How do you know if it’s worth staying?

[siobhan823]

Hi y’all.

I’ve been separated from my husband for 2.5 years. We recently got back together during the pandemic but we still live apart. Things were great as he was making significant changes and with meditation and reflection he was doing really well. He was for the first time taking accountability for himself. And, now it has stopped. He’s meaner than he ever has been before. His beliefs about me seem to be increasingly paranoid. He treats me horribly until he figures out he was wrong about what he was thinking and suspecting. He had been apologizing when he would get caught up in his thinking errors,, but that stopped again too.

He’s angry with me right now and I have no idea why. He won’t respond to my attempts at communication. We were just barely okay and now it’s as though it’s worse than it’s ever been. His stress has increased with a new job and I’m sure that has something to do with it. Also, I dated while we were separated and he cannot seem to trust me now. Treats me like a cheater. He would act jealous before but it’s worse now.

It’s been not quite four months and I’m starting to feel my sanity leave me again. I was doing well for a while and recovering me. It’s just so hard to be villainized repeatedly and come out unscathed. Starting to really struggle with self esteem again. I try to ‘observe not absorb’ but it’s affecting me now.

Any help and advice is appreciated. Thank you.

[PLEASE - NO RUN MESSAGES]

PLEASE - NO RUN MESSAGES This is a high level discussion board for solving ongoing, day-to-day relationship conflicts. Members may appear frustrated but they are here for constructive solutions to problems. This is not a place for relationship "stay" or "leave" discussions. Please read the specific guidelines for this group.

[Football2000]

Could you tell us what kind of beliefs he has about you that are paranoid? Are they related to your dating or something else?

[RolandOfEld]

Hi siobhan823 and welcome. I'm sorry to hear that getting back together with your husband resulted in the same patterns despite his attempts to get better.

It is impossible to be villainized and come out unscathed. No matter how strong a defense you may have built up in your mind, it will inevitably eat away at your self-esteem. 

Do you currently have any in-person interaction, or is it all online?  I ask because the one advantage of an otherwise nightmarish pandemic is that it allows you to set more boundaries in terms of communication, e.g. hanging up and/or blocking him for a while if he is not communicating with you in a respectful way. This can be almost impossible with a BPD partner if they are in the same house.

Please keep posting here and stay strong!

~Roland

[siobhan823]

@Football2000
The beliefs vary. Last week I was explaining to him some things about unemployment. We owned a business together and I told him that I had reported self-employment under that name to the department of labor. He became upset. I didn't understand why. He kept saying "I can't believe you did that." I reassured him it was fine and wouldn't affect him or his pandemic unemployment funds because I reported no income (because there was no income.) I had to report the business and the attempts at earning I had made for the company. Somehow he took that to mean I had claimed his income on my taxes and lied to him about it. I was able to finally get him to communicate what he was upset about a few days later. He demanded I show him my tax refund as proof. I did and he believed me and then he apologized.

On the 4th of July when he became upset all I did was put in a pair of earrings. Nothing I haven't done nearly every other day of my life. I spent the day with him as much as possible. He was going to other activities without me because we hadn't told family or friends that we were back together. I mentioned to him there may be a get together of my friends later that evening, but that I probably wouldn't go because of social distancing. He said "oh now I know why you wore those earrings." I stopped him and hugged him and told him he had nothing to worry about, and asked him what I could do to help him feel like he could trust me. It broke into a fight instead. Since coming back together he has been able to reflect and see where he was misperceiving and fix it and apologize but not this time. He spoke to me via text briefly this week. Then he sent a text that said "now the fourth of july makes perfect sense." I have zero clue what he is talking about, but now he won't reply to anything I send. Every message shows "read" (iphones) but he will not respond. I don't know what he's thinking. I don't know what I could have done. I don't know why he won't talk to me.

[siobhan823]

@Roland
Thank you. That is exactly what is happening to my self esteem. I was doing a lot better after our separation, and the first few months were fine, but it's not like that now. Thank you for the validation.

We were having in person interaction until he stopped communicating altogether. He was asking to meet up again before the abrupt about face. But we don't live together. We have separate homes but live across the street from one another.

I haven't been great at boundaries this time around. When I draw boundaries he becomes 100% uncooperative. I gave him money to buy tires so he could get to work at his new job, but when he was verbally abusive and seemingly uncooperative again I told him I was going to keep them for him until he got paid. He said unkind things and told me he would get his own tires. I changed my mind about the tires and decided to give them to him and hope he would pay me. I did this because of some things that happened in the past. Times I wonder if I should have cared for him more and have regretted not doing. I did it for me, so I could say I did everything I could to care for him and know that if he rejects me or I find that I have to walk away I can do it with no regrets. In the past I have been quick to run at the first violation of a boundary. I was trying a new tact this time. But truthfully it seems he has gotten meaner and less cooperative. Everything feels like a test.

[RolandOfEld]

When I draw boundaries he becomes 100% uncooperative.

This is the hardest part, isn't it? It took a long time for our counselor to understand that it was a lot harder than just saying no. She would suggest, "If she's speaking to you in an abusive way, leave the house and take a walk." What she didn't get was that if I tried to leave in the middle of a hard conversation my wife would block the door or use my kids to try and keep me inside."

In my view, setting boundaries are not so much about cooperation as it is you stating and holding your ground on a certain issue. The fact that you are having trouble setting the boundary around abusive language seems to show that you are afraid of some result if you end the conversation. Based on your husband's past behavior, what do you think would happen if you said something like "This conversation from my view is not going to a productive place. I want to take a break and we can try again in an hour"? 

In the case of setting boundaries around money, my MO became to neither give it nor owe it. It made things harder for me financially, but it gave her one less string to pull on.

~ROE

[siobhan823]

What she didn't get was that if I tried to leave in the middle of a hard conversation my wife would block the door or use my kids to try and keep me inside."

In my view, setting boundaries are not so much about cooperation as it is you stating and holding your ground on a certain issue. The fact that you are having trouble setting the boundary around abusive language seems to show that you are afraid of some result if you end the conversation. Based on your husband's past behavior, what do you think would happen if you said something like "This conversation from my view is not going to a productive place. I want to take a break and we can try again in an hour"? 

Blocking the door is a thing, then. He used to do the same. I got a protection order against him for this last fall. I never knew I wasn’t alone in my experience.

The result I’m afraid of... I won’t get my money back, or my things that he has in his apartment. With the verbal abuse I do tell him no. He acknowledges he does it and that it’s not okay when he’s calm. But he has something going on with stuff. Always sure I’m stealing from him. He has my things. Things that were mine before he and I were married. Things I acquired during separation that I put in the storage unit that was under his name. He held them hostage for a very long time. When he finally got on his feet and got a place of his own he let me have, basically, the dregs of it. He took everything else. He said if I fight him on it in court I should understand that he will do everything necessary to win.

Mind you, it’s not great stuff. It’s just stuff I paid for from meager earnings and revamped or refinished or the like. The rest was mine before I met him. Gifts from family. Quilts people made me. He took it all because during our separation I took back a vehicle he hadn’t paid for that my parents had lent us the money for. He considers that to be a major sin and so now I am deserving of nothing. From my perspective I never wanted to take it. He didn’t give me a better choice. But I think he will never forgive me, and will always punish me for it.

I am sad that in order to be free I have to let him steal from me.

[RolandOfEld]

I am sad that in order to be free I have to let him steal from me.

Personal belongings can become another big string for pwBPD to tug on. My wife was taking my things for years and hiding them to get me to do what she wants before I realized this was not OK. It wasn't until she destroyed 90% of my clothing and then stole the new clothes I bought that I finally called the police. It stopped her for a while but eventually she did it again. Then she started taking the reverse strategy, claiming I had stolen a key for a motorbike we shared to take the kids to school and having me taken to the police station. I had walked away from a conversation with her and it was the only thing she could think of to control me in the moment. See the pattern here?

My guess is the things and the money are far less important to him than the degree of control over you it gives him. Healthy functioning people like us can get what we need from people through communication, empathy, and mutual benefit. PwBPD, lacking these skills, instead fall back on what worked as a child, namely, stealing the other person's toy until they do what they want. Once you identify the pattern it gets easier to avoid falling into those traps.

If it helps, I doubt he truly holds a grudge against you for those things but is instead using them as leverage to guilt you into doing what he wants.

You were much smarter than me to file for the PO to stop the blocking. It took me over a decade to realize this behavior was against the law and that I could do that. That is some AWESOME boundary setting.


~ROE

[siobhan823]

See the pattern here?

Pattern of control. Why does he do this?

My guess is the things and the money are far less important to him than the degree of control over you it gives him. Healthy functioning people like us can get what we need from people through communication, empathy, and mutual benefit. PwBPD, lacking these skills, instead fall back on what worked as a child, namely, stealing the other person's toy until they do what they want. Once you identify the pattern it gets easier to avoid falling into those traps.

Okay... so he wants control as a dysfunctional form of healthy relating. What is he actually trying to accomplish? What is it he thinks he needs?

If it helps, I doubt he truly holds a grudge against you for those things but is instead using them as leverage to guilt you into doing what he wants.

Yes that does help. Sometimes is as if he doesn't care at all. And while he has gotten so much better at taking accountability in some ways, he absolutely will not take accountability for the fact that he did not pay for the car and therefore he had no right to it. He insists I made up excuses to take it and I knew better... that is so confusing to me. He invested in it by doing work on it and paying for the parts, but never paid for it. He has a loose relationship with money he owes... But now that he's lost it he doesn't even care about it, indicating to me it was never about the car in the first place. He pats himself on the back like he's become enlightened and learned to let it go, but he is equally obsessive about other meaningless things of mine that he still has, so I'm not buying it.

You were much smarter than me to file for the PO to stop the blocking. It took me over a decade to realize this behavior was against the law and that I could do that. That is some AWESOME boundary setting.

Thank you. It took me 7 years though... to finally have the courage to do it. I had heard it was against the law but the times I called the police over it, they did absolutely nothing so I thought I was wrong. Turns out if they don't witness the behavior they don't take action against it. I never knew that and so I spent those years feeling crazy and invalidated. PO's are a different process. I hope you have luck with yours. It is difficult to do, but sometimes it is necessary.