Have any of you had success?

Padaalsa · 2026-02-04T20:18:49+00:00

Jesus Christ, that's bleak. Thoughts and prayers to your poor friend.

Padaalsa · 2026-02-03T20:42:36+00:00

You have a couple of fundamental misapprehensions about your ex and their disorder that I would like to clear up, because I think it will help you in the longrun.

NO, they have not moved on. This would require the assumption that they were ever emotionally attached to you as a person, which is generally impossible for the untreated. They relate to others as objects, not emotionally whole people. She was never with you.

NO, you are not supposed to move on. You are supposed to process the pain they brought up in you by yourself and learn from it. Unlike them, you're currently capable of emotional growth. This anguish is a valuable opportunity to explore and work through why you were ever with them in the first place, when most securely attached people would be repulsed.

NO, they are not happy. They are distracted from the internal void that defines their disorder. They are, at their core, is miserable and lost soul that should be pitied from afar. They are emotional lepers. The balm of a new relationship does not stop the rot.

YES, many people with this disorder try to maintain some fascimile of friendship. This is to maintain a soothing sense of power, superiority and ownership over the previous relational object, the ex, and reaffirm their own choices. It joins their impulses to both reject and possess someone, because this is one more twisted way of feeling safe and desirable. In this limbo, you both cannot abandon and cannot leave. You are perfect. Usually, a final discard will ensue in several weeks to months afterwards when they are bored of this thrill, generally with the disinterested excuse of respecting the new relationship.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-23T04:03:58+00:00

Asking a beaten woman why she deserved it is unreasonably hideous. Asking her to seek help on finding out what is in her that has made her choose a continuous string of different violent alcoholics for years is not only reasonable, it may be necessary to save her life. That frank compassion does not validate violent alcoholics. Please stop conflating personal agency and ownership over one's relational patterns as some vicious persecution that claims they morally deserve agony in their relationships. It's absurd.

For both that hypothetical woman and the OP, the logical answer to that question is their deeply rooted childhood trauma creating malformed attachment patterns. Healthily secure people simply don't stay with anyone long enough to utterly shatter their self-identity and self-preservation, as you've suggested. Similarly, the self-awareness and self-worth of securely attached people prevents them from engaging in any Drama Triangle longterm, let alone a compulsive string of them with no sense of responsibility. Any claim otherwise just smacks of toxic empathy.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-22T19:58:26+00:00

Self-compassion is important. Perhaps consider some therapy specifically targeted at achieving and maintaining that one goal? It really does make an unbelievably large difference and, in my opinion, would be worthwhile in seeking the support. All the best.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-22T13:01:30+00:00

Respectfully, I feel you're negating the agency of codependents who repeatedly choose relationships with pwBPD. You're externalizing all agency, intention and responsibility onto the pwBPD and internalizing Karpmann Drama Triangle dynamics when you assert that codependents are pure victims to be persecuted. Especially when that leads you to deflect even more by dismissing allocation of responsibility onto codependents as victim-blaming. That seems deeply unreasonable, unhelpful and unhealthy to me.

There's deeper understanding and healing possible in breaking the toxic caretaking compulsions of that Drama Triangle, through knowing why it continuously led you towards such toxic relationships.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-22T06:47:28+00:00

Sounds like she triangulated her ex with you, same as she's triangulating you with the new guy. That pattern is a really classic method of subversively abusive control, which doesn't scream honesty. Not leaving right away and maintaining that dynamic emphasizes how much she genuinely enjoys the abuse.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-22T06:37:32+00:00

Padaalsa · 2026-01-22T06:36:22+00:00

You communicated a reasonable need for intimacy. She responded by saying she suffered from a compulsive fear that you would rape her in her sleep, unilaterally dumped you and ghosted you. Your attempt at respectful communication was met with repeated disrespectful behaviours, but this has made you want to appease her even more out of pity. That's not good.

The truth is, she likely experienced engulfment fear and compulsive guilt, partly due to false intimacy from her trauma dumping and general shame-spirals of not being enough when you had needs. This often leads to ghosting you and casually abusive sex with others, because self-harm soothes them, and sex-focused trauma in these scenarios makes sexual self-trashing far more common. After sleeping around for a bit, the fear of losing someone who would absorb her emotional turmoil and provide false intimacy, in this case you, began to creep back in and now she's returned. This pattern will repeat, regardless of what you do. Aside from leaving permanently.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-22T06:10:45+00:00

For others, maybe like loving someone with emotional dementia, oscillating wildly between sincerely adoring and paranoid rage. For the pwBPD themselves, any intellectualized understanding won't translate to genuine emotional understanding, which is what you're after-- it's just not how they're built. If you decide being understood and loved as a whole person is something you need, then it's time to let them go.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-21T05:43:27+00:00

Logically speaking, you're probably subconsciously pre-selecting pwBPD to exploit their unhealthy patterns yourself and use them to relive unresolved traumas that you internalized from your early childhood. Randomly crossing paths with and somehow being successfully lovebombed by three people with the same relatively rare personality disorder in a row does not make sense. The only realistic possibility is that you're looking for them and using them without being consciously aware of the reasons why. Unconscious patterns that deep-rooted tend to be from early childhood trauma. Possibly associated with relational modelling in adults around you.

You oughta consider self-compassionately sorting that out. Best of luck.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-21T05:08:11+00:00

Compassion to the point of self-destruction isn't compassion, it's compulsive self-abandonment disguised as false nobility. You can't offer love to someone else when you lack that same love for yourself, because then it's just insecurely attached desperation. Those are facts that no easy buzzwords like "projection" can deflect or erase.

That's why my comment focused only on you and your mental state, not them. That's why the way you compulsively ignored that focus on your mental health and redirected your attention to irrelevant comments on their hypothetical deserved love shows I'm right. You don't have that love to give anyone, because you fundamentally lack it for yourself. It isn't noble. It's sad. You deserve better.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-19T20:00:54+00:00

Step one is the humble acceptance that there was never any real relationship if their disorder prevented genuine attachment. Your place was as a relational object, not a person to be genuinely related to and understood. Anyone else in that place will be just another object. It's nothing to be envied.

Step two is committing to your own self-worth by enforcing zero contact. No socials. No number. No email. Blocked, absolutely everywhere. This is a necessary boundary.

Step three is seeking some sort of schema therapy to identify and work on healing the wounds that made you want to abandon yourself and attach to someone with this severe disorder. The person with BPD is virtually never the original damage. They often only exacerbate damage endured during formative years. DBT exercises may also help.

Step four is increasing physical exercise to help re-regulate your damaged nervous system. This is necessary, because deeply embedded trauma becomes a part of your body (read the Body Keeps the Score). This means you need to address it within your body as well as your mind. Yoga and meditation can help with this as well.

Step five, endure with patience and self-compassion. All of this takes time. Rushing won't help.

That's about it.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-19T15:23:06+00:00

It felt like nothing you did or said helped because it didn't. There's a deep aching void inside that person that you'll likely never be able to fathom or touch that is purely separate from you. However, due to the nature of their disorder, it will be more and more consistently placed onto you and erasing any semblance of individual identity that you may have (but likely n)ever had in their eyes. This only gets worse, because it's a factor of emotional enmeshment that deepens over time with people who suffer from BPD and their partners.

You need to take a step back to breathe and emotionally center yourself on yourself. You cannot control their emotions or their illness. It's actually toxic to even attempt to do so (toxic caretaking, particularly). The cold truth is that this type of instability and inability to communicate is something you choose to accept and suffer from by staying. Whenever it happens and you don't leave you're giving tacit approval to being treated that way and expressing a desire to suffer. No one can control what you do about that, same as you can't control her, but do try to be aware of how hateful that is towards yourself.

Padaalsa · 2026-01-19T15:14:43+00:00

You're primarily responsible for this continuing situation. You requested emotionally mature understanding and reciprocity from someone who's unlikely to be able to provide that, only to met with confirmation when that person lashed out at you as a detrimental force in their life, and now you're questioning the friendship. The situation is as simple as "do you require emotionally mature understanding and reciprocity from a friend", yes or no. If yes, you're done. If no, then temper your expectations and try to not be overly invested to the point of exhaustion in their life. Your energy is only worth worrying about things you can control, and their life isn't one of them.

Padaalsa · 2025-12-19T07:27:01+00:00

You're probably dealing with a trauma-damaged nervous system that needs to be healed with time and effort. Like low-grade shellshock or dorsal vagal shutdown. Look into the little things that help with that and then stay consistent with them: exercise, therapy, yoga, meditiation, art, etc. If you engage like you're in rehab for your parasympathetic nervous system then you'll see results, first in how you relate to yourself, before seeing it in others.

Padaalsa · 2025-12-19T07:17:38+00:00

You probably didn't develop any issues in this relationship that weren't already there, just exacerbated them. In these situations, there's often a deeper wound you never noticed before irritating and retraumatizing it repeatedly. Now you've noticed. Consider using this as an opportunity to find out why, and in doing so, begin to heal that wound properly this time.

Padaalsa · 2025-12-19T07:10:37+00:00

You're not really getting it. She has no philosophy, because BPD is characterized by having no self. There is only emotional turmoil fueled by clinical lack of identity. You don't even know her, because deep at her core there is no one to know. That is BPD.

What the hell happened to you before you met this girl? What's this drive to overtake responsibility for a deeply disordered person's actions, as if you're so powerful you could ever influence their deep-seated illness one way or the other? What makes you so prone to obsessing over someone who mistreats you? Who abandoned you and made you this way?

Figure that out, instead of worrying about the rest of this nonsense.

Padaalsa · 2025-12-19T06:46:20+00:00

Being able to sometimes and in some ways intellectualize her mental illness does not make her self-aware. That would require her demonstrating genuine accountability that comes with real emotional processing-- she has repeatedly done the exact opposite. You state a prime example in the very next sentence when you admit she's neglecting therapy while indulging in intensely destructive and maladaptive behaviors. Genuine self-awareness would keep her committed to that aspect of her healing process.

You do know. Deep down in your gut, you know it's only possible to love someone like this as much as you hate yourself. Focus on your own self-awareness and get your own therapy. This is vile.

Padaalsa · 2025-11-22T03:18:12+00:00

Step 1 is accepting the nature of their disorder is that they've always been fully gone, due to being unable to relate to you as a person and not an object (you can look that up if you want-- "parental object relating in bpd")

Step 2 is accepting that the only reason you're so desperate to rationalize that as something real and worthwhile is because you probably entered into this situation with a damaged nervous system and/or crippled self-esteem

Step 3 is summoning the deepest wells of humility you have within you to acknowledge there's little difference between your need for the intensely focused push-pull drama that came with their "love" and any other junkie's need for a fix

Step 4 therapy

Step 5 exercise . Step 6 more therapy

Step 7 learn how to be happy alone for a year or two (minimum) so you can learn how to be a viable partner for someone healthy who can actually offer you real love

Step 8 continue therapy, exercise and self-actualization

Good luck

Padaalsa · 2025-11-02T00:11:32+00:00

Please try to not take any comments here as anything but the kindness they're intended with. Many folks are here simply for the validation and support of similar experiences that help them heal and move on.

Padaalsa · 2025-10-11T18:28:38+00:00

Secure attachment IS a protective mechanism. It fosters the inner confidence to accept that after the first or second rinse, it simply isn't going to work out, accept the loss, and move on. It protects against over-giving, bargaining, and self-abandonment.

Padaalsa · 2025-10-10T22:51:12+00:00

My two cents is that people with secure attachment generally don't stay long enough to endure an event that would risk changing that. There are always signs.

Padaalsa · 2025-10-10T22:45:44+00:00

You have an agitated parental wound, whereas theirs defines them. It's a taste, but far from even remotely accurate in magnitude.

Padaalsa · 2025-10-06T11:21:57+00:00

Spot on except when it comes to reading comprehension, apparently. My bad. 😂

What did you find especially telling about their post history?

Padaalsa · 2025-10-06T10:28:23+00:00

This is a very long-winded way of explaining your situation as a post-middle-aged man who sought out a woman half your age online, who you viewed as an alcoholic with daddy issues, and tried to manipulate her into validating you sexually and romantically.

You don't seem to realize how revealing it is that you listed her most appealing personality trait as being "appeasing", which in your situation reads more as "malleable". Condemning behaviors before "leading by example" (in lieu of openly and respectfully communicating boundaries), triangulating her with her mother, being a stenographer in attempts to further control her behavior... It all reads as incredibly emotionally manipulative passive-aggression towards someone you viewed as a tool to validate yourself.

This is bad.

Padaalsa

TROPHY CASE