Seeking advice after breakup

[Pensive1]

It's been a few months since I've posted here. My ex, who has undiagnosed but clearcut BPD, started an affair (long distance, with a married former lover) last November, then told me of the affair and broke up with me last January. We were together as a couple for 25 years - with a lot of dysfunction, but also love. Today has been an especially painful day.

I've continued to try to restore the relationship for the last nine months. I'm in therapy myself for cPTSD and have worked hard on my own patterns that contributed to problems in our relationship. And I've read a lot about BPD, and tried to incorporate what I learned into my relationship with my ex (e.g. being validating, etc.).  My ex and I have continued to spend a lot of time together, and slowly rebuilt a lot of trust. We've been hiking, traveling, and cooking together. But it has also been excruciating, since her romantic relationship has been with her affair partner (who is cheating on his wife). And I've been basically playing the role of a platonic spouse (she has difficulty carrying out normal life tasks, and I've been helping her with many of those, etc.). It's a classic have your cake and eat it too situation.

The affair partner seems to pretty clearly be a narcissist. Entertaining, witty, and larger than life. Very dominant and full of himself. My ex finds him a lot of fun. A month and a half ago, she told me they broke up, because that situation was causing her too much pain. He led her to believe that she might have a future with him, as a couple, then, when pressed, said he'd always told her that he'd never leave his wife.

I continued to try to engage her into therapy. She doesn't want to admit that she has BPD, because she sees it as a stigmatized diagnosis. But she recognizes that she has serious mental health struggles and did enroll in a DBT group, and will also have an individual therapist (with DBT starting next week).

She and I continued to grow closer, but the affair partner sucked her back in. She told me yesterday that the affair was back on, and that he'd come out to stay with her for several days in a week and a half. I experienced extreme pain when she told me, and I mishandled the situation badly. I tentatively decided that I had to walk away - had to set a boundary for myself. But she began arguing with me about that decision, and then, in a numbed out state from the pain, I began bulldozing her with arguments - trying to point out how the BPD was affecting her choices, etc. That was an idiotic thing to do. If I was going to walk away, I should have just done it without getting caught up in arguing.

The arguing continued today, and totally exploded, undermining all the trust I'd worked so hard to build over the last nine months. She now says she wants no contact with me. She also says that she was looking at getting back into a committed relationship with me, before this meltdown happened. The things I was saying were basically true, but it was completely unhelpful to be saying them to someone with untreated BPD. And I think even if she wanted to break up with her affair partner, she'd find it very difficult to do - I think he'd keep sucking her back in. I think her no contact stance toward me may melt some with time, but I think it would be very hard to restore trust.

Anyway, I'm wondering what to do. I still love her, and want a committed relationship with her.

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[eirene]

I am so sorry you are going through a tug of war of the heart.  I think you can love a person without losing your own sanity.  Loving a person with BPD comes with a lot of pain.  You have to look deeply into your own emotional history. Are you drawn to people who love with suffering? Could this be a trauma bond?  I think you cannot be in a healthy relationship with someone who is not healthy emotionally.  You can love but with responsibility.  I think long term therapy would help you find the thing to do. Peace

[Pensive1]

eirene,

I think one of the factors at the start of the relationship was repetition compulsion. My mother had BPD. Though I didn't recognize it in my ex until a therapist pointed it out. But over the years, our relationship became much more than what gave rise to it in the first place. There's a lot of shared history over 25 years. And there hadn't been any prior affairs during our relationship. My ex pretty clearly started the affair to escape incoming pain due to a crisis involving her son.

[Pensive1]

One of the most important underlying problems with my ex is her lack of trust of me. Some of that lack of trust was earned. But much of it wasn't. In her mind, I was abusive, when objectively that's not true at all - an inverse of the actual situation (with her rages, etc.). She rarely takes responsibility for her own actions in our relationship - so in her mind, everything has to be made my fault. And so, in her thought process, there's an overwhelming basis for distrust of me. And this can't be rectified by trying to talk about concrete realities. Early in our relationship we saw a couples therapist, and my ex quit coming, because in her mind the therapist was blaming her for everything, when that wasn't actually the case. I don't know how to fully rebuild trust. And months of work in rebuilding trust can be destroyed by a single dumb argument. Today I succumbed to the temptation of thinking that, if I could only make her look at how BPD is distorting her thought process, she could see clearly. Such an obvious and harmful mistake on my part.