Seeking Advice to Reverse a Breakup - First Post

[Pensive1]

I'm in relationship hell after a breakup, and seeking advice.

My former significant other and I were together 25 years. For this post, I'll refer to her as Jane (not her real name). Last year, her adult son became addicted to meth and ended up homeless. Amidst this crisis, she was in extreme emotional pain and destabilized. She began an affair with an ex-lover from her youth, and left me for him. He appears to be a covert narcissist and is married (and is concealing the affair from his wife). He lives in another city, but takes business trips, allowing him and Jane to rendezvous.

I deeply love Jane and want to restore our relationship, if possible.

In the last month, I've come to recognize that she has BPD. My therapist initially pointed it out, given what I was telling her, and Jane clearly meets the diagnostic criteria. Finding out that she has BPD was like a Rosetta Stone - explaining so much. And I guess it's not surprising that I got together with her, since my mother had BPD.

I'm a quintessential nice guy - always driven to do what's right, and honest to a fault. Jane and I had a tumultuous relationship, but there was always love and caring. We initially got together while my ex-wife and I were getting a divorce. My ex-wife then begged me to get back together with her, and I briefly did, then returned to Jane - this episode fractured trust between Jane and I. But we built a decent life together over time. Jane was always prone to rages, and had difficulty carrying out many tasks of ordinary life, and I did quite a lot of caretaking. We stopped having sex over a decade ago, after she became very critical of me in that domain (in sharp contrast to the early years). Several years after the relationship started, we went to a couples therapist, but Jane refused to continue after the first few sessions because she believed the therapist was blaming her for everything (which was not the case). Over the last decade, I repeatedly begged her to go to a couples therapist with me, but she always refused.

Her affair began six months ago, and Jane told me about it and broke up with me just over four months ago. The guy she's now with had been her lover forty years ago, but she has apparent complete dissociative amnesia regarding this, and does not remember anything of a sexual nature involving him from that time; and she told me that she went into an extreme dissociative state of terror (with loss of hearing and vision) when they first were going to sleep together last year. Most of her romantic partners over her lifetime have been narcissists, and that has caused a lot of trauma. She knows she has C-PTSD, but not that she appears to meet the criteria for BPD.

I've continued hanging out with her after the breakup - the only criterion she set is that I can't do anything in the nature of courtship. I have C-PTSD myself and have been in therapy for half a year, and that has caused beneficial shifts in some of my own behaviors, including some that contributed to problems in our relationship (e.g. workaholism). And recognizing that Jane has BPD has been incredibly useful for understanding how to better interact with her. So ironically, post-breakup, emotional intimacy between us has grown a great deal. I've also continued helping her with many ordinary life tasks (though this could be viewed as problematic caretaking), and she expresses appreciation for that.

I did try, a couple times, to tell Jane that her current romantic partner is a narcissist, but she blew up at me and responded with complete denial. The first time I tried it, she almost cut off all contact with me. In many ways, he and I appear to be complete opposites. From online videos of him, and from what Jane has told me, he appears very arrogant, entitled, manipulative, prone to rage, etc. The other day, out of interest, I took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and scored a 0 (at the extreme non-narcissistic end). I'll also mention that currently, Jane is isolated, so that I and the narcissist are the only people she's talking to in any extensive, meaningful way.

The initial pure idealization phase of Jane's relationship with the narcissist appeared to end a couple months ago, and it appeared that he began to devalue her. Her internal alarms started going off, but then he gaslit her (and gave her the silent treatment), apparently convincing her that that she was "overreacting", and that the alarms were just due to her faulty alarm system and not supported by “objective facts”. Though she's inherently insecure, I think the narcissist is clearly doing things that trigger her (and of course he's ultimately unavailable, since he's married, and it's unlikely he will leave his wife).

He has recently reverted to love-bombing Jane again, and I suspect this in part may be because he realizes I’m still in the picture, and he doesn’t want to lose her. So I feel like I’m in a double bind - the time I spend with Jane brings us closer, but also may be greatly prolonging the time until the narcissist fully shows his true face. My initial plan had been to try to outwait him - a marathon between how much pain I can endure versus how long he can continue until removing his mask. The romantic chemistry between borderlines and narcissists can be really strong, but such relationships invariably turn toxic and generally fall apart. But sometimes the timeline can be quite long. I've tentatively decided to wait a year, or potentially two, before moving on.

Any advice on the best approach for restoring this relationship would be appreciated.

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[Pensive1]

Just adding a few more thoughts...

I'm in a world of hurt, and would really appreciate advice.

My biggest mistake was thinking that my ex thought like me - that ultimately, her mind operated like mine (with analytical reasoning, etc.). And going for 25 years not really recognizing that this wasn't the case.

Because of my own family-of-origin trauma history, a number of my patterns were the opposite of how one would optimally deal with a pwBPD. I was a busyholic, so I was often not physically available or emotionally available (instead focused on some project). I was often numbed out. When my ex raged at me, I would shut down and withdraw. And I was often invalidating what my ex said (one of my own defensive patterns, from my family of origin, was to analyze and correct what I perceived as invalid statements - e.g., statements expressing paranoia, etc.).

Amidst her son's crisis, a parent coach advised my ex that she urgently needed to seek a therapist for herself. She briefly looked for one, then decided to work through a trauma therapy book herself, with the narcissist serving as her quasi-therapist/sounding board. This "therapy" then led to the affair, and her breaking up with me.

Her affair partner apparently validated everything she said. He kept telling her how much he loved her, how lovable she was, complimented her on everything, etc. She later told me that she had never met anyone who was so "safe" and whom she could trust so deeply.  It seems the beginning of the affair was very intense, and it took off like a supernova.

I had devoted myself to trying to help her son, and I gave that everything I had (taking a month of vacation time to help, attending classes on addiction, etc.). Out of her distress, my ex had started raging at me, and what I didn't do was just be present for her (allowing her anger to be there without reacting/withdrawing). She recently thanked me for everything I'd done for her son, saying that this allowed her to focus on "therapy" (with her affair partner).

My ex and I currently live a block apart, and this week her lover is staying at her place (I guess telling his wife that he's on a business trip). I'm trying to minimize time walking around in our neighborhood, so as not to run into them. I find myself experiencing a ton of pain, and I'm trying to hang out with friends. Before her lover arrived in town a few days ago, my ex and I were having some wonderful quality time together (and when I last left her house, she called out that she loved me). At another point she said there's "room" in her life for me as her "friend and long-time companion", and she said she's enjoying her "autonomy". There have been times recently when, if she wasn't involved with the other guy, I think we would have quite possibly ended up making love. But she's obviously very, very hooked on the narcissist.

[Rev]

Good day Pensive,

Thank you for such a heartfelt testimony. I wonder what it was like for you to write it?  I remember my first post, half of what I was carrying never made it on to the page, I was still so raw.

I am really sorry to see the pain and turmoil you seem to be feeling right now. And I am really happy that you have found us here. Welcome. This is a really great place. There's lots of wisdom on the one hand and zero judgement on the other hand.

You've asked for advice - presumably with what to do to "restore the relationship".  Do I have that correct?  I see that you are in therapy and that it appears to have had a positive effect on your behaviors?  Is that correct?  I wonder if you might help me understand more about that?

Like - if you could pinpoint a few things about why therapy has been successful, what would you want me to know?  What, if anything, has your therapist worked on with you regarding your own personal goals, regardless of the break-up?  How often are you going for therapy?

At this stage, we're just starting a conversation, so any "advice" I can give you would come out of my own personal experience. My story is not your story, so please take the one piece of advice I will offer here with a grain of salt. Adapt anything said here to your own situation.

25 years is a long time for patterns to develop. So long in fact that you may not even be aware of them. If I were in your position with my ex (we lasted only 5 - she was verbally and sometimes physically abusive - I was in pretty bad shape when the marriage ended - she started an affair with her 3/4 brother who she found through ancestry DNA) I would really want to understand the patterns for what they were and how they continue to show up in an ongoing relationship. For me, that work was purely on the emotional side, because when she ended the relationship ended, I had face to face contact with her only once to sign papers to get my name off the lease. In the aftermath of that, I suffered the first and only two panic attacks of my life. So the work I did really focussed on the emotional patterns that were keeping me hooked. Three years later, I still think about her and at the same time, the emotional charge is gone.

I hope some of that resonates with you.

Reach out any time.

Hang in there.

Rev

[60av8tor]

Hi Pensive,

I’ll echo what Rev said - this is more my thoughts than advice. These circumstances are SO different - severity, length of relationship, non-BPD issues, kids, personal attitudes/values, etc. - that it’s very difficult to offer advice unless it’s about a very small, objective portion of the scenario. I’ll also state that I’m brand new here and very new to my situation - my wife of just under 3 years (4.5 years together) filed for divorce, split, and filed a protective order the end of February.

This whole situation crushed me like nothing in my life. For the first 45 days I would have done ANYTHING to get her back - and I mean anything. I would have quit my job - I have a career that is fairly lucrative and, way more importantly, I really enjoy it. It is part of who I am. This is just one aspect of my life that my wife slowly but surely began railing against - the one thing I had left of my personal identity - oh and it supported us BTW as my wife never worked, so there’s that little detail During that period, I would have given it all up and flipped burgers just to have her back.

What would I have been getting back exactly? A beautiful woman? Yes. Amazing sex? Yes. The FEELING of being loved like I’ve never been loved before? Yes. Feelings to quench my need, pretty much an addiction, for her? Yes.

What would have been the cost to get all that back? The continued cycle of spiraling every 7-10 days; spending hours in circular arguments really about nothing at all? Yes. The feeling that the sex - while wonderful in a guy’s fantasy porno way - was awesome, was also beginning to feel like something more - and that wasn’t something more “good”? Yes. The full time job of keeping the sun, moon and stars aligned in order to get those good feelings in return? Yes. Giving everything of myself financially, physically, emotionally to only feel like very quickly I’m off to the next thing to calm the anxiety? Yes. A wife that had to be the most suspicious and paranoid person I’ve ever been around in my life? Yes. A life that slowly made me ignore and give up anything that was ever “me” in my life - friends, family, hobbies? Yes. A “love” in return that was truly conditional in ever sense of the word? Yes, yes, yes.

I guess my point with all this is that I didn’t see ANY of this when I was knee deep in it. I noticed huge red flags early on but ignored it for all the same reasons I read from others again and again - love-bombing, physical beauty, amazing sex, wanting to help/fix her, confusing all of that for love, feeling like I met my soul mate (that thought makes me feel stupid and sick at the same time in retrospect). But after a while, all the mess just became my life - I knew how much we argued, I knew how I felt, I knew that things weren’t “right”, but I was ADDICTED. And that was after only a few years.

I have one audio recording from one of our fights a year ago. I listen to it now - with some time and distance - and some things she says just shock me. And even more shocking is how her words don’t even phase me at the time. She says:

“I can find someone to do what you’re doing without being a pilot” (she hated my job)

“I need more attention. If it’s not from you, that’s ok”

WTH? That was my wife objectively telling me she needs certain things, but she really doesn’t care who she gets it from. HOLY CRAP! That’s what she really thought about me. She wasn’t giving me love - it had nothing to do with me. She was giving me what she thought I wanted ONLY to fulfill her needs; to get what she wanted. By her own admission, it didn’t really matter who was giving it to her. That realization makes me sick, but it also has allowed me to begin baby steps to getting me back, working on myself, and realizing why I was so susceptible to falling for all of this - not just the outward trappings, but personal issues that I need to work through.

I look at the words you wrote - about her freely flaunting her boyfriend being there, etc - just like my audio recording. You are so used to the attitudes and treatment it doesn’t phase you. I can tell you NO ONE deserves treatment like that. You are WAY better than that and there are truly good people out there all over the place.

It is SO difficult to see the reality when you’re in it. My wife left me in a vicious, very vindictive way - after I gave EVERYTHING I had to give. That’s just not normal. All the same, I would have given anything to get her back. That’s also not normal.

I hadn’t even heard of BPD for the first 45 days after her split. At first, learning about BPD helped my emotions, then I began feeling depressed again thinking that if I would have known about the disorder, I would have adjusted my behavior and could have “saved” it.

I think my reality is that I would have just been  making more accommodations in my life and my health for her behavior; behavior, that in hindsight, was far from unconditional or reciprocal. For “us” to get better she had to recognize her behavior and want to improve it. Not saying that it’s 100% impossible, but every day as the old me begins to slowly return, I’m realizing that it would be highly unlikely and, quite honestly, I want all that energy into myself, my friends, family, and some day, someone who is deserving of who I was before I met my wife.

[Pensive1]

Thank you so much for your kind replies Rev and 60av8tor, 

Rev - in answer to your questions:

re: "You've asked for advice - presumably with what to do to "restore the relationship".  Do I have that correct?"
Yes, I'm asking for advice on what I could do to restore the relationship.

re: "I see that you are in therapy and that it appears to have had a positive effect on your behaviors?  Is that correct?  I wonder if you might help me understand more about that?...
Like - if you could pinpoint a few things about why therapy has been successful, what would you want me to know?  What, if anything, has your therapist worked on with you regarding your own personal goals, regardless of the break-up?  How often are you going for therapy?"

I am in therapy, and that's helped me tremendously. I began therapy two months before my ex began her affair. We had a "parent coach", who helps people with a child in addiction. She advised each of us to go into therapy, and I found a therapist and began therapy immediately, on a weekly basis. In addition, I purchased on online course in Acceptance & Commitment Therapy and began working through that. And I purchased and read a very good book on mending relationships.

I didn't want to live the way I was living anymore, and was at a point where I was fully ready to change. That had to do both with myself, and with what was happening in our relationship. Because of childhood trauma (physical, sexual, and emotional abuse), I have problems with dissociation, mainly in the form of being numbed out. I'm of the C-PTSD "flight" subtype - using busyness to flee feelings. I was involved with a lot of political activist projects, and couldn't say no when people asked me to do things. I sort of felt responsible for fixing the world. And I lived with very strong internal feelings of shame. I also had a strong pattern of nitpicking and "correcting" statements that others made that I believed to be incorrect/untrue. The last was a huge problem in my relationship with my ex - she brought it up repeatedly, said it was a make or break issue in our relationship, and I tried hard to diminish or stop it, but couldn't fully do so. I also was living with constant extreme painful physical fatigue due to a medical issue that resisted diagnosis - and that fatigue often greatly impaired my higher cognitive functions, such that I was often operating on autopilot.

I had the luck of finding an excellent therapist, with many decades of experience working with victims of trauma.

The therapist prompted me to make a concerted effort to find the cause of my physical fatigue. Mainly through my own concentrated efforts (I'm a scientist with biomedical background, and delved into the research literature), the medical issue was diagnosed, with the initial diagnosis confirmed by medical testing, allowing treatment of the condition - it was Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. That almost entirely resolved the fatigue problem.

I learned to say no to additional demands on my time, and dropped involvement in most of the activist projects I had been working on. And miraculously, therapy resulted in an 80-90% reduction in the profound feelings of shame (originating from childhood sexual abuse) that I'd been living with all my adult life. I was able to begin to relax, in contrast to the wound up state I'd been living my life in, and to better inhabit my body. The therapy also helped me understand and recognize my own savage internal critic. In conjunction with improved understanding of how my ex's mind worked, that allowed me to finally completely cease my pattern of nitpicking/correcting statements that my ex made.

My therapist also began pointing out that, from things I was relating to her, that my ex appeared to be borderline. I initially didn't want to believe that and counterargued. But then I looked up the DSM diagnostic criteria, and read more about BPD, and it was clear.

Unfortunately, this all came a tad too late. The timing of events was unfortunate.

At the peak of her son's crisis (at the beginning of August last year), under circumstances that threatened his life, my ex had reacted with rage, and that rage was completely inappropriately directed at me. She split me black. And she crossed the line into hitting me and throwing objects at me - something she had never done in our relationship.

In mid-August of last year, an uncle of mine was dying. He'd been like a father to me after my own father died many years ago. I flew out to take care of him, so he could die at home. I was there for three weeks. During that time, my ex's now-boyfriend showed up in the city I live in, looked her up, and began pursuing and love-bombing her. By the time I began doing therapy, my ex and her now-boyfriend had begun talking and texting extensively. So she wasn't noticing the changes I was going through, and she was devaluing me.

I will add - in the years immediately prior to 2020, our relationship was in a fairly miserable place. In 2020, we began taking long hikes in natural areas each week, and that began to fundamentally change things - we were growing closer, and I really felt that we had turned a corner. That process - of drawing closer, was interrupted by the incredible stresses of her son's crisis. And then the entry of her now-boyfriend.

In early January, my ex disappeared for a weekend and ghosted me. She'd flown out to meet her boyfriend. When she returned, she told me of the affair and that our relationship was over. But we continued to hang out, and she really began noticing the changes in me, from therapy. I used to believe that things in our relationship couldn't improve unless we were both in therapy. But I've concluded that's incorrect - that the changes in me were sufficient to shift our dynamics in a much more positive direction, even though her BPD remains undiagnosed and untreated.

She's ambivalent about obtaining a real therapist herself - mostly resists the idea, but sometimes appears open to it. In the last four months, we have had some of the most emotionally intimate conversations we've had in years. And we're doing a lot of things together - cooking dinner together, gardening, hiking, etc. But it's a complex mess. And, right now, in some ways, she can have her cake and eat it too. I provide her with companionship and help her with her life tasks, and am functionally like a spouse, except that her romantic relationship is with someone else. But the position I'm in is exceptionally painful.

Last weekend she was cleaning her apartment for her boyfriend's visit. We usually have been spending most of each weekend together. I had decided to pull back, so I didn't call her on Saturday, to get together. Then she called me in the late afternoon. I told her I still intended to go on our customary Sunday hike, but didn't want to hang out Saturday, because the situation was somewhat painful. She then asked me to please come over while she cleaned - that she didn't have any other friends, and really needed my company. So I went over. Though I had intended to pull back somewhat, last weekend, at her request, I was over at her place, helping her with stuff and hanging out, Friday evening, most of Saturday, most of Sunday, and Monday evening.

I will add - when she announced the affair, I had initially (foolishly) believed, based on what she had said, that her boyfriend was a nice guy. That belief began to change when my therapist pointed out that it was manipulative for the guy to take on the role of being my ex's trauma "therapist". And my therapist then asked if my ex had any history of dating narcissists (as I noted previously, most of my ex's prior romantic partners had been narcissists). My best friend, is someone who used to exclusively date narcissists, as a consequence of childhood trauma (she then went into therapy, and healed, after a decade of hard work in therapy). She's a master at recognizing narcissists. She asked for my ex's boyfriend's identity because she was curious what he was like, then looked him up, and immediately told me, based on pictures and video of him, that he was a raging narcissist. And everything I've learned since fits with that. My ex had spoken of him in prior years, but had repressed all memories of a sexual/romantic nature involving him, and had split him white. She had retained very detailed memories of him, but nothing sexual or negative.

[Pensive1]

re: "25 years is a long time for patterns to develop. So long in fact that you may not even be aware of them... I would really want to understand the patterns for what they were and how they continue to show up in an ongoing relationship."

Yes, 25 years is a long time for patterns to develop and consolidate.

For seeing patterns in my own behavior, it has been super-useful to talk to my best friend. Where my ex and my best friend have noted or complained about some of the same behaviors, I can know it's actually me, and not projection or misinterpretation by my ex. An example of projection - my ex would never apologize when we had conflicts and I often would. But she would claim that this wasn't the case - that I would never apologize and that she did. I asked my friends and ex-wife, just to check if I was misperceiving my own behavior, and they all told me that I was always quick to apologize and consistently owned my own part in conflicts.

At the beginning of our relationship, I fell deeply in love with her. When I transiently returned to my ex-wife she frantically tried to win me back, then devalued me when I returned to her. Like all BPDs, my ex has difficulty trusting in general, and events toward the beginning of the relationship contributed to fracturing her trust in me. During most of our 25 year relationship, she repeatedly threatened to leave. That left me untrustful, and I kept some walls up around my heart, for fear of being hurt. Ironically, I let those walls down several years ago after erroneously concluding that she wouldn't actually leave me (given the length of our relationship).

There was a short-lived breakup in 2009, initiated by my ex, but there wasn't another guy involved, and we soon got back together. My ex's brother died by suicide in 2011, and I was super-supportive, and she was extremely grateful for that, so our relationship improved, though we didn't return to sex.

In many areas, my ex didn't express her needs, and expected me to read her mind. There was a long pattern of us each being unhappy with the nature of our relationship, but sort of averting our eyes and living with it, in a deadened way. The repair attempts by my ex were in form of commands she would issue, or sometimes rages. We would each issue commands/demands, while keeping our emotional walls up. It seemed like we didn't know how to resolve our problems ourselves, so I would repeatedly ask her to go to couples therapy, and she would refuse.

One major problem is that we never went on vacations - we only went on two vacations near the beginning of the relationship. My ex loves novelty and exploration, so this left a major need unfulfilled. The lack of vacations partially reflected my workaholism and partially was a consequence of inadequate money. But we really should have gone on more vacations. As part of her affair with her new boyfriend, she's travelling to different cities and seeing new sights.

Pretty frequently I would tell her I loved her. But she would very seldom reply back in kind. And I now know she didn't actually believe I loved her. After she announced the breakup, I said I'd always deeply loved her, and then she said "why didn't you tell me?" I pointed out that I had, and then she said if a message is not received, it's always the fault of the sender (that's obviously not true, but it is her perspective).

During our relationship, she would often go into rages at me. I would then shut down/withdraw (or sometimes respond very angrily myself). That was a deeply problematic reaction. What I've learned to do recently is to just allow her rage to pass through me, without reacting or shutting down, and to continue engaging with her.

I would also often try to argue with her using logic and evidence. That pretty much never worked. It all goes back to the problematic assumption I was making, that fundamentally her mind worked like mine.

I feel like I really am at a point where we could both be far happier in a relationship. I have more perspective, am less numbed out, etc. And I can accept almost all her difficult qualities, other than the BPD propensity to enter into affairs or to threaten to leave relationships. That's one thing I can't accept. And if she and her current boyfriend did break up, narcissists tend to suck people back into relationships, so that would potentially be a threat hanging over everything.

[Rev]

Thanks for this.

Could you give me a few days to process it all.  I am a big fan of ACT. 

The course you bought - did you get it from Steven Hayes directly? Does your course make use of the Hexaflex?

Talk soon.

Hang in there.

Rev

[Pensive1]

Rev,

The ACT course I've used is by Russ Harris - "The Happiness Trap Online Program" on Psychwire. It's helped me a lot. It doesn't make use of Hexaflex, but the basic components of the Hexaflex model are all there.

[Rev]

Here's another great resource by him

https://www.amazon.ca/ACT-Made-Simple-Easy-Read/dp/1684033012/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=61494217859&gclid=CjwKCAjws8yUBhA1EiwAi_tpEXK35Bo1LEmylSqFSqUB-_X-SjwK4FTGiWF9P84kwFt8BgGwIE1kwRoCMfQQAvD_BwE&hvadid=310059763162&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9000663&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=4726722204432971823&hvtargid=kwd-298544273925&hydadcr=8681_9621588&keywords=act+made+simple&qid=1653870930&sr=8-1