My head is still spinning

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

I’m really not sure where to start.
Pursued by a girl 14 years ago.  Felt like a love bombing period where upon leaving she’d text me minutes later saying she’s being harassed by a male.  Knight in shining armour saves her…
Over the next 12 years.
- slowly devalued and intimacy was from sympathy.
- gaslighting
- no empathy
- rages about nothing.
- always the victim regardless and it was like herding cats keeping her on the topic at hand.
- she had significant childhood neglect.  Foster family then dominated by narcissistic mum.
- sexually active at 14 with new boy every 2 weeks.  Idolising them.
- hyper sensitive to any criticism or deemed criticism.
- I was diagnosed as PTSD (police) and she left me taking away the kids.
She was a very attached parent though.  They’d sleep with her and she’d spend every living moment with them.
- kids (both under 6) now displaying anxiety.

I was then kept in the friend zone for 2 years whilst I treated and recovered from PTSD.  She led me along thinking we’d get beck together.  She’s now run off with another cop…..
Tried to parallel parent and was met by rage and BS accusations.  I have stuck with it and she seems starstruck with her new police host.
She has a good stable job, studying to be a therapist LOL.  None of her family remain in contact and she has little friends. 
Acknowledges she has childhood trauma, abandonmemt issues etc but refuses treatment.  Could it be BPD, CPTSD, abandonment issues, daddy issues, combination of all 4? 
I just really want to know as we have a lot of parenting ahead of us.  Thank you.  Hope this made sense.

[Lotus24]

I’m really not sure where to start.
Pursued by a girl 14 years ago.  Felt like a love bombing period where upon leaving she’d text me minutes later saying she’s being harassed by a male.  Knight in shining armour saves her…
Over the next 12 years.
- slowly devalued and intimacy was from sympathy.
- gaslighting
- no empathy
- rages about nothing.
- always the victim regardless and it was like herding cats keeping her on the topic at hand.
- she had significant childhood neglect.  Foster family then dominated by narcissistic mum.
- sexually active at 14 with new boy every 2 weeks.  Idolising them.
- hyper sensitive to any criticism or deemed criticism.
- I was diagnosed as PTSD (police) and she left me taking away the kids.
She was a very attached parent though.  They’d sleep with her and she’d spend every living moment with them.
- kids (both under 6) now displaying anxiety.

I was then kept in the friend zone for 2 years whilst I treated and recovered from PTSD.  She led me along thinking we’d get beck together.  She’s now run off with another cop…..
Tried to parallel parent and was met by rage and BS accusations.  I have stuck with it and she seems starstruck with her new police host.
She has a good stable job, studying to be a therapist LOL.  None of her family remain in contact and she has little friends. 
Acknowledges she has childhood trauma, abandonmemt issues etc but refuses treatment.  Could it be BPD, CPTSD, abandonment issues, daddy issues, combination of all 4? 
I just really want to know as we have a lot of parenting ahead of us.  Thank you.  Hope this made sense.

[Gerda]

Could be all of the above.

I personally do think BPD can be triggered by trauma. My mom probably has BPD, and she's a victim of incest by her father. My husband probably has BPD too and he had an alcoholic father who would get into drunken rages when he got home.

But at some point, it also doesn't matter. I watch a YouTube channel with a therapist who says, "your trauma is not your fault, but it is your responsibility." Lots of people grow up in abusive families and go on to get treatment for their issues and become functional people. And then some people decide to be the perpetual victim the rest of their lives. Both my husband and my mom just LOVE for people to feel sorry for them (especially me). They'll go on and on and on for HOURS with their tales of woe. How unfair life is and they don't deserve everyone to treat them so poorly and they've had such a rough time.

And I've spent years and year listening to their tales of woe, feeling sorry for them, until finally I started to notice that they never really do anything to try to improve their lives. I noticed that there are some things that they COULD do to improve their lives, but they'd rather wallow in misery and self-pity than put in the effort to do them. And FINALLY I realized that means they're never going to change or get better.

So the first step, if you haven't done it already, is to realize that your girl is not willing to put in the effort to get better and improve her life. She would need tons of therapy for years to do that. It's not going to just magically get better on its own.

And then you need to focus on the kids, because people with personality disorders make terrible parents, and those kids need some sane adults in their lives. Their mom is probably too far gone, but the kids are still young and can still be saved from perpetuating the cycle to the next generation.

[ChooseHappiness]

Acknowledges she has childhood trauma, abandonmemt issues etc but refuses treatment.  Could it be BPD, CPTSD, abandonment issues, daddy issues, combination of all 4?

Sounds like a complicated set of interconnected issues. A diagnosis is best left to the professionals. What ultimately matters to you is her behaviour and how it affects your kids. Make sure you're keeping a journal of everything in case you need to intervene on the kids' behalf in the future and seek custody - or maintain your own parenting time if she becomes threatening to you and makes false allegations, etc.

- always the victim regardless and it was like herding cats keeping her on the topic at hand.

Gerda makes a great point about your trauma being your responsibility, even if it isn't your fault. It's fine to recognize you've been a victim in the past, but there is absolutely nothing healthy about always seeing yourself as a victim. It denies your own agency -- but it also denies responsibility for your actions, which is why I imagine some people get stuck in that mindset. I used to have white knight syndrome and tried to help people who had been "victimized" too. Now when a grown adult tells me they're a victim I back far away because it's a big red flag.

She was a very attached parent though.  They’d sleep with her and she’d spend every living moment with them.
- kids (both under 6) now displaying anxiety.

Being an attached parent can be a good thing, but I've read that people with BPD can see kids as extensions of themselves or use them to soothe their pain. That can become a real problem as the kids age and start to develop a sense of their own self, which someone with BPD may see as threatening. (They're being abandoned, etc.) The fact that your kids are displaying anxiety even though she is an attached parent is worrisome.

I just really want to know as we have a lot of parenting ahead of us.  Thank you.  Hope this made sense.

It sounds like you're not able to effectively co-parent with her and even parallel parenting will likely be a challenge. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about her behaviour and how it will affect your kids. All you can do is be the emotional rock for them, and the calm, stable one so they have a good foundation somewhere. As they age, they will likely see how disordered and unstable she is and turn to you for stability and peace. As my lawyer says, kids tend to vote with their feet as they hit the teen years and usually gravitate toward the stable parent. I'm in the process of a divorce now and my teen has requested majority time with me because my xwBPD has been so unstable through his entire life. So your role as a parent may grow as the kids age.

I recommend reading Raising Resilient Children with a Borderline, as I found it useful to shift my mindset to the long term as a parent.

Best of luck with all of it.

[livednlearned]

It's tough that you had to pull through PTSD. I can only imagine how challenging that was given your job and on top of that, an unsupportive spouse and young kids. Sounds like a hard stretch for sure. And it's admirable that you put in the time to work through it.

You won't have much control or say in how mom raises the kids but you have a lot you can offer to give them an alternative way of securely attaching.

Many BPD moms do ok during 0-6 when the kids haven't begun the earnest process of individuating and beginning the process of developing their "self." Their anxiety may be due to her insistence that they remain dependent on her, something she communicates in sublte insidious ways as well as obvious ones "you can't sleep alone or someone might take you," for example.

If you're a reader, there's a book called In Search of the Real Self by James Masterson that's fascinating. It kind of unhooks us from the symptom perspective of BPD and focuses more on what happened to interrupt the healthy development of a real self.

Bill Eddy's book Don't Alienate the Kids: Raising Emotionally Resilient Children When a Parent Has BPD/NPD is also excellent.

Your kids will get virtually no emotional validation from their mom so learn as much as you can about how to emotionally validate them. It's helping them develop a muscle so they learn to trust their emotions and decide for themselves what is real/not real. BPD parents have a tendency to erase any sense that reality could be different than how they perceive it, which can have a catastrophic impact on kids.

[ForeverDad]

A diagnosis is best left to the professionals. What ultimately matters to you is her behaviour and how it affects your kids. Make sure you're keeping a journal of everything in case you need to intervene on the kids' behalf in the future and seek custody - or maintain your own parenting time if she becomes threatening to you and makes false allegations, etc.

Most of us never got a diagnosis about the ex.  Even family court seems to studiously avoid any diagnostic labels.  It sticks to documents and evidence.  You would do well to follow that lead.  Complaints of "he always..." or "she always..." are ignored as vague hearsay.  Which is why journaling or documenting specific incidents is crucial if you are to make headway in court or successfully counteract false allegations.

As my lawyer says, kids tend to vote with their feet as they hit the teen years and usually gravitate toward the stable parent.

Be forewarned not all children seek out the stable parent.  Some become so enmeshed with their acting-out parent that they actually choose that as their comfort zone.  Your task is to be as involved a parent as you can be, ensuring they get love, stability and proper validation.

[Lotus24]

Thank you to everyone who replied and provided further insight into co parenting with someone with likely BPD.
I will chase up the two books suggested, keep learning and always being there for the kids.
This is a great site.  Thanks again 

[Lotus24]

Hi there, just a follow up question as there’s no end to the confusing madness….

Ex is now 4 months into a relationship.  It went at record pace with him meeting our kids within weeks.  She would more or less ignore me after I said parallel parenting.  When I have the kids they tell me that her new bloke is their dad, she’s going to have a baby one day etc etc….   They still behave like I’m their dad so that didn’t bother me too much. 

What does though is that she’s suddenly texting me with non kid related requests, advice and banter.  I am pretty much ignoring it and just very short answers.
The past 2 days though she’s sent me pictures of our child when she was a baby, yet there’s no comment with them!!  Totally bizarre as I have the kids and play a big part of their lives.
I’ve got no idea what game she is playing.  Is she suggesting I’m a bad parent, is she reminiscing?  I don’t want her back.

[kells76]

Hi again Lotus24;

If BPD -- a real and serious mental illness -- is in fact in the mix, then some of what she does will be impacted by the disorder. She may have times of overwhelming emotion where she'll feel desperate to do anything to manage it, including things that don't make sense to us. In fact, it's important to remember the "D" in BPD -- she doesn't have a well-organized and integrated personality; she's likely struggling with a disorganized and disordered existence with little to no core sense of self. Again, that means that she will say and do things that leave us scratching our heads -- that's a feature of, not an exception to, having BPD traits.

My thought is that it's important to find some balance in your thoughts and responses when she does wacky things like that.

We can acknowledge that yeah, she is doing that stuff. And it can be OK to spend a little time to try to understand if there's anything there to understand. For example, does she message you non-kid stuff when the kids are with her, or with you?

The danger is in sending too much of our focus to trying to figure out What It All Means... which means we're not focusing enough on the kids and their thoughts, feelings, and needs. We can accidentally reproduce the dynamic where "Mom's behavior gets all the attention" which is actually the cycle we want to break. We need to be creating a child focused home, not an adult focused home.

It's fine to have no idea what she's suggesting. She may not even have an idea what she's suggesting. She may be so in the moment of trying to handle her wildly varying, harmfully intense emotions, that even if you asked her "what did it mean when you sent X" and she were in a place where she could try to answer, she wouldn't be able to.

So, I guess my thought is that the answer to "what game is she playing" is that she's living a very adult-emotion centered life where much of what she does is about managing her overwhelming feelings. I think it's much, much less than some carefully crafted manipulation, and much, much more like desperate impulsivity.

Knowing that, and knowing that you have decided not to reconnect, you can choose if or how you respond. Does she escalate if you ignore/don't respond?

It's good that you are trying briefer responses, when you do respond. BIFF (the Brief, Informative, Friendly, and Firm communication structure) was a lifesaver for me when I had to communicate with my H's kids' mom.

...

What's the current parenting schedule like?

[livednlearned]

With the new relationship likely in honeymoon phase, it sounds like you've been split white.

You're the good guy. Until you won't be.

the kids they tell me that her new bloke is their dad, she’s going to have a baby one day etc etc….   They still behave like I’m their dad so that didn’t bother me too much.

 

How did you respond? When kids tell us this stuff it's often a sign that they're struggling. They're bringing you information they find confusing or hurtful or emotionally painful in some way. Asking, "Wow. How'd that make you feel?" and letting them process it with someone they trust can go a long way. Otherwise it's tempting for them to compartmentalize and not talk about things because they may feel like adults don't listen. Honestly, I found it tough to focus on how my son felt. My instinct was to rush in and fix it with words. It's ok to do that but it can also miss the big hurt.

The past 2 days though she’s sent me pictures of our child when she was a baby, yet there’s no comment with them!!  Totally bizarre as I have the kids and play a big part of their lives.
I’ve got no idea what game she is playing.  Is she suggesting I’m a bad parent, is she reminiscing?  I don’t want her back.

She's likely feeling emotionally regulated if the new relationship is going gangbusters and can't connect her own past behavior with the present (not seeing her kids 24/7). Maybe she wants another baby and looked at a picture of your child and it made her feel nostalgic, who knows.

Feelings = facts for people who don't have a differentiated sense of self. How she feels = reality.

After you get to a place of radical acceptance and have solid boundaries it doesn't matter so much although I know when the pendulum swings it's pretty bizarre.