Can you ask her not to rub her affair in your face and that you are disgusted by her actions?
My STBXW doesn't have a filter. She is a huge word vomit type. Comes from never being heard as a child. She is an extremely emotional person to a point of near insanity sometimes, which causes her to fight dirty.
There really is no way to shake it I think. I asked her to not talk about him to me anymore, I asked her to please be respectful, but the cat is out of the bag and I live there. I see her dressed up, I see the intimate shower wash when I shower, I see her when she comes home late at night to get the baby monitor, I just see everything now. Not really sure how she can keep it from me because when she leaves now I know from the way she is dressed, smells, where she is going.
I have told her that she disgusts me and have told her that it really really hurts my inner being, but alas she is in the fog and thinking that she has all the answers through this relationship.
I am just kinda stuck and the only way out is to sell the house.
Really just need to monitor how I am doing day to day. This is still fresh though, only found out 100% a week ago. Prob just going through the motion.
I have had a few decent days in a row. Feels a little bit like letting go.
I am a little afraid of it, but I am feeling a little bit more normal the last few days. I know it will not last forever, but I have it now and I am going to hold on to it as long as I can.
We are going to still do the divorced uncontested.
We have agreed to the following.
750 a month for support
Three day rotation with daughter with a rotating 4th day. (Joint Custody)
We are not allowed to take daughter more than 15-20 minutes from on another. (Living arrangement)
Whomever pays insurance, gets to claim daughter on Taxes (Me)
Money is split, and assets I do not care about enough to fight over anything.
I dunno much else to worry about, does anyone have anything that I am be missing? I am at peace with this and we are going to use legal zoom to get all of the paperwork pushed through.
Been alight today. The blues won! Had a great day with my daughter.
Putting the house for sale tomorrow. Meeting with the real estate lady. I pray daily that this house sells fast. Would be hectic, but it would be a huge step to getting all of this over with.
I didn't want this, but there is no going back now. Anything that can happen to get me past all of this the better.
No, I have only been separated for about three months. I honestly can not even fathom dating someone else, being still emotionally in love with my stbxw.
I want to give someone a fair shake and lord do I know that I couldn't be with anyone else currently.
I also am of the mindset that I am still married and will not date anyone until the D is finalized. Call it pride or whatever, I just would feel like I am cheating, even though the STBXW is currently deep into a relationship.
Well, she is out with her new man and her new life tonight. Won't be home till the morning. I have got to get over this, I just do not know how to even comprehend this.
I am definitely accepting it, but when an affair is so blatantly in your face all of the time it absolutely sucks the air out of my lungs.
I love trying to go to sleep at night, knowing full well what is going on with another man. My daughter deserves better than this.
The house went for sale and we already got an offer one day later of what we are asking. They are in love with our house.
Yeah, I am too.
If this house goes, it will be one of the last links I have in order to move to divorce.
Trying not to look back, trying to accept that this life that I had is slowly slipping away. That the memories from this house will be just that, memories. There is no future here.
Realizing that when the house sells that I am going to be not seeing my wonderful daughter everyday. There is nothing good that comes from this. Nothing at all.
Was a good one. I have been angry all day and the STBXW left to go see him. Oh well.
I am struggling with the feeling of not having control over my life. It is not fun having to change everything because of someone's choice. Not really sure how to wrap my head around that, but when you marry someone you truly put your trust and faith in someone else to take care of your feelings and when they don't the loss we feel is ridiculous because we never expected the person we love and adore to do these things to us.
This scares the hell out of me to a point where I will have issues trusting someone fully in the future. At least that is how I feel now. I guess that is just a sign that I am not ready yet.
Just lonely I guess, and SHE gets to have those needs met while going through this. I swear I am losing everything and she is gaining everything.
I am divorcing [a BPDer]. I know her childhood caused this and I know how a BDP'er makes you feel completely insane.(3/12/12 post.)
Traggy, I agree that the behaviors you describe -- verbal and physical abuse, temper tantrums, blame-shifting, lack of empathy, easily triggered anger, and black-white thinking -- are classic traits of BPD. I therefore am so glad to see you changed your mind about the duplex. If your W is a BPDer, you will be seeing a level of vindictiveness and meanness that you did not think she was capable of. My BPDer exW, for example, had me arrested and thrown into jail for "brutalizing her" at the end of our living together for 15 years.
I strongly recommend you start participating (or at least lurking) in the "Leaving a BPDer" and "Raising a Child with One Parent with BPD" boards at BPDfamily.com. Those are two of the 8 message boards you will find at that large forum targeted to the spouses and family members of BPDers.
I also recommend you read Splitting: Protecting Yourself when Divorcing a Borderline or Narcissist. Released 7 months ago, it was written by the same author of the best selling BPD book (Stop Walking on Eggshells.)
If you would like to read about my experiences with my BPDer exW -- and those of Maybe with his angry, abusive W -- please read my post in Maybe's thread at My list of hell!. If that discussion rings a bell, I would be happy to discuss it with you and point you to other excellent online resources about BPD traits. Take care, Traggy.
Traggy, I agree that the behaviors you describe -- verbal and physical abuse, temper tantrums, blame-shifting, lack of empathy, easily triggered anger, and black-white thinking -- are classic traits of BPD. I therefore am so glad to see you changed your mind about the duplex. If your W is a BPDer, you will be seeing a level of vindictiveness and meanness that you did not think she was capable of. My BPDer exW, for example, had me arrested and thrown into jail for "brutalizing her" at the end of our living together for 15 years.
I strongly recommend you start participating (or at least lurking) in the "Leaving a BPDer" and "Raising a Child with One Parent with BPD" boards at BPDfamily.com. Those are two of the 8 message boards you will find at that large forum targeted to the spouses and family members of BPDers.
I also recommend you read Splitting: Protecting Yourself when Divorcing a Borderline or Narcissist. Released 7 months ago, it was written by the same author of the best selling BPD book (Stop Walking on Eggshells.)
If you would like to read about my experiences with my BPDer exW -- and those of Maybe with his angry, abusive W -- please read my post in Maybe's thread at My list of hell!. If that discussion rings a bell, I would be happy to discuss it with you and point you to other excellent online resources about BPD traits. Take care, Traggy.
Already read it. I am getting those books you recommended because I know that she unfortunately is a BPD'er. Thank you for the site's definitely something I need to read because I worry that my daughter is going to eventually become all black to my wife and when she gets older and she will turn her back on her as well. Not sure if that is the case with a parent with BPD, but I worry greatly that my daughter will pick up this unfortunate disorder.
I am not trying to find an answer to why she left, but she hits all the traits to a tee. It almost scares me how accurate that it describes her.
I have been walking on egg shells this entire marriage trying to make her happy. The resentment that she holds is unbelievable. I am not been myself for a long long time.
I gave all I had and in the end it wasn't enough, because it was never enough.
She wanted to move in
She wanted to get married immediately
She wanted to get a house
She wanted a baby
She got all the things that she thought would make her happy, but now she is just left with no more goals and her unhappy self so she found someone else that is her knight in shining armor.
My STBXW told her brother last night what is going on. He is one of the very few that has a good head on his shoulders and will speak his mind.
They spoke for two hours and it really effected her. They spoke about her childhood, being neglected, abused, etc. They spoke about her being raped. They spoke about her anger and issues that they both have.
I came upstairs and ran into her and I could tell she was shaken. I asked... I shouldn't have, but I did.
"Are you ok"
I don't like seeing her upset and I can almost sense it from all of the times she has been upset in the past. I can see it in her eyes.
She rambled a bit, but at the end she made a statement that shattered me.
"Maybe its me, maybe I have issues in relationships from my dad never being home. From being neglected. Maybe I will never have a good relationship because I expect this grand tv type thing"
She turned over a leaf. Even though it was a small one, but she might just see a problem in herself and that is the first step.
Later that night, her brother calls me at 1am. He wants to talk, so I had to sneak out of the house because I know if she knew I was talking to him she would flip her lid.
I told him everything. He was pissed and shocked. He said that she painted me to be a villain. A terrible husband that neglected her and did not do my duties as a man. He knew better though, because the STBXW forgets that he knows her even better than I do. He knows me too.
I told him there are definitely things I could do to improve, but those things do not constitute divorce. They are only means to validate her cheating.
We spoke about her childhood, her rape, her self medication, her anger. I told him she needs help. From the bottom of my heart, even if this marriage ends, watch her closely because she needs help.
He knows there is nothing that we can do, but to pray and put it in gods hands. God is the only one who can help my stbxw and she has forsaken him. She is searching for happiness and she will always be searching because she never will truly be happy.
I was asked if there is anything that could change in order for us to reconcile.
I said if she accepted god in her life and went to therapy I would try. I said try though, there is nothing I can guarantee. I do not have any hope for R, but I do have a little hope for her now. God I wish I could help her.
She turned over a leaf. Even though it was a small one, but she might just see a problem in herself and that is the first step.
Traggy, what you witnessed is called "moments of clarity." Unlike narcissists, BPDers are so unstable that they generally have a vague awareness that the self image they project is fake. They know that something is wrong even though they rarely have the self awareness and ego strength to be willing to admit it and suffer the painful shame they feel.
They nonetheless will occasionally get moments of clarity where you can actually sit down with them and they will calmly admit to a whole list of faults. With my exW, for example, that happened maybe 5 or 6 times in 15 years. Typically, it doesn't last long and, no matter what they agree to during that brief period, they nearly always will disavow it later.
Of course, I hope this is not the case with your W. I just don't want you to get your hopes up too much, Traggy. Even if she does agree to stay in therapy to prevent you from leaving, it will be very difficult to determine whether she is making any real progress. Unstable people are always greatly improving every three weeks in the same way that smokers are always quitting.
This is so overwhelming. I am her husband and even though I have literally been beaten down I feel a great urge to save this marriage and save her and I know that these feelings are nothing more than a case of denial.
She has to be the one to change, I can not do this. All I can do is focus on my daughter, my faith, and myself. It is all I have left.
I have to let her go, but I just feel like I am giving up on her.
I have to let her go, but I just feel like I am giving up on her. How did you deal with that?
Traggy, like you, the first thing I did after stumbling upon BPD information was to read everything I could find for several weeks. That helped a LOT, so I am encouraging you to do the same. Acquiring an intellectual understanding of what happened, however, is the EASY part.
What is much harder is convincing your "inner child" that your new-found knowledge is true. Because I had been in a 15 year relationship, it took me at least a year (and perhaps two) to bring my child's feelings into alignment with my adult's understanding. After just two weeks of intense reading on the Internet, I had a pretty good understanding of what I needed to do to get out of the toxic relationship and why I needed to do it.
Yet, because my child was over a year behind my adult, the child sabotaged my every effort to break away. It hindered me with nagging doubts, terrible guilt, and a strong feeling of obligation. It kept telling me that the theory floating around in the adult part of my mind was an insufficient basis on which to wholly abandon a loved one. Even after I had left her, I still refused to go No Contact for eight more months, at which point I finally realized she is incapable of ever being my friend.
My adult dragged my child -- with him kicking and screaming every inch of the way -- to that shocking truth. How do you accomplish that? How do you teach a child -- who had felt for forty years she was my best friend -- that she never had that capability?
To bring the child and adult into alignment, what helped me a little was talking about my new found knowledge to anyone who would listen. Well, that was good for a week. Then their eyes glazed over. So what helped the most was coming to forums like TAM and BPDfamily, where I could discuss it with people who had been there, done that. Significantly, that helped my mind to associate feelings with each of the intellectual thoughts. That has to be done because the child learns from emotional experiences -- not from logic.
Writing and talking will help you internalize the information, turning knowledge into wisdom -- by connecting thoughts to feelings. If you doubt that, simply ask any university professor about its effectiveness. They will quickly tell you they never had an intuitive, deep-level understanding of their subject matter until they had to teach it to someone else -- or had to write it down very precisely when doing research. Hence, what I found most helpful, Traggy, is talking about it to anyone who listens and writing about it to anyone who writes back.
For all human beings, it seems true that the inner child makes at least 90% (if not 95%) of the important decisions. I was 50 years old before I understood that simple notion. And it took me 12 years to do it.
What happened was that, for 12 years, I took my bipolar foster son to a weekly family group meeting with the psychologist who was treating him. Whenever the psychologist challenged me on something, I always had an elaborate well-thought-out explanation for doing whatever I had chosen to do. Never mind that what I had chosen was not working with my foster son and never mind that I kept repeating the same pattern year after year.
The psychologist was always greatly amused by my explanations. He would laugh and point out, in his kindly fashion, that my elaborate rationalizations could not disguise the fact that my inner child -- not my adult -- was calling all the shots, making nearly all the decisions. In any contest between the adult and child, he claimed, the child would almost always win. But I just could not swallow that concept.
Yet, after twelve years of his gentle rebukes, it dawned on me one night -- right as I was about to drift into sleep -- why he had to be right. My inner child, I suddenly realized, is the sole judge of what is fun and what is not fun. That decision is all powerful. The adult part of my mind will nearly always conclude that it makes no sense -- indeed, would be preposterous -- to do something, go somewhere, or date someone I do not enjoy. My adult logic thus nearly always has to end up in the lap of my inner child.
This is why, as I noted above, learning about my exW's problem (BPD) and my problem (codependency) is the easy part. What is difficult is internalizing that understanding, i.e., transforming knowledge into wisdom, which requires that my feelings catch up with my intellectual thoughts.
Simply stated, I must persuade my child that my adult views of my ex's illness and my own codependency are correct -- an objective I mostly attained after working on it for over a year. Had I failed in that effort, I would have remained stuck in a destructive pattern, repeating my past mistakes over and over, because my child will be calling nearly all the shots.
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