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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.

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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.

Understand the age gap fully @Smc

We are seeing this with our S1 with an ever increasing gap.

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.

Some positive news today.

Met with the school S3 will be attending next year and guidance officer was able to explain in a far more positive light the cognitive assessment that has been creating some anxiety.

New plan is for a supported enrolment in a main stream class but closely monitored to ensure he does not sink. And they take seriously our previous trauma with S1 in this regard.

While darling is quite anxious about enrolment in a main stream class teaching staff we met with today were very understanding and reassuring.

I am feeling much happier with this approach.

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.

Feeling pretty ordinary tonight, made it to dinner time and realised that all I have had to eat or drink all day is 2 cups of coffee. Silly Boy.

We had another meeting with school and S3 teacher for next year today at an enrolment interview (Different staff to last meeting). While we still have concerns with how he is going to cope we are both feeling reassured that the school will monitor things and provide support where necessary. At face value they seem to genuinely care about our concerns.

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.

Can you set phone reminders/ alarms to remind yourself to stop for some sustenance @Determined

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.

May have to @Former-Member

Have been working from home since start of covid so having morning tea and lunch with darling but had to go back ro on-site yesterday as home net connection is on the blink and too unreliable.

Combination of that and back to back calls keeping me busy.

K8nd of how I was pre burnout. 1 meal a day after 7pm due being engrossed in work. Don't need to go back ro that.

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.

Work is winding up over the next couple of weeks for usual Christmas break so won't be so much of a problem then. Well won't be able to use work as an excuse anyway lol.

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.

Feeling deflated tonight.

Age appropriate discussion with S1 about life and expectations of an adult (prompted by an email from teacher about school behaviour) resulted in a response of 'Too hard. May as well just end it'

There is an element of trying to upset me as he knows how sensitive to such things. But I believe there is an underlying anxiety about life post school 😣

Gently clarified what he meant and the response was clear.

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.

This is on the back of darling disclosing that she is not coping and randomly asking how we all survived when she was away. Was too scared to enquire what prompted that question. Just told her we survived. Unsure if she is contemplating another hospital stay... or worse... or just generally interested. Also don't know if I should follow this up with an enquiry about wellbeing and if there is any need for concern, or anything I need to be doing differently to help.

Prompted some difficult memories and regrets how I feel I could have been there more for our older boys rather than them spending so much time with grand parents while I was travelling to visit darling.

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

Perhaps check in with your counselor.

I do recall somewhere along the line that saying everything is good or praising progress with BPD can be counter productive.

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.

Were you affected by the recent rains @Determined

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