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

DeterminedSenior Contributor22 Jan 2018, 1:25 pm AEDT

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.

DeterminedSenior Contributor09 Apr 2018, 8:28 am AEST

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

Thanks @Former-Member- Likwise for you.

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

DeterminedSenior Contributor09 Apr 2018, 12:25 pm AEST

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

@Former-Memberafter 6 text messages and 2 phone calls thins morning indicating a rapidly deteriorating mood I have just called my darling to check in and she seems happy.

Hard not to suspect it has something to do with my being anxious to prepare for a phone meeting with a lecturer when the mood improved after that meeting. (Same as I usually get phone calls and text messages before exams and presentations)

Do you find it harder to accept some of the MI traits when things seem to be going "well" (well being a relative state).

There are some specific personality traits that I can overlook when in crisis that really bother me when things are not in crisis.

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

DeterminedSenior Contributor09 Apr 2018, 12:30 pm AEST

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

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

Unknown userMember09 Apr 2018, 1:31 pm AEST

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

Hi @Determined

I think whether well or not so well, certain traits are going to remain. I know I have to be quite patient as Mr D often does things slowly.

In my situation I found it hard to transition from caretaking - caregiving. Even though I guess in my heart I am probably still terrified he will deteriorate, I needed to realise that he needed to be loved and treated primarily as my spouse and not a patient, I did read somewhere about the importance of ensuring we treat our loved ones as equal marriage partners.

One thing I did notice in the 5 love language book which was a bit if an indictment on myself being a quality time person was that when we moved here Mr D thought he might like to get involved at a footy club, apart from the fact that he thought he could walk into a coaching job (after not playing for close to 30 years) I was a bit miffed that he had given no consideration to us as a couple and would be busy 2 nights week and at weekends whilst I was working full time to support us.

I know my love language is different to BPD but perhaps on the days you have an exam or important meeting etc, could you take your darling out for a coffee after (not as a surprise, let her know before) or before you go, give her a little gift and tell her you appreciate how she is looking after bub whilst you are at uni. This may or may not help, but could be worth a try.

Darcy

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

Unknown userMember09 Apr 2018, 1:59 pm AEST

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

PS Bro
I understand that being the strong one all the time and bearing the weight can be so overwhelming. I have found since making the effort to be patient and loving that Mr D responded positively and it has helped lighten the load.

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

SmcSenior Contributor09 Apr 2018, 2:54 pm AEST

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

@Former-Member@Determined

I think for us, one hard thing has been that our daughter hasn't been able to make the usual transition to adult independence. Every time we tried to gently push her into being more self reliant, she seemed to have some crisis that threw her back on to us for support. It is very hard trying to establish and maintain a healthy family bond when caring responsibilities are thrown into the mix.

With my Mum having problems as well, I feel a bit lost and sad when friends are talking about how much they enjoyed a day out with their mum or adult daughter. Any time out with either, for me, means being extra watchful of thier mood and state of mind, trying to unobtrusively manage things so that the outing doesn't go pear shaped. I'm guessing both of you have also experienced losing the relaxed spontaneity that would usually be normal.

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

Unknown userMember09 Apr 2018, 3:20 pm AEST

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

@Smc it is one crisis to another ... exactly as you describe except the intimate part of the relationship is also compromised, both physically and emotionally. Our partners do not understand the emotional chaos we suffer when they are unwell. I try to remember though that not all the issues we face are due to MI (but can be magnified by it) and that I am not perfect by any means.

I feel that by choosing to stay with my husband, I do so out of love and because of that am intentional in loving him, knowing that very often this is hard to do.

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

SmcSenior Contributor09 Apr 2018, 3:43 pm AEST

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

@Former-Member, sadly the "emotional chaos when they are unwell" also has a negative effect on marital intimacy. 😞 We're both stressed out and burnt out, and it's hard sometimes finding enough left over emotional energy for each other's needs. We have to make a real effort to grab "us time" when it's possible, both intimate times, and ordinary time together. So, for example, when we're doing out of town errands, we'll try to find time to stop for a cuppa together.

When things are going hard with Daughter, or after visits to my parents, I'm often too emotionally stretched thin for any intimacy that goes beyond a hug and a kiss. It's not lack of love or anything, it's just that there's too much deep emotion to deal with already. It's like the equivalent of being on a ship in a bad storm. You're totally occupied with staying afloat, and there's no chance to attend to anything else, even the things that would normally rate as being important.

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

DeterminedSenior Contributor10 Apr 2018, 12:52 pm AEST

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

Afternoon @Former-Member @Smc

Sorry about my little precious moment yesterday, I hope I didn't come across as whinging, I was more trying to put things into perspective so I could better manage how I was feeling.

I appreciate both of your input, it was helpful.

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

DeterminedSenior Contributor10 Apr 2018, 12:57 pm AEST

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

Hope things are ok for you today @Former-Member, understand you have some concerns at the moment so you remain in my thoughts.

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