Man, go to bed early one night and all hell breaks loose.
Boo Boo Foo Warning Issued
I could have picked one of a dozen messages to warn you for. You are derailing and hijacking this thread with your psychoanalysis of the OP. You are being a jerk while doing it and dancing on either side of the no personal insults line.
There is nothing productive you can contribute in this thread so stay out of it. Do not post in this thread again.
Ambivalid, I’m really sorry about what you are going through. I feel certain from what I know about you from reading your posts that you have the inner resources to deal with this over time. You’re in my thoughts and prayers.
Boo Boo Foo, it is long past time for you to just STFU.
Ambivalid I understand you have been insulted and provoked in this thread. However, you choices aren’t only to be silent or insult the poster. Feel free next time to open a Pit thread if you need to call someone out in another forum.
No warning issued, but don’t engage this poster further in this thread.
EVERYONE ELSE
I have restricted Boo Boo Foo from posting in this thread, so everyone else can drop the criticisms of him. Open a Pit thread if you want, but keep it out of this thread. Thank you!
Jamie, please read this over and over. Slithy says some terrific things here.
Ambi, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. We believe my mother is BPD (although it would never be diagnosed because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her – according to her) and the hyper-sensitive behavior you describe is also what my mother does. A gentle joke translates in her head to everyone persecuting her. So, I can completely understand how you could go out of your way to be accommodating and yet she still take it the wrong way. It sucks so much, but I do agree with most everyone else; as bad as it is now, you’ve saved yourself years of heartache down the road. That said, I wish you healing and peace ahead. Hang in there, friend.
Maybe, but people have very different thresholds when it comes to yelling. I hardly ever yell, and if I do in a relationship, it means that I’m finding the situation so unbearable that the relationship is probably going to end over whatever the issue is. I hardly ever even raise my voice in an argument.
As a corollary, I always have had great difficulties handling people who are short tempered. If they yell at me, my feeling/asumption is that something very serious is going on (*). With age, I came to understand that for a lot of people, yelling isn’t really meaningful. They yell when they’re pissed off, and then things come back to normal.
Despite this understanding, yelling still disturbs me a great deal, and I couldn’t stay in a relationship with someone with whom I would have “typical arguments with yelling”. If you yell at me when you aren’t in a justified great turmoil, of for something extremely serious (at least from your point of view), and do so repeatedly, I’ll probably quickly drop your ass. Our characters would be uncompatible anyway.
I now nothing about BPD, or about your ex gf, but now that while some couples yell at each other over any minor issue and without it having any consequences whatsoever, some people perceive yelling as a serious agression and just can’t handle this kind of behaviour.
(*) sometimes, it works the other way around too. Some women/friends/coworkers just couldn’t get I was really, really serious because I was appearing calm, despite me explaining clearly how irrate I was.
I’m sorry you’re going through this, Ambivalid.
The minute I read your OP, I thought ‘I wonder if she’s got borderline personality disorder.’ And sure enough, you say there’s a good chance she has.
People with that disorder do not experience things like the rest of us. What they see and hear in any given conversation or situation often has absolutely nothing in common with what any mentally healthy person would see and hear.
The best way I can put it is that they have emotional hallucinations. You think you’re discussing what to have for lunch, and what the person with BPD hears is you telling her that she’s worthless and you’re going to force your will onto her till she loses her mind and has to be taken into a hospital forever.
This doesn’t mean that you didn’t play any role in the relationship breakdown, by the way. It sounds like you do have stuff to work on with anger and the way you express it - shouting at your partner, for example, isn’t actually a necessary part of a relationship. But the reason why you’re feeling that sense of wild dislocation, like all of a sudden the whole situation and what she’s saying have absolutely no connection to what you experienced up until that moment? Yeah, that’s the classic BPD stuff.
I don’t know the whole story. I did load TP money for legal fees, and he said the ex-fil tried to convince the judge TP was still making his old salary, which he wasn’t. I’m thinking the dad wanted the split out of some grudge toward TP and was determined to see him screwed.
“Feelings create facts” is the phrase I’ve heard for the phenomenon. From what I’ve read and observed from the outside, the way it works is more like you’re discussing what to have for lunch, and something in what you’ve said can possibly be interpreted to mean that you don’t care about her opinion or are judging her preference. For most people this would be a momentary flash of emotion that they put down, but BPD turns the emotional intensity up to eleven, so an incredibly tiny slight (like disagreeing about what a menu item means) feels like a complete invalidation of her as a person and of all of the choices she ever made. As a defense mechanism, her brain says ‘well, clearly if I was that upset, it must have been for a reason’ and so decides to remember the statement as being something that justifies the level of emotion she had. If you later try to talk about what was really said and analyze what went on, the pwBPD sees it as you trying to justify your unreasonable behavior by gaslighting her and calling her crazy.
People who successfully manage BPD realize that they have wildly unreasonable feelings about events and learn to manage them (often with Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which is one of the few techniques that consistently works on the condition). But because of the extreme emotions and broken defense mechanisms, a lot of pwBPD don’t realize just how unreasonable their reactions are in the first place, and even if they start to think they might have been unreasonable, those same huge emotions and broken defense mechanisms work to defend them from acknowledging it.
ETA: Well, I see Ivory got to it before me…normally, I’d edit this to say NM, but since I said pretty much the same thing she did, I’m just going to leave it.
Ambi - You will be better off in the long run. Even though you just suspect your ex-GF has BPD, her actions in this situation are very consistent with that illness. It’s hard to see right now, but trust me, you are better off. Write this experience off and move on.
Ambivalid, I don’t have any advice or anything - I just wanted to say I’m really sorry you’re going through this, and that you’re in my thoughts.
Just one more doper tossing in heartfelt condolences, Ambivalid. Dating can be heaven or hell and I’m sorry to read this one ended badly. Despite the wreckage encountered in this thread I hope you were able to get some good from it too, there certainly is some here expressed sincerely by people that really do care and have a pretty good clue.
I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m glad you had an opportunity to speak with her afterward. I think you are wise to treat that as your final communication.
I hope that you are taking reasonable, prudent steps to protect your security physically and online. I hope also that you are taking care of yourself. It’s hard to work through bomb blasts like this one, but sometimes it’s the only thing you can do.
Your explanation is much more thorough and probably more accurate than mine. My main point was that, while Ambivalid’s own actions may well have played a role in the relationship not working out, the *way *it ended - the way he was left with this overpowering sense of ‘What the holy FUCK just HAPPENED?!!!’ - is a very, very common thing for friends/lovers/relations of people with BPD to go through.
They might even be lowered, when one is rather isolated, far away from friends or family.
I am far too lazy to read the entire thread but I just want to say that this exact scenario happened to my husband with his ex that he had been with for 4 years. Except she took the dog too.
He changed his status on Facebook to “single” about 2 weeks later and I saw it. We’d known each other for 14 years at that point and even dated a couple times when we were both single. I adored him from the moment I met him when I was 19 years old. We went out, got caught up, and long story short we’ve been together ever since. Got married in 2011 and are very happy together.
So sometimes very good things can happen after very painful things. Keep your chin up, Ambivalid.
I just wanted to say these posts hit home in an eerily close way. We’d even discussed DBT as a form of therapy for her. Often times, she’d accuse me of saying things that just never were said, period. It almost seemed that at her worst moments, she couldn’t discern between the “reality” in her head and what was actually going on. I don’t mean to make her sound crazy, she was an incredibly sweet and innocent girl. But troubled.
Thanks. That was a good call.
Just wanted to chime in and say I am very sorry you are dealing with this. From my experiences with someone with BPD, your ex sounds like a classic case. Most likely this relationship was doomed. The longer it lasted, the worse it would have been. Maybe at some point you can take a solace in the fact that it was a clean break.
As others have said, I think there is a strong chance she will try to contact you and “fix” things. Obviously, I would highly discourage giving that a chance. She isn’t going to change without major help and even then it’s not a sure thing.
Stay tough.