Are You Dating Someone With Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)?

First, you need to be able to recognize the signs that the person you are dating has BPD. Extreme highs and lows are the hallmark of a relationship with someone who has BPD. Initially, your BPD partner will place you on a pedestal until you come to believe you are as special as you are being told you are. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, your partner will become aloof, emotionally and perhaps physically abusive, and then leave you feeling discarded. You will be blindsided by and baffled by your partner’s willingness to destroy the relationship you nurtured and enjoyed, as well as the indifference and callousness with which your relationship is dismantled.

Although you may even wish to piece together the smoldering embers of the relationship that is now seemingly broken beyond repair, the healthiest thing to do would be to let it be. If you are emotionally attached to your BPD partner you will need to learn some survival tools in order to pick up the shattered pieces of yourself and put the wreckage of this trauma in the past. Moving on is the hardest and most necessary thing you can do. You need to conscientiously force yourself to forge a new resolve and disengage from unhealthy relational dynamics before it gets worse. It almost always gets worse, and most certainly gets worse without any intervention.

Partners who have BPD know how to get into your head in a way that can make you feel invigorated and renewed. The way this person can hang on to your every word and make you feel special, validated and understood causes you to let down your guard and emotionally connect in powerful ways. Such a person can tap a wellspring of powerful feelings you never knew you had until they surged alive as a result of the alchemy created between you two. You must move past the way his or her admiring eyes hung onto your every move in ways that enlivened you and made you feel rejuvenated. Your partner’s neediness and insecurities made you feel inspired, heroic, valuable and irreplaceable. Still, it is not a good idea to tolerate unacceptable behavior. If your BPD partner entered your life when you were most receptive to the powerful drug his or her idealization provided you, your own sense of reality may have become distorted in the process. You may experience rumination, confusion and powerlessness in the aftermath of the loss of such an intense yet traumatic relationship.

 Part of the confusion may be your belief that your partner with BPD was experiencing the relationship the same way you were—this is likely not the case at all. Feelings of depression and heart-palpitating anxiety won’t lessen the harshness of this uneasy situation you find yourself catapulted into. The person you thought you would spend the rest of your life with is now suddenly an unavailable stranger to you.

When your partner suffers from a major mental disorder such as BPD you would find it helpful to realize you both were never really on the same page at all. Your partner is a master-manipulator who is chameleon-like and you just didn’t stand a chance at real happiness of the lasting variety. Unbeknownst to you, your partner’s underlying traits of BPD caused him or her shame, fear, disappointment, resentment, and anger. The entire time you were in a relationship these powerful feelings seethed just below the surface for your partner who finally could no longer contain them. The eruption of these feelings ran deep into the core of your partner’s being and were inescapable—ultimately you saw this when they broke through the calm (read: detached) surface and spewed molten lava havoc throughout your own relational landscape.

Although entirely too tempting to recall the periods during your relationship when your partner expressed vulnerability, openness, and candor which makes his or her complaint’s seem credible in part---his or her BPD causes the distortion of facts, and details and preys on your vulnerabilities and insecurities until you believe the wild fabrications and begin to become distrusting of your own intuition and gut reactions. Your partner’s complex defense mechanisms and masterfully developed ability to deny blame and highlight your inadequacies can cause you to believe you are deserving of such punishing abuse. You are not deserving of such treatment.

Next Blog: How to Make a Clean Break from A partner with BPD.