The official discard was 17 days ago. We’ve been in a relationship for 5 months total before that. The last two was her devaluation stage, and I’d hardly call what we had during that time a relationship. Everything was pretty good prior to one date I forgot about. After that missed date, I went from her absolute dream she was in love with guy, to just a guy, If that makes sense.
From that day forward the devaluation got progressively stronger and stronger no matter what I did, until she discarded me for her ex fiancée. I definitely saw it coming but I didn’t expect her to leave me for the guy she was with before me though. She talked so bad about him to me a lot. My guess is he is her favorite person that was painted black when she met me. I was his replacement until she painted me and went back.
How did you eventually recover from that crippling depression you was in for those months? Did your ex ever try to contact you during that time? I hear often from others they do that for various reasons.
Yes, one of the things that makes BPD breakups so hard is how the love-bombing and devaluation cycle hijacks your brain into falling hard for the person and creates that trauma bond which can be stubborn to let go after the relationship ends. Then you get hit again on the back end if the discard is extra sudden and “shocking” because the sudden shock will cause that breakup to be even more traumatic and its actually been shown to make the breakup harder and longer to get over.
So there are 2 different approaches one can take towards addressing the depression that results from such sudden trauma and loss: 1) work on healing the trauma bond and 2) work on reducing the depression directly. I am doing both.
Here are the things I do for addressing the depression directly:
1) daily meditation.
2) daily wim hof breathwork and cold exposure (cold shower or ice bath - shown to help depression)
3) daily strenuous workout, i do mostly weight lifting.
4) i changed my diet to a rather extreme healthy diet.
5) nofap and general dopamine fasting.
6) supplementation with natural supplements shown to help depression (you can also talk to doctor about antidepressants if you want)
7) being sure to allow yourself to feel pain and not numb out the pain, the nofap and dopamine detox helps with that. In fact when you are in touch with your feelings like sorrow, it actually makes it really easy to stick to nofap. I found fapping was essentially dopamine chasing to numb out pain. That discovery was gigantic for my healing.
8) Talking with friends and family
For addressing the trauma bond i am doing:
1) daily EFT tapping with FasterEFT technique.
2) weekly EMDR therapy / talk therapy to identify and heal childhood issues that result in vulnerability to love bombing.
3) periodic mushroom and ayahuasca ceremonies, maybe 4X per year at most.
4) subliminal recordings for healing the subconscious.
I’d be curious to hear what else anyone has come up with. I’ve also been meeting new women to date, which is a nice distraction — some i’ve even connected with very well — but I’m less than 5 months out from my BPDex and still pretty hurt from that breakup, even as the dumpor she forced my hand so I had no other moves, that really hurt a lot. Having my hand forced is made me feel so powerless and helpless and is what resulted in a lot of my depression.
To answer your other question, she has broken NC twice in 5 months. Both times I have shut it down. Each time it did set back my healing temporarily, it did not help me at all. I could sense her BPD illness lurking there trying to charm me back in for another cycle. It really doesn’t make you feel better because for me my anxiety skyrockets whenever I have been in touch with her or around her. I’m normally a calm, grounded, confident dude but around her my anxiety is a 10/10.
