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Author Topic: "In crazy tennis match w/ uBPD, you aren't the other player. You are the ball"  (Read 410 times)
bethanny
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« on: September 07, 2020, 05:14:19 PM »

This headline is paraphrasing something I heard on a "Little Shaman" podcast on youtube re narcissistic behavior.

I am in the throes of a crazymaking scenario with an unrecovered BPD manager who is suddenly in my face with such breathtaking malice. After years of dedication I am suddenly not smart or fast enough.  And ambushing me with strident shaming apparently is her way of fixing me.  She seems to be using the remote workplace platform which gives her more privacy and the workers more dependency on her as a workplace link to do her worst.

Latest discovery I made was that when I was sent a new laptop from the company (since I am working remotely) a couple of months ago, they forgot to install some software which actually would have made my work output somewhat faster at times.  I have conveyed this reality to my nice supervisor and the torturing manager in an email. The supervisor will appreciate that reality.  The manager will use this news probably to indict me on my incompetence not to have noticed I didn't have the right tools.

I trusted I had the latest upgrade. But uBPDs do not do empathy.  Nor can they hear your explanations for a situation that they have decided not to abide, an opportunity for them to mete out some torture to another as catharsis for their own demons.  Projection.

I called the EPA assistance program at work last week and I have five free sessions set up beginning Wed afternoon.  I don't have to face down the witch again until Friday. I pray these will help me. The intake interview already helped me enormously.

I hope the counselor is acquainted with borderline personality and narcissistic behaviors.  I wish the intake person were my counselor.  My brief talk with my newly assigned counselor setting up an appointment bummed me out.  She talked about herself and when I tried to preliminarily share about my own story she didn't seem to want to hear. Ended the conversation suddenly.  

These sessions are set up for people in crisis mode. WTF? Her not letting me allude to my crisis was disappointing. I asked her if the intake counselor had explained my situation. She simply said, "Not much," and continued to talk about herself and her general opinion of stress and therapy and then terminate the call. WTF?

I know we don't formally start  until Wed. but I still had to face down my nemesis over weekend for work. It would have helped to have bookended the event sharing with the counselor my fears beforehand and talking about what happened later with her.

Fortunately, the witch was briefly cordial and then ignored me rest of the shift on Friday.  My nice supervisor who is usually my buffer was on vacation and I felt extra vulnerable to this woman's abuse. Also, I suspected she would delegate me the worst jobs.  

I made it through the shift.  Not without lots of anxiety.

I was told if I didn't like the EPA assigned counselor after the first session I could switch. I actually tried to switch before the first session and they said  no.

That quote above about being the ball.  Since my manager has triggered my complex PTSD I have been at times flooded with anxiety and economic terror of being fired after now being so close to retirement and my years of dedicated and excellent performance at this company. I began bingeing on podcasts by Dr. Romani on youtube re narcissistic and other personality disordered people. It is helping.

I also ran across a few podcasts by someone who calls herself Little Shaman and when I heard that quote from her that I just paraphrased about being the ball not the other player in the whacky game of tennis with an uBPD person, I related it to my manager.  

Little Shaman stridently asserts that the crazy game of metaphorical tennis is the uBPD playing with herself, projecting her inner struggle onto me as a scapegoat.  Explaining doesn't work with such an irrational person. You do not have the power that being another player would have.  You are the mere whacked upon ball.  Empathy is not forthcoming.  The uBPDs are lost to their own paranoid delusions getting triggered and using you as their scapegoat to unload their own fears and anxieties.  Too bad it manifests as cruelty and crazymaking.  It manifests in what Christina Lawson (great book="Understanding the Borderline Mother") calls "annihilating anger."  When the uBPD has that shark-like turn to Mr. Hyde mode!  And your PTSD makes it extra torturous, you get thrown back in time when you were a helpless child facing down a disordered parent with the power of life and death over your child life.

I need to keep breathing. I need to comfort myself.  I need to repeat to myself I am not afraid of this woman.  I need to not let this woman use my own dysfunctional history of chasing "perfectionism" to feel shame.  

There is a quote I heard recently and it helps.  

“Small minds can't comprehend big spirits. To be great, you have to be willing to be mocked, hated and misunderstood. Stay strong.” – Unknown."

I think it was Little Shaman who also said the uBPD person is addicted to your pain.  That was a powerful statement.  It fulfills their own "narcissistic supply" of feeling superior to you and powerful over you. The deranged ego convinced if it can destroy you it will be safe.

If I withstand her torture more serenely, I hopefully will be reducing that narcissistic supply of my pain for her addiction!

The uPBD  person is irrational.  Using logical resistance is futile.  Assuming their recognition of at least some of your true worth is futile and dooming.

I must be prepared for profound injustice and vilification from this person.

You can only detach so far from someone who is a work authority, but I don't want to fall into pathologically ashamed child mode from her moments of abuse.  I must fight my own conditioning of complex PTSD.  

Complex PTSD is what POWs develop, for example, once they become convinced there is no hope of release ever.  That is how I felt with the role my mother demanded I play in the family. I was not to have a life, or even a unique self.  My father was a narcissist and an alcoholic.  I felt like I was a forever POW of their Strindberg-ian marriage.  Pity and fear made up the glue that kept me locked in for such an unhealthily long time.

My own uBPD mother and the alcoholic family merry go round (or maybe roller coaster is better metaphor) of pain caused me a nervous breakdown in my 20s and another decade of depression and debilitating mood swings the decade after. As I pushed for recovery and stood up to her quite modestly finally at one point, I immediately was estranged from not only her, but thanks to her character assassination of me and her either lies or simply paranoia, I was bereft of the network I had trusted all my life knew and loved me.  It was like falling out of a plane without a parachute.  

It took over a decade to re-bond with my immediate family who I loved so and some other significant people. Some re-bonding I should have done but have still not.

So hard to trust people will process the true horror of what you have lived through. Also, as a child, I had so much pity for my disordered parents, at the same time they were terrorizing and traumatizing me from their own emotional illnesses. And there was the alcoholic family injunction to keep all the horror SECRET!

I survived.  I daresay I will survive this creepy, unpleasant, crazed woman who is using me to unmercifully bully out of her own narcissistic conflicts.  

I am grateful I can come here to try to regain my balance at precious times.

The experience is triggering a lot of grief still about my struggles as a helpless child trying to earn a mother's conditional love, since she wasn't capable of the unconditional kind.  "Conditional love is transactional."  It is about the narcissistic needs of the other person. Maybe too there is a sentimental appreciation they have for a comforting "affinity" with you, if you walk the tightrope and are unhealthily compliant, but there is no platform of intimacy ... "into-me-see."  There is only the demand that you satisfy, and not only that but you are supposed to mind read to know what you must do to satisfy.  That is impossible and futile so you are in the dooming double-bind game that is no win set up by the irrational uBPD.  

Again, you are the ball, not the other tennis player.  You will be whacked back and forth by a Jekyll/Hyde personality.

I am trying to brush up on my wordprocessing work skills though I know that will not save me from this vindictive woman who is so arbitrarily demonizing. But it is something I can do besides sharing with my support system, including here at this  website that has gotten me through an earlier and quote formidable work crisis that also echoed my painful history like this is.

Also repeating the serenity prayer.  

As Little Shaman keeps repeating ... it is not personal.  But it feels at the same time brutally and crazy-makingly personal... you are dealing with a primitive being lashing out from their own hellish struggles.  One savvy enough often, though, to identify your, their victim's, Achilles heels for potential shaming.

I know uBPDs deserve our pity, but not the ones who are currently battering us.  I am facing down a ferocious psychological enemy.  

I have my own recovering life spirit, my Higher Power I too often forget about, and also support systems and people I often, again, too readily forget about.

Time for exercises in courage and endurance and acceptance.

Thanks for listening.  Will be back soon.  

Best,
Bethanny
 With affection (click to insert in post)

« Last Edit: September 07, 2020, 05:26:03 PM by bethanny » Logged
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« Reply #1 on: September 11, 2020, 11:29:15 AM »

Us as the tennis ball is a perfect analogy, Bethanny.  I can relate to your observation of the pwBPD finding our Achille's heals and using them against us as well.

I'm glad you are able to turn to exercise as a form of self care and stress relief. 
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bethanny
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« Reply #2 on: September 12, 2020, 11:12:15 AM »

Thank you!  I need to exercise more. Thanks for the reminder!  With affection (click to insert in post)
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