Caring for a wife with Borderline Personality Disorder- Sequel to Diary of wife’s hospital stay - holding it together for our family.

I love you, but I can’t help hurting you. Why? What are the inner mechanisms behind such an irrational behaviour?

1. We’re angry and frustrated with ourselves. By trying to hurt them, we try in fact to hurt ourselves. We think we don’t deserve anything good, so we aim at the good things we have in life and unconsciously try to destroy them.
2. We expect too much from them. We nurture the secret hope that they can help us, that they can do all the things we are not capable of doing; moreover, that they have to do them, because of the love we invest in them. When they don’t, we feel disappointed and the natural instinct is to make them regret.
3. They are the ones who have the courage to be honest and tell us the truth, even when it hurts. And even though we know it is the truth, it still hurts and the pain can cause violent reactions.
4. Yes, we love them dearly but there are things about them that annoy us terribly and we know we’re never going to be able to change them. It’s like living with our own body. Sometimes it is a blessing, other times a nuisance. Sometimes it gives us a lot of satisfaction, other times it drives us mad, but there is not much we can do about it cause it’s ours.
5. We feel misunderstood. We wish they could make a journey inside our head and see things the way we see them, just because we think it is the right way. We simply can’t understand why they think differently and how they can miss something that seems so simple and obvious to us.
6. We misunderstand them because we’re not always willing to try to understand them. When we feel tired and tormented, burdened with our own faults and deficiencies, we find it difficult to deal with theirs.
7. We are influenced by what we see and hear on TV. Violence, melodramatic scenes, pain and suffering, self-destruction – they all can leave marks in our subconscious and develop patterns that make us think and react in a certain way. Sometimes we are tempted to do what our favorite soap opera character would do, even if that means hurting the one we love.
8. We love them but in the same time we hate them because they know our weaknesses and there’s no way we can hide. The mask we wear in relation with other people is put aside and all the things we usually try to hide come to the surface.
9. We hurt them to give them comfort later. We all have the inner need to cuddle, to protect the ones we love and we feel we have the right to hurt them for the very reason that we love them so much and we’ll make up for it later.
10. We trust them and we know deep in our hearts that, no matter what we do, they won’t stop loving us. We feel safe to take our frustrations on them because we think there will be no consequences. We hurt them most of the times because they let us hurt them.