Aftermath of communicating my BPD concerns, and question

[rattled64]

After things have been considerably worse for my undiagnosed pwBPD after her father's death in early December, she went on a 6 week tirade of lashing out at me relentlessly, I asked my therapist whether it would be productive to share my observations with my wife's therapist, who is also my therapists partner.

For those wondering if this is a good idea, I would say read on, but bottom line up front - it is too early to tell.  The reaction was swift. I signed paperwork in my session mid afternoon, and my wife's therapist had a discussion with her about it in her session that evening.

My wife came home from that session feeling the need to assert that maybe it was me with BPD and not her. It did not take long to get there. She started by confronting me directly for having provided input to her therapist at all. She asked if I thought that little of her therapist that she would miss such a diagnosis and asked me point blank what condition I was "diagnosing" her with. I quickly said that reading about CBT helped me understand what was going on with her when she was triggered and lashing out at me. I gave her the example of JADE. She said that JADE sounds like something a spouse should be doing anyway so what was so revelatory about it. I reminder her that it took a lot of presence of mind to exercise JADE when she was in full blown attack mode and insisting that I do not care about her and never loved her (after 25 years of marriage).

I asked her if she had looked at the diagnostic criteria for BPD at all and she dismissed the question saying she had come across it tryting to figure out what is going on with her mother. This is in shart contrast t how she dives deep into researching any minor infliction in her or our family's health.  Oh well.

The question is whether or not anyone has the experience of their pwBPD hiding the condition or at least not revealing the tendencies to their therapists. Both my therapist (who met my pwBPD when we were in couples therapy) and her therapist said that border line personality traits cannot be hidden and there is zero chance that my wife was doing this, but my experience is when we are deep in the vortex in an episode she is very good at hiding it from the children, her siblings, and her outside professional relationships.  Professionally I find it hard to believe that there is not an awareness that she is petty, prone to feeling slighted, and seemingly always has to make someone the enemy in any job she has. 

So does anyone else have the experience of the condition not being apparent to your pwBPD's therapist or the rest of the world? I find it really hard to imagine that her bahavior fits the Dx to a tee and it is still undiagnosed even after being pointed out. Am I going crazy here?

Thanks

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[Outdorenthusiast]

Sorry that did not go down the way you thought it would.

In my journey I read many books on the subject - she found them and aggressively confronted me and swore up and down that she didn’t have it.  Luckily I read that this likely would happen and I responded that “I wasn’t a therapist, and that the books were for me to learn coping skills, not for her.  Only a qualified person working directly with her can diagnose what is going on with her.”

Separately, I have learned that there are a lot of overlapping symptoms with CPTSD, and ADHD.  You can read up on them.  They can also be co-morbid conditions but it will take intensive work regardless.  Childhood abuse trauma and genetics seems to be a very common theme.

She talked with her therapist, and her therapist placated her (apparently is also quite common to avoid a label). In the end- I told my therapist I don’t really care what they are labeled and if she is un-diagnosed - I know what I experience after 26 years of marriage.  Most important for me is that the symptoms are aggressively managed.  So far her therapist is working through her issues and the screaming, yelling has stopped, and the emotional manipulation has dramatically reduced, and suicidal tendencies have dropped.  So we will continue to keep our fingers crossed…