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

Wow that's a lot of moving @NRG

For us this will be the first time in 18 years. In fact it will be a week over 18 years when we move mid September (provided this place sells)... 🙂

And you too @NRG

This is such a wonderfully supportive space.

Do you care for/ support your wife?

I saw you speak of boundaries in an earlier post. I was interested to talk more on that.
I recently decided that I would not accept disrepectful comments from my wife and would leave the room if it occurred, as an example.

This is something I have found really difficult to do @NRG... the boundaries. It was only with the support of a councillor that I was able to get a start. And that was after 18 years of pandering to emotional blackmail (and I don't say that to be disrespectful to my wife). I have found that consistent response has been effective.

How long have you been married?

4 years married. No counselling - only books, you tube and prayer.

The councillor I was seeing actually classified the way I was being treated as domestic violence (although other than an incident a couple of weeks ago there has not been any physical violence towards me... only property)

She actually showed me a chart of the emotional cycle of a DVD victim. It was a bit confronting and was the catalyst for implementing the boundaries.

Not sure if it is in this or the previous thread (link on page 1) but I introduced the boundaries before she was discharged from hospital knowing that if she lost it I could leave knowing she was in a safe space.

My wife is very controlling and does not trust. Makes it hard to breakaway from codependency, but have been making some inroads of late. Like you, I'm determined to help myself so I can help my 'darling'.

Prayer is definitely something that has sustained me through some pretty dark days @NRG. Councilling is something I wish I had followed through on much earlier.

The first councillor I saw told me to leave my marriage children and job.and all would be good in my world... I walked out and refused councilling until after a complete burnout.

I would highly reccomend it and if at first you don't succeed try and try again.

I also now have the support of a fantastic pastor after finally opening up after my darling had a string of suicide attempts and landed in a mental health ward. It was freeing actually admitting things were not ok.

I soldier on @NRG because my darling is totally worth it. It is an illness and not a personality deficiency. When it seems it is all to hard I just remember that I made a commitment 'for better or worse. In sickness and in health'

And we have 3 beautiful little boys that need a mum and a dad.

I mostly go to my bible and prayer if my wife is continually abusive but recently I escaped verbal abuse to a (remaining) friends place, but when I left after only 2 hours, there was a message on my phone from police saying that they were at my place and taking my wife to hospital. What happened from there was shameful, in relation to hospital staff actions.