All mirroring?

[Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse...]

Hi all,
This is my first post here and I’m really grateful for this community. I’ve read a lot of posts already but one question that makes me feel really stuck in moving on from my ex who I think could have BPD was in regards to feeling really understood by him, and him telling me he feel really understood by me. This felt “unprecedented” to me and he said that he felt the same way, and that he had been wondering if anyone could “know him in the way he’s needed to be known” and I finally have, and that he’s very grateful for that.

Part of what is so difficult about this was my upbringing with a narcissistic mother, who I did not feel understood by. I’ve spent my life (I’m in my early 30s) yearning to feel that way. Once I got together with my ex (even though there were red flags, namely the way he spoke about his ex girlfriend and mom and also his tendency to criticize me about really vague things like how much I make “meaning out of everything”-although he would always try to rectify things if I pushed back on the criticisms) I ultimately felt like an orphan who had met another orphan and we were against the world together. Our tastes and opinions seem to match up almost eerily and we seemed to never tire of talking to each other. We would talk on the phone regularly for 4 and sometimes 5 hours at a time and would only stop because it seemed ludicrous to keep talking or one of us got tired. This was also a LDR as he lived 5 hours away by car, though we did meet up in person. However, I could tell that he was using me as an escape from loneliness and that he probably needed to be alone for a while so that he wouldn’t use me for that (he hadn’t been single in about 7 years), and so I initiated the first break. He agreed that he had been avoiding being alone but he believed we had all of the right things to be incredibly happy together and that he didn’t want to ruin the future for today. He also told his friends he thought that I was “his person” and told me that he couldn’t believe someone like me existed.

During the break he attempted to communicate and even would hide clues for me on his social media posts. Truthfully, I still wanted to talk to him because I had only felt that connection a couple of fleeting times before in my life. So my question is—can I just chalk all of this up to mirroring? Can someone actually fabricate all of that? I can recognize that this is such a deep need of mine that he may have picked up on that and that could have been a way to hook me, but I don’t know how you could hold conversations for that long unless you were truly getting along. I feel almost crazy that I had this experience and that now it’s completely dust in the wind. What do you guys think? Is it likely this was all a strategy and the connection was in my head?

I knew something was amiss when he broke up with me the morning after an especially positive/intense conversation (we had exchanged I love yous for the first time) and when he devalued me after an argument a couple weeks later (to me it felt more like a debate, about some points that were made in a podcast he sent me) which was our first real argument. I think that could have been the first time I took an opposing stance on something. I apologized later, thinking I must have done something wrong to have provoked that reaction. That’s when I started researching about BPD. After he broke up with me I said that our connection was very rare, and he responded that he was aware of that and that he just had to understand the rarity from a romantic point-of-view through dating and that he could only handle the early stages of love right now. I told him I didn’t want to try to be friends (he had been so cold to me our last talk) and then a couple of weeks later he blocked me on Facebook even though we weren’t even friends there.

The hardest thing as I mentioned is how deeply it hurts to feel “seen” and understood and then be devalued and discarded. I read somewhere “as you are falling in love the pwBPD is getting their needs met.” Which sounds accurate to this situation. I can understand needing to be single, but how quickly he lost all feeling for me after an argument is something I can’t get  my head around. It’s definitely made me feel shame about who I am. Can a person like this ever appreciate you as a whole person later on or in retrospect? Maybe our shared history of abuse by our parents and our similar coping strategies when we were younger made our bond feel special. But I hadn’t ever met anyone with so many overlapping interests and perceptions (can’t think of a better word than that).

[DiscardedLady]

Hi all,
This is my first post here and I’m really grateful for this community. I’ve read a lot of posts already but one question that makes me feel really stuck in moving on from my ex who I think could have BPD was in regards to feeling really understood by him, and him telling me he feel really understood by me. This felt “unprecedented” to me and he said that he felt the same way, and that he had been wondering if anyone could “know him in the way he’s needed to be known” and I finally have, and that he’s very grateful for that.

Part of what is so difficult about this was my upbringing with a narcissistic mother, who I did not feel understood by. I’ve spent my life (I’m in my early 30s) yearning to feel that way. Once I got together with my ex (even though there were red flags, namely the way he spoke about his ex girlfriend and mom and also his tendency to criticize me about really vague things like how much I make “meaning out of everything”-although he would always try to rectify things if I pushed back on the criticisms) I ultimately felt like an orphan who had met another orphan and we were against the world together. Our tastes and opinions seem to match up almost eerily and we seemed to never tire of talking to each other. We would talk on the phone regularly for 4 and sometimes 5 hours at a time and would only stop because it seemed ludicrous to keep talking or one of us got tired. This was also a LDR as he lived 5 hours away by car, though we did meet up in person. However, I could tell that he was using me as an escape from loneliness and that he probably needed to be alone for a while so that he wouldn’t use me for that (he hadn’t been single in about 7 years), and so I initiated the first break. He agreed that he had been avoiding being alone but he believed we had all of the right things to be incredibly happy together and that he didn’t want to ruin the future for today. He also told his friends he thought that I was “his person” and told me that he couldn’t believe someone like me existed.

During the break he attempted to communicate and even would hide clues for me on his social media posts. Truthfully, I still wanted to talk to him because I had only felt that connection a couple of fleeting times before in my life. So my question is—can I just chalk all of this up to mirroring? Can someone actually fabricate all of that? I can recognize that this is such a deep need of mine that he may have picked up on that and that could have been a way to hook me, but I don’t know how you could hold conversations for that long unless you were truly getting along. I feel almost crazy that I had this experience and that now it’s completely dust in the wind. What do you guys think? Is it likely this was all a strategy and the connection was in my head?

I knew something was amiss when he broke up with me the morning after an especially positive/intense conversation (we had exchanged I love yous for the first time) and when he devalued me after an argument a couple weeks later (to me it felt more like a debate, about some points that were made in a podcast he sent me) which was our first real argument. I think that could have been the first time I took an opposing stance on something. I apologized later, thinking I must have done something wrong to have provoked that reaction. That’s when I started researching about BPD. After he broke up with me I said that our connection was very rare, and he responded that he was aware of that and that he just had to understand the rarity from a romantic point-of-view through dating and that he could only handle the early stages of love right now. I told him I didn’t want to try to be friends (he had been so cold to me our last talk) and then a couple of weeks later he blocked me on Facebook even though we weren’t even friends there.

The hardest thing as I mentioned is how deeply it hurts to feel “seen” and understood and then be devalued and discarded. I read somewhere “as you are falling in love the pwBPD is getting their needs met.” Which sounds accurate to this situation. I can understand needing to be single, but how quickly he lost all feeling for me after an argument is something I can’t get  my head around. It’s definitely made me feel shame about who I am. Can a person like this ever appreciate you as a whole person later on or in retrospect? Maybe our shared history of abuse by our parents and our similar coping strategies when we were younger made our bond feel special. But I hadn’t ever met anyone with so many overlapping interests and perceptions (can’t think of a better word than that).

[once removed]

hi DiscardedLady, and

so, its a complex question(s) that you ask. its one that i struggled with myself.

as a starting point, all of us mirror. mirroring facilitates bonding. mirroring from our earliest caretakers is considered essential in development.

I can recognize that this is such a deep need of mine

i think that this is a very important realization. it occurred to me, much later in my recovery, that i was fairly dependent on mirroring, and on validation, of the things about me i most wanted to be loved for. it wasnt especially easy for me to see, but i realize now that for me, it was a significant part of the bond i felt with my ex, and the struggle i had over the breakup.

is it something our exes can pick up on?

i would say sure, to some extent. people with BPD traits fall fast, and they fall hard. we all tend to put our best foot forward in order to attract a potential mate. we pick up on queues, we present the best, most likeable version of ourselves. people with BPD traits are no exception to this, and can be even more extreme about it. they can even come to resent us for it later on, which can feel pretty confusing.

is it a malicious thing? i dont think it is. i know that similarly, a lot of us wanted to help our partners heal, for example.

Maybe our shared history of abuse by our parents and our similar coping strategies when we were younger made our bond feel special.

when you meet someone you can identify with, on a deep, intense, and relatively quick level, powerful things happen, and it can feel like the romance of a life time. and in some ways, it is. all of it can make for a loaded, complex, passionate bond.

the problem with that is that it is not necessarily the foundation for a healthy long term relationship. our partners have complex inner struggles we arent necessarily privy to. inherent distrust issues, for example.

people with traits of this disorder significantly over emote and over express themselves (in good and bad ways). its not that they are lying or dishonest, its that they are speaking in extremes, extremes that can be fickle and fleeting. an example i often use is that ive probably told every girl i ever dated that they were "the most beautiful girl in the world". i wasnt lying to them or trying to gain anything. but its not something i still believe today, it was an over the top expression.

its another example of something you tend to get in greater extremes with people with BPD traits. the hard part is that we invested a great deal in those expressions, the words, the actions, all of it. to see it seemingly suddenly disappear can feel alarming and confusing, and it can feel like a rejection of us on a very deep level. healing involves seeing it (all of it) for what it is, grieving it, and rebuilding ourselves even stronger than before.

and thats just the short answer 

so what was the argument about and what happened? how long has it been since the breakup?

[DiscardedLady]

Thank you so much for that once removed! You made so many great points. I appreciated hearing this was somewhat like your experience too.

The argument started out with us talking about another science topic, but then went into romantic love and what we both thought it was. He seemed to have gotten really devoid of feeling at this point and said he thought romantic love what just about safety and procreation. I asked if he had just felt that way about me and he said no. I said I thought that because we were also social creatures  that attach to ideas that I thought there were more layers than that. I should say that he’s a scientist and I’m an artist, and even though up until this point we seemed to agree on everything it seems like for this point we didn’t agree fully and maybe that scared him. I loved the fact that he was so logical and was fine with him believing something somewhat different (I mean, after all, who really knows). It has been 6 weeks. I have emailed him twice, neither time I asked for a response but he’s ignored both of them. I can tell through his Instagram that he’s moved on (to a woman who is a scientist) which makes me feel even worse. It’s not that I don’t know I have value, but being devalued in his eyes and that I’m sure he must be idealizing her now is almost too much to bear. It also makes me feel very misrepresented because I love science and used to want to be an astronomer as a kid, but life just brought me to a different path.

If I hadn’t been devalued that way I think I could feel secure in what we had and better able to move on. It haunts me that I can’t know how he feels about everything.

Ironically I talked to my mom about this last night and she told me she used to go “cold” on her boyfriends too. I asked her why and she said she didn’t know. With one boyfriend she said she never got that feeling back and with another she kind of came out of it. Eventually she said she felt she “wasn’t getting back what she was giving” when she went cold, that there was a tally system in her head. She said she can feel how much she needed to “work on her heart” at that time in her life. I’m recognizing that I’m attracted to people like my mom probably because I hadn’t fully healed the wound from her. I’ve actually been very low contact with her (talking only every two weeks) since the breakup and I can tell it’s helping me heal.

Do you think that it’s possible there could be a reconciliation or just have him view me in a more balanced way? Does him ignoring my emails indicate he’s continued to have no feelings for me after the breakup? I’ve never lost all feeling for someone suddenly like that and I can’t relate to it. I don’t think I could ignore anyone’s emails unless I was afraid of them.

[once removed]

Do you think that it’s possible there could be a reconciliation or just have him view me in a more balanced way? Does him ignoring my emails indicate he’s continued to have no feelings for me after the breakup? I’ve never lost all feeling for someone suddenly like that and I can’t relate to it. I don’t think I could ignore anyone’s emails unless I was afraid of them.

if you want to reconcile, or patch things up, id encourage you to post on the Bettering board, work on a plan and get some feedback.

if he is in another relationship, that complicates things significantly in terms of either him responding, or a reconciliation.

[Educated_Guess]

Hi DiscardedLady!  Thanks for posting this question.  It's something I thought about quite a bit in the aftermath of my own breakup.  With all of the mirroring, it leaves you wondering what was even real about that person and if you ever truly knew who they were to begin with it.   

I struggled over this for a long time before I finally accepted that I did not really know the true person as I understand what that means.  It would be impossible to for me to do that because there is no core person there. 

Think of a pwBPD as being like a kaleidoscope.  Who they really are is those fragments of colored glass at the bottom of the tube.  When they mirror you, you perceive them as being a fully formed, complex, beautiful image. It is like how the mirrors in the tube of the kaleidoscope and the light combine to create a beautiful image from those loose fragments of colored glass.  But the image is impermanent.  When things shift in the relationship or they begin to mirror someone else, the tube of the kaleidoscope turns and a completely different image is formed.

I also had a similar experience with the argument that you described.  My ex and I were discussing an ethical issue about when violence was acceptable.  I considered it nothing more than an intellectual debate.  She had a different opinion than I did.  She said that she could not understand how I believed as I did.  I explained the reasons for my ethical standard. 

She started getting emotional about it and kept challenging me on it.  I think she was trying to get me to change my mind or maybe she just could not deal with there being a difference between us.  She got angry to the point of crying about it.  I was blindsided by it.  I remember saying, "I don't understand what is happening.  I love you with everything in me.  It's ok if we have different opinions."

As she wiped tears off her face and turned away from me, she said, "When I bring up things like this, I just want you agree to whatever I'm saying and go on."  That was pretty shocking to me.  She was essentially telling me that there was no space for me in the relationship unless I agreed with everything she believed.

I look back on that experience as a turning point.  It was sometime before the breakup actually happened but things were never the same after that.  She started a slow discard cycle from that day on.

I imagine that it probably brought up fears for her that if she could not anticipate who I was and how I believed well enough to mirror me, then I would eventually abandon her over it.  Of course I wasn't thinking anything like that.  But clearly that event had more significance for her than it did for me initially as I thought we were just having a friendly intellectual debate (at least in the beginning).

Do you think something like that may have been triggered for your ex when you debated him?