Hello, My Wife was diagnosed BPD

Hello Everyone,

I think I'm posting in the right place.

Anyways, I'm glad I found this! The clinical psychologist I’ve been seeing over the last 3 months referred me to this site awhile back. However, I've just decided to post now.

My name is Dylan. I'm a 37-year-old male, Canadian citizen living here in the Chicagoland suburbs! I've had been living here since 2001, working for an engineering firm ...Up until I met her in January of 2005.

Like many of the other posts, my story is all too familiar. I was dating on and off over the years. I was always a relatively healthy, happy and outgoing person. I had a great job and wanted to try my luck at finding a great partner, settle down, purchase a home, and perhaps have a child one day.

I met her through a dating website. She was polite, attractive, and soft spoken yet opinionated, charming and well educated. She was finishing her Masters degree in Elementary education at the time and ready to start her own professional career. I liked what I heard, I liked what I saw.

A small plus was also the fact that she lived a mile away from me, as I had been throughout the Chicagoland area on all kinds of dates in the previous 3-4 years. We hit it off instantly...It seemed we had a lot in common. We both had Jewish mothers and Christian fathers, we both loved Jazz and the Food Network, and when she came over to my place for the first time and saw the Alphonse Mucha print hanging on my wall- she flipped out because she had the same print hanging in her room- not a print you see everyday.

Was it fate? I thought so at the time, but now I would actually prefer to use the word FATAL.

Hi, dylski71! What happened with your wife? You can talk here.

Well Jasmin,

I have quite a bit to say. It's somewhat of a long story but I feel by posting, I may feel better about the way things turned out.

So, we bonded quickly, she spent almost every day of the first 3 months at my place. We enjoyed long conversations, dinners (she loved the fact I cooked, but she could not) and movies, until I asked her to move in. Long story short, I proposed to her in May and we were married in October of 2005.

Not too many arguments those first 10 months. In fact, it was the only time she was genuinely nice (opportunistic manipulation I think, the idealization phase in full force). The Hooks were in very deep, very quickly. I felt on top of the world, proud and confident. My ego was being stroked even more that my johnson.

But after the last 3 years of hell, I finally started to realize that there were signs during our courtship that were unhealthy, and I didn't think to much of them when they occurred. I didn't know anything about setting healthy boundaries for myself, and I certainly didn't know anything about BPD.

To be honest, I had a different idea of what mental illness was supposed to be. I foolishly and stereotypically thought a mentally ill person was one of those people walking around on the street, dribbling, talking back to the voices going off in their heads. Naive I was. Never again will I stereotype a personality disorder/mental ilness.

These early red flags and signs I mentioned included:

1.) Frantically receiving a call at my workplace, asking me if I was going to leave her just three weeks after we'd met. Apparently, she checked the dating website and saw my profile still active. She was the first and only woman I met through that site, and I had only paid a 1 month membership. It was going to expire within the week. I simply had to convince her that I just never went back to the website and my membership would expire on its own. But I gave into her demands and cancelled the remaining week of membership online, removing my profile to make her feel "secure".

2.) She told me that I had a very outgoing personality the first time I met a couple she knew, but that I tended to dominate conversation. Her friends were asking me all kinds of questions, and I simply answered them. She was hostile about it. I asked her to explain why she felt this way, but I couldn't get a straight answer out of her. The truth is, I was having a rather mild conversation with her girlfriend's husband in a separate room in their house. Otherwise, I kept fairly quiet and minded my manners. That situation confused me.

3.) When I discussed marriage with her the first time, she was insistent on getting a ring with at least one carat, just like "all of her best friends had". Very few of those "best friends" remain, and they see her once every few months for polite chitchat and superficial conversation. She maintains a few long-standing relationships with those whom she sees the least or on a somewhat controlled basis where she initiates the plans at her own convenience.

4.) I was outgoing and always fared well with communicating with others. She insisted I had listening problems and that would have to change...Eventually; over the course of our whirlwind marriage- I stopped saying anything.

5.) She mentioned that ALL of her relationships were with horrible men and she had to end things abruptly because she didn’t put up with nonsense. Comments like “all men are the same”, or “you know how men are?”...Except for me at the time. I was still being idealized as her personal messiah, and I have to say- I both wanted and enjoyed the adoration. However, I often would get into small arguments about the fact that not all men are the same, and not all women are the same...Everybody is unique and complex in their own way.

I never actually met her family for the first 2-3 months, although I asked her if and when I could. She told me that it wasn’t the right time because her younger sister had just moved back in after a 3 month long marriage with a coke addicted, porn addicted loser whom she was with for 7 years prior to marriage. The funny thing is it was my wife that had introduced her sister to this guy years before. My wife simply said she did not want to make her sister feel bad and depressed with me coming around, especially because my wife was on cloud nine with our relationship.

I'll try to post more later, or tomorrow. Thanks for letting me vent and get this all out of my system.

When I did visit her family for the first time, it was fairly nice. Her mother was very welcoming. My wife had told me that her father wasn't the most social guy I’d meet though.

He had a violent and turbulent temper as a young man (picture a Chicago version of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas), but he was sixty-five years old now, and his testosterone levels had long since diminished. Her father, it turns out lost his younger brother at an early age (died on a basketball court during a high school game). Afterwards, he suffered depression and a breakdown, and stopped talking to his remaining two brothers (even to this day). He spent almost two years in a mental health institution. I also found out that my father-in-law couldn’t stand his own in-laws, either. He almost threw his father-in-law out of a window.

My wife told me her parents fought violently when she was a young child. Neighbors had made anonymous calls to the police to drive by and check things out. Also, my wife also had to get in-between her parents as a young girl in order to protect her mother. Mother left the house twice as a result.

As a young girl, my wife witnessed her father stop the car on several occasions, get a bat out of his trunk and proceed to pick a fight with whomever cut him off in traffic or wasn’t driving fast enough, etc…This is how the guy dealt with day-to day life.

Mother-in-law, as it turns out, wasn’t a perfect picture either, although I thought she was in the beginning. I had no idea about the BPD mother and child relationship. Her mother had been teaching in CPS for 30 years. She was professional, with that “I got it all together” appearance, more a Borderline Queen that a Borderline Witch.

My wife told me she never would have a great relationship with her mother, even today. She told me her mother constantly belittled and scorned her as a child, and was incredibly controlling (my wife didn’t know how to boil water when I met her because she said her mother would always kick her out of the kitchen when she wanted to help).

My wife was never breast fed as a child (her mother didn’t believe in weaning, she was part of that early 1980’s working woman, feminist movement (or what I would actually call Anti-feminist movement). My wife told me her mother was NOT EMOTIONAL AT ALL and if she was, she kept it hidden from her girls.

My wife was never complimented; she wasn’t allowed to get in her mother's way, and was always told that she wasn’t creative and wouldn’t amount to much.

More to come…I’ll eventually get to my wife and describe the raging, splitting, dysphoria, impulsive behaviors, abandonment and control issues…

Thanks for reading up to this point.

We started going to her parents for Sunday night dinners. However, the swearing around the table was unbelievable (between my FIL his two daughters). I didn’t exactly appreciate it, and neither did her mother. She always would scold everyone for swearing, but they ignored her and thought it was funny. It was the normal form of discourse.

In May of 2005, I went to visit my sister Alexis, a psych nurse practitioner in Seattle. I'd also planned to travel to Vancouver to visit friends and family, and to renew my last TN Visa. After marriage in the coming month of October, my new wife and I would be filing to adjust my status to permanent US residency, otherwise known as the Green Card.

Up to this point my sister was single, and looking for someone too…She was happy for me, but I think she was lonely. She’d always call me twice a week in Chicago (I’m close with my family that way) and my wife, very subtly, started making comments early on like “Wow, she really calls all the time doesn’t she?” and “Doesn’t she have any friends?”, and “What’s up with the constant phone calls? Doesn’t she know were getting married?”

I tried explaining to my wife to be that my sister had recently dated a string of schmucks and she'd also just been diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis; she needed some support, and she is after all, family.

I proceeded with my visit and received non-stop phone calls while I was away. I hadn’t even put an engagement ring on my soon to be wife's finger yet (needed one more paycheck to purchase), when she'd told me she'd already bought her wedding dress…Well, her mother’s credit card purchased the wedding dress.

She'd also booked 6 venues for appointments, found a photographer and a florist, and was now working on wedding invitations. Over the phone, she'd stop mid-sentence and yell something horrible at her sister across the hall. They'd been fighting all week, but I stayed out of it. She was also at staying at my place too. I'd given her a set of keys to get in, feed my cat Cyrus, and stay there if she wanted to.

When I returned home from Seattle, she was there waiting anxiously.She told me she had a surprise; It was a large bag of weed. Months before, we'd discussed the subject. I never had a problem with it now and then, once in a blue moon. After all, it’s pretty well de-criminalized in Canada. But for me, that amount was enough to supply someone for a whole year.

What I didn’t know is that it was only enough to last her for a week. A well-kept little secret had emerged. She told me she’s actually been smoking it for 14 years straight, and she was 28 at the time. Suddenly I didn’t feel comfortable having it around because I was a foreigner in this country, we hadn’t been married yet, and we hadn’t file for my green card with the US Gov’t yet.

I couldn’t be caught with that stuff, and I’ll repeat…Once in a blue moon, fine. But everyday? No way. She told me that she would finish the bag off and that would be that, especially since she had student teaching approaching prior to her graduation, and because we were getting married and a child would come a few years after that. She was planning on giving it up for good, and I believed her.

Her student teaching experience was dismal. This now, in retrospect, was my first sign of other patterns that would emerge. She complained everyday while she did it. The teacher she'd been assigned to for 8 short weeks was out to get her.

She hated the kids, she vilified other staff members, and she wasn’t getting the professional training she needed with this “group of incompetents”. Her back started to hurt; she didn’t want to get of bed in the mornings. I think they were psychosomatic induced illnesses now that I know what I know.

I agreed with her “persuasive blaming” and started to placate. I figured she just got a raw deal, and I told her that the next go around as a full-time teacher would be much better. I'd be there for her. Her student teaching evaluation yielded unsatisfactory results, but as we all know, none of it was her fault - it was everyone else's naturally. This cycle would repeat itself again and again.

Hey! It sounds like weird behavior or mental illness runs in her family... Don't give her a lot of control over you, because you might have a really hard time getting it back. How are things now? Are you making progress? It's ok, vent away, it's good to get things off your chest.
Figuring out what she's doing and how she's acting can be a good way to start to set healthy boundaries.

The wedding approached, everything was in place. As she was only working a few hours a week for her dads’ cleaning business….my credit cards and checking account were getting a healthy workout with down payments and other little details. My parents paid for the rehearsal dinner and about 20 % of the actual wedding. Her parents paid for the other 80%.

We were having a Jewish wedding so months prior to the actual event, we met as a couple with the Rabbi she found. A very nice guy from Mississippi recently transplanted to Chicago. He would meet with us once a month to discuss the ceremony, research who we were as individuals, and discuss our commonalities and our differences in terms of how they play into our future union as a couple joining together in marriage. My wife had several panic attacks just before these meetings. At one point, she burst into tears at one of our meetings with the Rabbi and said she was scared I would leave her one day. He calmed her down and mentioned that it’s quite common for fear and anxiety to set in as the wedding approaches. I was dumbfounded and not quite sure where this emotional volcanic burst was coming from. She calmed down; I grabbed her hand and told her that I wasn’t going anywhere. I mean, we weren’t even married yet.

I forgot to mention earlier, we visited my parents and my younger sister in Winnipeg, Manitoba in June of 2005 so she could meet them for the first time. She was sweet, loving and affectionate with both of them right off the bat. She hit it off with my younger sister, who happened to have some weed at her disposal. She met my grandmother (also a borderline that did irreparable damage to mother her whole life, until she passed away this past May). My wife’s bond with my grandmother would be the only one that would last throughout the course of our marriage. She met my aunt and uncle. She thought everyone was just peachy…. Unfortunately, this attitude would not last long, but I’ll get back to this later.

My family and friends arrive in town for the wedding. At this point I would like to bring up my best friend (and best man Saul). Saul was a true lifelong friend, still is, and always will be. He is a good looking, charming and intelligent guy, who had a tremendous and turbulent family history. We grew up together. His family included his father, mother, a twin sister, and two sisters and a brother from his fathers’ previous marriage. Follow me here.

Saul’s father passed away from Alzheimer’s when he was 15. His mother was Borderline. His brother was institutionalized as a young man and still is at the age of 50+. His twin sister, just a beautiful girl when I first met him, was diagnosed Schizophrenic in high school, made several suicide attempts and was institutionalized shortly thereafter. Saul went for an architecture degree after high school. I went for a masters’ in History and Theater. We didn’t see each other for a few years there. When his mother passed away in 2002, she left everything to her eldest stepdaughter and shut the others out in the will without explanation. The sister she left everything to cut off contact with the family after that, sold the house and anything else she could and deprived the others of anything, even a family picture.

Since that time, I went back to school for an engineering degree and bumped into Saul just before all this happened. He had finished traveling through Africa, Rome, Greece and parts of Europe, and he had just returned. He got into medical school at the same time I went into engineering. Our friendship was rekindled immediately. Saul, after all the trials, tribulations and family history is now a Psychopathologist and is now in Montreal pursuing a second residency for Neuropathology.

Saul arrives in Chicago the night before my wedding and meets my wife to be for the first time. After the wedding weekend is over, my wife’s very first character assassination and distortion campaign starts to take shape.

The wedding was set for Sunday. Saturday night was for the rehearsal dinner with friends and family. Friday night was supposed to be an evening spent with Saul and my wife. Saul arrived at the airport on Friday afternoon. We spent the afternoon talking and went for lunch. The plan was to spend Friday night together with my wife, so they could get to know each other a bit. Saul also told me his fiancé, who couldn’t make it in town for the actual wedding, would in fact, be flying in the day after to spend a day or two in the city and so that she could also meet my wife. Saul also needed some time to complete his best man speech. He put a lot of work into it.

When my wife arrived at home on Friday night at about 6:30, she was excited and in a pretty good mood for about a half an hour. She was however, in no mood to actually sit around and engage in any conversation lasting more that 5 minutes, even though we had nothing to do that night. I felt negative energy from her, perhaps because I was catching up with my old friend and NOT HER. She told me she wanted me to catch up with him and not be in the way, but she was clearly annoyed. She pulled out the weed pipe, smoked a bit, and went to the bedroom around 8pm to watch TV. This wasn’t what I expected from her meeting my best friend for the first time. Saul later told me that he thought that was strange behavior. After all, if it had been her friend I was meeting for the first time, it would have been an all night affair, with no options of getting out of it (not that I would do that to her anyways).

Saturday, we all woke up early. The plan was set. Alana was off to the spa all day with her friends. She also penciled me in for a manicure and an eyebrow waxing- that seemed to be really important to her because she would joke that I looked like a hairy Tasmanian devil (another subtle putdown I laughed off at the time). Saul and I would visit my family afterwards. They were staying in a hotel close to where I lived. Afterwards, Saul and I were to take care of some errands before the rehearsal dinner that evening.

Dylan (i.e., Dylski), welcome to the BPD forum. I am so glad you found us. I have been away from my home for a few days so I am only now able to read your five posts. As you say at the beginning, it is a storty that most of us Nons can identify with. Your wife's jealous reactions to your best friend and (ultimately) to your relatives is exactly what I experienced.

Indeed, I have a foster son whom I've been taking care of for thirty years (he is bipolar) and my BPDexW hated him from the beginning -- not because he was bipolar but because I spent time with him. So I know where you are headed in your story. Just the same, I am looking forward to your next installment of what happens on the day of the marriage or shortly thereafter. You have my rapt attention.

Ultimately, I will be very interested in knowing how you ever got a clinical diagnosis of her being BPD, if in fact you did. I mention that because I took my ex to six different therapists over 15 years and never heard "BPD" once -- instead being told it was a "thought disorder" or "PTSD." The problem seemed to be that some therapists did not see through her acting and others saw it but used a different term because insurance companies won't cover BPD.

Hi. I'm finding this place to be unfriendly to borderlines, but I did want to chime in here.

Could it be that her daily weed use was contributing to her insanity?

Downtown DC, perhaps your wife is NOT borderline. Maybe she has other problems that made her the way she is. If six therapists did not diagnose her...why not???

Also, at least in the US, if you look up the LATEST stuff on bpd, there is, like most mental illnesses, thought now to be a strong genetic factor. That's probably why many who are diagnosed with borderline (and many ex's here have not had that diagnosis), have dysfunctional families. Mental illnesses run in families. Borderline is being inspected closely now and what was once thought about it is changing. It is actually a mood dysregulation disorder along with impulsivity disorder, and you can have a little bit of borderline or be very, very sick with it. BUT...it is treatable. And it is not necessarily caused by dysfunctional parenting, or, at the very least, this once assumed fact is now up for serious discussion. There was nothing in my family that would have made me a borderline. Nobody hit me. I was never sexually abused, put into foster care, or told I was dirt. My parents did NOT have a great marriage, but how many parents do? Both have their own problems, so it makes sense that I possibly inherited some of their weaknesses. Also, and this is a big one, I was like this from the time I was very young. Difficult baby, hard to quiet, phobic and demanding toddler who raged, etc.

Trying to figure out "why" is pointless imo since even professionals don't know yet. Just be happy you are no longer in the relationship, and make sure you get into therapy yourself so that you never become attracted to a person who can't give you what you need again (we are creatures of habit).

I'm sorry you had a bad time, and I hope venting helped, but if you are trying to figure out where it all began, the only true answer is, who knows??? Have a good evening and focus on the life before you, not behind you. Learn from it. When you have bpd, like me, you learn every day and I think it's good advice for everyone to concentrate on how things will be different and better in the future

Downtown DC, perhaps your wife is NOT borderline. Maybe she has other problems that made her the way she is. If six therapists did not diagnose her...why not???

Pam (Alphabet), my ex was sexually abused by her sociopath father for many years until she got old enough to be able to fight him off. Then he started beathing her pretty regularly. He also molested the two sisters. And her mother stood by and let it happen.

When I finally came across the classic books on BPD, they read like the story of her life because she strongly exhibits all nine BPD traits. As to the therapists, my ex refused to go back to them if they started to catch onto her lies. She did stay with one for five years and that woman refused to give a diagnosis beyond "thought disorder," claiming that she did not believe in using lables. I have written several times on this forum explaining why a diagnosis is not likely to be coming forth from them to the spouse -- the main one being the refusal of most insurance companies to cover BPD because they consider it "untreatable," even though that is not true.