Dear Ed:

I took a long time this morning reading through our communication and therefore I can answer you better today than I did yesterday:  first, welcome back to your thread 3 months and 6 days since you last posted!

“I don’t know if you would be interested or okay with continuing/ restarting this conversation, but I would appreciate your input“- yes I am very interested and I am okay with restarting and continuing our conversation. I would like to read more from you and give you more of my input.

“I am also unsure about the way my desperate tries at compliments made you feel… my people-pleasing-behaviour got very bad“- do you mean that your compliments and expressed appreciation for my input were insincere?

* If they were insincere, it’s okay: I would still want to continue our conversation, but would ask you to express yourself sincerely this time around. I need your sincerity/ honesty as I extend the same to you.

“If I offended in any way or made you feel uncomfortable, I would like to apologise“- I see nothing for you to apologize for.. except perhaps insincere compliments and expressed appreciation, if this was the case.

I want to point to a few things that you shared during our long and elaborate 6-page communication: (1) Growing up, your parents’ behaviors toward you were these:  “father screaming at me for hours for not being ‘good enough’, my mother supporting this by not intervening and making me feel like he was right“,

(2) “I have been suffering from diagnosed dissociations and depersonalisation for years as part of the ptsd complex of symptoms“,

(3) “I am desperate for a judgement about my past, in the sense that i am desperate to know if I did wrong and deserved what I experienced or if I am allowed to free myself and move on“.

anita

Dear Ed:

Good to read back from you so quickly! You are welcome and yes, I still walk daily although recently I’ve been substituting some of my walks with the activity of picking apples in an apple orchard (so many apples to pick!).

“I have been and will continue to be honest and sincere with you“- and so will I. Good to read that you were sincere with me. This means that you don’t owe me any apology whatsoever! Also good to read that you attend therapy with a therapist whom you like, that you eat better,  exercise and that you are in the process of quitting smoking.

“I was just worried that I might have been too.. ‘clingy’“- interesting, I don’t remember it ever crossing my mind that you were clingy with me.

“I am now able to see things more neutral and less angry and so I’m able to understand your perspective. I also came to understand your input on abuse and abusive relationships, especially with one’s parents to a deeper degree. These would also be the 2 topics I would like to talk about“- please do!

anita

Dear Ed:

Before I invest my time and energy trying to understand what happened between you and your ex, I need to understand the following thing you wrote in your recent post: “During our first discussion, I talked about my confusion about my last relationship  and about me feeling gaslit which you strongly (and rightfully so) opposed”-

– what about my opposition was right/ true?

anita

Dear Ed:

“With the state of ‘acute’ confusion I was in the only thing I felt was anger“- we all do some of our worst thinking when we are angry, or as I like to say it, when we are under the influence of anger (and other intense feelings and states of mind). Calm is essential for productive thinking that is balanced and true to reality.

“After I now managed to get through the anger I had then, I could find the things that led me to this conclusion. This post is not asking you to decide whether or not some sort of gaslighting happened. Instead, I am asking for your opinion on the matter again“- okay.

In your yesterday’s 1st post, you shared that by the end of Sept 2021 (when you stopped attending therapy), you were “actually feeling quite well and proud of myself during and after finishing the therapy. I got a lot of positive feedback from my therapist concerning my coping behaviour and techniques and a lot of suggestions for further improvement which I wanted to take my time with understanding“.

As part of your mental health progress, you were assertive with your now-ex, making it clear to her that you weren’t “going to continue the relationship much longer due to the issues I had with her behaviour towards me (distanced, disinterested, dismissive of my feelings, telling me that my issues with the relationship were not real, etc.). She then also started saying things like that ‘nobody would be there for me/ I would be all alone if we would break up“.

It was at that point, following your healthy assertion with your now ex, that she (and mutual friends who spent 90% of their time with her, not with you) started telling you that your mental health was going to get worse, that you should find a new therapist, and it was then that your now-ex pressured you to get ect (electroconvulsive therapy), which is used for extreme cases of poor mental health. Your mutual friends told you later on that your ex “used to talk very harshly… ‘frequently complaining’”  about how your mental health.

“By the end of October the constant pressure from these people pushing me to do things I did not want or need to do started to make me feel suffocated and unstable…  I also started to severely doubt my self-perception regarding the state of my mental health…  My self-doubts were growing more intense… My last-ditch attempt to clear things up was a talk with my ex around mid-December during which.. She then gave me her handwritten list… (of)  problematic behaviour on my part…

“Around two weeks ago (end of Sept 2022), I… decided to try and ask one of the former friends to ask my ex if she would be interested in talking one last time with me, to maybe clear things up… The friend replied calling me “insolent for even writing him after the things I had done” and that “the things I would want to talk about were only important in my own little world”

You shared back in June- July 2022: “During this relationship I was in therapy because of my chronic depression and ptsd. My therapist told me that I’m doing great regarding my problems and that I shouldn’t let anyone tell me otherwise…she was diagnosed with bpd in a clinic“-

– I re-read much of your writings in this thread and it is consistent with what you shared yesterday. I believe that you were honest and consistent all the way through your thread. You were also kind and gracious in your interactions with me. I believe that honest, kind and gracious is how you treated your now-ex all along.

“I am struggling to this day to understand what I did to these people. If you have any idea of what happened, please tell me“- it seems to me that once you asserted yourself with her back in Oct 2021, telling her that you will end the relationship with her if she continues to mistreat you, it was then that her BPD ANGER was activated big time and in her mind, you became- in her mind-  the BAD GUY.

very well mind. com: “Many people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience anger so intense it is often referred to as  ‘borderline rage’. This anger sometimes comes in response to a perceived interpersonal slight—for example, feeling criticized by a loved one…It may occur as a result of perceived rejection… Many people with BPD engage in unhealthy behaviors when they get angry, including acts that can cause physical harm or destroy relationships”-

–  Angry, she tried to hurt you by making you feel badly about your mental health, promoting the idea in your mind that you are so sick that you need ect. Instead of encouraging your mental health progress, she discouraged it and did you a great disservice. Angry, she complained about you to her friends, making you look like the BAD GUY, while she was allegedly your victim. (These are all her unacceptable behaviors and you were her victim, not the other way around).

More from very well mind: “BPD splitting is characterized by a rapid, extreme change in how a person or situation is perceived. The perception may alternate back and forth between ‘good’ and ‘bad‘ or remain static once the altered perception is declared…a person with BPD may idealize a person and then devalue them and never go back. The inflexibility may serve as proof that the decision was ‘right’ or even righteous”-

I think that once she perceived the possibility of real rejection by you, her BPD rage flared up and in her mind you became permanently (so far) BAD. She never went back on this typical black-and-white BPD type evaluation of you, and so in her mind and all badness… is yours. Seems like she convinced one or more of your friends of this untruth.

What she did to you was bad enough, so when I say that I still disagree that she gaslighted you, I am not taking away from how badly she mistreated you. The reason I disagree with the gaslighting idea is that gaslighting and BPD rage do not go hand in hand. Gaslighting requires a certain cold hearted, unemotional, measured, persistent and long-term manipulation, while BPD rage is heated, emotional, impulsive and it present itself in intense, short-term bursts or explosions.

Psychology today. com: “Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves”.

This is my best understanding at this time, Ed.

anita

Dear Ed:

You are welcome.

Ed, Oct 17, 2022: “I am so horribly afraid of me getting it wrong from the start. What if these people were right. What if I was and still am indeed living ‘in my own little world.’ … What if me even posting this is just some way of me keeping up my own delusions. What if I was the one ‘gaslighting’ my ex and everything was actually alright… What if I told my other friends and family and my last therapist things that would support my version of the truth. What if I am doing the same here with you and not even knowing that I do. I don’t even know if I should post this or if there is any use to me posting this but I am pretty desperate right now for anything as my anxiety is killing me. I just don’t know how I will ever know what is true“.

Ed, June 28: “my father screaming at me for hours for not being ‘good enough’, my mother supporting this by not intervening and making me feel like he was right”.

Ed, June 29: “June 29: “I am desperate for a judgement about my past, in the sense that I am desperate to know if I did wrong and deserved what I experienced or if I am allowed to free myself and move on”-

This is my understanding today: you are obsessed with the topic of what is true and what is not true, whose version is true, whose version is false-  in regard to your ex/ her friends/ the past relationship with her-  because growing up, when your father was screaming at you for hours, saying terrible things about you, your mother made you feel like he was right, that is, she made you feel that the terrible things he said about you were true.

You are currently stuck in this old childhood conflict: what is the true version; what is the false version? Who is right; who is wrong? This conflict causes you a lot of anxiety and it makes you very desperate for AN ANSWER to this very painful question: who is right, who is wrong; what is true, what is untrue?

Ed, June 25: “I don’t want to need people… I have been hurt and disappointed so much that I realised that needing people can kill you“- when it came to your abuse, your father was primarily the aggressive one and your mother was primarily the passive one. You desperately needed her to defend you: to stop your father from saying terrible things about you, and to tell you that what he said was not true… and she failed you on both accounts. It is not only your father who “killed” you with his words, your mother did too, by figuratively stamping his words with her silent approval.

The result: “I have been diagnosed with ptsd and i have been suffering from diagnosed dissociations and depersonalisation for years as part of the ptsd complex of symptoms“, and you are obsessed with the questions in the heart of your childhood and ongoing conflict.

Answer only if and when you feel calm and comfortable enough answering these two question: (1) What were those terrible things that your father said to you/ about you when he was screaming at you for hours? (2) What exactly did your mother say or do while he was screaming at you for hours?

anita