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This question often is the first question that my group is asked. Many family members of those with BPD believe that therapy is the answer. And for some with BPD therapy CAN be the answer. However, there are some complications when it comes to therapy and borderline personality disorder. They are:
- Sending someone to therapy is not like having your car repaired. It involves a lot of hard work on the part of the patient/client and on the part of their loved ones and supporters.
- Therapy as usual (referred to as TAU in the studies) can actually make BPD worse in some individuals. There are several BPD-specific therapies, such as DBT, Schema-focused therapy and Mentalization-based therapy.
- Therapy requires the buy-in of the patient/client. If he/she doesn’t want to admit he/she has a problem or doesn’t trust the therapist with his/her feelings, therapy will likely not have a lasting effect.
Unfortunately, you can’t force someone to go to therapy if she doesn’t want to go (except through a court order). What I suggest is that you use the tools I offer for a while. After you do that for some time, the borderline might begin to gather some self-awareness or to share her inner thoughts and feelings with you. It is likely that these thoughts and feelings will be filled with shame, self-hatred and worry. At that point, you can say something like, “Boy, it must feel awful to feel that way about yourself. What do you think you can do to feel better?” or “That’s so painful to feel that way. Maybe therapy can help?”
My wife has resisted going to DBT because it identifies her as a borderline and she “doesn’t want to be that person.” She also resists because DBT seems like a therapy of last resort to her and, if she fails at it, she feels that she will have to be committed to a mental institution. I occasionally do reinforce to her that there are people who are trained to help her feel better and encourage her to look into it. She is in therapy, but not in DBT. My daughter does see a DBT therapist. She decided to go because she was so angry all the time, and she felt terrible. She wanted to learn how to feel better. At some point, her emotional pain reached an intolerable level.
I have tried to model these skills in my life and, by doing so, shown my wife that I can more adequately cope with emotional situations, both personal and interpersonal. This modeling encourages my wife to consider DBT (or another emotional training program) to help her feel better. My suggestion is that you practice effective tools, master them and use your mastery over emotional situations as a beacon for your borderline’s healing.
Related posts:
- Mentalization Based Therapy Shows Promise with BPD
- Can therapy actually hurt borderlines?
- Ask Bon: How do I get my borderline loved one in therapy? What’s the best kind of therapy? How long will it take to cure them?
- Ask Bon: Why does my loved one with BPD fear judgment so much?
- Ask Bon: Why does my loved one with BPD do such dangerous things? (like cutting, drugs, etc.)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Radical Acceptance
- A therapy that helps to rebuild broken lives- DBT
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Bon,
Thanks, as usual, for your perceptive comments. I find your balanced approach – don’t make the borderline the “identified patient” for the entire family, having the “non” focus on their own behavior, yet hold the borderline responsible for their actions. The two other ends of the spectrum (blame the borderline or adapt to their behavior) are cul-de-sacs in my estimation.
“Persuading” the borderline to enter therapy is a dead-end, in my opinion for two reasons.
One, because it can tend to put the “non” in the mindset that the only key to the relationship improving is to get the borderline into therapy, which overlooks necessity of the “non” to take responsibility for their emotional being and destiny. [This is not to dismiss the chaos, bewilderment, and plain out injustice that the borderline can leave in his or her wake. Living with a borderline can be excruciating! It is merely to note what savvy mental health professionals watch out for - family members seeking to make one person in the family the "identified patient" for the entire family, who if they will just get their act together will solve all the family's problems.]
Two, my experience is that one of the most difficult things for a borderline to do is to look at themselves. My wife is one of the most amazing persons I have ever met in many, many ways. She is also a “borderline” borderline. I am grateful beyond words that she doesn’t cut, abuse alcohol or drugs, threaten suicide, or abuse our children when they were growing up.
Yet, in the aspects of shame, self-referential processing, IAAMF, and mood, sensitivity, cognitive, memory, pain and emotional dysregulation, she is a classic borderline. Her internal sense of herself and others and her perceptions of what people say and behave toward her do not line up with external events/reality, yet she will insist on her perceptions in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary. She orients her life around her internal pain/insecurity and seeks to organize the people in her life in such a way as to take away her pain, yet is unable to recognize and receive caring in any form that it comes to her. [Thankfully, she is able to allow the care into her life that comes from our two sons!]
She holds me responsible for her internal pain and any discussion we have about our marriage focuses only on her pain and how I have caused it. Discussions only deal with what is on “her side of the fence,” or on how issues affect her. Her fragile psyche does not allow her to examine her own functioning and especially how she erects obstacles to her own healing. Here is the key – to do so she would have to revise her entire worldview, something that would probably cause her to shut down emotionally.
This is demoralizing. It means that there is very little room for error on my part. The smallest “misdeed” (real or perceived) on my part and her always-present pain bubbles over. Even when things are calm she is constantly scanning the environment for threats. Many of our interactions include low-level negativity and comments on her part as she tries to manage her internal pain. Yet every once in a while the real person she is breaks through.
We have been in marriage counseling several times and in each instance her stance was to create an alliance with the therapist against me in an effort to straighten me up so that I would “stop hurting her.” In each case she wouldn’t hear the places that the therapist was trying to work with her in modifying her way of functioning in our relationship. Therapy wasn’t a place for her to learn and grow, it was a place for her to, again, manage her pain by having the therapist attend to me and my hurtful behavior.
So what I try to do is be as centered and as gentle as possible to her in all interactions. In the past when she raged at me because I had hurt her, I would (inappropriately) tell her that she couldn’t be hurt because I hadn’t done anything hurtful. Bon’s postings have helped me a huge amount in this regard. My next step when she pressed me to apologize for my “misdeeds,” was to say that I acknowledged that she was hurt, but that I hadn’t done anything hurtful. [Being unable to look at herself, she is not able to say "I feel hurt." It is always "you hurt me."] Now I am simply trying to be present to her, acknowledge her pain, and not discuss the origin of her pain. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Occasionally, and it happened again this morning, I simply run out of energy and compassion after having sought to ease her pain, after having been gentle, caring, responsive, and giving up things that I want to do/be to orient my life around her pain to have her (once again) tell me that I have been inadequate as a husband and that she needs “more.” [I have found that being married to a borderline (no matter how wonderful a person) that my caring is seldom enough.] And so I tell her (louder than I want) the attention I am paying her and the gentle, caring behavior/words that I have done that cannot be denied, dismissed, or discounted and how I am tired of doing the right things and having her tell me that they aren’t happening. My image is that I work very hard on writing a theme for class and she hands it back with a big red “F” on the top of the paper. The past thirty-six hours I worked harder than I ever have to listen to her carefully and respond according to what she said she needed. And with God’s help I did! Then she gets upset because I spent five minutes in the garden cutting off some sunflower heads so the birds wouldn’t eat the seeds, said that I was ignoring her, and that she needs “more.”
Then I feel awful because although what I am saying is factually true, I should have said it differently. The growing edge for me now is to behave in the caring ways without giving up the rest of my life because then when her despondency comes the next time I won’t feel so resentful because I have given up things that are important to me. What makes the bitter words/accusations so painful isn’t primarily that they aren’t true, it’s that I have adapted my life to her pain (given up stuff that is important to me) and it hasn’t made any difference. She still sees me the same. So now, I hope that when the bitterness comes I will let it roll off my back because I am doing things in my life that are feeding me.
Thankyou for writing about your wife whom I know you love very dearly as you would not be still with her because when I read this I thought that you must have been recording me some where. The only difference is it was not sun flowers but the feeding of our two little dogs. I have been arrested for assulting her twice and the police would only believe her because she can be so believable. Like you I have had to give up all the things I like doing to accomadate her but it is still not enough. Also she does not allow me to sleep so I am always tired and it makes it difficult for me to think properly. I can only hope that there is help for us somewhere.
Tame,
As I mentioned, this is an excruciating path – the most difficult part of my life by far, despite my pouring more energy into trying to figure out the best way to function, be responsive, caring, etc… without setting my own life aside. And while I am chagrined to recognize that often my responses have been invalidating and in other ways not helpful, it has also been exhausting and disheartening that, in my perception, my wife seems to find a way around my gradually increasing level of maturity and caring.
For example, when I learned and put into practice reflective listening, her response was “quit acting like a counselor and treating me like a patient who has something wrong with them.” Recently I am trying to meet my wife’s despondency with the validating responses I am learning from what Bon advocates. The other night she turned to me as I was validating her and said: “Did you learn that in a book somewhere?” In other words as I modify my responses to her adversarial expressions of her internal pain it seems as though she adapts her responses in ways that neutralize or dismiss what I am saying or doing. The net effect is that she continues to focus on me as the source of her problems.
As I mentioned in the previous comment, I am very grateful that she does not act out in the self-destructive ways that people with BPD often do (cutting, risk-taking of all kinds, suicide attempts, etc…) – her lifelong strong Christian faith will not allow her to do these things. She has saved me, our two sons and their families from this ordeal. I shudder to even imagine what our family life would be like with repeated interventions with law enforcement, the legal system, hospitals, and the mental health system. (There have been seasons where she has physically abused me in the past. Thankfully they are over. Some of these and other episodes have had a harrowing, bewildering, and bizarre unreality about them.)
However, there is a downside to avoiding the worst non-destructive behavior: her only “outlet” for her pain is me. My perception is that the level of her internal pain is no different from that of a person with BPD who is involved with the extreme behaviors, yet she doesn’t have these other ways to manage and cope with her pain. So while the wide variety of ongoing ways that her emotional dysregulation continues to feed her internal pain, the only way she “uses” to deal with her pain is to focus on me as the primary cause.
This manifests itself in an almost moment-by-moment commentary, judgment and criticism of my behavior, and demands that I apologize and commit myself to change. These interactions leave me exhausted as I seek to practice all sorts of ways not to be reactive to her, not get snared by rhetorical questions, not get caught up in her bringing up events that happened twenty-five years ago that she inaccurately compares to what is going on presently in an effort to make the case that I am evil and am the sole cause for all her pain. Recognizing how my first choice of response is to “go silent” and emotionally or physically distance myself, I try to stay in touch with her emotionally without ending up in a “he said, she said” discussion. Sometimes I succeed, more times than I would like to admit I fail.
Bon has helped me immensely to see that this isn’t about me – it is about her. I can keep this straight in my head much of the time. Inevitably across time the strain of her negativity toward me wears me down. While her moments of extreme emotional dysregulation probably only occur once a week or so, what I perceive as her mechanism of using me to manage her internal pain is more or less continuous. For example:
1. She is exquisitely sensitive to external stimuli. When we are riding together in an automobile (I drive most of the time) she will flinch when another vehicle suddenly appears in her vision. She senses that we are in danger (most of the time we are not), but rather than say “Wow that scared me” she will agitatedly accuse me of driving unsafely. In 39 years of driving I have one moving violation and no accidents at fault, yet she is convinced that I am an unsafe driver. As we are traveling down the road, she is giving me a steady stream of instructions (“watch out for that pothole, turn on your blinker now, move over into that lane, you are only going 30 mph in a 35 mph zone, you are too close to the car up ahead,” etc..)
2. When I make statements about myself she hears me judging her. So when I say “I need to lose ten pounds” she responds by saying “Why do you think I am fat?” When I say “I am tired, I am going to get ready for bed” she responds “Are you saying that I haven’t done enough work today?”
3. When we are watching a movie, she is reading a book, or she hears about something happening with an acquaintances of ours and an aspect in that movie/book/situation reminds her of her perception of me she will begin to criticize me and she is no longer experiencing what was just going on – rather she has “left” the immediate moment and has gone to the place of her pain. I find myself thinking “where did that come from, we were just watching a movie and now we are talking about what a bad person I am?”
4. The rough patches in her relationships with her extended family and other people become my problem. She doesn’t seem to be able to leave the pain where it “belongs.” If she isn’t getting along with her sister, she shifts her pain with that situation to me: the problem isn’t in she/her sister’s relationship; it is that I am not protecting her from her sister’s disrespectfulness.
5. When we are in each other’s presence during a peaceful time, we are just being together with no commitment, agenda, conversation topic – just her and me in the wonderful times of companionable silence, she will, after a brief time, bring up something that is bothering her, some “unresolved issue,” etc… The peaceful time is gone and she now wants to “solve the problem.”
6. An inadvertent and neutral event, with no negative intent, occasions an outburst. For instance, last night we were snuggling together in bed. She was lying on her back under the covers reading a book. I was on my side facing her with my “top” hand under the covers caressing her far hip and my “top” leg on top of the covers so that I wouldn’t overheat. She reached up to turn off the light and then tenderly turned toward me so that we were both lying on our sides facing each other and hugging. It was wonderful! As she rolled toward me the covers between our two legs (my top leg was on top of the covers prior to her rolling over and both her legs were underneath the covers) got pinned between her bottom leg and the mattress. Noticing that the skin on our legs wasn’t touching he muttered angrily “You put the blanket between us; I can tell you don’t want to be next to me” and rolled away from me to face the other side of the bed. Now she is back into her narrative of how I don’t like to touch her, I don’t want to be with her, I think she is worthless, and so on.
Now I know as I am learning from Bon that this isn’t about me. It is about her. Yet these kind of interactions on a regular basis across more than a quarter of a century have just worn me down.
Part of the reason for my being so worn out is that I am so isolated. While most of my extended family and our two sons know that she and I struggle in our marriage, no-one knows the nature of our struggles other than we have a hard time getting along. While she shares her perceptions that I am a bad husband with her extended family, friends, a few people in my very public work setting, (occasionally) the “personal committee” in my work setting, and my district supervisor her, I have on two or three occasions shared a few details with a two colleagues across the years. My loneliness is that there is no single person on this planet who knows the day-in-day-out trials that I have experienced for over thirty years. If I were to die tomorrow I would be remembered by the people who love me, but nobody would know the true nature of what my life has been like.
I apologize if this sounds like a pity-party. I would describe self-pity as having two aspects: one, bemoaning one’s situation without doing anything to make it better; and two, not recognizing the way one contributes to one’s family situation (in other words, not admitting that one does play a part in the relationship difficulties in one’s life.)
I hope I am doing neither. I am trying to be fair to my wife (she is a lovely person with a “better” heart than I have) in not making moral judgments; rather I am seeking to outline as descriptively as possible our functioning as a couple without assigning any ill motivation or intent to her behavior. As Bon mentions persons with BPD are in a huge amount of pain and are doing the best they can – their behavior makes sense to them. I am also being careful to mention how/where I fall short as a person and a husband.
What I am seeking to do is to express my heartache and sorrow of spending a long, long time working very, very hard at something and of seeing very little light at the end of the tunnel. For the past twenty-five years I have examined our relationship through spiritual, traditional psychological, interpersonal, and family systems lenses. My bookshelf includes many books/journals that are very carefully highlighted and with detailed marginal comments. My profession allows me to do “double duty” – my vocational learning/study is on behalf of my job as well as my personal/interpersonal maturity. I throw myself with great enthusiasm into this learning. Recently I photo-copied an article from a professional journal I found very helpful and am cutting and pasting sections of the article into a personal journal I keep with lengthy comments on how this article challenges me to more mature functioning in my marriage. Again, I am not even beginning to suggest that I am a fast or thorough learner, only that the highest priority of my life is to function more maturely. My wife’s perception is that I am as mean now as I was twenty years ago.
Although my perception may be inaccurate at this point, it seems to me as though my wife’s functioning is like that of a strain of bacteria (I am using this image descriptively, not as a metaphor) that becomes resistant to an antibiotic. She appears to be able to shrug off my slow increase in maturity, adapting her functioning by becoming increasingly skillful in keeping the focus on my “bad behavior.” In other words her despondency and criticism don’t seem to be related to the level of my functioning. This is disheartening. I truly believe that suffering is redemptive. In my case I see very little redemption, only more of the same.
Bon has helped me to see that many of my responses have been invalidating and I thank him for that. I will seek to continue to learn. I am not optimistic however. Why? Because as long as my wife continues to accumulate pain from the way she experiences life, as long as her only outlet for managing her pain is to assign it to my behavior, as long as she misperceives my behavior (usually her perception has as measure of truth as well the distortion caused by her pain and defense mechanisms), as long as she denies, dismisses, or discounts the good things I do her pain will not be lessened. She will still have the same amount of pain to manage and unless she learns new ways to manage her pain, will live a pain-saturated life and my consistent experience is that when she is in pain she emotionally moves toward me in invasive ways. Bon is correct when he says that while the ways she seeks to manage her pain don’t make sense to me, they make sense to her. The problem is that it doesn’t make the pain go away: at best her pain remains the same, but often it gets worse.
I will seek to be as non-reactive and validating as possible. I will rejoice in and hold onto those moments when things are different. I will seek to have realistic expectations. I will try to summon up the courage to move out of the adaptive posture I have in our marriage of setting my goals/passions aside because they are upsetting to her.
Craig,
You write: “These interactions leave me exhausted as I seek to practice all sorts of ways not to be reactive to her, not get snared by rhetorical questions, not get caught up in her bringing up events that happened twenty-five years ago that she inaccurately compares to what is going on presently in an effort to make the case that I am evil and am the sole cause for all her pain. Recognizing how my first choice of response is to “go silent” and emotionally or physically distance myself, I try to stay in touch with her emotionally without ending up in a “he said, she said” discussion. Sometimes I succeed, more times than I would like to admit I fail.”
WOW – just WOW. You have exactly articulated my marriage of 14 years to an undiagnosed BPD woman. Among my most vexing problems at the moment is that I’m trying to figure out how to stay in touch emotionally after realizing that my emotions have all essentially been “switched off”. Have you developed any effective strategies for staying emotionally engaged (or even in touch with your emotions b/c I’m not even aware of what my emotions are anymore)?
Hang in there – you’re not alone. God bless.
Dear Wrongturn1,
Thanks for your comment. I haven’t been back to this website for awhile so I missed your response of October 28. I noticed it this morning (Nov 6) and won’t be able to reply for a week or more – very busy schedule coming up that includes a family wedding out of town, and I also want to give a well-thought-out response to your significant question.
If I hear what you’re asking, it really gets to the very heart of the matter of how we can maintain a sense of self (who we are) when so much time, energy, and focus seems to be expended responding to the emotional “uproar/chaos” within our marriage. How do we not “get lost” and “disappear” when IAAMF [it's all about my (our spouse's) feelings]?
This has been the dilemma of my married life. The hard part is that it’s easy to ricochet from the emotional entanglement and reactivity that comes with being married to a person with BPD (I’ve heard these otherwise wonderful folks described as a “tar baby,” from the Brer Rabbit story – how they have a way of “sticking” to other people emotionally), to ricochet over to an emotionally detached, unavailable, and distant spouse that unilaterally moves through life without the intimacy of shared vision/ communication that so many couples seem to have.
I know this isn’t healthy, but it seems to me to be the only way I can preserve who I am from my wife’s behavior which (in my perception) functions to co-opt who I am/my life goals/what is important to me because it appears as a threat to her. This ricochet seems to infuriate her as my emotional “pullout” leaves her feeling abandoned and my different life vision leaves her feeling betrayed. (“If you don’t see things the way I do it must be because you don’t love me.”) So I often “return” to the enmeshment, feeling upset with myself, yet at the same time it doesn’t seem to improve her sense of security or well-being. So we both are distressed.
I know there is a middle way between the two extremes. A way to stay emotionally connected with her in warm, caring, and supportive ways without giving up my life goals, etc… I think I have glimpsed what this looks like and have taken some very small baby steps in beginning to practice this lifestyle, although not without setbacks! I think this is what I hear you inquiring about and hope to be able to put this into words in a response I’ll post here in the near future.
Thanks for the encouragement and God’s blessings to you as well.
Craig
Craig,
You said this: ” How do we not “get lost” and “disappear” when IAAMF [it's all about my (our spouse's) feelings]?”… If you truly understand IAAHF then you will know that I am not advocating ceding one’s feelings for your loved ones. The purpose of that formulation to for the loved ones to understand the motivation behind the behavior and not to say it’s a situation in which your feelings are never heard. When a person with BPD is reacting emotionally, the motivation for those reactions are about their feelings and not (generally) about your behavior. If you can speak to the feelings, you can help that person quell the behavior that results. That’s the purpose of the words “It’s all about her feelings”.
Bon
Bon,
Greetings!
Yup. I am with you on IAAMF, at least I think so. When a person with BPD is “in the IAAMF mode,” what they are saying may sound like it is about us, but as you mention, generally speaking it is about them.
Now I do know that when I first encountered “IAAMF” I completely misunderstood the concept and found it offensive, mistakenly thinking it was advocating that the feelings of a person with BPD do indeed trump anyone else’s. After a more careful and thorough reading of your description I now see what you are saying at a theoretical level and how it makes a difference “on the ground.” It has helped me. Thank you. When my wife is in a momentary or longer period of emotional dysregulation I find myself repeating silently to myself “It’s not about me” and it helps me not get as emotionally reactive as I used to.
Near the end of your comment you write: “When a person with BPD is reacting emotionally, the motivation for those reactions are about their feelings and not (generally) about your behavior. If you can speak to the feelings, you can help that person quell the behavior that results.” With your help I am finding this to be true. As I learn to validate her feelings I do find that this behavior doesn’t happen as often or as intensely as before. It is still there. It’s still bewildering. It still hurts. But as I am learning to respond differently her level of emotional dysregulation is less and she returns to baseline more quickly.
In my comment to Wrongturn1 above, I was referring to a different aspect of IAAMF that I find in my marriage, which could perhaps be more accurately described with the acronym “IAAMP” (It’s all about my priorities).
My sense is that my wife is threatened at a deep existential level whenever my life’s vision/goals/ priorities differ from hers. My perception is that when and where our views on, say money, politics, religious faith, activities, parenting, friends, and so on diverge she senses that she is being rejected and/or abandoned, and begins to move toward dysregulation. “Emotional dysregulation” might not be an accurate term; perhaps in this case “existential dysregulation” is more apt, because she feels as though her existence is being threatened. She has verbalized that she feels as though her life is on the line when we have significant differences of opinion or life direction. “I have to fight just to survive!”
While her episodes of existential dysregulation aren’t as intense as when she emotionally dysregulated , it takes her longer to return to baseline. To use the metaphor of a gong struck by a mallet, in this case my sense is that the tone of the gong (her response) is not nearly as loud (she is not as emotionally agitated and upset), but the sound keeps on going much, much longer and I perceive a grim, dogged determination as she pressures me to return to be the way she wants me to be.
So for instance if I were to spend some money, even an amount under $10 (we are debt free with significant – and I mean significant – assets) she would lean hard on me about how I shouldn’t have spent that money. If I would continue to spend this way on a regular basis, how would she respond? Would she “raise the stakes” or get used to it? Well that is the $64,000 question, because I’ve never had the courage to try.
So that is what I mean in my comment when I said “get lost” and “disappear” in my marriage. I suppose it technically isn’t in relation to IAAMF, it is more accurately in regard to what I am referring to here as IAAMP. It sure does seem to me that in our life together there are a lot of ways that we live on a day-in-day-out basis (furnish our house, organize our household, spend our time, spend our money, accumulate possessions, who we associate with as friends) where I don’t recall “being given a vote.” Now I know that sounds incredibly passive on my part and it is; unfortunately it is a dynamic in our marriage and I do play a role. As a friend of mine says in jest about he and his wife: “We compromise and do it Ann’s way.”
Is this an aspect of BPD or merely something unique in our marriage? I’m not sure. I see a linkage between IAAMF and IAAMP in two places. One, the fear of abandonment that haunts persons with BPD: My perception is that IAAMP isn’t about my wife wanting her preferences; she sees it related to her survival itself – she must have her preferences in order to survive. Two, IAAMP can move to IAAMF at any moment without any additional external stimulus and the existential dysregulation escalates into emotional dysregulation. In this case the triggers are invisible to me. Just today it appeared to be her anxiety about our upcoming trip and interactions with my extended family that elevated her IAAMP frustration about how I spent Saturday evening (drove 40 miles round trip to a sectional volleyball championship game and paid $6 admission) to a more emotionally dysregulated level that had many of the markings of IAAMF.
I am making slow but sure strides in embracing the concept of IAAMF (two steps forward, one step back) and learning to be less reactive to her emotional dysregulation, yet I still find myself feeling a significant amount of bitterness toward my wife because of the larger issues that I am referring to as IAAMP. Have you noticed this in your relationship with your wife?
I have given up important parts of who I am because I don’t want her to be mad at me, because I don’t want her to fly off the handle, spread stories to family members, friends, and people in my work setting. I don’t know if this is a common theme among other “nons,” but it is an underlying melody of my life.
Craig,
Hope your wedding trip and family visit goes/went smoothly. During the period of time leading up to a family visit (especially visits with my family), I find that my wife typically becomes dysregulated as she 1) mentally and emotionally rehashes every perceived offense that my family has done to her over the years (e.g., “when I walked up to your sister and your mom that one time, your sister nudged your mom, and I just know they had been saying XYZ about me”); and 2) imagines wrong things that my family members *might* say to her or do during the visit (e.g., “I just know when your mom arrives that the first thing she will do is look me up and down and smirk, thinking that I’ve put on a few pounds”). Instead of trying to defend my family members when this anticipatory dysregulation happens now, I just say things like “I wish they would not hurt you like that” or “it’s a shame that things have to be that way with them”, which I really do mean…maybe just not exactly in the way that she interprets it. But this seems to be a better strategy and validates her feelings instead of adding fuel to the fire.
As for your statement/question:
“…yet I still find myself feeling a significant amount of bitterness toward my wife because of the larger issues that I am referring to as IAAMP. Have you noticed this in your relationship with your wife?
I have given up important parts of who I am because I don’t want her to be mad at me, because I don’t want her to fly off the handle…”
Yes, definitely. I have given up pursuits that were *hugely* important to me in order to accommodate my wife’s BPD dysregulation. HOWEVER, giving up parts of who I am because I don’t want her to fly off the handle does no good for either of us because giving up these parts of me will not actually “cure” her, and it only leads to me resenting her. I have started to recognize that both the accommodating behavior and the resentment on my part are unhealthy CHOICES that are solely my responsibility. So what I am trying to do now is to make choices in my life that are more true to myself while at the same time showing love and validation to my wife. And part of that is trying to get back in touch with my emotions and stop keeping my wife at some emotional distance, which I’m not sure how to approach yet.
Dear Wrongturn1,
Thank you for your comment. You write clearly and concisely – it’s a pleasure to read what you write.
The wedding visit went smoothly. Thank you for asking. I am sure that part of it was that my behavior has been less emotional and more validating lately. Part may also be that we were staying with my wife’s sister and family whose home is only ten minutes from all of the wedding events – so fortuitous! So my wife had the soothing presence of other siblings (her twin sister traveled down with us) and a niece and nephew there to take a bit of the edge off of having to encounter my extended family – most of whom she gets along with very well, it’s just my mother and father who are threatening to her.
Your comments of how your wife interacts with you when around your extended family mirror my wife/my interactions when around my extended family to a “T.” I could add anecdotes where only the words are different! Interestingly, my wife becomes unsettled before and after short visits that I occasionally make alone to my Mother or Father’s homes (they are divorced).
It is a real “dance” to be validating toward my wife in regards to my extended family because she has a way of “disarming” most techniques. If I were to make comments like you do (“I wish they would not hurt you like that”), even if (as you say) I didn’t mean them the same way that she would interpret them, my wife would “demand” that I intercede with my extended family members and tell them not to be so hurtful to her. In the past she has insisted that I call or e-mail them in advance to tell them to treat her with respect. Later she will question me as to exactly what I said to them and if it doesn’t fit what she thinks I should have said to them, she is upset. So I find what works best is to softly and quietly tell her that I love her and that she deserves the utmost of respect from everyone. If/when this doesn’t work I just try to stay in touch with her emotionally without getting caught up in the “content” of what she is saying or asking.
Your final paragraph is “spot on.” My accommodating behavior in our marriage also does not make things better in her perception and behavior; I similarly find myself feeling resentful and bitter which can make me emotionally cool and distant around her. Recognizing that making decisions not to accommodate (yet staying in warm emotional contact with my wife) are solely my responsibility is something that I have known in my head for a long time, but am only recently making the emotional shift to make it a reality in my life. I have a huge desire to avoid her judgment, criticism, anger, and comments to others – clearly unhealthy and surely one that goes back to my relationship with my mother, which is actually pretty decent yet with occasional accommodation.
My wife had a horrendous and brutal childhood. I don’t want to cause her to suffer by making choices in my life that are related to things that are important to me; yet what I am realizing even as I write this is that it isn’t my choices that make her suffer, it is her response to my choices. She does seem to see life in “zero-sum” terms – that if I choose to spend time or money on things other than her it is somehow a negation of her. I try to be a “both/and” person in my life; she is often “either/ or.”
It was my twin brother’s youngest son whose wedding we traveled to. I knew I admired my twin brother very much, but didn’t realize just how much until our time down south for the wedding. During the events surround the wedding I realized that he is probably my greatest hero. He made a very difficult decision about fifteen years ago (a decision that I don’t agree completely with) and has lived with the decision faithfully, courageously, sacrificially, winsomely, and steadfastly ever since. He is gracious, sincere, humble, and accepting with everyone that I am aware of. Certainly he is not perfect and he and I share a certain driven-ness and uptightness. He was graciously present at the wedding. He has courageously lived by his principles, yet without distancing himself from anyone in his life. He is still warm and gracious toward them. As I think about slowly taking steps to live by my principles I am hopeful and terrified by turns. I pray that I have the courage and grace that my twin brother does and will follow him as an example.
I hear confusion in your final two sentences when you write: “So what I am trying to do now is to make choices in my life that are more true to myself while at the same time showing love and validation to my wife. And part of that is trying to get back in touch with my emotions and stop keeping my wife at some emotional distance, which I’m not sure how to approach yet.”
I don’t hear any confusion in the rest of your comment; in fact I hear clarity and purpose. You seem to know what you think, believe that what you think is based on sound principles, and you want to move in that direction. I do hear you disconcerted because you are out of touch with your emotions.
Two thoughts came into my mind when I read your last two sentences: One, while I don’t think emotions are unimportant, I think one’s life principles are far more important. When we figure out our principles and learn to graciously live by them while remaining emotionally connected to the important people in our lives, the emotions will follow. I don’t want to be emotionally “hollow” inside, yet it is a higher priority for me to be clear about my principles for life and committed to live by them than it is to cultivate my emotions. Two, I read somewhere recently that when we feel emotionally empty it can mean that we are either poised to make a move for more “differentiation” in our primary relationships or to slip back into a posture of adaptation. So I am trying to see emotional emptiness as a “clue” or a “signal” to pay close attention to moving toward differentiation rather than adaption.
Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful comment.
Craig,
Thanks for the reply – It’s helpful to hear your perspectives on things as we seem to have a lot in common.
Glad your recent wedding trip went well. How very interesting that you and your wife are both twins… from a scientific experiment standpoint, have you observed any BPD traits in your wife’s twin sister? Since BPD is said to have both environmental and genetic causes, one might expect both twins to display BPD symptoms – not that your wife’s twin would necessarily reveal that side of herself to anyone but her spouse though.
To elaborate a bit on my statement that “…what I am trying to do now is to make choices in my life that are more true to myself while at the same time showing love and validation to my wife…”, I guess I could have more precisely said the following instead:
“Now that I am aware of my wife’s BPD, I am shifting my strategy for dealing with my wife’s behavior from this:
• Codependency, e.g., attempting to predict and control/avoid anything that would be a potential trigger for my wife, which has actually hurt both of us more than it has helped, and
• Invalidation, e.g., previously I would always counterattack my wife’s statements/accusations and defend myself verbally during dysregulation
To this instead:
• Living the life that God has called me to and letting the chips fall where they may
• Validation, e.g., expressing empathy for the underlying emotion; trying to normalize the emotion where I reasonably can (“I would feel the same way if I thought XYZ”); and this final one has been really difficult and counterintuitive for me – no longer defending myself against her (sometimes bizarre) statements and accusations since that’s not what it’s really about (since feelings = facts to her).”
Note that the above is what I am trying/starting to do, and I’m not doing it very skillfully just yet. But I can already see improvements in our relationship after a couple of months of starting to apply these principles.
Dear Wrongturn1,
Wow – your experiences really do resemble mine in a lot of ways, both with your wife’s behavior and your responses/missteps/current new behaviors. It is interesting that our timelines are somewhat similar insofar as coming to “see the light.”
Your description summarized in the two bullets under “To this instead” mirrors almost exactly where I am at right now, right down to the phrase “letting the chips fall where they may.” I am surprising myself by the stands I am quietly taking – attending high school athletic events at the school, joining the local branch of the Kiwanis Club, setting aside money in our medical flex plan to have a physical next year, volunteering to go with my Mom to the veterinarian the day after Thanksgiving to have her lap dog put to sleep.
In each case she responds with fury (which can be intense and sustained) and I am tempted to cave in like I have in the past. What I am trying to do is stay in touch emotionally, but without defending myself or arguing or explaining. I simply hug her (when she will let me) and hold fast to the decision. In each case her fury moderates, but mentally I am trying to be prepared to stand by my decision even if she ups the ante.
My wife’s twin sister’s personality is almost identical to hers and I think she suffers in similar ways to my wife (i.e. – BPD). Their very close friendship brought them through their horrific childhood. It’s not clear to me how they would have survived psychically without each other. In adulthood this relationship continues to be sustaining for both of them. However, sometimes they bolster up each other’s mis-perceptions of their respective spouses, which means they also corroborate in their perceptions that people are mean to them and that the world is out to get them.
Your two present life directions just happen to be two items I try to keep in my consciousness as much as possible, which (it just occurs to me) I would paraphrase as “Hold fast to who God made me to be” while I “lovingly accept and validate who God has made her to be.” I find if I lose touch with either of those things don’t go well for my wife and me.
I hope you and your family have a blessed Thanksgiving. This is a scary, yet invigorating time for me as I find myself “growing into” who God made me to be. Hopefully I am proceeding without any belligerence. It isn’t that everything that happens between my wife and me has to be my way. It is just that I am going to as lovingly as I can take a stand at those points where the principles of how I want to live my life are at stake.