Saw Exbpdw today and she is just as mad as if divorce happened yesterday.

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

Been 4 years since me moving out, and 13 months since judge final ruling.  Exbpd wife lives with a new boyfriend.  Ex voluntarily gave up all rights and custody of kids 6 months ago wanting to see them only 1 month in summer. 

Kids asked to see their mom ( I said sure) and had overnight yesterday.  It Had been since October they last spent time with her.  Again kids requested overnight in October. 

Anyway, when doing exchange at sons bball game.  I went to car to help load kids stuff.  As I got close to car, Ex said to me with kids listening 'I dont want you to get near me.  Go away' . 

Really?  You got everything you wanted.  You have boyfriend, no responsibility for kids, no financial responsibility, got the house, the entire 401k, and I paid both sides of lawyers.  Why so angry. 

It is an anger that is bubbling on top.  Like something just happened yesterday.   Its Been 4 years.  How can one stay angry so long.  How hard that must be to live that way. 

It is not all that surprising I guess because I was married 18 years to her and I know now she is.   My problem is that I still hold onto the false hope that she would be friendly to me.  Now that I say it outloud...  in my marriage that is all I really wanted her to be... friendly to me.   

[Sluggo]

Been 4 years since me moving out, and 13 months since judge final ruling.  Exbpd wife lives with a new boyfriend.  Ex voluntarily gave up all rights and custody of kids 6 months ago wanting to see them only 1 month in summer. 

Kids asked to see their mom ( I said sure) and had overnight yesterday.  It Had been since October they last spent time with her.  Again kids requested overnight in October. 

Anyway, when doing exchange at sons bball game.  I went to car to help load kids stuff.  As I got close to car, Ex said to me with kids listening 'I dont want you to get near me.  Go away' . 

Really?  You got everything you wanted.  You have boyfriend, no responsibility for kids, no financial responsibility, got the house, the entire 401k, and I paid both sides of lawyers.  Why so angry. 

It is an anger that is bubbling on top.  Like something just happened yesterday.   Its Been 4 years.  How can one stay angry so long.  How hard that must be to live that way. 

It is not all that surprising I guess because I was married 18 years to her and I know now she is.   My problem is that I still hold onto the false hope that she would be friendly to me.  Now that I say it outloud...  in my marriage that is all I really wanted her to be... friendly to me.   

[Lifeinthefastlane]

Sluggo,

That is very hurtful for your ex to say that in front if your kids. I wonder if it’s because she knows she was in the wrong with whatever happened to end the relationship? Unfortunately, I believe our exes with bpd create their own stories of what happened to make themselves look like a victim. With your kids wanting to see her, I’m sure she’s trying to make herself look like a better parent?  I think it’s part of the image and lacking identity thing. Your ex was gone, now the kids see this new b/f and she probably told a story to him too.

I may be wrong on all this, but my ex had 2 girls and the story she created about the breakup and told people couldn’t be farther from the truth. After her 1st breakup with me, she blamed me for not fighting for her and the girls. She broke up with me 4 states away from the state in which we lived at my dad’s house after he died.

I wish they could be friendly but it’s like the positive images of us that existed before has been erased when they are with their new person. Sorry for what you are going through as I’m sure it hurts when it’s in front of your kids like that.

[ArtistGuy70]

I am sorry you are going through this. My ex wife was the same way as far as I was concerned. Time did not matter. 10 years after the divorce. 15 years after. Can we be civil? Nope. Such anger inside of her. Remember, they can never truly heal their many wounds.

[Lucky Jim]

I am sorry you are going through this. My ex wife was the same way as far as I was concerned. Time did not matter. 10 years after the divorce. 15 years after. Can we be civil? Nope. Such anger inside of her. Remember, they can never truly heal their many wounds.

Hey Sluggo, I'm with ArtistGuy (above).  Ditto for me.  In my view, it's unhealthy to hold onto such intense anger over a long term, but that's my BPDxW for you.

I think it's unrealistic to expect friendliness from your BPDEx.  I don't anymore.  In terms of how I feel towards my BPDxW, I would say that I have reached a place of indifference, which is something you might want to work towards.

LJ

[Sluggo]

Thank you all for the comments.  Yes I'm surprised that 10, 15 years later is the same.   But good to know and have realistic expectations. 

Thank you!

[zachira]

I am coming at this from a different angle. My mother had BPD and I have two siblings with BPD. In my experience, it does not matter how well you treat a person with BPD, they need a person to dump their negative feelings on, and people who are close to them are their favorite targets. You did everything you could to end the marriage on decent terms, and were especially generous with the divorce settlement. It still hurts though when you go overboard to be decent and you get dumped on by the BPD. The challenge is to not dwell on the negative feelings, as those feelings belong to your ex wife and not to you.

[Panda39]

If your ex is like my Partner's ex, then she has likely made very little if any change to her patterns of behavior.

My partner has been separated/divorced from his ex 10 years and she is just stuck in wash, rinse, repeat...her patterns of behavior have not changed...it's like some kind of arrested development. 

Most of us learn lessons from the past or our mistakes for example but not my partner's uBPDxw.  She is the victim, everything happens to her, she didn't do anything, so why should she change? I also think there is a component of, this is what she has always done in the relationship with my partner...she dancing the dance she always has with him.   He meanwhile is not only no longer doing the dance, he's dancing with someone else.

Panda39

[MeandThee29]

Yes, it's sad, isn't it?

I'm at the point that I don't have any problems with using his name in conversation or looking at old pictures, and he seems to still be on the warpath and trying to manipulate. When I was signing the settlement some months ago, my lawyer observed that I seemed to have come to a place of acceptance and that I would do fine afterwards because of that.

[cda888]

This is something that I have at times really struggled with since my divorce. I have been divorced for 6 years, and my ex flat-out refuses to even be artificially civil. Because the prospect of fighting with her in domestic court was so overwhelmingly unappealing, I gave in to virtually all of her demands in our divorce. I took responsibility for all of the debt we had racked up (70k on credit cards alone). I gave her virtually my entire 401k. I gave her all of our mutual possessions. I agreed to let her have full custody of our 5 kids because I didn't want to drag them through what I knew would be a nightmare of a custody dispute just to get 50/50 custody.

During and after our divorce, lobbying our friends and family to sell a narrative that made her a victim seemed to become her full-time job. Her energy for this seems inexhaustible. I still receive angry rants via text message that are many pages long critiquing my character, my life decisions, my parenting, etc. If she gets her child support payment a day later than she expected (I pay the state and the state pays her), I get the same. Incessant efforts at parental alienation are a given, but luckily I have always and still maintain a good relationship with my kids, most of whom are now adults.

When I hear stories of couples who have even just moved on and can be facially civil, I am very envious. I have asked her many times if we can just bury the hatchet and at least be civil, and her response is always that if I am doing something wrong or she has an opinion, then she is not going to be silenced. When I hear stories of divorced couples who are actually friendly with each other, it seems like a dream wrapped in a fantasy.

I have certainly moved on emotionally. It took a lot of therapy for me to accept that I was not the profoundly defective, unloveable human being that she had convinced me I was. In some ways, it was her conduct after our divorce and long after the fact that was the most helpful in helping me to recognize that the way she treated me was more about her than about me. But I do wish that I did not have to continue to deal with her conduct. I wish that I did not have to feel the anxiety that goes along with explaining to significant others why I don't have a civil relationship with my ex-wife, and wondering whether they will be able to understand and tolerate the drama that I cannot entirely avoid because I still have a minor child with this person and am compelled to maintain at least some contact with her.

The only advice I can offer is to remind yourself that this person's inability to leave the past behind is not a reflection on you. My experience was that the more indifferent I became to my ex's tirades, critiques, and complaints, the more bitter she became. I suspect that if you are someone the BP once had firmly under their control, it is extremely difficult for them to accept that they no longer have you as a resource. If they cannot draw you back in or get you to engage, then vilifying and punishing you becomes the next best option. I don't think BPs like her are capable of the self-reflection that is necessary for most of us to "move on." As long as she feels the need to "explain" the failure of her marriage to herself, I think she will continue to need to blame me, continue to feel like a victim, and continue to be angry about the perceived injustice.

In the meantime, I remind myself that in a couple of years I will no longer have any minor children with her, and I can legitimately cut off all contact with her of any kind. I have accepted that she will probably never be "civil," and that I will always be a reprehensible villain in the story of her life. And I have also accepted that it is pointless and unhealthy to give any more mental energy to the desire to change that.