Just found this board today and hoping to learn new and better coping techniques to help myself navigate the minefield I find myself in almost daily in my marriage.
For a bit of background my pwBPD was recently diagnosed, which has helped to better understand why attempts to treat depression, anxiety, etc. haven’t been as effective as hoped, and after reading a lot about the disorder gave me a way to explain the worst of her behavior over the 23 years we’ve been married. On the downside it seems like the diagnosis is also being used as a way for her to dismiss or justify her behavior recently, which has been some of the worst I’ve experienced in our entire relationship.
In the past I’ve dealt with all the things that others describe, angry outbursts, walking on eggshells constantly, physical and verbal abuse and so on, but the last 6 months have been really hard. In this time she’s gone through periods of being very distant and excessive drinking, but it was after she started talking to one of our oldest friends who I had mentioned was having major health issues that things got really bad. She started cutting, having violent outbursts where she has ripped the doors off kitchen cabinets and attacked me physically as well as saying some really horrible things to me that I’ll never forget (she of course has no recollection saying these things and has accused me a few times of making it up). She would spend all day playing video games online with our friend and leave me to do everything around the house and take care of the kids in addition to my high stress and demanding job and act like I was putting her out if I asked for any help.
Things all came to a head when I started to notice a pattern where she would get sad or angry after talking to our friend and asked her to stop communicating with him, to which the response would usually be to pick up her phone and start sending him Facebook Messenger messages as if I wasn’t even there, and if she had been drinking a “f$&
you” would be added. On one particular day our 10 yo mentioned to me “Mom’s crying again” and I finally had enough and downloaded messenger on my phone and logged into our (originally meant to be a family FB account) account and read the messages. She had been carrying on an emotional affair for months, and basically had said that she had everything but him, how she would be a slut for him, and how unfair life is while he had sent descriptions of VERY graphic sexual fantasies he had of them together. I confronted her and the blowup was nuclear level. Of course it was all my fault somehow, I don’t pay her enough attention, he manipulated her, I’m just an asshole and had it coming (for a mistake I made 23 years ago and have never repeated, but it gets brought up in every argument no matter how unrelated), and so on.
I decided to work on things because we have 2 kids, and if I’m being honest only for their sake. We’ve had several really bad fights since, during which she seems to play the victim more now and says things like “Of course it’s always me, I’m a piece of crap, I don’t deserve anything” etc. which really seems like a passive aggressive way to push it all back on me. She has also become hyper-sexual and wants it all the time and gets angry when I don’t (usually because she’s been drinking and I don’t like her aggressive personality) she starts a fight and says that basically as a man I should never say no, so I must be doing it to hurt her on purpose.
I’ve been trying to do more to disengage, ignore, unemotional responses, but it’s hard and I can feel myself becoming more depressed day by day. I’ve thought about divorce, but worry about the effect on the kids and how damaging it could be for her to have joint custody since she’s hasn’t been as attentive a mother as she should (or used to) be. Just trying to make it through each day, and any advice is greatly appreciated.
