Hi Hope-in-fog, glad you found us, and welcome.
28 years is a long time to cope with BPD, and it sounds like it was always kind of volatile, where the good times were so good and the bad times were so bad.
This stood out to me in your first post:
I find it particularly hard to hold the part of me that deserves respect with the part that has empathy for his pain. I can’t integrate these two feelings - an intense need for a supportive, respectful relationship with a deep understanding of his pain and suffering having been born the way he is.
I have started to practice some of the skills - setting boundaries, working on which emotions are mine and which are his, taking time outs (headphones, book, walking away). I do see ways in which my own background and desire to help and understand has enabled some of this. I find being clear difficult. I find myself enveloped by the fog of trying to understand his bp mindset sometimes only to shake my head at all the energy I’ve put into to try to understand something so destructive to myself. Or the alternative of arguing how the viewpoint isn’t true.
Sometimes it can help to think of being in a relationship with a pwBPD as an "emotional special needs" relationship.
If our partner had to use a wheelchair, and couldn't go on long hikes or go rock climbing, but those things were really important to us, we'd be disappointed -- we would have wanted to have a relationship where we could hike together -- and would also need to come to a place of
radically accepting the inherent limitations in our relationship. We'd stop expecting our partner to be able to stand up and walk, as it were. It wouldn't be a judgment about how walking is better, or not walking is better, though there could be a conversation about that. It would be saying: whether it's better to be able to walk or not, the reality is that my partner can't, and that's where we're at.
Technically, there could come a time with advances in medicine where your partner could get a special treatment enabling walking, but there's no guarantee, and it'd be down the road.
BPD is like that -- there are a lot of emotional limitations with the disorder. Technically, with extensive and involved treatment, there is hope -- but it can be challenging for some pwBPD to engage with treatment. That means we may need to "radically accept" that they are who they are at this moment in time, and then, like you've been doing, we can decide to build our toolbelt and see if we can change the dynamic from our end.
That doesn't mean accepting abuse, or taking responsibility for things we aren't responsible for -- that's not what RA is about. It's more about what you're doing:
It helped also to think of which feelings are his and which are mine. When I know I am hopeful, even the false narrative or the fact that my loved one chosen to craft it, doesn’t get to me. There’s no point getting bogged down in it.
That doesn’t mean the sorrow and grief I feel in this relationship has left. But it does make me feel more clear eyed.
You can "radically accept" that who he is right now, is a person who sometimes crafts false narratives. That doesn't make it OK -- it just means, that's who he is, and you are looking at it clearly (not pretending that "the real him" is "the good side", for example).
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All that to say -- you're definitely not alone in working on staying with a spouse wBPD, and in working on building your own strong sense of self to accept what you're responsible for and decline to pick up what you're not responsible for.
It also makes sense that you're grieving having a limited relationship.
What stage of grieving do you think you might be in?
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Fill us in on how things are going, whenever works best for you.
-kells76