Hello RW,
I understand you are venting, still I thought I would offer some feed back.
This evening my wife text to let me know that the tire pressure was low in one of the tires on our truck. Just a week ago I had added air for her and it seemed to do the trick. But it became clear today that it has a slow leak. I understand why my wife is uncomfortable driving like this, but she just wants to blame me for the problem.
One time my Ex told me "I understand that only bad things happen to me but now the
#$% weather is out to get me". and I finally understood that she did view the world/life/existence that way. this was beyond "the whole world sucks" ideology that some people express colloquially. this was a mindset, a world view of 'things don't work out for me because I am so unlovable, so not worthy, so completely unformed as a human being that I don't fit into the universe. and the universe is out to destroy me.
Earlier this summer my son and I were doing some building using nails and screws. My wife immediately “knew” that I was too lazy to clean up and “knew” that one of those nails or screws was in the tire. She “knew” that there was no possibility of it happening anywhere but where we were working. She also “knew” that I was lying when I said I had cleaned up.
and of course this is the other half of that mind set. the fight against it. someone here once wrote that 'to survive the catastrophe of not being whole is the life long struggle of a pwBPD'. being certain, being hardwired to process life through the filter of 'its broken (I'm broken) and you need to fix it. at this point you were talking about two different things. she was on the slippery emotional down slope of - 'the world is unsafe, I can never trust people to take care of me. No one protects me. no one thinks I have value'. Pete Walker calls these emotional flashbacks. An emotional flashback is the experience of regressing to the former feeling states of having been an abandoned, neglected or abused child. I think that is close to what a pwBPD experiences but not quite 100% descriptive. for pwBPD life is a terrifying place, waiting for the person closest to you to suddenly not love you,... suddenly emotionally abandon you. suddenly hurt you.
So, after a few texts she decided she needs to call me and tell me how I caused this and it proves that I don’t care about the family and that’s why she can’t wait to finally be free of me and my “abusive” ways.
in a way she is reliving her earlier experiences... and I think this is where Pete Walker's emotional flashback fits better. She is reliving a complex mixture of intense and confusing past trauma. It is like living a nightmare while you are awake, with overwhelming sorrow, toxic shame, and a sense of inadequacy.
So tonight when she started singing that tune again I stayed calm and quiet. I could see she was dysregulating. Then I asked her how she knew that the nail/screw in the tire was there because of me. That was a trigger. She went off on me forA little while then hung up on me. I can’t say I really expected her to consider the possibility that it came from somewhere else, but regardless, I asked. I couldn’t resist.
my two cents? the trigger was way upstream from here. you asking if the nail/screw in the tire because of you was the breaking point but not the trigger.
again I would say you two are having two very different conversations. you are talking about a tire. she is expressing visceral emotions about how unsafe and uncared for she feels. this is not to say you don't care for her. this is not to say you are responsible for how she feels. the question about how can she be sure the nail is yours threatens her reality so badly she has to disengage. remember her reality is distorted. especially in times of dysregulation or emotional flashbacks.
I really don’t see that there was a way to deescalate this situation. I really don’t see how using any validating or empathetic words would have gotten a different response.
I would agree that by the time it reached the point of her calling you it would be very hard to deescalate this one. The JADE about the nail maybe not being yours probably didn't help. I think the place to deescalate was probably more around when you acknowledged it was uncomfortable for her to drive like this. she must drive with a pretty huge amount of uncertainty and fear, finding a way to partner with her and move into active troubleshooting... how to get the tire repaired was way earlier in the converstation.
In reading the tools on detaching I recall reading something along the lines of accepting that I am her trigger and therefore the most caring thing to do for her is remove that trigger from her life (I’m paraphrasing here, and probably not very well). I think I’m just waiting for some things to clear up before I act on this. So I’m the meantime I will keep reading about detaching and try not to make things worse.
you are her trigger in the same way life is her trigger. Marsha Linehan compared pwBPD to third degree burn victims. She said pwBPD have no emotional skin, and lacking emotional skin (skills, maturity, tools) even the slightest movement causes suffering.
even the slightest leaky tire causes a pwBPD to believe that no one cares for them, no one will protect them and that life is inherently unsafe and unfair.
with the highly intense of emotions of a pwBPD they feel that so strongly. again this is where Pete Walker's idea of a flashback fits. Like a PTSD flashback ... the pwBPD is experiencing all over again the fear and pain of being neglected.
detaching from the emotional storms of a pwBPD is very important. understanding how much of this is about the tire and you and how much is about the way pwBPD processes life helps us not be so wounded by the emotional storm but let it blow by us.
'ducks
