Page 125 of Breathe Again

Rhys’ words came back to him. Harder this time and he began to acknowledge that he’d missed something crucial in all the years he’d been with his wife.

“Why, after so many years of coping, did things go so badly off the rails?”

“Before her diagnosis, she had hoped that if you two were able to fix the flaws in your relationship, that she would feel better. She saw the problem simply in terms of her having a jealous streak that she needed to contain and being insecure. The solution, for her, was more sex, which stabilized her emotions. It was a simple fix. Really it’s just a band aid, but it worked for her well enough. Getting the diagnosis, she lost that hope, because the problem was bigger than she expected. She said that it lives in her, and it’s bigger than she is. She feels sorry for you being stuck with her, and there’s another aspect as well, but I’ll circle back around to that in a minute.” She continued. “So, the diagnosis triggered feelings of hopelessness and unworthiness, and then the situation with her mother came to a head. Being raised by a narcissistic parent is a unique form of abuse that robs a child of their esteem and identity, all their focus is set on calming the parent if they’re the token good child and escaping the parent if they’re the token bad child. Either way, children of narcissistic parents don’t develop healthy self-esteem. Environmental factors, combined with a genetic predisposition, caused Mara’s BPD. Part of the equation in her life that added up to developing Borderline Personality issues is her mother’s narcissism. Breaking away from a narcissist is tough. When that narcissist is a spouse or parent, and you are not mentally healthy, it’s earth shattering.”

“So, her diagnosis shook her, took away hope, made her feel worthless and a burden, and realizing her mother is who she is and the effect she’s had on her, caused her to combust?”

“Yes, I’d say so. Coupled with the distance she felt from you, due to the lessening of sexual activity between the two of you, her despair over the growing anger she’d been dealing with largely because of that, and your dismissal of the seriousness of her diagnosis, and your unwillingness, in her eyes, to be involved with her recovery.”

He closed his eyes against the exposure. “That’s a lot.”

“It boils down to this. You are her favorite person. You get all the love in her heart, you also bear the brunt of all her fear of abandonment, that fear that is just as much a part of BPD as the rampant emotions. When you took away sex, or cut it back, you took away her life raft. It was what she was using to keep her head above water.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility.”

“Yes...and she needs to take responsibility, as she has tried to do over the years, but she will probably always have BPD issues, even after therapy, which leads us back to where I said I’d circle back to.”

He felt like he’d already been hit with a sledgehammer, but he nodded for her to continue.

“She is not talking to you, not because she’s angry, but because first, she feels you should be free of her and she’s been contemplating how she can leave you without hurting Olivia, and second, and this is where you need to make a decision, she doesn’t feel you can handle what she calls her dark side. She feels yourimpatience with her, and your resentment, which is understandable by the way, but is intolerably painful for her. She’s amazingly in tune with other people’s feelings. She may struggle to understand your perspective on a situation, but she is incredibly emotionally empathetic. Some BPD patients have a superior ability to sense emotions in others just as they feel more intensely. I believe she is one of those people. Does that ring true for you?” He nodded. “Because she can feel your hesitation, your resentment, your impatience. She’s not going to be able to thrive under that shadow.”

“How do we move forward? Without her leaving, without me continuing to walk on eggshells, to get her to a healthy place. I love my wife. She’s the best person I know. I’m not going anywhere.”

Marissa smiled widely. “Funny, she said the same thing about you.”

Several minutes later, the session ended, and he left, knowing that Mara would soon be having her session with Marissa, and just as she’d allowed Marissa to speak openly to him about her, he also gave permission and agreed to ongoing therapy alone, as well as with Mara, to learn better how to cope, create appropriate boundaries for himself, and help her to cope. That one session was excruciating, having his brain peeled like a grape, but if that’s what it would take, he would do it whole-heartedly.

Later on that day, he heard her laugh through the phone, and that sound lit him up inside like a Christmas tree. She was a pain in his ass at times, but the joy, love, and passion she brought to his life faroutweighed the angst. Honest to God, all he ever wanted to do was love her, he worked all day just so he could lie beside her every night.

She did not want to talk to him, but he spoke to her through the speakerphone for a moment. Knowing she could hear him, his one-sided communication, he was desperate to reach her, knowing in that moment, that whatever mistakes she made due to her diagnosis, he forgave her. It was an easy decision in the end. One that he should have made long ago.

It wasn’t even that he hadn’t forgiven her, he had, but he’d never forgotten, and the events, without context, had led him to behave toward her in ways that were triggering for her, shaded as they were with his resentment at what he perceived to be control and manipulation.

He needed some reprogramming to change those learned responses, to get closer to her when she started spiraling instead of taking himself away, to see her requests for sex as something he, and only he, could give her, a perk in this whole fucking mess that they could enjoy, not a tool to control.

Communicating that change to her was going to be a bitch but failure had never been an option for him. When he finally fell into bed, he flipped open Instagram to add photos and saw that she’d replied.

I miss you, too.

He hadn’t cried since his parents passed, and before then he’d been a child, but he cried more in the past three days than all those memories combined. He read those four words and his eyes welled again, from relief this time.

His day had been a rollercoaster and he had the uncomfortable thought that Mara lived like this all the time.

The last thing he did before going to sleep was to add Nickelback’s ‘Far Away’ to their playlist.

Within Arms’ Reach

Mara

The morning therapy session with Marissa focused on creating a care plan for me, including a rundown of the therapeutic supports they had set up for me to continue when I went home, and a review of the therapeutic tools, especially Radical Acceptance, that we had covered, that would help me through the next few days.

I had an appointment with the psychiatrist as well. His determination was that my breakdown wastriggered by the collision of a few different situations, like a multi-vehicle accident at an intersection.

“We could look at a prescription, but I feel you’d be far better served if you were to create space for yourself to breathe, by reducing the stressors.”

“There’s not much I can reduce, I don’t think.”

“What about homeschooling Olivia? Can you get some assistance there for a while?”

---