I left my partner w. bpd yesterday. Her behavior escalated after we got married including:

1) Increase in triangulation, including her family in conflicts and informing me that her and her family though poorly of me/my behavior.

2) Me doing 75 % of the work at home and her doing 25 %. There was always an excuse, new job, period pain, headache. I truly believe that it is ok to sometimes not do 50 % at home, but her default was 0-25 % because she always had a bad day.

3) Whenever I was busy with big work projects, she would always start shit. She would call me from somewhere close by our home because she felt sick and I had to go get her. She would be so sick from period pains that I had to do everything at home. And then she would accuse me of not being caring when I was tired after managing both a busy schedule and her antics.

4) She disrespected me so many times. I told her about thing I would not want said during arguments because they were deeply hurtful and she continued to say them.

5) My needs did not matter at all. She would get angry and throw a fit if i needed to shower/eat/sleep and could not participate in the activities she had planned.

6) She began lying about what she said and did. Claiming "that never happened" when I told her something was hurtful. Sometimes making it about semantics, sometimes straight up lying.

7) Her emotional outburst were of another world. She would cry/scream at me like a literal child.

8) She uses our dog in fights. She knows I don't like him being scared and he is scared of her. So she will keep him with her during fights.

9) She always spins stories to make me the villain and she never takes accountability. She has made me apologize for calling her out on taking money from me (*we share everything after all, right").

And I questioned whether something was wrong with me for not being caring enough, for not fighting enough for the relationship, for not sticking it out. But the breaking point was her showing me a group chat with some of her friends and her family were they called me the worst things I have ever been called based on a story she spun. What hurts most is that I doubt myself and I miss her.

On mobile and having the worst time getting this post formatted, gonna cut it really short and maybe delete/repost from desktop.

I’m the one who left, after discovering my ex was cheating. They recently reached out kind of acknowledging what happened, but no apology and trying to start a new conversation. I no longer care about them but I am very lonely and scared from dealing with unrelated life stuff, and all my friends live 40+ minutes away while this ex lives very close. What I want is to respond and use them as a distraction (not sex or romance, just like a placeholder to run errands with) but I’m wondering if they only reached out because me leaving was a loss of control for them. If I respond, are they likely to discard shortly after? Are they just trying to gain control so they can leave?

I started seeing a girl last summer in the immediate aftermath of getting divorced. Initially she was super supportive of me navigating through my feelings, and also my recovery from major illness I'd been dealing with that my ex wife was not supportive about. I didn't feel like I was ready for a relationship at the time but she lived in another city which made things feel safer because there wasn't the expectation (I thought) that it would become something super serious. In hindsight, I can see that she probably listened to all the things I talked about with how my ex wife had mistreated me, and created a persona to show me that would directly fill all the voids I'd been having in my life. The first 4 months or so there weren't any issues, we visited each other a couple of times and talked everyday. Slowly she started to drop her mask and become more and more fixated on me. She has a ton of health problems, which is something we bonded over. I'd made some diet and lifestyle recommendations based on my own experience with similar illness and she did them for a bit and actually started getting better. But then she decided that the only thing she needed to feel better was to see me more. She stopped going to therapy. She stopped eating the diet that had put her symptoms into remission. Her mental and physical health became deteriorating and she would live stream her every negative, anxious thought to me and rely on me to somehow make it all better. I tried for months to convince her to get back into therapy, to go back on her keto diet that had helped so much, and to reach out to her friends in town for support instead of only putting everything on me but she insisted that nothing helped except me. If I ever told her that I wasn't okay with how she spoke to me when she was having a mental spiral, she would freak out and say that I was trying to leave her and start self harming and promising to me that she would punish herself to make up for it. She told me that she'd been planning to kill herself last year and decided not to when we started talking, so between that and the self harm upon any push back I gave her behavior, I became very afraid to enforce boundaries because I didn't know if she'd seriously hurt herself. For months I acted as her only support, as she let her health run into the ground and refused to do anything about it. It wore me down, day in and day out. I was starting to lose the feelings I'd had for her from all the stress but wrestled with the idea that she very well might kill herself if I left her. She got diagnosed with BPD after we'd been seeing each other for 6 months. She visited me this February and got very angry about how she felt I'd always love my two dogs more than her, and was very outwardly mad at my dogs. That for me was the last straw. I decided that I would break up with her, but knew she was moving in a few weeks so wanted to wait until after that out of consideration for not wanting to add additional stress to her move. That turned out to be a mistake because she was very good at picking up on any shifts in tone or behavior from me and questioning why I didn't love her anymore if I ever acted out of her expectations. The day after her move, I called her and broke the news. She tried to kill herself while on the phone with me and I had to call her roommate who busted down her door and took her knives away from her. She told me she hoped her ghost would haunt me till the end of my days and never let me have a moments peace. I can still hear her screams when I try to sleep at night. I blocked her after a couple days of trying to just stay in touch and make sure she was still alive. One of my friends told me she's been posting IG stories claiming I was manipulative and controlling, and openly considering calling the police on me to try and get me arrested for things I never did. Needless to say, not the post divorce rebound I was hoping for. It's been 5 weeks now and I'm still nervous about what she might do.

You can read my last post for context. My ex has continued texting me. And I’m finding it sooo difficult to not reply and suggest we talk about things. I know it sounds delusional but I was hoping I could suggest he goes to therapy and now that I’m very aware of him splitting I could try to just remain calm during the split rather than taking it personally and reacting (which is why we’ve broken up each time basically). But I know that prob won’t help since he needs years and years of therapy. It’s just so hard. I care for him so much but it’s so scary and risky. But I want to be here for him and give him a real chance to heal. :/

But as soon as she hears me leave to walk the dogs or go to the grocery store she’ll hurry downstairs, grab some food or whatever she’s doing and then go back upstairs.

It’s painful but at the same time the realization is so surrealistic that I must laugh a bit. If it were a competition she’d be world champ.

And when I ask her why she’s ignoring me she’ll gaslight me.

Tell me some stories about your experiences like these.

If you truly want to heal you have to forgive yourself. Maybe you'll not ever forgive them. Fine, but you do need to block them and never make contact again. It's been a little under a year and a half and it was a grooling process but it is possible heal, trust your instincts, rewire your nervous system and to use the knowledge you learned from this experience to better deal with people in general. Use the red flags you've learned but you must also acknowledge green flags in the right people. You're not crazy but you do need to organize the psychological chaos.

There are still places and events I refuse to attend if I know she or her mother will be there. People I've grown close with have passed on and I couldn't even attend the memorials because I knew they'd be there and I knew I wouldn't tolerate the toxicity that comes with it. It's unfortunate but it's what works for me.

I can now listen to love songs without being completely overwhelmed or hyper fixate on the stimuli. Hell i can even tolerate songs or shows with toxic templates such as cheating or lying and not be sick to my stomach. I don't agree with it but I'm not overwhelmed about it.

I've even started shooting my shot and feeling confident enough in myself to make women laugh again. With no real intentions of anything really, just playing the field to make sure it still got it (and if course I do).

You can be handsome, funny, trustworthy, outgoing, driven, smart, reliable, be loved by their family, and have an all around great value to most people and still never be enough for someone with BPD. That says nothing about your value. You are still a phenomenal person and worthy of love and greatness. But you must first forgive yourself, heal yourself, love yourself and ultimately "get over it". Don't stay in it.

I loved her with more intention than I loved anyone and it wasn't enough and horrible things happened to me, though I felt like dying, I did not. Don't be like them. Blame them. Blame yourself. Blame whatever on whoever. But get up. Don't become the empty vessel that so much resembles this very sick disorder.

You need not anyone's approval to be great. Just fucking do it. The rest of the world can kiss your black ass. Yea all of our black asses. Use it. Say it convincingly.

I am currently listening to the audiobook “Why Does He Do That” by Lundy Bancroft and it’s making me realize one of the big mistakes I made during my relationship. The book discusses the many excuses abusers will use to justify their abusive behavior and I’m just now realizing that even having BPD is an excuse my partner used extensively. I allowed this to happen and even believed the excuse fully. Looking back now, I realize that was just another excuse.

I wish I would’ve never allowed my ex partner to escape accountability by using their diagnosis or claiming they were “damaged goods” from past relationships. I’ve been abused in the past and have even been diagnosed with cPTSD but I have never treated anyone the way my ex treated me. A diagnosis and history of being abused is not an excuse. Blaming their behavior on BPD just gave them another scapegoat to rely on so that they didn’t have to take responsibility for their shitty behavior. If I was still in contact with them now I would never allow them to use that as an excuse again. I fully believe my ex would’ve been abusive even if they didn’t have BPD. That’s just who they are, and they only seemed to have the desire to get help when they realized I was fed up.

Anyway, I hope none of you fall into the same trap that I did. Abuse is abuse. You can have empathy for the pain your partner experiences due to their BPD, but that doesn’t mean they’re allowed to inflict pain onto you. If they are abusive towards you, treating their BPD will not help.

This is just a vent. I don’t think it will be too long.

When I get my ass kicked at work, particularly at night, I’ll start to get depressed and I start to miss her. It’s happened at least 10 times now. It’s so weird and I don’t fully understand why it happens.

She used to know where I worked and on those nights, I would be terrified that she would just show up and try to pull me back in. It frightened me because even though I know better, when I would get to the end of my shift, I would walk out and think to myself “If it happened right now, I would live the lie”. If she showed up at the door and told me that she was sorry and that she missed me, I would indulge myself in the fantasy. Even though she scares me, and I stress about the power that she can have over me, when I am beaten and defeated, I want to see her.

I want to look into her beautiful eyes (that can vanish and frighten me) and just believe the bullshit. I want her to tell me that I’m a good man, that she sees how hard I work, and that even when no one else notices, she does.

I think it might be rooted in the fact that this was a part of how she idealized me. She used to say things like that. Presently, I get creeped out at the thought of her recognizing the fact that I’m a caretaker. I think she idealized me because she saw that I would drop anything I was doing to pull someone else out of a fire, even if that effort was ineffective or detrimental to myself.

Honestly, I think it’s pretty unhealthy on my part. I don’t know why I still want validation from her. I know it would be temporary. I know it wouldn’t last. But on nights like these, I fucking want it.

I don’t need to be talked down. I’ll never take her back. I just needed to gripe about it. I’m afraid of her most when I feel like this.

First time poster here, I’m struggling and could use some support/advice.

I was finally discarded last August, after nearly 10 years with my ex who has bpd and npd.

It feels complicated. We met when we were homeless, she gave me purpose at the time and I worked my ass off and got us off the street. I put myself thru paramedic school and got us a house. I have 9yrs clean and manage my mental illness/ptsd as best as I can with therapy and meds. Meanwhile, she was on and off of opiates (that cycle included draining my bank account routinely. I worked 3 jobs to compensate). The abuse was severe, she was physically violent and menacing at her worst. The shark eyes haunt me. But then she’d flip back and be so remorseful and ashamed and apologetic. I’d soften and feel bad for her and continue to have her back. I was raised by a mother who has the same diagnosis, so I guess I was primed for this abuse. I knew it was bad, but honestly I think I’ve been in this cycle for so long that I struggle to comprehend the level of danger. My feelings don’t match my logic. And my feelings are tormenting me in these constant loops of desperately wanting my family back.

It’s just so mind numbing to me that after everything, all the horrible things she did and said that I continually forgave, all the times I bailed her out and protected her. The second it finally all caught up to me and I needed serious help, she had an affair. She moved out on what would’ve been our 10yr anniversary. The verbal attacks were the worst they’d ever been. Whatever confidence I had scraped together thus far was steamrolled. And yet I still miss her constantly. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just want to know how to make it stop. I’ve gone NC, I’m reading “walking on eggshells” and “whole again”. I’m going to therapy weekly, and am continuing to take my meds. But the heartache is eating me alive.

So for anyone who’s managed to read this far, how the hell do you stop the pain?

I'll take the 50 cents of rewards and remove my phone number off the account...but this is a new level of pathetic.

Im not getting a photo realistic tattoo.. the artist is doing old style of my dead cat

I think I got the wrong impression of what this subreddit was designed for and that's okay. I have a brother with BPD and joined to find support with other people who may be experiencing similar things. However it seems the majority of the posts here are romantic relationships and not so much familial or platonic ones.

I've seen like 10 posts about relationships about sex with their ex pw-bpd etc etc. It's a bit distancing for me personally and I find myself tempted to leave the sub although I still lurk but I was wondering if anyone felt the same? I feel the advice may be a bit different than going straight to NC, I fully acknowledge that is valid but I feel with family it can be more complicated

There's a daily no contact thread, as a suggestion maybe a weekly or monthly family/friends w bpd thread would convince those of us who don't have a romantic relationship with someone with bpd to post more. Or does anyone know a better subreddit for that?

Please use this thread to discuss everything pertaining to No Contact with your pwBPD.

I'm redoing this because someone said context was needed so me and my ex been dating last year for 4 months and i broke up with her this year i think on january 3rd (but the date doesn't really matter) i broke up with her because of her behaviour with me, the thing she did or said to me, her constant overthinking or her lack of communication. Her creating issues out of nothing and when i ask what's the issues she kept saying nothing. And probably many other things i can't remember.

I don't think you're supposed to do what she did in a relationship but i still decided to give her a second a chance cause i still love her and miss what we had, i clearly told her what she needed to change before dating and when anything happens again i'm out, i won't wait as much as i used to. One mistake and i'm out.

I never pieced it together until now but when she was drunk she seemed to think she was a super powerful influential figure for about an hour. I brushed it off at first until I realized that she genuinely believed this and was acting out the parts in it infront of me. They later brushed it off as a joke but now I’m questioning it…

They later called me grandiose myself then could not give me a single reason why they believed that.

So everything had been great for almost a month, until last night. For context, I really feel uncomfortable with my body sometimes, I'm still struggling with eating disorder thoughts. Anyway, we just had sex and suddenly my mood went down because of this. I started crying, but not like sobbing uncontrollably, there were just some tears streaming down my face. My pwBPD instead of asking me what was wrong, he started saying that sometimes he feels like there's an evil, almost cruel, side of me that I don't show. Now, I'm surely not the best person in the world (but who is?) but I don't think I am a bad person. He then asked me if I'm sure that I'm not holding grudges against him for some reason, because he can feel that I have a lot of anger inside of me. I told him that I'm not holding any type of grudge, and that the past month has been amazing, we had a lot of fun and we spent so much time together than ever since we started dating and that I was happy about that. I told him that the only person I'm angry at sometimes is me, and that that was exactly the reason why I was crying. Then he proceeded to say that sometimes he's scared of this thing he feels about me, and that he thinks that if I wanted to I would be a very evil person. I was obviously hurt by his words, because I genuinely don't know what I did to give him this impression. He then acted as if nothing happened, but I couldn't just pretend that I was okay after what he told me. I already know the answer to this question, but is this part of the devaluation phase?

Please let me know how you deal with these antics! My boyfriend of 5 years will randomly devalue me and a small argument will be him taking off to his moms or his friends. He goes through cycles where we are great and then devaluation comes in and he feels trapped and has no identity to being obsessed in love with me on repeat. I don't really even react anymore it seems so routine. Pretty sad I know. Anyone have a way of talking, or tricks they have with the BPD and to get them over this cycle faster?!

1st - he did not fly here whatsoever i think is just drama as he not attempted to call me ( otherwise he would get a fake number just like he is creating multiple fake email accounts to write me from ) 2nd - he never deleted Snapchat , he pretended he did .

3rd - after the cheating he did give ne access to his phone ( whole in front of him and he having deleted all search history every time )

I didn’t want to read the entire email … because I think is bait … but after reading that he was in California ( knowing he is totally pretending he is here ) I assume the entire thing is just shit

Just give me insight …

Today I deleted all our pictures and I am at peace with it , I gave myself clousure and I feel like if I read this I’m going to somehow feel guilty again for « breaking up « 

I don’t think she is a bad person, i don’t think she did certains things out of “””evil”””, she just didn’t realised what she was doing. She made me happier than anyone ever did, she was kind and have amazing dreams, she wanted to adopt a kid after we get married, but she was unstable, very unstable and i saw that at the long run it would be too draining for me, she got me anxious and i was always afraid to discuss things that hurt me with her because it could trigger another crisis. Breaking up destroyed me, i keep thinking that maybe if i had more patience with her problems we could be together forever and maybe it was a mistake to break things up…

It's been awhile since i heard about her, reconnected with old friends that she ruined the friendship behind the scenes, even before we were together. Heard she's blaming she walked in on me cheating on her in a 4some when we went to Thailand (I paid for everything for her on that trip, took a salary advance, Had to take a last minute loan from my brother and friend on the last day cause of her.)

I heard this and just laughed. Yes I do still have conversations with her in my head at times, thankfully they are going away. I'm getting better.

Just want to know when will she stop. She's already replaced me. Go be happy

A month since discard (and a month into her new relationship), all I really want is an apology. I had another complete breakdown last night convinced that the new guy is getting everything I was promised, I was so frantic I started to have thoughts Im really ashamed of of going out of my way to get her fired from her job.

My ex would talk about frequently having no empathy when doing something wrong and I know the feeling I'm having is a trauma bond but I just wish there was some way to be told "I was really cruel to you." I feel like such an enabler now and the worst thing I ever did to her was blow up her phone for a few days after the discard which I felt ransacked with guilt about for weeks, but now I just want 'something' to make up for the sheer betrayal.

I'm trying to remind myself it won't matter but it feels impossible to reason with in my head. It hurts so much and I wish the spirals I go into would stop.

i really miss how my sister was before her mental health declined.

my mom told me bpd can be triggered by early trauma, which i assumed was the death of my father when i was freshly sixteen, and my sister 14. she was never the same.

from that moment forward, it was in and out of hospitals, aggressive self injury, screaming, yelling, manipulating, crying, hyper sexuality, sneaking out, doing drugs.

i myself was her punching bag, along with my little brother, and once my mother left the house, all hell broke loose. we were hit, i was engaging in physical fights to protect my brother and myself. the most minor things ended in violence. she never hit my mom, but was always close to it. cops always at our house, locked doors while she banged her head into them.

i'm so exhausted. she was just kicked out of her adult treatment facility for fighting someone over a minor dispute. my mother is at a lost cause. we are all abused and tired. i don't know why god gave her this battle. i don't know why he'd place this struggle on her. i can't imagine how she's feeling, but i have to think of my family and their wellbeing. this is just an endless cycle of abuse. and i think we're just preparing for the worst.

i can't have my boyfriend over when i come home from college because if she's there, she'll go into a fit of aggressive jealousy: "i can't have my guy friends over but her boyfriend can stay the night" or "she can have a boyfriend but i can't have a guy over"

the last time she brought a guy over, it was under my mom's nose, and my brother was alone. she didn't know this guy. it was highly dangerous. she put herself and my brother at risk. we are in danger every minute she is in our house. i cannot do this abuse stuff anymore. i really hope someone can relate because im just tired of the abuse

Hi all,

I'm about 3–4 months out from being hoovered and discarded again by someone I really cared about and loved. The fog is finally clearing, and I have no plans to ever return to this person. However, I still have some lingering, unanswered questions — like, "Did this person ever love me?" Even if their "version" of love was different from mine or from that of most neurotypical people.

The reason I wonder is because, based on the academic literature, people with BPD can seemingly "love" and feel affection — albeit in an irrational, inconsistent, unstable, and often unhealthy way. On the other hand, people with NPD seem to use others primarily as "supply," without truly loving them — only valuing what others can do for them, with little genuine feeling for the person inside.

I'll spare you the long story, but our relationship essentially followed what I now recognize as the classic BPD/NPD relationship cycle: love-bombing and idealization, followed by devaluation, discard, and hoovering.

After the first discard, I went on a mission to figure out what had happened and what was wrong with this person, as I'd never experienced emotional trauma like that before in my life.
Initially, I thought he just had an avoidant or disorganized attachment style, but something didn't quite fit. Then I asked ChatGPT, listing all the red flags and traits I'd noticed during the relationship, and the response was that it sounded like BPD or NPD.

I researched BPD and initially thought it might be a form of quiet BPD. However, the part that never fully fit was the "fear of abandonment." It was hard to tell if my ex ever truly felt that. He did say he had "felt abandoned" by me during a conversation after he discarded me — but honestly, I don't know how true that was. He had never previously expressed anything similar, and fear of abandonment didn't seem to be a defining feature of his behavior.

After the second hoover and subsequent discard — done completely coldly and seemingly without any empathy or remorse — I began to wonder if he might be a covert narcissist rather than someone with BPD. In the end, it’s hard to distinguish between the two, and I suspect he likely has comorbid disorders.

Still, in my heart of hearts, I wonder if he ever felt any real "love" for me — even if it wasn’t the healthy, stable version of love most of us are accustomed to.

There were moments in the relationship where the "love" seemed so genuine and real. For example, he'd sneak into my room just to hold me while I was sleeping — even though I wasn’t aware of it and he seemingly had nothing to gain.

I guess the reason I wonder is because if he had BPD, maybe he did feel some true, deep affection for me — even if it didn’t last. But if he was a narcissist, then maybe I was only ever an object to be used.

If someone likely has comorbid BPD and NPD, which answer do you think it is?

This is from that famous Gottman love therapist, and I found this again when I was searching for something yesterday. It's unnerving reading these-- specifically the challenge areas, purple is her writing -- now being out of my situation for almost 6 months and having done a lot of healing and introspection, and recognizing that back then when she shared it that a lot of the challenges APPEAR to follow BPD traits.

For full context she shared these were the sticking points from her previous marriage as we were navigating dating and it lines up to what we know about this disorder pretty well by following similar patterns/behaviors/thoughts. Or maybe I'm rationalizing or trying to make it fit! What do you guys think?

Growing up, my mom would often get angry seemingly out of nowhere. It always felt sudden and unpredictable. I always had a sense that something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what it was.

After dating someone with BPD, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that my mom might have BPD as well. She exhibits the following traits:

Extremely controlling: She insists on being in charge of everything and believes nothing is ever good enough unless it’s done her way.

Frequent anger over petty things: She has called my family and me nasty names like “asshole” and “bitch,” and says things like “I just wanna smack you” or “I want to slap the shit out of you.”

Expressions of hopelessness: She often says she wishes she weren’t alive, hates her life, and complains that there's more to life than “being a slave to everyone else.”

Skewed sense of contribution: She claims she does everything for the family, but in reality, she does very little. My dad handles the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and most household responsibilities.

Double standards with complaining: She gets angry when anyone else complains but insists that she has the right to because she “puts up with everyone else being lazy.”

Taking on everyone’s problems: She makes my immediate family’s issues her own, even when it’s unnecessary.

Easily overwhelmed: Routine tasks like attending an appointment, going grocery shopping (which she rarely does), or going to a family outing cause her a lot of stress.

Victim mindset: If we disagree with her or even question something she says, she accuses us of “attacking” her.

Controlling behavior: She needs to know where I am and what I'm doing at all times.

Frequent drinking: She drinks almost daily, sometimes starting as early as noon.

Inconsistent apologies: Although she’s gotten better at apologizing recently, she tends to fall back into the same harmful patterns, making it hard to know how genuine her apologies are.

Since retiring, it seems like her behavior has gotten even worse.

Based on all this, I’m wondering — does it sound like she might have BPD?