loloot

hard to blame him really. This stuff usually starts to make sense when you look back on it when it bites you in the ass. And it is like you remember yourself as a different person, a stupid blind fool. And you find it hard how you missed or just overlooked all the huge red flags
yeah but it becomes her fault when she makes her problems your problem. I ***** hate people who bother other people with their mental illness. It is one thing to receive some social support, but if you invade people's life because you are unable to deal with it yourself then you better give ALOT back to make up for that. There needs to be some balance in every relationship. And that is coming from someone dealing with mental illness.
And if she then says **** like 'im just small, how much damage can i do??' that means she isnt really sorry. She should have said, 'that was completly unacceptable and I take responsibility for it and will make up for it.' And then she should have apoligized a thousand times more for it. She basicly removed her self from any responsibility by saying that. And implied it will probably happen again.

I mean this therapist/counselor might or might not be very good, but allowing a client to spill it all out in an initial session is fairly common, and a lot of therapists use minimal direct advice/recommendations.

I always highly recommend people "shop" for a therapist they are comfortable with, but expecting great things the first session is pretty lol. Remember the therapist literally knows nothing about the client at this point.

Not really sure why I'm bothering, but here's my input. Again.

Go look up lunatic - that's precisely what it is. It's not our fault you fail to see or accept that reality.

How do you know any of this is real? These people are master manipulators. She could be embellishing this stuff to the n'th degree or making all of it up. You clearly still don't get it. And regardless, plenty of people had crap that had to go through growing up - not everyone ends up clinically diagnosed with BPD.

Do you not see how wrong this is? You feel the need to hide this from her? You should be able to tell her - "listen, your mental disorder is really difficult for me to deal with. I need to talk to someone about it."

Manipulation.

This couldn't be more true, but 4 months in, I don't really think OP is at that point yet that he has been mind-f*cked enough to not leave for a long time. He isn't "stuck" yet for lack of a better way to explain it.

not trying to hijack, but when people say their gf cut them off from their friends how does this happen? Are these people removing themselves from friend circles or just going from hanging out with friends 3-7 times a week to 1-3 times? I cant say that I have ever experienced it or seen a friend go through it unless you mean the latter, but even that usually coincides with having multiple friend circles and 2 sets of family obligations to manage.

She threw a plate at your head. It doesn't matter who you want to blame, that is not normal behavior and not a relationship you should be in. Why are you trying so hard to defend her (this question is for OP, not everyone else that knows the answer)?

The therapist doesn't know you at all, so what could she offer you on the first session? This was an opportunity for her to get to know you to figure out what the problem is and what the best treatment modality would be.

As for the suicide stuff, that's just routine for the first visit. She just wanted to be sure that you're safe and not going to hurt yourself, as people that seek mental health treatment (and those that should but don't) are at increased risk of suicide. Plus, once you've seen her, she could be liable if you do hurt yourself and she didn't properly assess for your safety. So it's not that she thought you were suicidal, it's that she had to find out.

It's as if you don't actually know how therapy works yet you have strong opinions about it. Sad.

In my case my gf tend to suffer from paranoia when she get in the "down" mood and she ll think everyone dislike her or is dishonest and it become tough to see other people. One day one of my friend is such a nice guy and the next day he didnt reply to something on facebook and there s something really fishy about him.
Same with my family

OP, some people think you're missing the red flags. I'm not going to assume you're naive enough to be missing them, but I will instead say that you're choosing to ignore them.

Is there a nagging under-voice in your head that's always saying "man, I don't want to deal with this". I ignored that for the first few months that it popped into my head. I thought it would be easier to just wait it out...I mean, she was "getting better" right? At the time, I thought she was...she was getting upset less and her mood was generally more pleasant, but what was really happening was that I was getting better at watching what I said, at doing the right things at the right time, at making sure I was 100% devoted to making her happy. It wasn't about what made "us" happy. It was about what made her happy. I said to myself "Eh, I can sacrifice a little bit of exactly what I want to make sure she's happy", and at some point it wasn't just because I wanted to make her happy anymore...it was to avoid making her unhappy. I was no longer catering my my own needs. My needs had been put on the shelf. My emotional highs were literally any times I could take a sigh of relief that things just "weren't bad". I longed for a neutral state.

As things progressed, I spent more and more time and all of my waking energy planning ahead and always keeping in the forefront of my mind all the different scenarios how everyday events would pan out and how it would affect her mood. Could I go play a quick round of golf after work before I go home? Could I go have a beer with the gang? We talked about having dinner tonight, but it wasn't set in stone...no I better go home instead of studying this stuff for the test tomorrow. I don't want to piss her off.

Months turned into years, and after a certain point, I resigned myself to constantly trying to suppress that voice...that nagging voice that I never told anyone that was always there. "Man, I don't want to put up with this." And the longer I let it go, the more entrenched our lives became, and the easier it was to stop caring about my own happiness as I was just trying to avert emotional disaster.


So in my effort to avoid the few weeks of hardship of dealing with a breakup, I convinced myself that it would get better and I ended up with 5-7 years of not being happy. As I mentioned earlier, the breakup took about a year to go the way I needed it to go, taking much tongue-biting and careful little manipulations of my own to ensure no temper tantrums ****ed my financial situation (I got her to agree to pay 11 grand of the debt we ran up together which realistically she could've said "nah, I don't think so" and totally been under no legal obligation to cover). Even now I can never tell her how I really feel about the whole situation and she's under the impression that it was a mutual break-up. I've been single for almost two years now and I still constantly think about how unfair I was treated, but it was all my own fault for not having the respect for myself and knowing that I deserved better. I'll probably never get proper closure for it.


You know what I did yesterday? I slept till I woke up. I got up and showered and decided to go play poker at the local club. I stayed till close, and then I went and got Steak and Shake with a couple of the dealers at 4:30am. It's one of the most satisfying things to be able to be me again and to do the things that I want to do. If I see a girl anytime in the near future, "us" time will be scheduled around my happiness. There will be a mutual respect of personal wants and needs and space and time, and if not, well, I don't want a part of it. I wasted 5 years ignoring my own personal happiness, and I'm very bitter about it. Don't be me, dude. Listen to that voice...rip the bandaid off instead of ending up with an amputated leg.

As for how one can be isolated from friends and family, when you are out with friends and you constantly get "Come home. I miss you." texts in a variety of forms from sexual teasing or all-out guilt-trip messages, it's hard to deal with. You're already talking about someone willing to cater to the girl's brand of nonsense, so you have to take that into account. When you get home, you have to literally convince the girl that you'd rather be spending the time with her and that "sometimes I just want to hang out with my friends" doesn't mean anything more than what it means (which is exactly what she wants to hear). It's a gradual thing of course...most of the time the girl won't straight up give any sort of ultimatum. It's more just like emotional blackmail. Eventually you just stop going out. Or maybe you come home one night to find out she's cutting again. It's such a weird twisted scary thing that is hardly understandable for most people to even fathom, but for some people, it's not a hard trap to fall into....look at OP. All it takes is someone with low self-worth or some sort of "save the damsel in distress" type of guy that maybe hasn't been so lucky with the ladies (because he's not assertive or whatever).

It happens.

The exact method will vary depending upon what methods of manipulating you have met with the most success. For OP isolating him was pretty easy since he didn't seem to go out much anyway.

- Texting you when you're out
- Trying to make you feel guilty about going out
- Getting pissed about you hanging with friends to the point of it not being worth the risk so staying home is easier
- Acting sick/tired when it's a group thing (and she is invited too)
- Faking some emergency/work thing to keep you home

Just some examples - but it very gradual.

I skipped a bit of the thread, thought he had been to see her a few times already. First visit, lots of listening for sure.

But even so, yeah...be on the look out for psychologists and therapists who are just a f*cking joke...you'll be on session 6 and she'll still be on the 'head nodding' while irl your relationship is sucking the last bit of life out of your psyche.

Ah yes, this is a big one. I decided to include her and it was never a positive experience. Tugging on your sleeve early in the night "I'm not feeling well" and then you have to turn in early, often going home to do nothing at all. Sigh.



Petition to edit thread title to "BPD recovery thread"

He's not disputing that there's something wrong with her, but there's a big difference between her condition and 'lunacy'. If you finish your training I'm sure you'll be able to grasp this.
He's likely defending her because she's his girlfriend. Wild guess.

Love is blind guys. My best friend in high school and college roommate spent 9 years with a succubus of a girl. Everybody else saw how badly she was treating him and tried to get him to see reality. She didn't have BPD, but she was emotionally abusive. He spent part of high school, all of college, and three years of adulthood in an exclusive relationship with her. They were even engaged to be married around sophomore year of college. It was there that we accepted that this would happened and stopped our efforts. You can't force the blind to see.

Around our sophomore year, I had a conversation after a routine disastrous phone call.

M: You've been with this girl for a long time. I hear her screaming at you on the phone from across the room while I'm wearing headphones. Why do you stay with her?

R: If I leave her, I fear she may go insane.

M: But what do you gain out of this relationship? It just doesn't seem healthy for these kinds of calls to happen every single night.

R: It's not about what I gain. It's about what I give.

M: Giving is part of a relationship, but so is receiving. What do you get out of the relationship?

R: ...

He couldn't answer. The same reasons MS is giving for how great this girl is are the same reasons my friend gave wrt his girlfriend. He would rationalize her emotional abuse and harassment to make it sound not as bad as it really was. He feared the consequences should he break off the relationship. Would she kill herself? Would she stalk him? He stayed with her exclusively for her sake and it hurt him socially.

After 9 years, he finally broke it off with her. He never specified exactly what happened but whatever she did pissed him off. A few months after that breakup (mid-2010), he found a girlfriend who was interested in him and they got married a few months ago. Never seen him happier.

As for the girl, she's alive. Last time I spoke to her (a bit after the breakup), she had a boyfriend but if FB is to be believed, she is currently single.

Please elaborate.

BPD is insane. I grew up around it. It is considered a condition that is incurable by psychologists.

Makes people crazy and delusional. Only gets worse. I would end things before they get too serious. Things got pretty out of control growing up around it, don't recommend it, broken plates are just the start...

Yea exactly this.

My favorite one, when you push the issue a little bit, is "Oh so you care about your friends more than me?"

Eventually mine would make vague hints at hanging out with other guys if i went out, and eventually when i got tired of it and did go out, she would hang out with other guys and i'm almost certain these days she cheated.

Emotional blackmail indeed.

Starting to think this is just a pretty good trololol thread. Well played OP!

Hair dying and piercing thing is bad, bad news.

Maybe if you had some training, this wouldn't be so hard for you. Read his post again. He says, she's not a lunatic, it's not her fault how she was treated in the past. Whether or not you consider BPD lunacy is irrelevant. The thought process that 'other people mistreated her and made her who she is today and therefore she's not crazy' is what's interesting. And it's not just that she's officially his girlfriend that makes him make excuses for her. She really has him believing that she's the victim here and that her actions are understandable, and therefore excusable. I almost get the feeling that he feels guilty for what he's posted in here which isn't good.

I did have my doubts a couple of times, probably legit though. These things are always useful anyway for others in a similar situation.

The thread is full of people who have experienced the BPD end-game, and are all shouting warnings at the OP, who would appear not to be quite getting why they're shouting so much, and thus isn't adjusting accordingly. Understandable, you don't really know it til you've had it, the end-game.

in before OP's girlfriend read this thread from his browser history and makes an account.

He's making all of his decisions with her in mind. Even going to individual therapy is less about his own welfare as it is finding a way to manage her BPD so that their relationship can survive.

His desire to tend to her, provide her the love that she never received, nurture her the way that he was never nurtured, to be important and worthy enough to have someone rely on you for stability and love. It's all about her.

From another perspective though, it's all really about him. He stays with her because something about it feels good. Does he have the courage to explore that theme deeply with his therapist? Does he have enough courage and openness to see how his emotional wounds are tangled up with her and their relationship?

On a side note, very lolzy misunderstandings about therapy from vorvzakone. 6 sessions can be a lot or it can be very little, and that's more patient-dependent than it is therapist-dependent.