Living with a person with possible BPD, tips?

With the BPD aside, if you don’t like the way he treats you, don’t let him stay with you. Just tell him that you changed your mind and you don’t think it’s a good idea for him to stay with you at this time. You need to allow yourself time to heal and move on from the relationship.

If he does indeed have BPD (which you should find out for sure before he stays with you), he needs to be seeing a doctor and getting treatment for it. BPD is not an excuse to treat the people in your life badly. If he isn’t willing to do what he needs to do to take care of himself, I wouldn’t let him stay with you. If he does take care of himself and is going to his doctor and following through with what they want him to do, that’s different. If that’s the case and you do let him stay with you, you’ll need to be patient with him and watch out for those mood swings. Be prepared for him to change his mind at a moments notice. Those things should get better with treatment, but sometimes it takes a while to figure out the right treatment.

You sound very confused. If he has bipolar disorder, you would have a rough time being involved with him.

You would need to love him very much to be willing to go through it.

You may find helpful information in previous Fluther discussion. Just type “bipolar” into the search bar on the upper right hand side of the page and you’ll see an extensive amount of information.

BPD is borderline personality disorder, not bipolar disorder.

Having any kind of relationship with someone who has BPD is a huge challenge, whether that person is your significant other, parent, sibling, or child. You haven’t been with him that long, so it’s up to you to decide how much of yourself you want to invest in the relationship at this point. If you don’t want to be involved with him, end it firmly and in precise terms. “I am breaking up with you. You can come over to pick up your things.” Have a friend or two come over to be with you when he gets his things, or else drop them off for him someplace where you don’t have to be alone with him.

If you still have feelings for him, it isn’t going to be easy, but remember that you have to make the decisions that are best for your life, not his. If you decide to stay with him, I would strongly suggest you go to therapy with him or find your own therapist. As the child of someone with BPD, I can tell you right now you are going to need it.

Learning more about BPD can help you decide what to do. Google it, read about it, and find message boards online for friends and family of people with BPD. The disorder has many different aspects, and different people who suffer from it behave in different ways. Good luck.

Yes, I am confused, because I don’t like to leave someone I care about and needs help alone… but I realize I have to protect myself and my own feelings and be selfish, even though it hurts… Thanks to everyone!

I recommend Stop Walking On Eggshells
It helped me soooooo much.

This Borderline Personality Disorder support website is also very good. It has a lot of resources as well as message boards for people who know someone with BPD.

If he’s so traumatized by his past relationships then it’s going to be tortuous for him to trust his “good” feelings with you and he’ll flip flop often and more than likely sabotage your relationship until it’s unsalvagible (sp). Sure you feel bad for him and don’t feel right to just wash your hands of someone you see in trouble but his are the kind of troubles he needs to face and reason with before he plops them onto you. Cry it out and do whatever you can to stay away and protect yourself.

Why do you care for/love him? Could it be partly or even largely because he needs you and you need to be needed? Could it be partly because he has had so many bad experiences and you want to show him that there is at least one woman he can rely on?

From the way you describe it, I’m not sure how much BPD plays a role in your relationship. It already seems to me that you have a codependent relationship. One person runs, the other chases, the one is caught and then the other runs and the chase goes in the opposite direction.

If you guys are going to stay together, I suggest counseling. If he has BPD, he should get individualized counseling. If you really love him, then you’ll work to build a healthy relationship. If he is not interested in working with you on this, then you can only expect more of the same.

Perhaps you like drama. A lot of people do. I do. But eventually I learned a bit about how to be more stable. But I wanted to learn it. If you don’t want to learn, you won’t change, and your relationship won’t get any better. That’s the truth whether or not you have a mental illness. A mental illness only makes things more difficult.

@Neizvestnaya One classic behavior in people with BPD is to never take responsibility for their own actions or decisions. It’s highly likely that the past relationships weren’t the way he remembered them, or that he has altered history to excuse his current behavior. My mother does this all of the time. When someone has BPD, lying is a very common issue, but the person with BPD doesn’t even know they are lying. In their mind, they are telling God’s honest truth. It’s so much more frustrating than most people can imagine. It’s why I only talk to my mother about things like the weather. With anything else, I have no idea if she’s telling the truth or not.

@MissAusten: I met and got involved with a man like this before and it was a real trip, not a good one. The whole thing ended up being a push and pull like @wundayatta writes and in the end I wished I’d never met him and grown to care about him at all since it just ended so awful.

@wundayatta I like to help people in general, and I fell in love with him. He is going through a divorce and a hard break up with his ex-wife, as she left him for someone else and cheated on him. He has also a lot of debtsl… he had to leave his apartment because he couldn’t afford it on his own and his ex didn’t pay her part of the rent. So, before I knew about this, I thought his emotional inestability was caused by his breakup with his wife, and tried to “understand” it… and I care about the people I love… otherwise I wouldn’t help him, the problem is that I don’t think he really loves me. But that doesn’t make me stop caring about him. Anyway, I just wanted to help, and he needed me for this, but the thing is, found out that he may be suffering of BPD recently, and started reading about it, and just realized the causes of his behaviour are probably because of this. I wish I could help him and that he trully loved me, like he said before, but I don’t think that’s possible, is it? :(

None of what you share would lead me to think the guy is BPD. I’m not a doc but I am very educated and familiar with this diagnosis. The guy sounds down right flakey which is enough to run away from him. If I were you I would try to quash any feelings for him and stay separated from him with no contact.

@perspicacious we don’t know 100% sure if he is or not, but he had a self test and told this friend that the test showed positive results, and he is going to therapy, but my friend doesn’t know any other details… :( I supose if he is, may be a very light level. He told me in the past he used to self harm when he felt anxious and he had depressions as well… But currently, I only know that he was going to therapy, but don’t know exactly for what.

@Covergirlita Sometimes, when people have some bad feelings about themselves, they feel like they can’t really be loved based on their own merits. I am like this. I believe I am only as good as the last thing I did for you. If I’m not giving you anything, you’ll stop caring about me. I never feel very secure with the love I have.

As a result, I always feel like I have to do what the other person says, or they’ll abandon me. Sometimes the pressure gets to be too much, and I kind of make them abandon me. It’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

I like to find women who need help. I like to solve their problems. If I can make them feel better, maybe they will love me. The bigger their problem, the more I want to be the one who saves them.

I’ve been working on this problem for years, and I understand now that someone can love me even if I screw up or even if I hurt them. I don’t have to be so afraid of abandonment. I don’t have to fall in love with people who have problems, because that’s not the only way I can get people to need me.

When I hear the things you write about your relationship, you remind me of me. I have put up with an awful lot of shit to maintain a relationship. It’s not good for me. I want to feel more sense of power and worth. I want to stop being afraid of loss all the time. I want to stop being jerked around by my needs and fears all the time.

Your guy probably has his own set of issues about lovability, and his own ways of breaking up relationships because he is afraid they will break up anyway. It’s a lot to deal with if one person has these issues, much less two. If you want to stay with him, I strongly suggest couples counseling.

Thanks @wundayatta for your tips. Caring is a way of showing my love to others… although I know that nowadays people don’t think like me… I just think this world is too selfish and want to make things to make other people more comfortable with their lives, that fullfills me, even if it can sound stupid. And that’s what I do for the ones I love and they love me. I’ve been raised like this. I try to stop caring if I realize the other person doesn’t love me or they do something bad to me, but it’s hard to suddenly stop caring about that person you have feelings for. :(

@Covergirlita Caring is fine as long as you don’t need anything back from the person you care for. It sounds like you care for this guy and you are expecting something back from him that you’re not getting.

I’m not sure, though. Your bio says you are a Spanish girl living in France. I think that there may be cultural differences that I know nothing about. These differences sometimes make advice from people from other cultures kind of beside the point.