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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.

Thinking of you @Shaz51

Trust your mum recovers as.quickly as possible.

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.

hey @Determined I haven't read through all 220 pages but just wanna say good on you holding the family together.

Same boat here. Up and down the last few weeks, not helped by me being floored by something nasty (every symptom BUT a positive test)

Will check in again and hope to hear from 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.

Have been trying to work out in my mind what it is that concerns me most about darling atm.

We had an almost crisis a couple of weeks where I was concerned for her safety but we are past that.

Despite we are passed that I am still silently bracing myself, on one big thing causing concern, just lots of little things.

Memories of feelings prior to a major MH crisis.

It clicked this morning while we were out riding.

The narrow focus if icd is getting more intense.

Central to that is obsession around weight and wanting to ride her bike further and faster .

Little things around the house (little things that make a big difference) that she does well and usually takes pride in are out the window and being left to accumulate.

So what is there to do but support and encourage.

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 hear you @Determined . You have been so patient.

I hear what it is like from a borderline's point of view. Emotionally, they feel so out-of-control that they do whatever they can to regain some sense of control in the environment e.g. weight, immaculate window etc.

Hope this makes sense. I've been down that path. The less control they feel they have, the more they reach out to control their environment.

Look after yourself,

tyme

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.

Thanks @tyme so accurate.

I would hate to live inside a Borderline head, it is hard enough supporting 🥺

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.

Interesting you say this, Mrs has been spending the last 2 days wondering why she has to control everything.

She arrived at the conclusion that there's a double-whammy:

1. She finds it takes less to throw things out of control; and

2. It takes more effort for her to regain control.

End result is: she has more opportunity to feel out of control; and it takes longer to get it back. A bit like heightened sensitivity for emotional dysregulation, I guess.

I do value her insights. Gotta find a positive somewhere.

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 was interested when you said in one of the other threads @tired_sisyphus that you were able to discuss things with your wife after an event and unpack emotions etc.

We can't do that here,. It would just lead.to another even bigger meltdown event.

So we just carry on and pretend nothing happened. I have so much baggage around this that I struggle to let go of 🥺

Some things need closure, sadly that is not possible.

Occasionally there is some insight and darling can tell me hoe she is feeling and we can work with that, but never during or after a melt down. Or even leading into an event once a threshold has been reached.

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.

At the moment while we are all civil and getting along it is an uneasy truce. All on darlings terms. I tried discussing something last night that is important to me and it did not go at all well so 💔

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.

The right time, the right place, the right season is crucial @Determined - but when? is the question....

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 understood where you're coming from. I've been in that space. And with certain topics I'm still in that space.

not saying I'm ahead or behind anyone, I know recovery isn't a straight line, just the way cookie crumbled I guess.

and btw, it's HER unpacking HER emotions. I have to find my own place (which I haven't).

and I don't think that's ever going to be 'closure'. It's just another piece of wisdom that hopefully gets added to the list of wisdom she can draw on (usually not in a hard moment).

hearing you too about the truce being on her terms. I don't know how that's fair. or whether 'grin and bear it' is an adaptive strategy. but that's all I can really do.
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