soap
Fewer than 3 Posts
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What is your sexual orientation: Straight
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Romantic partner
Posts: 1
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« on: December 28, 2017, 05:47:28 PM » |
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Hey folks, I'm afraid this is gonna be a wall of text which usually doesn't get much attention on the internet but if anything it will help me vent.
I am a 26yo male from Italy, my SO is a 23yo female which shows traits of BPD. She's undiagnosed but from all the documentation I was able to read, she fits the description. We've been together for 2 years and 9 months. I only woke up to the situation and started looking for the root of the problem less than a year ago. I'm sure everybody here is familiar with what it's like so I'm not gonna go into details.
I guess I'll just give a brief description of the situation. I feel trapped in a lot of ways. Objectively speaking I think I acted always to the best of my abilities. Going out of my way to understand her, meet her needs and demands and be there for her. Probably my biggest mistake was always trying to go out of my way for her. The truth is this. She is the daughter of a woman with some form of personality disorder (my guess is Bipolar) which mistreated her since she was a child. She never met her father and she discovered recently that he has since passed away. Her mom goes from insulting her, belittling her and forcing her to do chores for her to giving her gifts and being super caring. She essentially ran away from her mom about a year and a half a go, dropped from university and went to ireland to be an au-pair.
She was initially happy there but she started to hate the place fairly quickly as the people around her were legitimately not very good people, the child she was looking after was pretty mean and she had no friends. We held together in a long distance relationship to the best of our abilities. Her limited pay as an au-pair didn't allow her to do much and I often had to send her money. She had a problem with a tooth and I had to pay for the extraction. I make 500€ a month so I can't help a lot but usually whenever she asks I'm there.
She was supposed to work only certain hours but the mom of the child was very random with her shifts and so that didn't leave any room to get any sort of job.
She came back briefly to italy and went back to ireland not long after. I was able to visit her once while she was there. We wouldn't see each other sometimes for up to two months. She got tired of ireland and she went to Lithuania, her home country. She went to live with her grandparents. Her grandpa has Alzheimer and is pretty old so not a good influence on her. Her grandma is fairly loving but she can have outburst of anger and has a very backwards mentality for a lot of things. She's been staying there for the past few months. I was able to visit her once and she visited me once. She has no money saved, no job, and her friends are all far away and she can only text them. She's pretty lonely and miserable. In a lot of ways I'm her only hope and she told me that multiple times.
The first time I thought something was wrong was after a big fight where I started googling things. I don't remember exactly how it went. I remember the first time we talked about it. I just finished crying my heart out, as it always happens when she splits. She seemed relieved. She had a name and something to fight. She felt motivated.
But money was an issue, so getting therapy has always been hard. Most importantly, she doesn't want to get therapy, at least not alone. She got very close to getting therapy, but she panicked in front of the medical facility, I was trying to comfort her and something I said tipped her off and she split (something along the line of ":)on't worry, they'll probably just sit you down and give you an appointment for another day today.". She blamed it on me. She knows she needs therapy, she doesn't want to do it alone. She is terrified by it and due to her moving a lot she fears that she'll have to "empty herself" multiple times with different therapists. We got to a point where she doesn't even wanna talk about it and threatened suicide over it. This is a good time to bring up abuse as any.
Technically speaking I think she's been abusive to me a couple of times. One time she was yelling at me while I was crawled in bed, begging for her pardon for something that wasn't my fault. I was harmless, crying with my head between my hands and she was yelling at me. It felt wrong and after some Googling I determined it was abusive behavior. The morning after she didn't remember any of it. I described it to her and she started crying and apologizing and she said that if it ever happened again I should leave her. I will come back to this later.
The other time happened recently and it's more "subtle" but I heard it's classified as abuse. She started talking down on my career. I'm pretty used to her telling me I'm not good enough but she started questioning my work and highlighting my failures and my lack of success. I told her it felt humiliating and that triggered another crisis. I guess my biggest issue is that every time I tried to get any sort of "territory" back, she would get mad at me.
It's been always so incredibly difficult for me to go to her and tiptoe my way around mines to tell her in the nicest way possible "hey I wish you didn't do this anymore" without the conversation somehow ending with me apologizing for saying that in the first place. The thing is: it's hard. I've tried to learn as quickly as I could and I've tried many different approaches that I found on how to deal with people with BPD but I'm sort of stuck in a ditch. Always apologizing and saying yes and trying to deescalate the situation usually would end with nothing really going anywhere and just me being depressed and miserable. Trying to push back in reasonable ways didn't work either. I don't know. So many things happened over the past almost 3 years that it's almost impossible to describe them all. I did the math the other day and with an average of a crisis every 1.5 weeks that brings us to roughly 88 crisis. With an average duration of 2-3 days per crisis that means that I've spent 220 days being miserable and depressed. That's over 7 months.
I'll try to wrap it up. She is in a dire situation, her future doesn't look bright. When we're together, things are a bit easier but we're far apart for most of the time, with most of the communication going on via text and phone. She is pretty much alone and she knows it. That's the hardest part. When she tells me how much she realizes she's screwed and how much she's sorry for what she's done to me. She often said I should be with someone better who makes me happy. I tried to be everything she wanted me to be and give her everything she asked. She knows it, she said it. I do love her. But I feel empty. I've been drained of everything I had.
She seems stuck and I don't know how to help her, I don't have enough money to fix all of our issues. Every single crysis, I fear she's gonna jump from her window and take her life. She went close to it multiple times. I think I was able to talk her out of it. She never had a true suicide attempt but a lot of idealization. What scares me the most are the derealization episodes. It happened only twice and it was very scary.
I don't know how to help her and I feel trapped myself. I feel like if I leave she will take her life and I'll be responsible for it. She doesn't have anything else happy in her life except me and boy I tried to make her happy with every way I could. When I think of her the words of professor Jordan B Peterson are ringing into my ears and they sound so spot on. It's something along the line of "BPD people often know what their problem is, often know what the solution is but have absolutely no capability of executing on it". And that it's true. My heart breaks every time I hear her talk about the problem and what solutions she wants to implement. All the ideas she has for a better her and for a better future. And then she does none of it. And I don't know what to do anymore. I felt like I dragged this for the best part of the last 33 months but I'm not sure if I can do this any longer. I can't afford a therapist for myself but I'd probably need one. I rambled a lot and described the situation poorly. Apologies, if you got to this point.
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