I hope you can see through this guise.
She probably felt bad realizing how little she was going to receive and because of the way BPD works she has to create a reality for those feelings. She feels bad, therefore you must be the cause. She feels abused, therefore you must be the abuser.
She is splitting.
Her email to you is unhinged and her attorney, if he or she hasn't already, will almost certainly see a giant red flag. It's not normal behavior. Victims who have been abused don't behave this way, and certainly not at this point in the divorce. The time to do this was a year ago to blindside you while taking D2 somewhere and filing a PO.
She claims she has realized after discussing with multiple people, including our marriage counselor, my first wife, and others, that she has been experiencing abuse from me for years. She claims to have audio and video evidence as well.
Like the video of you in church? I mean, the biggest threat here is that she has an attorney who will indulge her.
It sounds like the email from her is almost literally "I don't like your offer" so "I'm going to scare you."
Bad things can happen when bad lawyers get involved but usually there is a baseline for reality in many of our cases and your ex just sent an email saying "this is the reality I'm going with." She wants you to feel the way she feels.
Also, she didn't contact her lawyer as you mention. This isn't someone who is thinking strategically. She's recording you in church and trying to recruit negative advocates but to be blunt, she's not being very smart about it. I think it's hard to be smart when you're on an emotional roller coaster and trying to get reality to fit your emotional narrative.
Meanwhile, I’m stressed out to an extent I haven’t been since I first filed for divorce. I do not think I’ve done anything that would justify what she’s claiming, but of course at this point I’ve been turned around so much that part of me thinks “if she’s saying it, it must be true”.
She's been bullying you and warping reality for a while, it'll take some time before you can see the patterns and put things in perspective. And divorce jacks our nervous systems up. Lawyers get involved and we feel like we lose a little agency, not to mention the expense and fears about our kids' well-being. Skip used to say that people going through a divorce are all a little BPD. We feel x therefore y must be true.
Besides simply following my attorney’s advice to document the email and let things play out, what should I do here? Is there anything I should tell my attorney we need to be doing right now?
To be candid, your wife is kinda dumb.
This happened to my ex, too. He was a former trial attorney who hired a father's rights attorney. By most measures, you would think he should have sole custody of our child. Instead, it's the reverse.
People with BPD don't handle stress well and divorce is stressful. Your wife's email to you is a stress response. It's accomplishing what she set out to do, which is to make you scared.
If I were you, I would shrug. You could ask her to direct all comms to her attorney, but you know she isn't able to do that because her purpose is to make you feel bad and that's harder to do with middle men calming things down.
You could have a close, trusted friend or family member read all of her emails and let you know if there is anything actionable. That's what I did. It's kind of the way people feel when they unplug from social media. Your mind and body get a break and you can focus on people you really love like D2.
Between this latest thing and the behaviors I’ve mentioned earlier in this post (filming me, pressing boundaries on our existing agreements, insisting I am refusing to compromise, etc) I feel like I’m being emotionally and psychologically tortured here, with no clear end in sight.
You might have different coping mechanisms, but for me I found it was helpful to learn. I read a lot. Bill Eddy's book Don't Alienate the Kids was particularly helpful. It made me realize that I had no control over my ex but I had control over my emotions. I didn't want to be this strung out tightly wound tense mom when I was with my son. I learned to think of my emotions as a source of healing and warmth. For some reason doing things for my son is easier than doing than for myself (although that's changing), and bringing down my tension level for him obviously brought it down for me.
