First Time Seeking Support

[How to communicate after a contentious divorce...]

This is really long, but my first time posting on this forum or seeking support with this and I need some place to write it out. I’m 6 months out of a discard with my ex who I was with on and off for 3 years, who did not have a diagnosis, but who I highly suspect has BPD.

I’ve been struggling so deeply since this happened, have had an intense amount of anxiety and depression, and have been in such a heavy and prolonged space of rumination and confusion. Its been hard for me to keep up with work and my day to day responsibilities, and I have felt pretty antisocial. I don’t even know how to relate to others about this experience. I’ve been in a couple unhealthy relationships before, but I’ve never experienced anything like this, and I feel completely worn down by the shock and amount of energy it’s taken out of me.

Like many others, I went through various phases of idealization and devaluation, with this last time being the most intense and severe. At times my partner treated me like I was amazing, beautiful, the love of their life, talented, loving, and at times they treated me like I didn’t exist, or could be extremely cold and shut off to me. I am struggling to make sense of who I am and the things they told me about myself. During devaluation, they said I was manipulative, controlling, gaslighting, selfish, neglectful, that I was a liar and deceitful, that I wasn’t “innocent.” Things I have never had an ex partner say to me before.

There was a lot of things that happened in this relationship that I don’t know how to explain other then saying they didn’t make sense to me / something felt off. It was like whiplash because in other ways, we were very aligned on what we wanted and how we felt about each other, and I’d never really felt loved or wanted a life with someone in the same way before. But sometimes it was like they were a different person, and it caused me a huge amount of anxiety and instability. The blame for most of the things in our relationship was shifted onto me, and I often apologized for it. The times I would try to address something that was hurtful or not working for me, most frequently they would deflect it to something I did wrong, or they would go silent on me.

The discard took the form of a complete and total ghosting, where a week earlier they said they loved me and wanted to be together, the day before they said they love me and we’d talked about hanging out (but had a minor disagreement, and I’d asked for space for the rest of the evening so I wasn’t reactive and we could communicate from a healthy / calm space). Then nothing. Didn’t respond to my gentle and kind acknowledgement that it seemed like they were wanting to end the relationship and request for closure. Didn’t respond to my kind request asking for them to let me know they were safe, after 20+ days not hearing from them. About 2 months in I got one text from them that said “love you and sorry for everything” but they didn’t respond to messages after that.

I can’t stop circling in this space of guilt and shame feeling like it’s all my fault. In part because I had my own things I was working on, Iike my reactivity and communication, which I didn’t feel proud of and was putting a lot of intention into changing and exploring. I did take accountability and apologized to them for my anxiety and reactivity as well.  To be clear, I never yelled, never laid a hand on them, wasn’t aggressive or name calling ever. But throughout our relationship, they would cease communication mid-conversation, or at times would give me the silent treatment (for anywhere from a day to a week or more) and I would become very panicked and anxious, especially in the first half of our relationship. I’m these moments, I would text and call way too many times, or send really long texts spiraling out emotionally / explaining how bad it hurt or begging to be communicated with. These are also behaviors I’d never had before in previous relationships, so it was very humiliating. I chalked it up to an anxious / avoidant dynamic and tried to work really hard on my own anxiety.

The second reason I can’t stop blaming myself is that a few weeks before they discarded me, I brought up the topic of non-monogamy with them and told them I had an attraction / crush on a friend. I’m a queer person, and in my community and past relationships, having a conversation about this would be normal and just a conversation. It would be something we would talk through and conclude if it made sense, and have an openness and commitment to remaining monogamous if it didn’t make sense for any reason. For me, having been cheated on many times in the past, it’s also just a value of mine that you are open and can talk about anything with your partner. Deceit is way bigger of a fear for me then knowing my partner has an attraction to another person. So talking about this to them just felt right and ethical to me.

My ex knew I had been in non monogamous relationships in the past and that I am queer from when we first got together. When I brought up this conversation, at first they were receptive and said they weren’t surprised because they knew this about me and weren’t upset, but then quickly they devolved into intense anger and accusations against me. They started saying I was a liar, that I should just break up with them, that I had been leading them on our entire relationship, that I was deceitful, and a lot of other intense and painful stuff.

I maintained that I had actually been really honest with them, that I was still being honest, and that I valued our relationship way more than anything else and wanted to be monogamous with them and work through the feelings that came up for them. It was a tumultuous few weeks that concluded with them coming to me, us talking, and them telling me that they love me and do want to be together.

A week later is when they fully discarded me out of nowhere. I believe they split on me and have a narrative about me that is not accurate. They seem to have a story that I cheated and was with someone else. They also seem to have lost all empathy for me, as they haven’t responded to any messages, even ones expressing distress.

I personally am completely traumatized from this experience. I feel like a terrible person, I feel like I lost the person I love more than anything and wanted a life with, I feel like my self worth is completely depleted. I feel confused about if and what I did wrong. I feel confused about all the negative and bad things they said about me. I feel so confused about how they could go from saying they love me and want to be with me forever to discarding me completely within a week - treating me like I don’t exist and never existed after 3 years together.

I have not felt attraction to anyone, or been able to experience intimacy with anyone in months. It’s like that part of me completely shut off. I feel afraid, avoidant, exhausted, undeserving. I’m scared that I really am abusive or something horrible to deserve this. And I also miss them so, so deeply, which causes me an immense amount of shame, seeing as they have moved on and have made it clear they don’t care about me remotely anymore, to the point of thinking I don’t deserve a text / call / conversation of closure.

I feel very alone and isolated in this experience. I don’t want to armchair diagnose them, and their accusations of abusive behavior from me have made it difficult and disorienting for me to speak on what actually happened in the relationship. But reading many peoples experiences here is so familiar, it’s the one thing that’s brought a little bit of clarity to light.

I don’t currently know how to move forward or be in acceptance of what happened. I feel heartbroken and like I won’t be able to experience intimacy with someone for a really long time.

So many people’s stories on this forum are familiar to my own, and reading it has been the first type of affirmation that I’m not crazy / a horrible person. I have exes who are friends, because I think I’m generally someone with a huge capacity for conflict resolution, because I really care about people and want to amend. This isn’t familiar to me at all, and it’s deeply scary and painful.

[lastlap]

This is really long, but my first time posting on this forum or seeking support with this and I need some place to write it out. I’m 6 months out of a discard with my ex who I was with on and off for 3 years, who did not have a diagnosis, but who I highly suspect has BPD.

I’ve been struggling so deeply since this happened, have had an intense amount of anxiety and depression, and have been in such a heavy and prolonged space of rumination and confusion. Its been hard for me to keep up with work and my day to day responsibilities, and I have felt pretty antisocial. I don’t even know how to relate to others about this experience. I’ve been in a couple unhealthy relationships before, but I’ve never experienced anything like this, and I feel completely worn down by the shock and amount of energy it’s taken out of me.

Like many others, I went through various phases of idealization and devaluation, with this last time being the most intense and severe. At times my partner treated me like I was amazing, beautiful, the love of their life, talented, loving, and at times they treated me like I didn’t exist, or could be extremely cold and shut off to me. I am struggling to make sense of who I am and the things they told me about myself. During devaluation, they said I was manipulative, controlling, gaslighting, selfish, neglectful, that I was a liar and deceitful, that I wasn’t “innocent.” Things I have never had an ex partner say to me before.

There was a lot of things that happened in this relationship that I don’t know how to explain other then saying they didn’t make sense to me / something felt off. It was like whiplash because in other ways, we were very aligned on what we wanted and how we felt about each other, and I’d never really felt loved or wanted a life with someone in the same way before. But sometimes it was like they were a different person, and it caused me a huge amount of anxiety and instability. The blame for most of the things in our relationship was shifted onto me, and I often apologized for it. The times I would try to address something that was hurtful or not working for me, most frequently they would deflect it to something I did wrong, or they would go silent on me.

The discard took the form of a complete and total ghosting, where a week earlier they said they loved me and wanted to be together, the day before they said they love me and we’d talked about hanging out (but had a minor disagreement, and I’d asked for space for the rest of the evening so I wasn’t reactive and we could communicate from a healthy / calm space). Then nothing. Didn’t respond to my gentle and kind acknowledgement that it seemed like they were wanting to end the relationship and request for closure. Didn’t respond to my kind request asking for them to let me know they were safe, after 20+ days not hearing from them. About 2 months in I got one text from them that said “love you and sorry for everything” but they didn’t respond to messages after that.

I can’t stop circling in this space of guilt and shame feeling like it’s all my fault. In part because I had my own things I was working on, Iike my reactivity and communication, which I didn’t feel proud of and was putting a lot of intention into changing and exploring. I did take accountability and apologized to them for my anxiety and reactivity as well.  To be clear, I never yelled, never laid a hand on them, wasn’t aggressive or name calling ever. But throughout our relationship, they would cease communication mid-conversation, or at times would give me the silent treatment (for anywhere from a day to a week or more) and I would become very panicked and anxious, especially in the first half of our relationship. I’m these moments, I would text and call way too many times, or send really long texts spiraling out emotionally / explaining how bad it hurt or begging to be communicated with. These are also behaviors I’d never had before in previous relationships, so it was very humiliating. I chalked it up to an anxious / avoidant dynamic and tried to work really hard on my own anxiety.

The second reason I can’t stop blaming myself is that a few weeks before they discarded me, I brought up the topic of non-monogamy with them and told them I had an attraction / crush on a friend. I’m a queer person, and in my community and past relationships, having a conversation about this would be normal and just a conversation. It would be something we would talk through and conclude if it made sense, and have an openness and commitment to remaining monogamous if it didn’t make sense for any reason. For me, having been cheated on many times in the past, it’s also just a value of mine that you are open and can talk about anything with your partner. Deceit is way bigger of a fear for me then knowing my partner has an attraction to another person. So talking about this to them just felt right and ethical to me.

My ex knew I had been in non monogamous relationships in the past and that I am queer from when we first got together. When I brought up this conversation, at first they were receptive and said they weren’t surprised because they knew this about me and weren’t upset, but then quickly they devolved into intense anger and accusations against me. They started saying I was a liar, that I should just break up with them, that I had been leading them on our entire relationship, that I was deceitful, and a lot of other intense and painful stuff.

I maintained that I had actually been really honest with them, that I was still being honest, and that I valued our relationship way more than anything else and wanted to be monogamous with them and work through the feelings that came up for them. It was a tumultuous few weeks that concluded with them coming to me, us talking, and them telling me that they love me and do want to be together.

A week later is when they fully discarded me out of nowhere. I believe they split on me and have a narrative about me that is not accurate. They seem to have a story that I cheated and was with someone else. They also seem to have lost all empathy for me, as they haven’t responded to any messages, even ones expressing distress.

I personally am completely traumatized from this experience. I feel like a terrible person, I feel like I lost the person I love more than anything and wanted a life with, I feel like my self worth is completely depleted. I feel confused about if and what I did wrong. I feel confused about all the negative and bad things they said about me. I feel so confused about how they could go from saying they love me and want to be with me forever to discarding me completely within a week - treating me like I don’t exist and never existed after 3 years together.

I have not felt attraction to anyone, or been able to experience intimacy with anyone in months. It’s like that part of me completely shut off. I feel afraid, avoidant, exhausted, undeserving. I’m scared that I really am abusive or something horrible to deserve this. And I also miss them so, so deeply, which causes me an immense amount of shame, seeing as they have moved on and have made it clear they don’t care about me remotely anymore, to the point of thinking I don’t deserve a text / call / conversation of closure.

I feel very alone and isolated in this experience. I don’t want to armchair diagnose them, and their accusations of abusive behavior from me have made it difficult and disorienting for me to speak on what actually happened in the relationship. But reading many peoples experiences here is so familiar, it’s the one thing that’s brought a little bit of clarity to light.

I don’t currently know how to move forward or be in acceptance of what happened. I feel heartbroken and like I won’t be able to experience intimacy with someone for a really long time.

So many people’s stories on this forum are familiar to my own, and reading it has been the first type of affirmation that I’m not crazy / a horrible person. I have exes who are friends, because I think I’m generally someone with a huge capacity for conflict resolution, because I really care about people and want to amend. This isn’t familiar to me at all, and it’s deeply scary and painful.

[capecodling]

First of all, welcome!  You sound quite self-aware and are thinking a lot about how your actions might have impacted someone else ---- in other words, the complete opposite of someone who has a cluster B personality disorder.   I also couldn't believe how many resemblances your story had to mine.   Many of the details were exactly ---- and I do mean exactly ---- the same as my most recent experience with my BPD ex.

A couple of observations that may be helpful:

1)  It sounds like you're still asking a lot of the questions I've seen frequently from people still fresh off the breakup: "How could my BPDex say _______ when just a week ago they were telling me how they unconditionally love me from now until the end of time?"   While that certainly is a valid question to ask, it assumes the BPD thinks the way you and I do, which they do not.   They experience an extreme spectrum of emotions, like a child, in one moment when they say "I love you forever" they really mean that, in the next moment when they say "I hate you forever" they also really mean that in that moment also.   The BPD doesn't process information or love the same way that you and I do, so trying to understand their behavior through the lense of a sane, logical person is crazy-making.   None of their actions will ever make sense.   If you want to make sense of their actions, and it sounds like you've done a decent amount of research, you can do so by understanding BPD behavior and why they do the things they do.

2) While it is useful to understand BPD behavior ---- and it will yield a lot of insights into those things where you are scratching your head wondering WTF made them do X, Y, or Z ---- there is even greater healing in examining the parts in you that allowed this to happen in the first place.   It isn't on you that you go into a relationship with a BPD, but it is on you (and all of us) that we stayed once we started to see an abundance of red flags.   A healthy person would not tolerate the kind of behavior that all of us tolerated.   What wounding exists in you that caused you to tolerate the kind of abuse you did, for as long as you did?

3) Feeling crazy and like it is your fault.   I heard a lot of self-doubt coming through your message above.   This is a classic sign that you have endured abuse, gaslighting, and trauma bonding.   Particularly if you observed this is not your normal pattern, yet suddenly, here you are post breakup second guessing every little thing you did.   No doubt you made mistakes.   You did things you regretted,  but the post-BPD regrets go beyond that.  They eat away at your psyche and make you wonder if maybe you're a narcissist, and that you have been the problem this whole time.   This is a particularly nasty trap a lot of us fall into, because there are case studies that show that a BPD does convert their partner often into a transient (temporary) narcissist.  Even healthy partners can start showing traits of a narcissist if they are with a BPD long enough.  So a lot of the things you did, that seemed to out of character, those may have been real.   The borderline infects you with their illness over time, the longer you stay, the more cycles you do, the more infected you become.

4) One of the biggest tools you have at your disposal, and this is one that you specifically mentioned, is that you have a past history of basically healthy relationships.   I'm not saying you didn't make mistakes in those also, but if you've had healthy relationships ----- or even relationships that weren't that healthy but ended amicably with both partners supporting each other ----- then you have a huge, massive, GIGANTIC foundation on which to ground yourself while you are experiencing the tumult of this relationship ending.   Odds are your BPD ex won't have any past relationships that ended amicably, and even if they are in a new relationship you are seeing the sanitized version of it they post on social media.   My ex used social media to portray the "perfect life" she was leading, but the reality NEVER --- I repeat NEVER --- matched what was portrayed on social media.   I would urge you, until you have zero reactivity to your ex to just stay off social media completely.   I did that after a BPD breakup and looking back it was a really good decision that greatly helped the healing process.

5) It sounds like you are 6 months no contact?   Congratulations, that's absolutely huge.  I bet you are wondering why it still hurts to much, even after all this time.   Because that's what I was wondering about my last breakup in the same situation as you.   For this part, I would definitely learn as much about the trauma bond, and possible mom-wounds you might have.   Whenever we feel ourselves overreacting to a situation like a breakup, it is almost always about some past trauma and not actually about your ex.    I know it will seem like the hurt is because you've lost the love of your life, but could someone who treated you the way your ex treated you really actually be the love of your life?   I urge you to challenge that assumption, and I think you're find those deeper layers of trauma will yield some major insights into why you've been vulnerable to this kind of abuse from your ex ------- and also how you can seal those holes in your defenses, take away the pain of missing your ex and the trauma-bond to them by healing the underlying trauma, and also ensure this doesn't happen again.

I hope this is helpful to you.   It brought up a lot for me because I went through many of the same things.