cloudpatterns
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: September 15, 2018, 07:28:43 AM » |
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Hi everyone.
I'm 38, and have been with my 32 year-old girlfriend (w/BPD) for 6 years, with a couple years of friendship and dating leading up to that. We live in NYC, so it's not unheard of in our culture to remain unmarried, but... .the pressure to give her a ring is mounting.
This looming commitment is pushing a lot of unresolved issues to the front of my mind, and I feel like I have to make a decision in the near future.
The first four years of our relationship were wonderful - obviously not perfect, as no relationship is, but with significantly more happiness and beauty than struggle. We have a business/creative project together, and in 2016 (our fifth year together), we came within a hair's reach of global, breakthrough success with it. Unfortunately that success didn't materialize, despite our best efforts,
and the frustration and disappointment knocked her into an extremely dark place. She always had a streak that could be characterized by black-and-white thinking, almost authoritarian moments, and demonizing me when she had me on a pedestal only moments earlier. But these were in the background, only occasionally surfacing to cause damage. The events of 2016 changed that, however, and her darker side because so dominant that almost interaction or speck of dust on the floor could lead to a meltdown. This persisted for most of the last two years, with small steps forward and back. I did a lot of care-taking and eggshell-walking, and eventually developed a fitness and meditation practice that fortified me enough to stay sane within these circumstances.
Things reached a breaking point late last year, when it became apparent to us both that the relationship would need to end soon if it stayed on the same course. In a break from the dark spells, she did some research and suggested she might either be bi-polar or have BPD. I was uncertain at first, but as soon as I researched these disorders on my own, I felt like I was reading about my day-to-day life. I started reading Stop Walking on Eggshells, and at some point I told her I had read the book. Amazingly, she went out and found her own book about BPD (by Elinor Greenberg), and immersed herself in it, reading it cover-to-cover at least twice. There was a period of months where she carried it with her wherever she went, and it seemed to calm her.
(Sidenote: This is rare, right? That kind of self-awareness? This is one of the many reasons I love her so much.)
After almost 2 years of searching, she finally found a psychiatrist she felt comfortable seeing, who diagnosed her as extremely high-functioning BPD. She's started working with a therapist this year, and generally things are much better than the last 2 years. When things got exceptionally bad, I kept a color-coded spreadsheet of her moods, which helped me see the patterns and de-personalize what was happening. I kept it color-coded based on "threat level" - purple was peace/bliss, and red was dangerous to the point where I feared she would physically harm herself. As 2017 ended and she started actively working on her symptoms, I watched the spreadsheet turn from waves of orange and red to long, unbroken streams of calm blue. We would go months without major incidents, and though they were still jarring and painful when they occurred, I felt immensely hopeful and encouraged.
This summer, I decided I would propose to her in the Spring if things didn't suffer some kind of collapse. My thinking was, I just wanted to see one "good" year between us, something like we'd had in the past. Not a perfect year, but a year with a level of conflict that felt tolerable and sustainable.
Then a small kind of collapse occurred. We went home for a month in August to see our families (we're both from the same city), and small stressors began to pile up around her like papercuts. Before I knew it, she was making scenes and berating me in public over the tiniest infractions (I lost us a free play on a jukebox), and sitting in tense silence in the car for hours at a time. These incidents triggered a kind of PTSD reaction in me from her countless meltdowns over the past 2 years, and more importantly, got me thinking about how devastating they would be to our future child.
So now we're back to normal life, but the ground feels shakier than it has in awhile. Most disturbingly, when the events of last month come up, she seems to revert to a "yeah but that time was all your fault." "And that time." "Yes, and that time." Now, I'm not claiming to be perfect, and if I wasn't trying to keep this concise, I could list my own failings all day. But I like to think I own up to those shortcomings and immediately apologize when they mess things up, which obviously does happen. I told her I'm concerned because, for the last few months, she's been comfortable announcing things like "I have borderline personality disorder" un-prompted to our families and friends, but takes no responsibility at all when she's actually manifesting the BPD. She speaks about every *individual* incident as an exception- those are all my fault.
Ordinarily, I would take all this as progress. A handful of incidents and failure to see them for what they are is certainly better than a mountain of regular incidents, which is how I used to live. But we're getting older, and the window for having kids is not going to remain open forever. Even a few of these screaming fits a year would damage a child for life, let alone the 2/3x-per-week frequency I used to experience. In a difficult conversation, I told her this, and told her I want to be able to come up with tools that we can use as a couple to navigate those moments. So she can say things like "I feel like screaming at you right now" instead of launching into the actual attack. She nodded, said she didn't want to talk about it, and didn't speak much for the rest of the night. A few days later, she went off on me again for a tiny incident, and then followed it by saying how ridiculous it is that I expect her to contain her anger. "You're just too sensitive. Anger is normal, I shouldn't have to hide my anger." I think our definitions of that word are significantly different.
Again, I could handle a certain amount of those attacks for the rest of my life, as long as they're few and far between, and remain psychologically healthy. But it would break my heart to see this happen to my child, or to see my child imitate her hateful speech when she's in a bad place ("I can't stand these stupid and disgusting people"). We're at an age where it feels like we need to step into the future together, or be released from the relationship so that future has a chance to happen with another partner. Leaving her is absolutely unthinkable to me - I love her immensely and could fill this page twenty times with the reasons why. But it's also unthinkable to have a child and watch the child get psychologically broken before his/her life can even begin.
We've made so much progress, but I don't know where the line is - where I can trust her with a child. I know the BPD will never be gone, but I don't know at what point its effects could be kept in check, enough to avoid my nightmare scenario.
Thanks so much for reading, and I apologize for how long this was! Tough to summarize the state of your relationship and your life in one post. I hope you're all doing okay with the struggles you're facing in your own lives. Thank you for having me.
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