Codependent throughline

[Riv3rW0lf]

It makes me think that if I want to feel safe, I have to make it clear that it's not healthy for me to be around SD25, independent of what anyone else is experiencing. Like Notwendy said, treat it like an allergy. The thought of expressing my feelings to that degree -- really communicating what I'm experiencing -- makes me see how deeply FOO oriented this stuff is. Because there is this messed up hero narrative where if I can hold it together, the family will be ok. I know it's unhealthy, but it's also ... scary ... to think of rocking the boat, as nutty as that sounds. I am absolutely not allowed to be crazy, ever. And by crazy, I mean put myself first ahead of everyone and anything.

I get that.

I don't know how your husband is. For me, what also makes it hard is when I do not feel seen for who I am by my husband. And it is often times hard to know if I truly am not seen, or if I am projecting my past trauma of extreme loneliness onto my present days.

Maybe it is a mix of both. I am paraphrasing (maybe poorly) but like Notwendy often says, we bond with someone that will help us replay our internal struggles so that we can get ahead and fix them. But then... Life is imperfect, people are imperfect and who is to say we need fixing?

When I hit roadblocks with my husband, I also tend to overanalyse myself, what happened there in an effort to fix it... But sometimes, I think I just have to accept it is outside my power, even if I was part of the issue to begin with...

It's hard to put into word but I just feel... We all, here, are overly conscious, overly aware of ourselves. It doesn't help that we all see the world and our relationships in extreme details. And we try, relentlessly, to connect all the dots, so we can feel better, so we can stop the shame, the anger, the pain. So we can be our best self... But sometimes I wonder, if this overanalysing is not maybe our main issue...

It is easy to get lost in the details, then we lose track of the big picture.

A possible big picture is that : your reaction with SD might even have nothing to do with your FOO... It might be biologically ingrained in you. Competition for ressources. To a very primal level. You are the target of her covert abuse. She has created a competition for your husband's attention. And you could be a saint and still get triggered by that. Jealousy and competition are visible in the wild, they come from our history... And your husband has to juggle his daughters excessive needs with yours and his. The problem is she is..25? At some point : he will have to let her go and to stop the daily phone calls. Those are simply not healthy for a 25yo, BPD or not.

Your reaction might be emotionnally stronger because of your history, but it is valid.

All this to say: it might not be you. I personally think your reaction is normal, and many people, even without your trauma history, would be triggered by it.

And I do think that being triggered is not necessarily always a bad thing, and does not always mean we are reliving the past. All animals get triggered. Sometimes, primal instinct needs to take control to help us see, to protect us... Part of us is chaotic, primal, animal, and nothing wrong with that either.

There is something deeply unhealthy with a 25yo calling her father everyday and acting as a spouse with him... I think most women would get uncomfortable with that and want to intervene, to put back order in the hierarchy. I would say that this is actually a normal, healthy reaction.

[livednlearned]

I have to take a moment and thank you all. Truly and sincerely 

Riv3rW0lf, you are a wonderful writer and make nuance seem easy to describe. Your post communicates dialectical thinking so beautifully, where two seemingly opposite things can both be true. It is true I can be triggered by FOO, and SD25 would also be triggering for anyone.

It is true that my feelings of being triggered AF by SD25 are uncomfortable for me, and they are also strong feelings I can live with.

H has work to do when it comes to SD25, and he has been, willing to make difficult changes that put our relationship first.

I feel broken in many ways by my FOO experiences, and I feel in many ways reparented through my own efforts.

It is sometimes a burden to be hypervigilant and it is also at times a curse.

Thank you for helping me see the middle ground 

I think you also said something that touched me deeply, about not feeling seen. It goes to my struggle with what it means to be authentic, a hard thing to even describe though probably universally yearned for by anyone who has been traumatized at an early age.

It makes me realize that yes, I want SD25 to do better. Be less needy, less BPD, less traumatized, less aggressive. I want H to do better. Even better boundaries, no loyalty binds, no codependence, no enmeshment. Read my mind 

But what I really want is to feel safe saying what I want or need, and feel reassured that someone will hear me out and listen and maybe even (unfairly) anticipate what I need because being vulnerable is not only difficult but felt dangerous. I want a lot of mileage out of those moments, fair or not.

It's funny. To others here I often say, "Wait until it's a tender moment to say it if you're going to say it, and say it for you (with caveats for dangerous relationships)" but then I don't listen to my own advice.

I see a need to have a conversation with H about how I feel, not focusing on solutions, simply on through lines between my FOO, his FOO, SD25 behaviors. Do we want to do that with a therapist or can we do it on our own? It's a miracle to me that I am even with someone who could hear out just that small piece. I used to think with n/BPDx, surely there is a partner out there who is not reactive.


@khimbosis, thank you for your kind words

I likely have some version of PTSD/cPTSD, although if so, it feels like it does not impede me to live my life, which I believe is often a critical piece of any diagnosis. It is this one piece of shrapnel I feel from time to time.


@couscous, you are not shy to look away from the challenging thoughts and I deeply appreciate that. I'm sure there is part of my thinking that is exactly what that article gets at. Having grown up around so much narcissism, having married and divorced a man with so much narcissism, deep down I fear it in myself, even in healthy amounts. If I am to be honest, the self-blame at times worries me it is a form of narcissism. Difficult to say given how much violence and aggression associated in my mind with narcissism. It is a hot potato thought for me, very much connected to deep shame and guilt.

This board is amazing. It's a garden for me. I grow every time I come here to learn something 

[Riv3rW0lf]

I see a need to have a conversation with H about how I feel, not focusing on solutions, simply on through lines between my FOO, his FOO, SD25 behaviors. Do we want to do that with a therapist or can we do it on our own? It's a miracle to me that I am even with someone who could hear out just that small piece. I used to think with n/BPDx, surely there is a partner out there who is not reactive.

I am discussing with Notwendy on another thread, at the moment, just how reactive my own husband is ... It has been a hard week.  

I understand the need for safety, I feel the same way. And I have a very edgy husband, the father of my children.

I am slowly realizing though that there is a time and space for every discussions, as long as I am willing to wait for it.

Sometimes, I jump in sensitive discussions at the wrong time, and then I cannot backtrack, and I set him off.  It always ends in a disaster.

I know he can be welcoming, he has been before... But there are specific moments for that... I need to learn to wait for those moments, especially since I know when they happen. I know him enough now. I just talk too fast when I am frustrated.

Does your husband like therapists? My husband doesn't. He believes psychology is a scam, and they are just as messed up as he is (to be fair, in a lot of cases, he is right). So asking him to meet for couple therapy would put him in a highly defensive mode.

Waiting for the right moment seems to be key for me... Now to master it is another thing though...

[livednlearned]

Does your husband like therapists? My husband doesn't. He believes psychology is a scam, and they are just as messed up as he is (to be fair, in a lot of cases, he is right). So asking him to meet for couple therapy would put him in a highly defensive mode.

H is a big fan of therapy ... for other people 

That's not entirely true. We have done some therapy together, and I have to give him credit.
H will do therapy if it's important to me, and respects good providers, but he thinks there are an awful lot of bad therapists out there who can do tremendous harm. H is a physician and he has been horrified by psychiatrists and psychologists involved in patient care, and sees some pretty acute cases.

Would H see a T on his own, without my encouragement? Probably not.

Perhaps if he wandered into another BPD relationship after his last marriage, idk. 

He has been very receptive when I want to work on things. We have discussed Gottman's work, I share with him what I learn here and from books, he is very supportive of the trauma-based somatic healing I've done, we did mindfulness classes together.

I guess the more thoughtful answer is yes, he is receptive to therapy. Part of that is seeing how much it has helped people around him. Me, SD25, SD28, S21, and now SS23.

Whenever I focus on my stuff, he is pretty good about being there to support me. But if I focus on him, something deficient in him, a problem he has, then no. His defenses are equal to mine. And we are both very protective of our bio kids so that's a delicate place to tread.

Waiting for the right moment seems to be key for me... Now to master it is another thing though...

Timing is everything, I'm learning.

Also, I've learned to be light as a fairy  . I don't think men get as much practice dealing with the full spectrum of difficult feelings.

My girlfriends and I can be vulnerable together, but with guys it seems harder, though of course not impossible. H has good friends who were really important to him getting through his marriage and then divorce.

So some things I work out with girlfriends, knowing that H is likely to feel flooded. With him, it's more about finding or creating moments where I can raise an issue, and then give him the opportunity to turn it over in his mind, safely.

He's a fixer, and I have that trait, too. We both have to monitor these tendencies together, and I have to recognize that I have a higher comfort level with the super deep, whereas for him it's a bit more of a foreign environment.

One thing that we don't struggle with is reactivity. If we do, it's usually me, and it's usually been building for a while and it's over quickly, with me taking responsibility pretty quickly. When he's aggravated or irritated, it is so far from the type of anger that I grew up with, and was married to previously, that it feels entirely manageable.

We've only been together 10 years and didn't raise our children together. I think child-rearing puts so much more strain on people. It's been the source of most of our issues, but it's been fleeting, mostly because our kids are young adults now. If it weren't for SD25 we might not had any urgent reason to see a therapist together at all. Kids really do bring a marriage to the mat 

[Couscous]

So I’m thinking that the book Wired for Love would be worth reading with your H. Here’s a Tedx talk with the author, Stan Tatkin which gives a pretty good overview of his thesis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKXLPuju8U

[Notwendy]

Reactivity was a big deterrent to talking about difficult topics in my marriage. Basically, we could not resolve anything by talking. H would react with anger. Me, being afraid of angry people would start to cry. He'd see me cry and get even more angry. All it did was escalate. So I stopped talking to him about anything sensitive or personal. I think at first, he was relieved. Yay, wife doesn't want to talk but eventually it occurred to him that I had had given up trying and that wasn't a good thing.

That was how things worked in his family. Nobody spoke about anything personal or difficult. One could talk about a book, or a TV show, or the weather but it didn't get deeper. I realized also that conflict wasn't resolved in my family by talking. BPD mother got her way because we were afraid of her rages. So neither my H or I had a role model for this. However, by my teen years, I had friendships where we did talk. I knew how to do this and found it frustrating that I could not in my marriage.

At some point, H figured out the marriage was heading for trouble and agreed to counseling. I had brought it up before but he wasn't interested.

I knew that the counselor had to be someone I had not ever met- or he'd think the counselor was aligned with me already. So I had him choose someone. It helped to have someone there as a moderator. Outside of counseling- if something came up to discuss, I'd say "let's do this at our next session". She didn't let venting go on too far- and she would walk us through our reactions.

She knew better than to get into hurtful emotional childhood stuff. I was more willing to do that than H. But having someone there helped keep the emotional reactivity down.

I don't think it helps to push someone into self reflection if they aren't willing to do that but the moderation and role modeling less drama in discussions helped. If you can get your H to agree- and choose the counselor he'd be most comfortable with, it's worth a try.

[Couscous]

Sigh...after letting that TedX video sink in, I woke up this morning realizing that my H and I have major fault lines running through our relationship and need to get into couple's counseling pronto. What Stan Tatkin said about how when you are a conflict avoider you will appear threatening to your partner, and that "a relationship can survive fights but what it cannot survive is the loss of safety and security," hit me like a ton of bricks. I now realize just how threatening our relationship feels for me due to my H's conflict avoidant style, and how little safety and security we actually have.  

[Riv3rW0lf]

Couscous,

Only you know best what is happening in your relationship. But... I would invite you to look at it with a grain of salt. I say this because recently, I really jumped to conclusions, got debilitated, started wondering if my husband was BPD ! I was just triggered.

Breathe.

No relationship is perfect, and it doesn't always require a fast fix.

When you say you don't feel safe and secure, what do you mean?

Do you guys talk? How much per week? About what? Is he truthful? Is he committed? Not what you think he thinks, but what he actually does for you and your family. Is he there? Does he provide? How is he with the children?

Breathe again.

With our history, we get triggered. In therapy, I have found I tend to panick sometimes. I once convinced myself my husband was abusive because of what a friend, who saw him three times, said ! and this doubt stems from my childhood. I should have stood by him and told her to sh*t it, she is not in a position to judge my relationship at all, and she knew nothing. It was projection.

Yet, I ended up talking about it with my therapist about it, and the prick told me I had to discipline him like he was a dog. I call him a prick because he had much more issues than I do...the guy didn't even remembered my name last time I saw him, after more than 5 months seeing him... Not exactly a reference...

Thankfully, I came here, and at that moment, Im1109 pointed out to me some very real truths about marriage and love and it reminded me to first look for balance.

I was triggered recently again, and this time, thankfully Notwendy was there.

Especially for us, who were in a covert incestuous relationship with our father : we have to be very cautious, because we get dissatisfied easily, we are looking for excuses to run and disconnect emotionally.

When in a good place, I can see him : not perfect, but present, helpful.

Before jumping to conclusions from your feelings on a sentence, find balance. No marriage is perfect.

Maybe your marriage is unsafe, but right now, I invite you to look back on yourself : are you triggered right now? Do you see things how they are?

Here to listen and help you find balance again if you need it, friend.

[Couscous]

Thanks Riverwolf 

In fact I wasn't actually triggered; it was more of an a-ha moment and it explained why I have always felt this background feeling of insecurity in my marriage with my super agreeable, nice-guy, passive H. I have no doubt that our marriage is a big step up from both of our parents' marriages, but I am not satisfied with merely having a "non-toxic" marriage and really would like to at least take a shot at having a healthyish one.

I actually emailed a couple's counselor who uses Stan Tatkin's approach yesterday without having talked about it ahead of time with my H, and I told him half-jokingly afterwards that I have decided I would like us to attend counseling and went ahead and contacted a therapist, but that I didn't bother to check with him ahead of time since I knew that he would agree to going. He replied with, "Ah, yes, well that's fine since I need to be in therapy in order to be able to say no." At least he is aware that he has a problem with this. But I am fully aware that a marriage is a system, and that I also contribute to the suboptimal dynamics, but since H never speaks up about anything I do that bothers him, I see no other choice for us but couple's counseling. 

[Riv3rW0lf]

So does your lack of safety comes from the fact that he doesn't tell you the truth ? That he keeps everything in?

I've been with someone that might have been similar to this before. It ended in an explosion from him and he left me. Which for me was a godsend. But I  am still a bit puzzled on why he never said anything. I remember moments where I would basically ask him what he was thinking, what he wanted. He never seemed to care.

I had my issues, ended up cheating on him emotionally, but to be fair : he was completely spineless and it didn't felt like he cared at all about our relationship, nor even about himself. Once I asked him point blank if he was happy with me and he said : "well it's not like there is anyone else I could be with. If I am not with you, I will be alone."
Who's whants to hear that kinda thing? feeling this way indeed doesn't make the relationship feel safe, because it wasn't a decision on his part.

I divert. But just to say that indeed, when someone is unable to share what they think, their needs... For me, it created a feeling of void. And I kinda knew it would burst open at some point and it did.. and his reaction and how he acted was actually quite harsh. I always felt it had been a bit unfair. But that I deserved it kinda too.

I remember trying to anger him, to push him over the edge, if only just to get a reaction out of him, something to tell me he cared enough to want to tell me... When I tell my husband I don't like something he did, it's not just for me, its for us too in the long run... To not build resentment, to not let our partnership die... I expect truth from him too. I want to know how he feels about things. It's proximity.

So yeah... Reactivity is scary, but at least I know what is going on in his head.

I hope therapy helps you guys figure out the best way forward.

[Couscous]

So does your lack of safety comes from the fact that he doesn't tell you the truth ? That he keeps everything in?

Correct. He has a powerful Subjugation schema and suppresses his needs/desires/opinions/preferences to such an extent that I think he honestly believes that he doesn't have needs/desires/opinions/preferences of any kind. His mother trained him well.