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Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

This thread is a follow on (or starting over) from my previous thread Caring for a wife with borderline personality disorder – sequel to diary of wife's hospital stay, I wanted to start over and in order to leave all the trauma and negativity of last year behind me and start fresh.

Those of you who have been following our family journey will know that after a number of hospital admissions for my darling I was encouraged by my councillor to implement some boundaries (lovingly implemented guidelines, not rules to be enforced) as well as self-care for myself as what we were doing was clearly not working and my health was /still is being affected.

Well after a smoother than expected start the boundaries and self-care were forgotten with my darling having a complete melt down and further lengthy hospital admissions due to high risk of self harm and a genuine attempt to leave us. The last 6 months particularly have been quite difficult for us all. S2 particularly had a lot of issues at school during this time and is currently seeing a councillor.

The purpose of this new thread is to again document our journey of healing, working on implemented boundaries and commitment to self care. As with the previous thread this is so that I can have a visual plan for myself with some accountability to follow through with plans in place and in the hope that it may help others in similar situations to ours. And so that I can track our progress. This was especially helpful in the last thread leading up to Christmas when I was feeling down about our current position to review what I had written and see just how far we have come.

2306 replies

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In response to: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Yes @Smc there is a positive to everything.

I am just disappointed in myself that I could not achieve that at a normal study load. Currently at 25% dropped back from.only 50% because I was not coping 🙁

Pleased though that this takes some pressure off for final assessment task.

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

@Determined, I took five years part time to complete a two year ceramics diploma. You do what you have to do, as long as you get there in the end.

Disappearing offline now- still up at the parents' place, so am using library internet. Going home tomorrow...yay.

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Safe travels for the journey home @Smc

Thinking of you and family.

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

I had an unexpected pleasent start to today.

As I was leaving for uni this morning I actually got a genuine and warm hug and kiss goodbye from my darling. And I was able to respond without being uneasy...

Hoping this is a sign that some quality time as a family over the next week may be an opportunity to reduce some barriers between us. I have someone covering my work shifts next week to allow this.

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Darling has been pushing me away for so long and I have withdrawn with enough protective self preservation barriers that Im not sure how to respond anymore 😕

At least I am aware of this so I can work on it without inadvertently blocking out any opportunities for healing.

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

And then I when I let my guard down I get the usual scowl when I say goodnight.

Will probably be in in an hour or 2 to turn on all the lights and wake me up while she gets herself organised 🙁

Oh well it was good while it lasted.

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

@Determined... I guess the warm moments are glimpses of what was, and what you hope will be again. Dropping your guard may leave you open to being hurt, but you're right, being constantly on the defensive can also mean you miss those good moments too. I know the warm moments I saw beween my parents meant a lot to me when I was growing up, and somehow they seem to be what Dad's memory has held onto in spite of the more-frequent nagging and arguments.

You and your Darling and family have so much more support than there was when we were kids (you'd remember... the only context where mental illness was discussed back then was gossip 😞 ) so I really hope you've got better prospects for making things work together. You're all in a vulnerable time after losing your MIL, but that vulnerability can also be a chance for openness. Guess I'm mostly trying to say "Don't give up, we've got your back".

And we did have a pleasant and safe trip home- thank you. 🙂

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Thank you @Smc,

My last post was probably unnecessarily narky, I was just feeling a little hurt and rejected. I had been feeling `warm and fuzzy` and had just finished contemplating how nice the start to the day was so the response at the end of the day was unexpected. More the look in darlings’ eyes than her words… hard to explain ☹

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Glad your travel home went well 😊

In response to: Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Re: Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Checking in @Determined to see how you are going.

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