uBPD wife - again a strong episode after a long peaceful period

[olafinski]

Hi everyone,
I think of my situation as of a success story, but I am not writing this there cause it's about a new episode.
I am 52, married with an uBDP wife for 17 years. We have a 13 yo son and my 24 yo stepson lives with us.
I am also type 1 diabetic, late-onset (started at 35).
Around 5 years ago I've realised, mostly thanks to this community, that my wife has a highly functional BPD.
This realisation helped me a lot as it confirmed the value of my set of adopted behaviours.
Because I love her and think that she is a really good person, and because she helped me through hard times of getting diabetes diagnose, and in spite of that decided to have a child with me, our son, who is the brightest star of my life, I decided to stay with her no matter what. I see her as a person with an illness that needs someone to be close to her, help her manage and survive this awful disorder.

Last couple of years she got a lot better. It seems that it all started to change for better when she started taking medications for heart palpitations, essentially a sort of beta blockers which "shaved" her peaks and made her more calm generally. Also, when she added continuous use of antihistaminics (cause they also help a lot with heart palpitations, and she uses them anyway half of the year), it got even better - that's why this "success story" intro.

My biggest concern was always mental health of our son, and how to create a "cushion story" for him to alleviate the effects of having a mother that sometimes "loses it".

As he was approaching adolescense, I thanked God that she was getting better cause I was afraid at most how he would react to her episodes while being in puberty! But it seemed that we are lucky and that it is all slowly fading away, as I heard sometimes happens with age (she is now approaching 50).

But, we are now on our vacation, and after a week, a strong episode started yesterday, with her again bitchin at me, saying that I am no worth, no partner, not an adult, that I am always against her in front of our son, that she is with me only because of him, that she hates me and can not stand being close to me - all the BPD stuff people here now all about.

It seems that I have found what are the triggers.

First, she mentioned something I never heard before from her, that in a summer camp like where we are now, when she was little, she had a traumatic episode where she fell on the floor while sleeping in a sleeping bag, and had a panic attack because she woke up entangled and could not find her way out of the bag. As she also suffers a strong form of claustrophobia, which might also have something to do with that childhood trauma, it could be that this event shaped her personality "in a funny way". So, being in a summer camp, although she said before always that she has nice memories from a summer camp, and that it was the best summer of her life when she was a kid, perhaps might work as a "trigger setting".

Second, there is a pattern of episodes that I know see. My mother has her birthday in the middle of our summer holidays, and we are always supposed to show up and spend a day with them as they are just 20-30 km far from us during summer vacation. My mother is an incredible person, but my father, though also a really good man, has a narcissistic trait which makes him bore everyone with stories about his life, where he always mentions his friends that are most of the time strangers to us, and whose life means nothing to us. As my wife is normally a very timid and submissive person, he somehow always gets to her and keeps her strangled with his talks for hours and hours. So basically she HATES going to my parents. So, couple of days before my mothers birthday, she always has an episode.

It seems to me that it works in this way: Whenever there is a social call where she must attend, but does not want to, it pushes her into BPD, working at her advantage as a sort of an "escape route", cause if I would have followed her lead and get into a fight, it would have ended up in me going there alone, which I guess is her subconscious plan. As I never take the bait, and just suck it all in and play invisible and unbreakable, she calms down and when we need to go, goes there.

So we will see how it goes this time. She is currently peaking, but I overheard her conversation with our son, something in the manner of "... so I will just need to stand him, there is nothing I can do, I must tolerate his faults and him being an imbecile..." etc

Birthday is in two days, a lot can happen still, so lets see how well I perfected "the Ducking Game".

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[olafinski]

UPDATE - day 2 - still the silent treatment. My son told me
his mother said to him that she is seriously contemplating divorce. As always, he added. Glad to see that he is old enough to start understanding how it goes.
Tomorrow is the Big day. birthday lunch at my parents. I have some news I still did not share with her cause I am waiting for the storm to settle. My older brother and his wife are not coming cause they are not on their vacation. My wife will interpret this as their intentional runaway from my fathers annoying stories, her being now in his focus. Most probably she will say that she is not going and that I just take our son. The (auto) destruction that this would bring is the aim of her currnet BPD episode state.The main goal is to make me run away from her, proving my lack of my dedication and real love.

Good news is that I had a good one hour today alone with our son on the beach which I used to have some fun but also to check how is he and how is he handling this situation.


He is mostly ok and understands that his mum is “loo loo”, but also for the first time I heard him say “if she continues with her divorce talk, I will show her trouble!”. I am not sure what he ment by that, but its certain that he doesnt like it when she behaves like this.

[kells76]

I understand that different families, cultures, and societies have different norms and expectations around "family gatherings".

Is there a norm-based reason why you believe your wife should attend? Or is it more that you would really like her to go, it would be nice if she went?

I wonder what it would be like to go if you want to, and also allow your wife to, as an individual, decide if she will go or not.

It would be wonderful if families could do family things together. However, if BPD is in play, then your W has a serious and impairing mental illness (and is still an individual choicemaker). That impacts situations that we believe "should" be normal.

Could it help to let go of the outcome? Maybe say something like "Hey, just letting you know that Son and I will head out to Dad's birthday at 2pm tomorrow. It would be great if you could come with but I totally understand if you want to take a break and take some time for you. I love you!"

[olafinski]

Kells76, it's always as you suggest. She never HAS to go. It is just that she understands that if she doesn't go, my parents will think bad of her, which is in her head a major problem. I suggested more than once that we can even split ties with my parents, if that is what she wants. But she has a highly functioning BPD and behaves perfectly normal most of the time, would say 99% of time. It's just episodes that last from a couple of hours to a couple of days at most. My understanding and acceptance of her condition makes me more or less "BPD-proof", meaning that I don't "bite the baits" and function from my ego perspective, but try to do whatever is needed for the storm to calm down. Because of this, she basically doesn't create problems while in an episode (I see to that) so it does not progress. In last 5-6 years this brought us to a much calmer place where she has less and less episodes.
In the end it went perfectly well. There were some guests from far away, my fathers cousin that lives far brought his girlfriend so she was in focus this time.