Do BPD's/NPD's get into relationships to use people to fill their void

[Family Court Strategies: When Your Partner Has BPD OR NPD Traits.]

Hello BPD Family,
Just reflecting on a past relationship with a bpd/npd.  It seems during the relationship I was only there to please my partner, to always give them compliments etc.  Does anyone have a similar experience.  No matter what I did they were never happy.  We could go on vacation and if one small thing happened she would think the world was coming to an end.  It also made me feel that she just needed to find something to complain about and when I took steps to fix it there would be something else.

[Newyoungfather]

Hello BPD Family,
Just reflecting on a past relationship with a bpd/npd.  It seems during the relationship I was only there to please my partner, to always give them compliments etc.  Does anyone have a similar experience.  No matter what I did they were never happy.  We could go on vacation and if one small thing happened she would think the world was coming to an end.  It also made me feel that she just needed to find something to complain about and when I took steps to fix it there would be something else.

[OKrunch]

Yea i agree with this, and if it's not something you did (or didn't) do that has them upset, it's someone else, and you need to be there to listen and help with that. Woe be to you if you go about being supportive in the wrong way.

Perpetual victims, constant need for drama.
It must be exhausting to live like that.

[Newyoungfather]

@OKrunch-totally, every time I was told what was wrong and I tried to fix it, once it was all good another problem came up, its like the bar was always raised to the point where I couldn't do anything to satisfy her anymore, the vacations, the constant affirmations to her, doing everything she asked me to do was just to fill her void, nothing really will ever fill it up.

[NarcsEverywhere]

I mean, desperation, delusion and impulsiveness drive that. I’ve got a lot of trauma related to this stuff, and in some ways I can temporally fall into these extremes myself. I find that if you get hurt enough by them, you can in some ways become like them temporarily.

But yeah, you can’t win if they put everything on you all the time, it’s important for both people to put in effort. And to admit mistakes and learn. That’s the only way relationships can grow. Plus it’s not really fair to take all the blame.

[StartingHealing]

Hello BPD Family,
Just reflecting on a past relationship with a bpd/npd.  It seems during the relationship I was only there to please my partner, to always give them compliments etc.  Does anyone have a similar experience.  No matter what I did they were never happy.  We could go on vacation and if one small thing happened she would think the world was coming to an end.  It also made me feel that she just needed to find something to complain about and when I took steps to fix it there would be something else.

That was one aspect with the exBPD.  25 years, and it didn't start that way she devolved into that.  Along with the unending drama about anything and everything.

[Newyoungfather]

Yes! The never ending and frivolous drama, I remember so many arguments that looking back I'm like what the heck is going on.  I'm starting to realize that they have so much anger inside of them they need to vent it out hence "walking on eggshells".

[Turkish]

I think that we all had similar experiences. Even going to the mall 3 miles away could elicit dysregulation due to... reasons. What are the reasons? A recovered pwBPD on Quora put it like this, "my feelings don't matter and are worthless; therfore, I don't matter and am worthless." This speaks to the desperate need for validation, even when angry.

Separated, but still living together, I asked my ex, "what goes through your mind when you're angry at everybody?" By that point, I had nothing to lose, and I wished that I'd asked her this when we were still together. She replied, "I just want everyone else to feel my pain!" That told me a lot, even though it went against my values.

Before we had kids, I took her on a trip to the Pacific Northwest where I used to live. I borrowed my buddy's motorcycle and gear and took her on the bike up and down Mt. Ranier. We visited Whidbey Island and that famous Bridge shown in a number of movies. Hurricane Ridge. Seattle. Multnomah Falls and the others near Portland and Mt. Hood. Tourists from all over the world come to visit those sites.

She had an attitude most of the time, WOE. At the Portland Airport waiting for our flight home she asked me a question and my glare said it all. She laughed and kind of apologized for her attitude of the past few days.  I'll give her a little credit, but an otherwise awesome vacation was ruined to me feeling like WOE most of the time. I'd have had a better time inviting a random person from the street to take and pay for.

[Pricklypickle]

A person with BPD goes through life with deep pain, and has developed ways to try to cope with it that are disharmonious to relationships with others. If you enter a BPD's life and prove yourself to be a source of unconditional affection and support, and a consenting target of their anger and complaints, then I believe they will succeed in making you feel almost as much pain and anger as they feel themselves.

A stable and relatively happy person who enters a relationship with a BPD will have to be in an asymmetrical relationship while the pwBPD goes to therapy and improves the quality of their life. As long as BPD is present, only two states are possible:
1) you put boundaries, you stop accepting certain behaviors, and accept that you will have to emotionally separate yourself from their emotional states.
2) you are both dragged down to the level of dread experienced by the BPD, and sooner or later you will be worn out and unable or unwilling to continue

[Turkish]

Pricklypickle sums it up well.

I was at first hurt and a bit humiliated when my ex left me for a young college football jock. She was 31 with our then 1 and 3 yo, and I was 41. He was a studly 21.

Early on, I noticed she was exhibiting the same behaviors that she did me. When they married, she amped it up, she being more frustrated that he wasn't a Provider (how could he have been just starting out?). She unleashed more on him than she ever did me, including multiple police calls and an arrest, such that I eventually felt sorry for him.

[Newyoungfather]

Turkish-You summed it up very well, the cycle will restart over and over again.  I feel bad for the exbpd, to live such an unstable life with those emotions must hurt so much.

[OnPinsAndNeedles]

I think one of the most difficult parts of living with someone with BPD is the conflicting feelings their chaos creates .  You feel sorry for them, and realize that for the most part they can't help their behavior, but at the same time you are tired of the emotional abuse and always being the one who has to compromise, never having your own feelings validated. 

[capecodling]

There is a great talk from Sam Vaknin on this exact topic — what would it take to successfully be with a BPD?  Love him or hate him, he makes some really good points, that essentially it would be a full time job of managing their emotions, you would essentially have to become their personal therapist, and the process would still beat the crap out of you.  

One of my friends she is a therapist, one of the smartest most perceptive people I have met in my entire life and also her mother was a BPD.  She explained it best to me about my ex:  “she would have to have been in continuous therapy by her own decision for at least “5-10 years just to get to the place you were when you were a college student or adolescent. Even then being with her would be excruciating.”

Unless your BPD is already in therapy, by their own choice, odds are you won’t be able to withstand the beating that being with them will put on you.  Its just too painful, the constant manipulations and “death by 1,000 cuts” that they seem to do.

[OnPinsAndNeedles]

“she would have to have been in continuous therapy by her own decision for at least “5-10 years just to get to the place you were when you were a college student or adolescent. Even then being with her would be excruciating.”

A therapist once told me that people with BPD have the emotional maturity of a toddler in an adult body.  Once I started thinking in those terms, their actions all of the sudden made sense. 

"death by 1,000 cuts”

Excellent description of the pain they cause.