Control

[Boat Babe]

t:

I suggest that you not wait to file for divorce until either of you "breaks."

[escapingman]

This is insanely going down the drain, she is losing it. Kids started another fight with each other, kids do. She made it about her. Then cried and blamed the kids for them not coming with her for coffee and cake in the afternoon (they were in school ffs), GC went really distressed and SG started crying uncontrollable. Stbx kept going on it all being about her and noone watching tv with her, noone going for coffee with her etc. Tried to calm it down but then GC turned on me as she always do when she tries to get in the good books with stbx. It hurts, but I get it. This is why I need out. I need to setup my own home where I can be with the kids without stbx. I spent another half an hour calming SG down until she eventually settled down. Stbx still thinks all this is about her, I feel sick.

I think I will ask my solicitor to just bl**dy file and then I stay in a hotel until I have the keys to a rental. I have the money so that wont be a problem. I don't care about our house and if I forfeit my rights to live there, this is no life. Kids be better off with stbx on her own for a short while than me being there with all the projections and divisions. I will never be able to get GC any normality being in the same house. SG gets it, but she needs a safe place too.

[Boat Babe]

Get cracking mate. Really.

[escapingman]

As others have suggested, stbx is definitely a very low functioning PD. She really does not understand what she is doing and she lives in a different reality. When talking about past events with the counsellor it's like we talk about completely different events. It's really helpful for me to be honest to hear her reality to really know it wasn't me, it was all her all the time. I think even the counsellor can see what is going on, it's feeling very liberating to get the validation. As much as it helps me getting my head around this, I am not sure how long I can stick around. Stbx is behaving OK right now, what happened yesterday has been completely brushed away and history rewritten. I can't rewrite history and neither can the children. In the back of my mind I want to stick it out until stbx is pointed out in black and white she is a PD and beyond help. But I know what probably won't happen, and is not something I should need as I know my truth. Stbx told me she needs me and that she can't function without me, I believe her. But is that my job in life? To look after someone that won't be there for me when I need someone? No it isn't and I have to let go. As she is so low functioning, I don't think she will carry out a war when I file, I don't think she is capable of it. I think she quickly will turn on the victimhood and turn to her mum to be her supply. All is of course speculations and I can only do educated guesses.

I have setbacks, days are though, but I am feeling more and more free even though I am still here with her. The less I bother about her reactions and her world the better I feel. This forum has helped me immense on my journey. Whatever happen next, I will never be in her claws of her twisted reality again. I am for the first time in a long time looking forward to the future and to shape happy memories with the girls and on my own. This therapy session she wanted to use to rope me back in is actually helping setting me free.

[escapingman]

After the session yesterday I have had a completely different feeling in my body. It's like my constant worry about what does stbx gonna think is gone, my own self is coming back. It was so validating to hear someone tell stbx she was wrong, and for a couple of big things that has been infecting me. It was one episode I brought up and stbx laughed and blamed the incident on me being drunk. I remember it very well and I had had one beer for lunch on holiday. Therapist told stbx calmly that people do have a drink or two when on holiday and stbx stopped in her tracks. Another incident was when I told her something she didn't know and took it as criticism,  she then revealed that all advice are meant as criticism and need defending against  It really opened my eyes how much of a different world she lives in. This new knowledge and more trust in myself will definitely help me through the next steps of healing.

[SonofThunder]

EM,

Very nice to read that you are beginning to find some positive headspace about yourself and mentally be able to look down on the situation from above in a wider viewpoint and better understand your stbx and yourself, with the help of your counselor. 

I wish you continued progress in your goals and healing. 

SoT

[escapingman]

Thanks SoT, it's always encouraging to read a message from you. I found another audiobook I am listening to, this one is incredible good and us spot on fir me, can highly recommend as it is opening eyes wven further send help me understand. The book is called "The highy sensitive person's guide to dealing with toxic people: how to reclaim your power from narcissists ant other manipulators" by Shahida Arabi.

[SonofThunder]

Thanks SoT, it's always encouraging to read a message from you. I found another audiobook I am listening to, this one is incredible good and us spot on fir me, can highly recommend as it is opening eyes wven further send help me understand. The book is called "The highy sensitive person's guide to dealing with toxic people: how to reclaim your power from narcissists ant other manipulators" by Shahida Arabi.

EM, thanks for the recommendation on the book.  I consider myself an HSP, both by 'nature' and also accentuated by past trauma 'nurture', as i realize being very high-radar has been to my benefit from my childhood, dealing with my uPDf and now continuing with my uPDw. 

By nature, i am an introvert and firmly put myself into the INTJ Myers-Briggs category, as it fits very well with who I am and can see it also in myself as a very young child, continuing in its development as I age.   Therefore a HSP book related to dealing with toxic people is also a good match for me as well. 

SoT

[losingmyself]

EM, this is a book that Kris Godinez always recommends in the beginning of her podcast. You might want to check her out. I love listening to her!

[escapingman]

Thanks losingmyself, I will look into that.

I am tired, I mean so tired and I have zero motivation to do anything. I feel like I am just existing and not wanting to get out of bed in the mornings. I know it is over and that I will pull the trigger and file, but still wary of the war that will start. At the moment we are both in the house, I keep to myself and spend as time with the kids when she is not around. But I can see that stbx is not happy with me, she is just biting her lips and ready to rage. The only, and I mean the only reason she isn't raging is that she knows that would be the end. The sad thing is to see that she can control herself if she wants to, she has never done that before. But she is not able to hide her true feelings, facial expressions, not doing certain chores she normally does (making a point she ain't doing them as I am not admiring her). The only good thing coming out of this period right now is that I have got closer to GC and have had some good moments with her, I want/need this to be as good as possible for when the smear campaign starts again. I am fully aware GC will be turned against me, she will try with SG as well but I think she will be harder work.

I am also circulating in the various stages of grief at the moment, I have mostly got to the acceptance but I get some anger about what she has taken from me over the years. I feel I am past it and to old to find proper love and I feel my life has been thrown away in that way as I have forfeited the chance to love and be loved. I had a girlfriend for a couple of years before I met stbx, that was completely different and although we didn't last we respected each other. I could share my emotions and very personal things with her, if I do the same with stbx she will use that against me when it suits her. That makes me feel so lonely.

The only thing I know, however stbx treats me, however good she tries to be, I will not jump back on the drama cycle. I cannot take one more of them, I just can't.

[escapingman]

I have always thought my wife was uNPD but I am really starting to rethink this, she has acted really weird lately and I start suspecting she is more uBPD for all what that would mean if any. She has shown real fear of abandonment and really express she would be completely lost without me. When she says it, she looks terrified so I really believe her. I feel sorry for her, I really do, but at the same time I know how much she has hurt me and to be honest I don't want to spend the rest of my life looking after another adult  (that will continue hurting me). Currently I am trying to keep it together for the kids and plan for the next steps, but as I said before, it's so difficult when in the same house as the PD. I so want things to work out, I so want the future together that we should have, but it's not up to me. She will not change, she might be able to control her anger better, she might stop abusing me (very unlikely), but she will never see my needs and she will never be there emotionally for me. She never touch me in a sensitive way and never as I like being touched, she doesn't know how I want to be touched. It really much is a relationship of me being the caretaker and her the child. She can organise material things and function perfectly, until any emotions get involved, then she lose it and she can't handle it. Both daughters are more emotionally mature than my wife, it hurts to see. I feel like I am throwing her to the wolfs if I leave her, but by staying I am being thrown to the wolfs.

I so know what is needed to be done, but why do I feel so bad about doing it?

[SonofThunder]

Hi EM,

There is a high % of coexistence of multiple cluster disorder types among PD's.  So there is a possibility your wife may display both BPD and NPD traits.  My uPDh displays three: NPD and PPD mostly guide her decisions, actions and comments.  When she believes she is experiencing a situation out of her control or confrontational, her BPD claws come out.  I have learned to simply focus on the toolbox, because the tools are effective with all PD types. 

Also, to your 'wolves' comment.  I believe it is a male trait to naturally feel the desire to provide and protect.  We males with PDw's are more rare here on Out of the FOG, so i want to interject a thought from my male experiences.  Imo, my PDw displays a childlike personality when she is experiencing distance from me.  In the past when i purposefully separated from my uPDh for a couple months and her foa= fear of abandonment came front and center, her childlike behaviors were on full display.  I personally believe that this is both foa, but also part of hoovering, playing to your male provide/protect, which also triggers a 'fathering' feeling inside us and allows us to believe we are abandoning a child, not an adult. 

I dated my uPDw regularly starting at age 23 and prior to her PD traits coming out years later (when she locked me in the marriage tight with child #1), she was a confident, self-supporting adult who graduated honors from a top university and held a very responsible job.  She interacted well with other adults and carried herself confidently.  When i experienced the father/child feelings of foa in the separation, i had to recognize the foa as a deep underlying, yet overwhelming PD trait that quickly bubbled to her surface in the situation, but also the genius of the PD traits that play the innocent victim, who wont survive without the caretaker. 

Therefore i want to urge you to think back to when you met your wife.  In a divorce, once she realizes you are not being hoovered, she may likely revert back to a confident, highly educated adult fighter, and you will be the wolf shes fighting.  My wife would be just fine, once the foa boiling settles down to the bottom of the pot and her pre-marriage fighting spirit comes to the top once again.  So will her love-bombing of other males, as a part of trying to arise jealousy in the male wolf who abandoned her 😉.   

What was your wife's adult life like when you two met? 

SoT

[escapingman]

SoT, this what I am not sure of. But, I think her parents were very much caretaking of her before I "took over". I am not sure she ever taken any responsivity for her own feelings or actions, there has always been some reason or someone to blame. When we started dating she had a best friend, she rapidly lowered the frequency they saw each others before my wife just discarded her and never spoke to her again. I thought this was so weird at the time as the reason she gave was such a stupid one, but I have seen her do this to every friend bar one or two since I have been with my wife. She had another "so called" best friend, her husband died a few years ago and my wife only attended the funeral out of duty and then didn't take any time to either go and visit this friend or have her over at ours. She had another friend through the children, they became really good friends and my wife raved about how good friend she was and then suddenly stopped seeing her, reason she gave was that the friend was too busy so she didn't want to ask her to see her. Read flags all over and shows the immaturity and lack of seeing others feelings. I have seen first hand with my inlaws how my wife acts out like a ten year old and they bend over backwards for her demands and really treat her like a child (her dad was def a NPD and her mum either had severe fleas or is a PD herself).  Not sure where I want to go with this, but I think it is that she actually never has been mature enough and always have had one or two caretakers. Anyone that can't take care of her is discarded brutaly.

But to function in day to day life she is fine, no problems arranging for food to be purchased, bills to be paid, clothes to be bought etc. But to give me a hug when I have had a bad day has never happened, the opposite all the time though.

[Andeza]

Escapingman, hi, I'm the only child/adopted of an uBPDm. My dad didn't divorce her until I was already married and out of the house. My dynamic was different, as I alternated between being the SG and GC depending upon whether or not dad was home (she would SG him if he was home). Additionally, being adopted by a BPD is not pleasant by any means. This dynamic left me emotionally scarred and stunted. It nearly destroyed my own marriage. I have spent the last three years learning about Borderline Personality Disorder, what causes it, what it does to the brain, and what it's hallmarks are. I will share some of that here, since I've been watching your journey and suspecting you had a BPDw for some time now. I can perhaps save you some time doing the research yourself.

The jury is still out, but many researchers believe that this personality disorder is caused by a perfect storm of childhood trauma, genetics, and exposure to other BPDs. There is a high prevalence of BPDs raising eventual BPDs. I don't have a single source for this as I've read it in about half a dozen different articles, and it's pretty easy to find one somewhere.

Brain scans of people diagnosed with BPD indicate some very interesting differences between their brains and healthy brains. BPD individuals have a disconnect. They are able to recognize that there is a problem with themselves and their behaviors, they are aware that it exists, and yet they are unable to change it without outside help (therapy). The changes you are seeing in your wife are not statistically likely to be permanent, but you already know that. She is "masking" right now. Putting on a different face to get along long enough for, as I'm sure is going through her mind "Long enough to make you forget about this silly divorce business." This is all an act and not the truth of her being. While there have been some successful rehabilitations with intense therapy, once a BPD person in therapy is diagnosed with BPD they tend to drop out of it immediately. They usually only do therapy as a way to blame everybody and everything and can't accept any responsibility for their own part in things. If a therapist says some variation of "Hey, you're personality disordered and it's causing all these problems in you, not the people around you" they flip out and won't go back. It's reality breaking for them. In other words, it shatters their construct, their "matrix."

BPD tends to manifest in women as four major types, as I understand it from the amazing book "Understanding the Borderline Mother." Last I saw the audio version of the book was up on Youtube, I encourage you to check it out. These four types are Queen, Witch, Waif, and Hermit. My mother was a Waif/Hermit, but your wife sounds like she's got a heavy dose of Witch and Waif. Quite the flip flop! Must be mind boggling to watch.

Now, SoT has pointed out a major part of the book mentioned above. These BPDs are drawn irresistibly to men who fit the "Huntsman" type. The protector provider. They are looking for a man with a steady income that is working his way up, and also a man with a good heart that will "protect" them from all their imagined hurts. But you can't, because the imagined hurts are innumerable. This is what my own mother was looking for in my dad, but she judged him wrong. She got a provider with no protector instinct. Hence why he was frequently scapegoated, because he wouldn't join her in talking me to death over tiny or imagined infractions. He wouldn't "take her side" when she wanted him to.

We already covered the difference between high and low functioning in a previous post, so I won't rehash that now. BPDs are capable of masking for a long time. It's entirely possible for them to woo somebody without the mask ever slipping, or only slipping in subtle ways. But it ends up being a hardcore bait and switch in the end.

Before my parents married, my mother had a job and lived at home. It was pretty standard in that time period for unmarried daughters to continue living at home. Ye olde mentality of the father protecting his daughter until she is handed off at the altar. So her emotions were being catered to to some degree in that situation. Again, SoT had a good point about this. Pretty much as soon as the divorce was final my uBPDm put the moves on a friend from 30 years prior in some sort of twisted attempt to guilt/jealousy my dad back. Dad's reaction was to hope they hurried up and got married so he could stop paying alimony. Definitely not what she was hoping for, but pretty funny to see from the sidelines as her ploy backfired. She had quite the fit. She'll probably never remarry though. She gets major sympathy points for being the poor little old lady abandoned by her husband of many, many years. Prime Borderline supply right there.

If you've got any questions for me, feel free to ask. I pop in pretty frequently, odds are good I'll see.

[escapingman]

Andeza, thank you so much for taking your time for that amazing reply.

I will try to find that book and listen/read as soon as I get a moment. When you are saying you where switching between being SG and GC, I can definitely relate to that in our family. Whilst GC (as I use to call her here) normally is the golden child, SG and GC often swap places and SG becomes GC. But for the last couple of years, since I started to come Out of the FOG, very much like your dad in your story, and I stopped backing her with the children I have mainly been the big bad SG in the family. During the last couple of years I rarely been in her good books, GC mainly has and SG child has been in and out of all roles. But now when my wife is doing her all to keep the family together (making me change my mind) and I suddenly is painted in gold, GC has very often become the new SG which in it's turn makes her a much better friend to me. But as a final twist right now as she desperately trying to have all family as good, she has started painted her best friend black and I can see a fall out brewing. Sorry if all this is just confusing, it makes me confused, but I think both me and the girls are starting to come Out of the FOG and see what's going on. Even the kids are trying to advice her on how to maintain friendships and handle it emotionally. Scary.

I admit I think that maybe she can change at times, but that never lasts long as she just won't be able to keep it up. I can see how she is seething under her breath when I am doing something she is unhappy with. It will come to a big blow very soon, question is when. But until then I am doing all I can to show the kids I am a good dad and the normal one. Then when the fallout and smear starts, I hope they will remember.

Thank you again for your support.

[Andeza]

Anything to help. And yes, it's totally normal for your wife to be hunting for her next drama. The drama is her supply, like a drug addict looking for a fix. It doesn't make sense to logical minds, and honestly it shouldn't. What you're describing with the girls trying to give her advice, that's caretaking too. Your children are trying to caretake your wife, and from personal experience I know this is not a healthy dynamic. If you get a moment to speak to them, and I'm sure others will advise further here, it may be good to introduce the idea of "children are not responsible for their parents emotions or happiness." Most likely she is trying to turn them into the mother she wishes she had, whilst at the same time treating them like very small children that can't do anything right. Parentification/infantilization. It's a double whammy.

I fear for you GC. She's going to do everything she can to hold onto that position at the expense of herself, because being GC means you don't get yelled at but to do so you have to the keep the BPD happy. It's impossible to keep a BPD happy without sacrificing your own self on the altar of their ego and desires.

[square]

Yeah, I fear for the GC too. I think she is the one in the most danger - not that SG isn't also.

[escapingman]

As you both state, I am very concerned for GC and I am trying to handle this as good as I can right now. She is very much doing all she can to remain the chosen one and to get to be in the good books with her mum. I know that the only way to protect her is to break the dynamic and move out. It's a delicate game and I wish I had a T right now to be able to guide me through this minefield. But I suppose being Out of the FOG and not interested in getting back into it will help and push me on. I need to be more on the alert for her traps she sets where she drags me back in momentarily, and one little slip from my side and she takes a mile. But I suppose the real fight I have is against myself, I need to file but I feel so bad doing it whilst she is "reasonable". I need to get it into my thick skull that it doesn't matter which mask she is wearing, she will paint me black and declare me as enemy whatever which ever colour I am painted when I file. Also, with her fast IDD she has gone from bad to good to bad so many times whilst I am making my decision so I have lost my focus during this and therefore still not filed.

We were watching TV together yesterday, I did it for the children, and she suddenly starts talking about holidays in the future. I could not think of any worse than going on a holiday with her, I have done it so many times and EVERY SINGLE ONE has had her drama in them. It ruins it for me, she refers back to it as a bit of fun and tells me she was only joking. I can say it's not very funny when something is screaming at you in your face that they hate you and want to see you dead whilst grabbing your arm so you get blue marks whilst driving a car in a foreign country with the kids in the back seat......

[square]

Not criticising you at all. We know you're doing your best.

Yeah, it's bad enough for that behavior on holidays, but to say it was "just a bit of fun" is super sick.

My H has a very different personality but all holidays have been absolutely destroyed. I don't have a single memory of a vacation that wasn't destroyed in some way. The best ones were when he had his meltdown right before leaving (leaving him on better behaviir for the trip) - but the meltdown was still just so baffling and toxic and awful.

[escapingman]

Square, I know and thanks for the support. Regarding holidays, I remember a big drama on almost all of them that ruined the entire holiday. I hardly remember the good bits as the bad ones overshadows anything good. The travel to and from are as close to unbearable as it can be, and that does not matter of mode of transportation or class of transportation. Something is ALWAYS wrong and it is ALWAYS my fault. She almost refused to board a flight we booked for a holiday of a lifetime cause I apparently had mixed up which gate the plane departed from, to this day I am absolutely sure it was her mixing it up and then blamed me for it (she said the incorrect gate number, I got confused and then replied back with the number she had said).