Newbie

[Confused1985]

Wow! So glad I stumbled upon this site. I have been reading up on BPD for months and still seem to be confused. I met the love of my life in 2010 and we were swept along in an intense love story. I thought I had met my soul mate. He asked me to marry him and I said yes and we planned both the children. Things got a little crazy when I was pregnant with my second child and then chaos just came. I thought we could fix it and become a happy little family but things went drastically down hill. There was others women/ drinking /
Gambling / drugs. I look back now and I'm just so confused as it ended up like that and how I got involved. I guess it wasn't like that at the beginning. He (my ex) got his diagnosis about 18months ago and after 12months I moved  away. I let my head rule my heart in the end after putting all my energy into it.  This is the strange thing though, I have moved 300 miles away and ready to start my new chapter but I just can't stop my heart from loving him. He is my children's dad and was a great dad to a certain extent. I had to assess how he was at the time for the kids. It's all just a mess now and and I've tried to get some sort of routine for the kids but their dad won't stick to a routine... My little boy is very angry, my girl seems ok but I've got him cohnselling through the school. They are 4 and 5. I would love them to have a relationship with their dad but it's hit and miss and he lets them down a lot and makes promises he can't keep. I know my boy is suffering and I just feel
So frustrated and upset about the whole thing as I hardly have any energy left myself. I never thought we would end up like this. It's all broken and a mess. I'm just getting everything off my chest really. How did you guys co - parent? How did your kids turn out with/ without the relationship with the other parent? Does your heart ever heal? Did you ever move onto somebody new and could you trust them? Thanks in advance. I'm looking forward to hearing from any responses

[livednlearned]

Hi Confused1985,

Welcome and hello 

I'm so sorry for the sadness that brings you here, and glad you found the site. Coparenting with a BPD ex is hard, and raising kids to be emotionally resilient when they've been traumatized and have a mentally ill parent is not easy.

It's great that your kids are getting counseling, and honestly, the anger your son is feeling sounds about right and in his own way, is a healthy expression. Better that he feels those feelings instead of burying them and setting himself up for depression as he gets older (which is what my son is experiencing).

The best advice I can offer is to learn all you can about emotional validation. There are some good books recommended on the site, including Power of Validation for Parents and I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better. It's common for parents to want to soothe how our kids feel, which tends to drive the very raw and painful feelings underground, where things get mingled with shame, a particularly toxic and damaging emotion. It's possible to validate their feelings without maligning your ex, though it does take some skill.

If you can avoid it, don't tell the kids their dad loves them. That is for them to sort out with their dad, and to decide if the way he behaves can be called love. Otherwise, they will confuse rejection and abandonment with love as they get older and start to forge their own relationships with significant people in their lives.

As for moving on and loving someone else, that happened in my case. I finally got the message that I made bad choices when it came to relationships and pulled off the band aid and did a lot of therapy, and a lot of soul searching. It was actually the process of wanting my son to be emotionally resilient that helped me heal. We have some good material to the right in the sidebar, in lesson 5 I believe. It's a good starter kit

And then I met a wonderful man whom I love dearly. We've been together close to 5 years. Everything I learned about myself and emotions helped elevate the relationship to a mutually loving one with trust and kindness. After what I've experienced in relationships, including my family of origin, it's a constant surprise and delight to discover someone so easy to be with.

I didn't just fall into it, though. The road to recovery was raw, and painful, and surprisingly, the part that hurt the most was believing I was worthy, and lovable. I acted like I felt this way, but deep down, I had to move a few mountains to genuinely believe it.

You can too. 

LnL

[Confused1985]

Thank you so much for spending the time to write back. That's an interesting point about not saying he loves them. I did actually just buy birthday presents and said they were from him but now in hindsight that was probably not a good thing. I just want to protect them and for them to never get hurt but I guess they are going to get hurt :/. It's such a shame for them. Oh well all I can do is try and build a good life for them and get them through this. Yes, I will try and read up on everything. It's a nice thought that one day in the future I won't be on my own so I will hold onto that thought but in the meantime get me and these two back on track. It's literally like a hurricane has hit you and everything has to be built again. Also , that's a good point about allowing him to express being angry (I never really thought about that). Thank you. If anybody else has any tips I would greatly appreciate them

[takingandsending]

Hello Confused1985.

A moderator here once said that the face of a personality disorder often is revealed around the birth of children. I know that my xw immediately began to create a triangle once my oldest son was born. At the time, I was totally at a loss what was happening. Xw became incredibly irritable and angry, and her thinking increasingly moved toward absolutes of black and white - there was no reasoning with her.

Your xh engaged in significantly destructive behaviors when your children were born, which made the decision to leave more immediate. But your heart hasn't caught up yet. If you had stayed in your marriage, you would have ample time for your heart to catch up with your head, because his hurtful behaviors would not change. It's okay to feel grief, confusion, uncertainty - that's human. We have all been there. You will get over this in time. And asking how you ended up where you are now is a great starting point. Look at what your role was in your marriage. How were you at expressing your feelings, your needs? How were your boundaries? If you identify some patterns, compare them with how you were within your family of origin. For many of us, the patterns we learned growing up are the patterns that lead us into an unhealthy marriage/relationship. What do you think?

On my part, I feel hook, line and sinker for the massive idealization that my xw gave me when we first met. And, as much as it sucks, I am now having to look at why I needed that soo much that I ignored all the  that I saw with her early on. How about you? Can you think of any early warning signs that you saw that you overlooked?

Regarding your children, validation is a gift that you can give them that they really may never get from their dad - it is not a strong point for pwBPD. I encourage you to validate both of them, whatever their experience is. Just let them know that you see them, you get it, you are there for them. And yeah, we all tend to try to overcompensate for what their disordered parent doesn't make evident through words and actions. I did it all the time when I was married. I still do it at times now that I am in process of divorce. But my kids are more important than my own comfort, so I am learning to just validate their experiences and not my anger and pain when they get hurt to modulate their feelings. They feel what they feel. It's not wrong.

[kells76]

Welcome to the boards, Confused 1985! It sounds like you and the kids have been through a lot and you all have some pretty mixed feelings in your own ways.

You won't be alone here, though. Although my situation is a little different (stepmom to 2, their mom is uBPD [undiagnosed but has exhibited some challenging behaviors]), I can vouch for the same advice that LnL and TaS gave:

-Get a good counselor for yourself and work on you. Sometimes our own responses to situations make the situations more difficult (I'm dealing with that right now personally). So if we can get healthier and build better skills, that can help deescalate situations with kids &/or disordered parents.

-Part of that is probably asking yourself those questions that TaS posed -- about what you thought you could gain by being in that relationship, even with warning signs.

-Get a good counselor for the kids. This isn't about the kids "having problems" and "needing to get fixed", but loving the kids by providing a resource for them. Ultimately the counselor can be a neutral 3rd party where the kids won't feel like they have to protect you or defend their Dad or say what someone wants to hear -- they can just let it out.

-Learn some good kid skills by reading books and online posts. The book that LnL recommended -- Power of Validation -- helped me out. Even just "going through the motions" as I started to practice validation helped me to build that skill. Like TaS mentioned, validation doesn't have to mean that you agree with everything -- it means you work to understand why someone would feel that way.

-Don't beat yourself up for trying your best (i.e. the birthday presents etc). I've also been in the place of saying "Actually, I'm the stepmom, and they have a mom who loves them too". I probably could've handled that better, but if I get stuck on thinking how much I messed up, I can't learn from it and move on. That is probably a good thing to model to the kids, too -- that we all make mistakes, but it's whether we learn from them and change or not that sets us apart.

Again, welcome, and hang in there.

P.S. There was a member here who went by "rarsweet"; I haven't seen her post in a while, but from what I remember there were some similarities with her situation and yours (she wanted her kid's dad to step up and be a good dad, and she gave him a lot of chances, but he wasn't very capable). If you search back through the boards I bet you can find her story.