Hello everyone! I've been lurking here for months and you all have helped me navigate through some difficult moments since my breakup with pwBPD ex. This is my first post. I thought I would share my story and some observations and realizations I've had since the breakup happened 4 months ago. I hope that my story may help you as much as you all have helped me.
So what's this swimming business? I'm stealing a line from song that I think describes how I changed over the course of the breakup.
"I hope I never see
The ocean again
Pushing and pulling at me
As I go deeper and deeper in
Til I'm so far from my shore
So far from what I came here for
I let you surround me
I let you drown me
Out with your din
And then I learned how to swim"
-Ani DiFranco "Swim"
So this is the story of how I stopped drowning and was able to get my head above water. It took time, a lot of support from loving friends and family and a lot of patience and kindness with myself.
I wanted to start out by describing the relationship first to provide some context. There are some things that I see now that were warning signs that I did not pick up on. I understand now that most of the relationship and who she was when she was with me was illusion and fantasy but it felt real to me at the time. Part of my process has been thinking back and discerning what was real and what was illusion.
I actually met my pwBPD ex because she was a friend of my previous ex. I had known her for a year or so when I broke up with my previous ex. That breakup was volatile and dragged out over months. My pwBPD was very supportive of me during this time and thought that I was the one being wronged. She wanted to help me. She said later that she threw her whole self into trying to help me through it because she thought that I was such a good person that I deserved it. I recognize now that she was playing the Rescuer role in a triangulated relationship and I was likely playing the Victim role (although there were real issues with abuse with my previous ex).
After the breakup with my previous ex, I fell in love quickly with my pwBPD. She thought that I was wonderful and was always doing things to make me laugh, to feel better and to feel that I deserved to be loved. We bonded quickly as we are both survivors of childhood physical and sexual abuse. When you are a survivor, it seems that most people do not get you because you just exist in the world in a different way than normal people. She understood me and I understood her because we had that shared experience. Plus, we had so many interests in common it was just unbelievable to me (now I know that it really was unbelievable because it was illusion).
She was not diagnosed with BPD but with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Although I never saw any evidence of multiple personalities at any time when we were together. There were no separate identities, no different voices or perspectives, no fugue states. I didn't doubt the DID diagnosis until after the breakup. But it was also part of what confused me during the relationship and why I did not pick up on some of the warning signs earlier. I thought the behavior was just aspects of DID that I did not understand. To further complicate matters, I think my ex is a waif BPD because I did not see the mood swings or any outbursts of anger until close to the end.
I knew that it was a bad idea to get into another relationship so quickly after the last one ended, but I was not in a position where I was really capable of thinking through things. All that I could do was follow my instincts and they told me that I felt safe and loved with her. I just wanted to dive into that feeling and so I did.
For most of the relationship, we got along well and we were optimistic. We made each other laugh constantly. I think she was in a place that Gunderson describes as the first level of emotional functioning
https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=70884.0.htm. She was agreeable and appeared to be willing to work on issues. She was just so nice about everything all the time. She was mostly submissive which is the way that she preferred to be. I did not want to be the dominant one in the relationship because I don't think that relationship dynamic works. But I ended up being the dominant one by default because someone had to make decisions and make sure things were taken care of. I worked and paid all of the bills and she stayed home and cleaned the house and made food.
Early on she talked about our future. Our engagement happened within a few months when she made a comment about something that would happen at our wedding. She made it seem like she didn't mean to say it out loud but followed up with, "You know we are going to be together the rest of our lives, right?" I just laughed and said that I knew.
She wanted to have kids with me. She talked a lot about this in the beginning of the relationship. This was a big fantasy for her. I agreed to have kids but wanted to be married and more financially stable first. She said that she could have a child without us being married and she could get more financial assistance that way. I didn't agree with that and said that I would want to make a commitment with her before having children. After that she stopped mentioning getting married or having kids. It only came up rarely and only when I brought it up first.
There were some problem areas even in the beginning of the relationship, mainly with sex and intimacy. I knew that this would be an issue with her being an abuse survivor but I thought we could work things out with time and trust. She had no desire for me and the thought of sex made her anxious. For me it wasn't even really about sex but about intimacy - that free flowing expression of the bond you share. I would try to explain this to her, that it wasn't about sex but she said that in her way of thinking, any of the expressions of physical intimacy only existed to lead to sex and they didn't have any other purpose. Since sex made her anxious, she almost completely cut herself off to me when it came to any kind of physical connection.
I admit I did not handle this well. It is hard to know that you are not desired by your partner. I took it personally. She saw how I struggled with it. Sometimes we would talk through things and there seemed to be a willingness to try but nothing ever really got better. I felt like there was a whole language of intimacy that was cut off from me and I did not know how to express the fullness of the love I felt for her. I was constantly friend-zoned.
She continually made it seem that I was the one with the problem because I wanted intimacy with her, as if I was unreasonable or my hormones were out of whack. She never initiated any kind of intimate contact; it was always my responsibility to bring the topic up. At the beginning of the relationship, I would bring it up about once a week. I would usually get shot down. As the years went by, I brought it up less often, maybe only once a month. I would have to ask well in advance to give her time to think about it. It all became very scheduled and methodical. This was the opposite of what I wanted but I tried to be patient and to understand that she had a lot of anxiety to work through.
To top it all off, she would sometimes complain that we were not spontaneous enough or flirtatious enough. I would say that this is what I had been trying to explain to her and I would set about being more spontaneous. Anytime I tried, she would recoil from me as if I had done something abusive to her. So I just stopped trying. I just finally came to the conclusion that she could not reciprocate any genuine, romantic emotion with me. I began to believe that the problem really was with me. I shut off the part of myself that longed for that connection and bond with her. By severing myself from my emotion, I fell into apathy. This is when things started to change.
I stopped chasing after her. I stopped reaching out to her. I still told her she was beautiful and that I loved her everyday but I stopped initiating any intimate contact. I had also started a project at work that required me to work 70-100 hours per week for months. I didn't have any energy to do anything but work. She was very supportive of me during this time and she took care of me but I think it caused a lot of uncertainty for her because I was no longer responding to her needs regularly. My intention in working on this project was to get a raise or a promotion so that we could get married and she could have a baby like she wanted, even though she didn't even mention it anymore.
She started talking with people on the internet to fill her time and her need for communication and she made some close friends. She was always chatting with her friends and pretty much stopped talking to me. She still did things like make me food and bring it to me. As I said, she was very submissive and said that she liked doing those things for me. I probably took advantage of it too much because it made my life easier but it was also the only times that she would even look at me or interact with me, even if it was just a quick smile that she gave me as she handed me a plate of food.
So I think that when I stopped chasing her and when I became so involved with work, it triggered her fears of abandonment. She started cultivating new people and her personality started to change over time to mirror the behaviors and interests of her new friends. She was less and less the person I knew and loved. I withdrew into apathy and depression even more. I believed that it was all my fault or that there was just something deeply wrong with me and she finally figured it out.
And that was what the 3 years of our relationship was like. On the surface, things appeared to be good, we had a lot of fun and we were optimistic about the future. But underneath the surface, there was no genuine bond or sharing of emotions. I felt like something was missing or was wrong. I loved her with my whole heart but I never felt that was reciprocated. I was probably also picking up on her unspoken resentments towards me that just gave me a generalized feeling that something was wrong, more specifically something was wrong with me but I didn't know what it was or how to fix it. All the while, she gave the appearance of being willing to talk about issues and to try to make things better, but nothing ever really changed. When I pointed out that we were still stuck on the same issues, the blame usually fell on me. It always ended up being about something that I did or did not do. This ate away at me until I believed it.
Wow, this is a long post. Thanks to you for making it through all of that. My future posts will probably not be as long. It's hard to briefly summarize years of a relationship.
For years I could not see how that "push me/pull me" dynamic ate away at me and my self esteem. It was all done in such a subtle way that there weren't any obvious things that I could point to. When I would try, she would just make it my fault somehow. And I believed it. I did not even realize that I was drowning, that I was being pulled by an undertow. I had been so trained to focus on the surface level of things that I did not realize the forces moving underneath.
On the next post, we'll get to the good stuff: the breakup and how I finally learned to see what was happening.
