Will the false allegations stop?

[How to communicate after a contentious divorce...]

Hi all, this is my first post. My wife and I separated in 2018 and we have two children together. I found her behaviour to be extremely difficult and it became psychotic during our separation. At the end of 2018 the false allegations started and they have escalated significantly. She was officially diagnosed with BPD about 3 months ago due to her having to see a psychiatrist through our custody matter of our children. I had to file as she was withholding the children as I was "unsafe". I now have full custody of our children, however she continues to make endless allegations I was abusive and currently has a restraining order against me which I am contesting. Every time we interact she reports it as a breach of the restraining order to the police. I didn't abuse her and was a caring and loving partner. She is refusing at this stage to go into treatment, however she will eventually have to if she wants unsupervised access to our children. Will she ever be able to be in the same room as me again and change her victim mentality? She has accused me of pretty much everything under the sun and none of it is true.

[adam2019]

Hi all, this is my first post. My wife and I separated in 2018 and we have two children together. I found her behaviour to be extremely difficult and it became psychotic during our separation. At the end of 2018 the false allegations started and they have escalated significantly. She was officially diagnosed with BPD about 3 months ago due to her having to see a psychiatrist through our custody matter of our children. I had to file as she was withholding the children as I was "unsafe". I now have full custody of our children, however she continues to make endless allegations I was abusive and currently has a restraining order against me which I am contesting. Every time we interact she reports it as a breach of the restraining order to the police. I didn't abuse her and was a caring and loving partner. She is refusing at this stage to go into treatment, however she will eventually have to if she wants unsupervised access to our children. Will she ever be able to be in the same room as me again and change her victim mentality? She has accused me of pretty much everything under the sun and none of it is true.

[ForeverDad]

No one can promise that it will get better or how much it might get better.  However, in general most find that once the disordered ex gets used to the stricter orders, that is, stiffer boundaries and consequences, then the conflicts can moderate over time.

My experience... I had two years of temp orders as alternate weekend dad.  Increasing conflict, starting silly and getting worse as she learned which allegations got attention of the professionals.  We had equal terms after the final decree, no improvement.  Three years later I got full custody but parenting schedule stayed equal.  No improvement.  Three years later I got majority time during the school year.  Finally her entitlement and control balloon was deflated a bit.  We haven't been back to court since and six years later our son is about to age out of the domestic court system.

[MeandThee29]

Will she ever be able to be in the same room as me again and change her victim mentality? She has accused me of pretty much everything under the sun and none of it is true.

Maybe not. Hopefully you are in counselling to learn how to manage your responses. If you "grey rock" it, you may still get a strong response, but over time they sometimes learn that they can't mess with you.

So many of us develop a pattern where we think that if we just behave a certain way, they will see the truth. Nope. They have their own truth, and it often isn't our truth. Just how it is.

[Panda39]

Just being you may be a trigger for her, not anything you do or don't do.  It could be being seen as "losing" when it comes to custody so she has to "win" by making you appear worse than her.  Shame can be really triggering.

I know you share children but I would do my best to keep my interactions with her to a minimum.  Less ammo for more drama that way.  Negative attention is still attention.

Everyone's situation is different my partner also faces false allegations by his uBPDxw.  She was particularly escalated during the separation and divorce process so things were worse then.  We also experienced Parental Alienation. 

Once the divorce was final things slowly improved as my partner learned that less was more when it came to his interactions with his ex.  He didn't respond to her bashing him, he started parallel parenting, the kids eventually voted with their feet and moved in with dad full time, and eventually the kids went NC/LC with their mom.  Time has created distance, less information about my partner's life has created distance, and now the kids are young adults so there is no need for contact.

Hang in there,
Panda39

[worriedStepmom]

I know you share children but I would do my best to keep my interactions with her to a minimum.  Less ammo for more drama that way.  Negative attention is still attention.

I was coming to say this exact thing.

It may not be possible for the two of you to be in the same room together ever.  Will that be a problem?  Are there ways that you can organize child exchanges so that you don't have to meet?  If she has supervised visitation, do you have a neutral supervisor, or are you present?

My H uses a parenting app to communicate with his ex.  It feels more neutral than them texting or emailing, and it's great documentation for court when she's overreacting to things. 

Even that may not be enough.  Is it possible for the court to put a stop to some of the nonsense filings?  H's custody order has consequences written in if his ex files false or frivolous complaints with any governmental agency.  We had to add that after a two-week span where she called the police on us 5 times for nothing, called CPS on herself twice ("my ex says I'm a bad mother because I do X and I need you to tell him I'm not") and filed a bunch of official complaints against SD's therapist.

It's frustrating and crazymaking.  All you can do is keep good documentation and set stronger and stronger boundaries around yourself and the kids.

[livednlearned]

She was officially diagnosed with BPD about 3 months ago

I'm guessing this has something to do with the uptick in false allegations, in addition to losing significant custody of her kids.

This would be a tremendous emotional challenge for anyone, much less someone who has virtually no emotion regulation skills (feelings = facts). You've been split black and she is looking for facts where there are none, to flesh out the feelings she has (e.g. he's bad).

I feel for you. My ex was a former trial attorney and I was in court on average once a month for four years straight. I don't know why it eventually died down ... I did end up with full custody and the judge seemed to know ex was engaging in vexatious litigation or whatever it's called.

For what it's worth, I remember reading somewhere that it takes one month for every year to recover from (normal) relationships. For high-conflict relationships, it's double. I was married for 10 years and it was roughly 2 years before I started to feel real, solid emotional detachment, even with a lot of chronic litigation. The litigious stuff kept things in front of me for 4 years but over time (especially as professionals began to see where the conflict was coming from) it started to feel like background noise. I did have to budget for legal action and that was a drag   and the documentation got old pretty quick.

You have a lot going in your favor (her official diagnosis, custody of the kids) altho I know how alarming it can be to hear absurd things you've been accused of.

This is a pretty volatile period with a lot happening to her. She is probably spiraling down and desperately trying to grasp for some kind of control.

[Sluggo]

Adam2019,

The accusations for me were also over the top.  I think the hard thing  for me was to let go of my desire to defend myself from her allegations to others.  She reported these allegations was to others with such feeling and conviction..   heck I would have believed her.   I liked to let go of my need to be liked by others. 

2 months after she gave up custody, my 13 yr old daughter who was severely alienated against me called in allegations against me (the night my daughter returned from visiting her mom clinically diagnosed BPD).  All accusations were unsubstantiated...

But the bitterness is so present for my ex.  I left 4 yrs ago, but it seems like for her it happened yesterday.  

For what it's worth, I remember reading somewhere that it takes one month for every year to recover from (normal) relationships. For high-conflict relationships, it's double. I was married for 10 years and it was roughly 2 years before I started to feel real, solid emotional detachment, even with a lot of chronic litigation.

I had not heard that...  18x2. About 3 - 3.5 years for me to detach.  

[ForeverDad]

To add to my prior post, I also faced numerous allegations.  They started out small, "he took my son to the park to ride bicycles, my son fell and got hurt".  Frankly, no one cared about that.  So her allegations became increasingly scary.  I won't say what the worst one was, but you can imagine when I say that time I was glad our son wasn't a daughter.  Yep, that disgusting.

If you had asked me during our first decade of marriage whether she would ever make allegations so vicious, I couldn't have even imagined it.

[mart555]

The smear campaign can last for a while.. They really need a public to listen to it.  At some point they seem to realize that it doesn't work and stop because it makes them look bad.  She even told my kids that I was sexually abusing her during our marriage.  Good thing she had sent multiple emails praising me the week before. 

A no-contact order is what pretty much saved me from insanity. It's been in force for 10 months... and I have another 16 months to go.  I am not looking forward to the end of it.. I'm really hoping that I'm done with family court by then.  

[40days_in_desert]

My ex made numerous false allegations but fortunately none to police. The bad part was that most of them were to our two oldest daughters who chose to live with me (one 3.5 years ago and the other 2 years ago). The one that comes to mind was that I supposedly hired prostitutes back to my hotel room when I would travel for work. The craziest one that I heard her tell other people is that I had two homosexual affairs. I was faithful the entire marriage. She would also make claims that I was neglecting our children in one way or another but never physical or sexual allegations. All five of our kids live with me full time. The youngest three due to her not having a place to stay where they can be with her much. Like mart, I have texts where she praised me as a good dad mixed in between the allegations of neglect. The allegations have slowed in the past six months or so as we approach the five year mark since we separated but I don't imagine that I have heard the last one yet.
The 2 months for every year is about right on the money for me too...16.5 years = 2.75 years. I'd say around the 2.5 year mark was my point of complete emotional attachment.