live in an isolated place. I clean if I want and don’t if I don’t. I try to connect with my kids as much as I can.  I have lot of pets.  I hate the charade of this whole thing. I don’t outright divorce him or leave because I fear what he’ll do to the only to relationships I care about.  And so, I play the stupid games. I play musical beds. When I can’t stand to be in the same bed, I feign a cold, or I get up in the middle of the night and say he’s snoring. 

I got him to see a therapist, actually one I was seeing. I told her about him and she said she couldn’t see him because he was emotionally abusive to me. I begged. She met him and told me he was delightful with a touch of OCD.  She continued to see us both and seemed to like him more and more. She’d fall asleep during my sessions and I frankly thought she was losing it, so I left, but he continues to see her and the last I heard, they talk politics. I can’t win.  She enables him! So, again, doubt, crazy making….
We had our anniversary last week. I got him nothing. What’s to celebrate? He got me a card and some gifts. The card said something like, “We make a cool couple. I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone else” to which I thought to ask, “Are we splitting again? Don’t you recall just 3 months ago I got a divorce lawyer and threatened to call the cops on you?” 

So, that’s my story.  It’s not compassionate. It’s 49 years of abuse, 27 of which I selected.  I am deeply upset at myself for getting myself into this mess and don’t see a way out without losing my kids to him at least for several more years until they are really on their own.  I think I’ve got my head on straight about watching out for signs in them, and as far as managing his BPD, not giving him attention, keeping my boundaries firm and living my own life, as much as I can. Right now I am just so upset about the truth.

[RELATIONSHIP PROBLEM SOLVING]

RELATIONSHIP PROBLEM SOLVING This is a high level discussion board for solving ongoing, day-to-day relationship conflicts. Members are welcomed to express frustration but must seek constructive solutions to problems. This is not a place for relationship "stay" or "leave" discussions. Please read the specific guidelines for this group.

[LightnessOfBeing]

I have no words of wisdom. I understand your hell, because I live in a not dissimilar one. I haven't been trapped nearly as long as you have, and I desperately hope not to be. These "relationships" (in quotation marks b/c how much resemblance do they bear to an actual relationship?... .) with a borderline can definitely feel like such a trap - even if you can extricate yourself emotionally, and give up on the hope you once had for love with them, you know that what probably awaits you if you actually end it is a maelstrom of bad behavior, smear campaigns, turning friends and family against you, trying to punish you financially if they can, etc, etc. I'm still in my marriage for several reasons, one of which is that I don't want to experience that traumatizing experience of everything my BPDh will do once he splits me black for leaving, I really just don't want to go through that agony, I don't feel strong enough. For me, it's like having my foot caught in a bear trap - it's horribly painful, but I can't face the worse pain of sawing my foot off, even though I know that if I can just get through that part, there will eventually be no pain.

I hope you might change your mind about your life being over in a sense. I see that sentiment alot in Nons who've been with a BPDSO for a long time, that resignation. I respect the "no-run messages" policy of this board, so I won't take the discussion in that direction. But you do say you feel stuck, and I would just say for you, as well as for myself and every other Non who feels stuck, that I believe that freedom is possible. I believe we can survive all the fallout, and that on the other side of that, perhaps after A LOT of intense grief and struggle, we can rediscover joy and real love. It sounds like, in part, you're staying to try to run interference against what would be his attempts to turn your children against you - but won't that always be a possibility? That is, whether you were to leave now, or five years from now? Isn't it a tragedy when we build our whole life around trying to mitigate, counteract, or otherwise respond to the pathological behavior of someone with a personality disorder? I'm not being as clear as I want to be, please don't take that the wrong way, I'm not meaning to imply that you're doing the wrong thing, truly!

Living these kinds of "charades" is frustrating, and lonely, and painful. But you say you're keeping your boundaries firm, and that's a good thing. And you have other good things in your life, too.  As promised, I had nothing helpful to say - but here, in a similarly sad house, up late at night after another classic being-raged-at incident, is a woman who has read your post, feels your pain, and is basically just conveying that you aren't alone.