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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

@Determined ,

Hearing you. I'm sorry to hear how difficult it is right now, and that your darling engaged in an attempt.

We acknowledge that carer fatigue exists. Not because a carer does not care, but because it's a real thing.

The boundaries for yourself are to ensure your darling gets the best care she needs - that is, that you are well enough to support her.

An admission will give you the respite you deserve. It is not a sign of failure or lack of care.

Use the time for yourself to recover and reset.

Please take care.

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

Hard @Determined. 😢 Glad they were able to keep her safe.
Guessing that means they'll be "upgrading" the level of supervision she'll be under?
Praying... xx

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

Dr is confident that simply being away from everything will be enough @Smc

And a very thorough bag search on arrival.

I was given a big bag of stuff I would have considered safe to take home with me.

And has regular check ins with nursing staff so not left alone for any length of time.

Recieved multiple texts this afternoon wanting to come home immediately but thankfully after seeing the Dr has agreed.to a 2 week stay..

Sounds harsh but I don't want her home before that. I don't have the capacity to deal with that at the moment.

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

Know what you mean about the bagful. The staff in these units have seen too much of people getting "imaginative" with very everyday items... we've seen our own girl resort to some very unlikely possibilities. 😕 xx

It's such a hard balance. When you're in such an un-homelike setting some personal things can make a real difference, but safety has to come first.

You're not being harsh. If you get pushed past your limits, you can't help her or anyone else. When things have been "running rough" here, we'd had hopes that a clinic admission might give us some respite and recovery time. Hope you can make this some special time to relax with your boys.

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

 

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

 

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

Both very apt @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

In confirming school pick up arrangements for S3 tomorrow I realise tomorrow will be 1 week since Darling went to hospital. This arises some conflicting emotions.

Yes things have been busy, but should I have missed her presence more 💔

Rather I have felt irrated around her wanting to come home already without engaging in available supports where she is.

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, yep. You're burnt out... emotions aren't functioning normally. And you just plain honestly need a break.

I think a lot of us deal with so much "extraordinary" level stuff day to day, and don't realise how normalised extreme things become. So things that would trigger a response in most people are so far below our usual operating threshold that they barely show a blip.

Our girl tended to be very reluctant to really participate in most of the therapy options available when she'd been in psych clinics. Mostly because she didn't like group therapy, and even the private clinics haven't got the funds to do everything one on one.


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

@Smc yep. Definatly burned out.

Break would be great but children are requiring care still. Have family help available for.that but they on a different page for how we do things and little interest in accommodation of process sooo....

One more week of work then have some time off. Expect that time to be intense with Datling home from hospital and potentially still unwell. There is talk of discharge this week despite ongoing damage and thoughts of permanent solutions.

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