After 25 years I could pretty well climb into her headspace. If I lived there, I don't think I could ever find my way out.
Luckily, nobody is doing that. The claim is that BPD is too broad. If there were separate, narrower diagnoses, we might also be able to treat them better.
That seems to be exactly right. However, it also seems that, with some intelligence and introspection, people can totally learn how to deal with that and live a normal life.
It's hard for me to tell whether the symptoms actually subside, or whether they are just perfectly capable of dealing with them. From what I've been told, a big part of BPD is "internal emotional feedback loops" that become hard to break out of, but it's apparently possible to recognize them early and not build up.
Part of it is certainly that. It's not strange that some attempt to self medicate with strong psychedelics like mescaline, I heard a few successful stories but it can also go terribly wrong.
She couldn't progress by setting any of it aside because it could never be enough to improve her perspective. And whatever space she created would be quickly overwhelmed by the adjacent bad perspectives.
Progress needs trust (in the process) and trust needs progress. She couldn't generate enough of either.
She acts out in order to gain attention. From ruining the family finances like in the first example to engaging in affairs and luring men from the internet to appear at the house. She has made false claims against me to the police. Refuses to clean up after herself, leaving huge messes, while complaining about a single item I might leave out. She lies, a lot. She doesn't seem to understand that I don't trust her anymore after all the lies, to her that's in the past even if it was a few minutes ago.
I'm stuck due to my kid and family courts bias in favor of mothers. 14 more years.
We had 5 (all over 18 now). I got out of it because she started hanging with the nearby homeless community and found other guys go glom onto.
Then one night, while I was asleep on the sofa, she came home and emptied out her bedroom (hoarded to the ceiling). I was one door away and never stirred. I just work up and the room was completely empty.
I'm still kind of stunned by that.
Sorry, I don't mean to belittle what you go through, it sounds terrible. But I have to "defend" people with BPD against it, because I have people close to me with that affliction. What you describe sounds more like a very narcissistic person instead.
For example, where in that article do you see that people with BPD can be so straight up delusional that they think they "own the town"? Notice that the words "lie" or "lying" do not even appear in the article.
In my experience, presenting a BPD-afflicted person with definitive truth is actually calming them down, because it disperses the worries and fears they have about things that could be (however unlikely).
Again, I don't mean to belittle your experience. What you're going through sucks, regardless of what disorder your wife has.
However, you kinda have to be there but she didn't arrive at owning the town all at once but a series of escalations over years.
It all started a few years after we moved in. She started claiming the property line was further back and I corrected her. Unable to admit she was wrong she started going off on me, I let it go because it didn't matter. Then a few years after that the neighbors redo their backyard, cutting down a few old, mostly dead trees. This set her off. Those were "her trees" and they housed a cornucopia of wildlife (they didn't).
First it was the property line claim from before, so she hired a survey company, the neighbors property line is actually a few feet in from where I thought it was. So she was way off.
She then spent six months looking at pixalated maps and essentially having pareidolia. None of her claims about the maps made any sense but she argues they prove she is right and "Since in 1900 when this was built they forgot to add a line here so we own all of our town". She only has made that claim a few times and I think understands others find it odd, but I'm pretty sure she believes it.
BPD-afflicted people are terrified to be abandoned, for one thing. Why would someone who lives that way actively antagonize the people around them? Yes, the emotional feedback loop if not broken out of can make people with untreated BPD show strong emotional reactions (anger, depression, crying) in the moment, but they snap back out of it, are usually ashamed afterwards, and don't press on with what can only be described as nonsense.
It answers the antagonize question specifically it's just too much to type out for me now.
To butcher it, they feel great anxiety that you are going to leave and test that assumption by acting out. When you don't leave after they act out, they feel comfortable for a time until the cycle begins anew.
Yes. (We broke it off, but for reasons entirely unrelated to BPD. We're still friends. It's not my only experience with BPD.)
> To butcher it, they feel great anxiety that you are going to leave and test that assumption by acting out. When you don't leave after they act out, they feel comfortable for a time until the cycle begins anew.
I agree. Believe me, I am actually very familiar with that. But your storyline still does not fit. Imagining a shifted property line is way more than that, and claiming that she owns the town is straight delusional.
In all the "testing of the assumption that I am going to leave/abandon" them that I underwent, never did anyone come close to spending six months to "prove" a delusional claim. It was all highly emotional spur of the moment stuff. No lies or actual counterfactual realities involved.
Going back to the article you linked, that actually all rings very true to me. But it does not mention either lying, or delusional and counterfactual beliefs at all. If that was a common symptom, why would the article not list it, especially given what a bad symptom it is?
Especially because, for example, the articles on narcissistic or histrionic personality do mention it pretty clearly?
I'm not sure why this is so important to you. You obviously have to deal with someone who has a personality disorder. It's a lot to deal with. Why does it have to be BPD, specifically? Or why can't it be BPD and something else on top of it?
That, by the way, sticks out to me a lot. Read the article you linked, and see if you find anything that matches that. Then look at histrionic and narcissistic disorders instead, and see if it matches that.
When folks would ask me about what disorder she has, I'd answer All of them. When she drifts into psychosis she'll have symptoms common to schizoaffective and maybe dissociative.
I genuinely can't come up with one symptom group that she never dips into.
You might win here. Mine didn't have this kind of focus. Early on, maybe but her symptoms were much less pronounced in her 20s. In her 30s, psychosis started showing up along with the rest and with that came some persistent loopiness - which was a bit of a blessing.
People are going to read this, and then when they meet someone who they know has BPD somehow (for example when getting close in a relationship), they are going to think that that person can become that delusional. That's not what happens.
Both is more likely. There's tons of overlap between the symptom groups.
Did she develop it the minute after you put it in, or was it a "I can fix her/deal with this" sort of scenario?
I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you find a way out sooner rather than later.
Generally speaking men tend to get every other weekend, maybe a dinner on a off week. I can't risk my kid being subjected to her worst days alone.
That is awful if that is truly the case. You are a far kinder soul than I am -- I would be scheme and connive every way I possibly could to set this woman up.
> I can't risk my kid being subjected to her worst days alone.
I can tell you are a great father. A far better man than I am capable of being. If you ever need someone to vent to, shoulder to cry on, etc. never hesitate to shoot me an email (in profile).
Yep. That sounds familiar.
> She acts out in order to gain attention. From ruining the family finances like in the first example to engaging in affairs and luring men from the internet to appear at the house.
Yep.
> She has made false claims against me to the police.
Not exactly but in the neighborhood.
> Refuses to clean up after herself, leaving huge messes, while complaining about a single item I might leave out.
Mine was a hoarder. Otherwise, yep.
> She lies, a lot. She doesn't seem to understand that I don't trust her anymore after all the lies, to her that's in the past even if it was a few minutes ago.
...while she keenly remembers the smallest of slights from decades ago.
> I'm stuck due to my kid and family courts bias in favor of mothers. 14 more years.
By the time mine got thru a paragraph, the judge would be giving me that look. I know that because judges routinely gave that look. Criminal judges, that is.
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.