TL : DR - This is a long post about what it's like to see Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) horror up close and personal. You've been warned.

https://therationalmale.com/2012/01/20/borderline-personality-disorder/ - When I read it, I saw myself in it.

BPD is the extreme female mind as autism is the extreme male one.

In Taoism, masculinity leans toward earth and is like the sun and Femininity leans towards the water and is like the moon. The Ying Yang circle has two dots in each half of the opposite color. The idea is that if the yang loses that yin dot, the masculine will become far too heartless, an inhuman machine. And if the feminine loses that masculine dot, it will fluctuate without any limit or grounding into insanity.

Autism is the first case. BPD is the second.

All women have the characteristics found in BPD women, you can't have the feminine without some irrationality and solipsism, but in normal women there are natural limiters, just like there are physical limiters in our muscles to stop them from ripping off from their joints. Normal women can see reason when they're calm. They can be made to respect boundaries. A BPD woman doesn't have these limiters wired in, and this means you're walking with a human nuke.

Borderline Personality disorder (BPD), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD) are the female dark triad, with the added rider that females are naturally Machevilian as it is. Women who have BPD usually have the other 2.

I'm no hero. I was a socially awkward nerd, bluepilled to the ultraviolet when I got into this relationship nearly 3 years ago. I was low SMV, had no idea of being charming, didn't get women at all, couldn't game if my life depended on it, and was a poster beta, a boy, not a man. I had all the issues that Glover's No More Mr Nice Guy talked about. Life kicked me till I woke up, fortunately it didn't kill me in the process.

I've dropped some hints before of my past and my ex in earlier posts and comments, but here is the whole story.

I was in a marriage with a woman who showed me what was BPD up close and personal. I made a lot of mistakes for my part in the relationship, hurt people, should have shown better manners, held myself to better standards, improved my SMV and game, worked on my social skills, my career, known how to deal with conflict. My mistakes weren't deliberate, but that was sufficient to trigger her and show me what she was capable of. I survived to tell the tale. And I intend to tell it threadbare, cause no one ever discussed the gory details outright. It's a warning.

One thing I notice about these females is at first they seem totally nice and normal. Only as you get more and more intimate with them, they start showing their true colors. They tend to be far more cunning than the average female. And absolutely ruthless if needed. Their senses tend to be hypersensitive, their ability to observe trifles can get baffling. However, the first sign when you realize something's not right is when you notice what happens when they get disappointed -- they don't go down, as much as they go into freefall...

I remember the first time, at the airport. She was upset about something because I had failed to do (which I should have because I wasn't paying attention) and I had said something that had hurt her. As she talked about it, she suddenly began to get into a well of uncontrollable emotion, started crying for her mom, behaving like her life was finished. Then suddenly she stopped herself, and remained silent for a long time and didn't speak to me till she was back to normal.

Oh wait, it was even before that, when we first discussed marriage. I was hesitant to proceed with a relationship as I was having difficulties in my career (which I didn't tell her) and something, something in my gut warned me with an intense feeling of foreboding, a racing pulse, and apprehension that I just couldn't explain - I wish I had listened to it, my nervous system was screaming -- No, No, No! She called me the next day and was extremely agitated, shattered, hurt, almost desperate to know what I thought of committing - her desperation and domineering didn't seem natural. I should have sensed it then. My gut's intuition sensed what was oblivious to me. Your mind can lie, rationalize and hamster stuff away, but the body and subconscious does not lie.

Looking back, there were several red flags, but the one on how she deals with disappointments and disagreements in her life was the most obvious. BPD women do not just fade or fold or cry, they shatter and go beserk. Their minds are made of glass.

The blame. All women project their fate on to their environment, in a giant extension of the sexual principle, where they feel as though the world acts on them. But BPD women take blame to another level - they literally cannot tolerate the pain of feeling responsible. They must get the other person to beg and plead for the smallest of mistakes. My ex would force me to keep apologizing until her anger would die down, make me dictate the lines where I had to say what I had done and what I should have done, and loathe me for being a guy who had to be told how to apologize to her.

Every discussion with a BPD woman becomes a court in trial, and the only objective is to prove you're guilty. She interrogates, asks question after question and 10 questions for every reply till you fall silent, and she loses her shit when you can't answer her unending list of ever growing insecurities. This is a power play. The person who keeps asking questions and demanding answers is firmly in control of the interaction. Your opinions, if any, will be declared wrong, and you must yield to her only correct perspective. And when it comes to power plays, my ex barely managed to scrape through school, while I was a topper and Ivy League graduate. But she taught me the meaning of the phrase "Women are Machievilian as water is wet".

BPD women are expert liars and masters of gaslighting (I didn't know this word existed till I read up after getting out). They can sniff every potential gap in your memory and fill it up with their narration. Only your guts warn you that something's off, but her persuasion and maybe even a few histrionics will force you to accept - the stage is then set to control the narrative. She gaslit me a lot of times about things that happened when I wasn't around, and often I found myself questioning my own memory.

She gaslit so many people in my circles that I only realized the scale of it after cross checking and comparing notes. A lot of people realized they'd been lied to. I myself couldn't believe the lies she'd made me believe - lies about how my family was disappointed in me and what many people said about me, including my own parents. Gaslighting to attack your self esteem - that's a low blow. It means they can never be trusted.

They simply cannot tolerate disagreement. Even the smallest disagreement can explode like a mountain of nitroglycerine. Your relationship with a BPD woman is not walking on egg shells - you're walking on landmines. It's only a question of how many times in a day will it get set off, and how bad your injuries will be. There is no room for rationality in any discussion with a borderline. They have extreme interrogation skills and masters of putting you in lose-lose situations. Good cop, bad cop, hell cop, all in one. She'd start her questioning or "discussion" just at the point where she knew I was most tired and wanted to catch up on sleep (I've had sleepless nights more often than I can remember). BPD women don't bat an eyelid at using violence to get their ends met. "We need to talk" gives me chills even now.

Their hamsters will rationalize their anger as totally and completely justified, which just helps perpetuate a cycle of escalating violence. Their extreme sensitivity means they suffer PTSD ridiculously easily, which only makes it worse for them. An argument or a fight could send them into PTSD and could spell real trouble down the road. A relative falling ill can send them into paroxysms of fear of death. I remember how on the day when one of her very close relatives died, she was remembering every detail of his last day, and warning me to keep quiet and stay away, as she was just barely sane. Normal women just remember and cry, maybe on your shoulder. This was scary.

Their minds do not know what consequences are. They have no qualms about blowing up your house, wrecking your phone, crashing your car (I would fear my ex could grab the wheel in a moment of disagreement in the car). There were days after a quarrel in the morning where I'd be afraid to go to work, not knowing what to expect when I got back.

Their extreme emotions and solipsism means they are literally incapable of understanding or seeing any other perspective as valid apart from their own - they can't fathom rational arguments - if you aren't so hungry, it means you MUST hate her, and she hates herself. They never thought that maybe your appetite is off.

This makes BPD women terrible listeners. They simply cannot listen to anything about you that is beyond them and might even sarcastically or angrily put you down at the first sound of your individuality.

BPD women cannot understand the concept of boundaries, and they don't take to it very well. They have a fierce desire to be included all the time. It makes them very clingy and obsessively possessive. They want inclusion extremely badly. But their idea of inclusion basically involves absorbing you into her frame and existence so thoroughly that there's nothing left of you. This lack of boundaries also means they end up trying to take other people's pain, fears and concerns and are forever worried about these things happening to them. Their insecurities are their god, and that god must be satisfied.

They crave partners who're BPD like themselves. If you don't go neurotic, they think that you're uncaring and you don't love her. I know a couple of former neighbors like this, when they fought, you wouldn't believe that a human being could make sounds like that. The most sane member was in fact their dog. I was informed by some friends that couples who fight like that also have some crazy sex and a lot of people consider this as normal. I certainly didn't. Now I know.

And this - BPD women NEVER apologize, because it is always your fault and you must apologize for it. BPD women have extraordinary egos and entitlement mentalities. My ex was a HB6 or 7 at best with the attitude of a HB11. After it was all over, some of my friends even felt she was just a 5 and wondered if there wasn't something unhealthy about her (in comparison to her sister, she was literally underdeveloped). They demand the respect and fear shown to dictators. They seldom appreciate, because duh, they are supposed to deserve the best as a basic requirement.

Their hamsters. When I once told her that her dad's smoking was causing his heart problems, she could rationalize that away saying that she knows non-smokers who died young. Only I know how her dad's health issues at an early age might have traumatized her, but her hamster was unbelievable. I did not bring up that topic again, fearing that it would rock the boat.

Speaking of this, BPD hamsters are amazing in a unique way. They can spin anything, ANYTHING in their favour. They can leverage any weakness into a strength and a reason for entitlement. She's feeling insecure and inadequate. Then she definitely deserves appreciation and validation from you. You owe it. What about you? Well, you're confident right? Why do you need appreciation? She has low stamina and can't walk in the sun? Then I deserve to be chauffered around. You better have that car ready mister. I'm not earning, so it's your job to earn more money.

Their tendency to remember everything negative about you that upset them is extraordinary. They can remember your list of sins in a way the book-keeping angels aren't capable of. With every offence, that book of sins is recited all over from the beginning, with the new entries. BPD women literally, and I say literally, re-live each and every one of those moments as they think about them. This means they suffer more and more trauma and take it out on you. There are no boundaries between them and their past or future. You didn't commit that mistake once, you committed it every time she remembered it. Curiously this is never ever done for anything good you might have done.

One real weakness with them is that they have no frame of their own, or even an awareness of what they really are. They fluctuate so much you can actually see their reality and beliefs and everything change with their moods - so much so that you have no idea who you're dealing with. The thing they liked in the morning, they can totally hate by afternoon. Their expectations change faster than the weather, and therefore you're continuously fed a steady stream of brainwashing that you're never good enough. You're afraid to talk anything because you have no clue what will happen and how she might react.

This lack of frame also means that comparisons and jealousies are extraordinary. Acceptance of me is out of the question, when her friend's boyfriend does so many fantastic things. My ex was a twin, and for me I had to live with the curse of comparison and shaming every single day. Never good enough. Every time there was news of someone else celebrating something in the family or social circle, there would a battle at home.

Another characteristic of the female mind is that it tends to value small stuff as seriously as the big stuff. BPD women don't know the difference between a serial killer and a strand of hair just a millimeter out of place. If it is important to them, it's THE most important thing in this universe. There is no basis in reality for the actual significance of anything.

BPD women are hyper-perfectionists. That and their extreme moon mentality means they have no sense of abundance, they literally need their day to be perfect lest they feel wrecked by their own despair -- this impossible goal leaves them perpetually frustrated. In my case it got so bad, I was even warned explicitly not to make one mistake for one month, not one. If I arrived at 9:01 p.m. for dinner, she'd start a fight and start reconsidering the marriage.

This hyper perfectionism makes them overly dominant, absolute control freaks, especially in how they want to appear to others. It may simply be impossible for these women to submit to a man and accept it that life is never perfect and we need to be grateful for what we do have. BPD women over time gain a lust for this kind of power, as it gives them a high of being dominating, but they're just killing their relationship.

Being decisive is near impossible - because you need to face walls upon walls of resistance before she lets you do what you could have done 10x over alone. That means they hate alphas for being dominant and they also hate betas for being despicable wimps who are only capable of begging forgiveness at her feet. It's a no win situation and they're doomed to be unhappy. My ex hated me for not crying and empathizing with her pain, called me inhuman, and then hated me for crying at the end of a horrible fight and thought I wasn't a real man. Talk of cognitive dissonance.

They can't take a No. Ever. It's personal rejection of them. They go on a rant of how much you are undeserving of her love. Once I remember she dumped everything for dinner into the bin, hurled the dishes into the sink and threw her wedding ring on the floor because she was upset and shattered that I didn't eat my dinner quickly and didn't praise her within 5 seconds of swallowing the first bite, which meant I was not interested and didn't love her.

Even dread can backfire on you, cause they're rabidly jealous, and can ramp up the level of control to the next level. My ex caught me reading Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and flipped out like I was caught in the middle of an affair. Even reading a book with a bit of 'manly advice' made her feel incredibly jealous.

BPD women absolutely fear abandonment to paranoid levels. But unfortunately her insecurities end up creating the very reality she fears. She won't mind killing you herself if she feels she cannot deal with the pain of you walking away.

They might also sometimes lose distinction between dreams and reality - often sleepwalking or having extremely vivid dreams and nightmares, often waking up and screaming in sleep. I remember that time when my ex got so worked up over a dream where my smartphone blew up that she did not allow me to use that phone for a few days. If the phone battery went low, by low I mean < 50%, that phone risked being shattered into a million pieces.

BPD women need validation so badly they throw sense out of the window. She told me that under no circumstances are we going to buy a second hand car - despite the fact that I would have to cough up a lot of my savings for something I could get at a third of the price - because new stuff gets validation from others. And if I discussed money, she would explode and tell me she hated the fact that I valued money and wasn't thinking positive and that her brother in law would do anything for her sister. While I was the sole earning member at the time. She in turn made me tell her down to the decimal point how much money I spent when she went home to see her family.

All this means that BPD women are a mess of all sorts of conflicting emotions at once. Their minds are more disordered and messed up than a teenage boy's bedroom. Their emotions work like most people's thoughts - lots of mental chatter - only thoughts IMHO are serial in nature.

And then the amnesia episodes. This is really scary if you've seen it live. BPD women get so worked up they can suffer memory black outs and claim they do not remember what they said or did. Some of them even claim to have out of body experiences - they can see their body, but not control it. Their nervous system goes out of control. My ex did do this. Till date I have no idea if her blackouts were real or faked. It's called dissociation. She once got into an episode of rage, slammed me against the windows, went on an epic past trauma rant where she didn't recognize me, accused me of having threatened her parents, was shattered remembering her mother crying. It got worse, as she suddenly began to make weird animal noises - growling, screeching, hissing, spitting, scratching. I was terrified and tried to snap her out by splashing some water over her. She didn't even realize it - she wasn't in my bedroom. She was no longer in reality. The next day, she wanted to know where she was all night, and she blamed me for it and physically attacked me till someone turned up at the door. That was the beginning of the end.

Suicide threat tests can happen and when they start, they quickly escalate to being rampant. My mom and dad have had numerous arguments, but despite their clashing minds the worst I've ever heard my mom say is that "One day I'll be gone, and that's when you'll feel my absence." Well, with a BPD woman, she can very well kill herself if it means you'll be sent to prison, or sometimes she doesn't even care, she just wants out. My ex once lost it after a fight where she went and slept on the couch, called me uncaring for not coming and checking on her, and ran to the balcony - that's when it started. Later on it would happen whenever arguments or her interrogations escalated and I had no answer to her never ending questioning. My ex threatened me with a knife to her throat near the end, warning me not to come near her. My apartment was located high up, and it has been on more than one occasion where I had to wrestle her back to the living room. One egregious case was when she found out that a few of our relatives got pregnant in quick succession. That whole day was an argument of "What are they doing?" "And what are we doing?" -- I was going through job loss and trying to shift career tracks to an industry with better prospects then. Besides, all those arguments and fights between us had ensured that sex was non-existent, and this wasn't helping.

And then there's what happens when you go out in public. A BPD woman has no qualms about public humiliation, raising hysteria or even getting violent with you because she knows the white knights will come for her. And she'll laugh at you that you can't save your dignity in public. Never mind that it's her husband, nope, that moment, he is her enemy #1.

Relationships with a BPD woman follow an abusive pattern where each cycle of abuse is more violent than the previous one. It might start small, but with every argument, you notice things getting worse, and worse, and worse. It started getting violent after she started grabbing my shirt and insisted I keep talking and talking to keep her sane.

The violence. I've been hit everywhere from the top of my head to my toenails. I've been hit more often in one day than some old guys have been spanked in their whole childhood. My eyes have been hit so hard I've hard flashes of light afterwards. My lips have bled more often than I can remember. My glasses have been twisted beyond repair a few times. A few bedsheets torn up. Bitten, hit by slippers for forgetting to take the shampoo in a hurry. My forearms twisted, kicked in my abs, even my balls. I've had several torn T-shirts, a broken laptop even. BPD women are a special breed of violence incarnate. You try to defend yourself, they can easily play the domestic violence card against you. I stopped trying to even defend myself and took it all until she stopped. She even justified her violence stating that I deserve it.

You're basically counting your blessings if you somehow manage to get to bed alive and sleep.

I have on a few occasions in my life been angered enough to smash something in my hand on the floor, but it takes a lot to get there and a normal person usually calms down and then wonders how they lost control like that. Maybe they'll even feel embarrassed or ashamed about it. But BPD people have hair trigger tempers, and can get enraged faster than a man can get his dick up at the sight of a HB10, and stay there all day.

BPD women's hypergamy is easily triggered. I lost count of how many times my ex told me how there were so many better men out there deserving of her (yes, she felt that I and even her brother in law didn't deserve such girls like her and her sister, while they deserved much better). The slightest mistake would have her questioning the relationship. I in fact feel that it was when her hypergamy went out of control that she started loathing me and craved to get out. On one occasion, she even told me that if I left her, I'd be the loser, and she'd go on to live a life she'd dreamed about. Speaking of hate...

Beware of that day when her feelings turn from fickle to permanently against you - which happens near the end. Usually if a woman gets scorned and turns against you, it's a special kind of anger - and BPD women take that to a level where most wild animals couldn't manage. It happened to me one day, after another disagreement. A BPD woman who starts hating you will become another animal, triggered by your words, your voice, your clothes, your presence, your hair, your walking... It's absolute hate as I've never experienced it - I never believed a human could be capable of such hate till I saw it. There is nothing a woman in this state won't do to destroy you to get you out of her mind. I was being hated at a cellular level! Just the sight of me could trigger her to attack me on some days.

And oh god, never believe her if she says a child will make her feel better. Once she has the kid, you're trapped. My ex told it to me that after she has what she wants, she'll teach me what 'loneliness' feels like - considering that a guy in my circles faced a situation where he came home to see his wife gone with his son, I was pretty sure she was planning her exit.

We hadn't had sex for so long (I was scared, cause if she didn't feel attracted enough, she'd get into a huge fight treating me like I had abused or molested her) that she began to accuse me of impotency, and would go on uncontrollable rants of how I hid that from her and that "even rapists are men". As if the beta insults weren't enough. She even tried hitting me in my balls and laughing telling me I shouldn't worry as she can't hurt anything that isn't there.

The thing about a BPD woman is that sometimes the only one who really gets to know just how deep this side of her goes is her spouse or boyfriend - it seems to be triggered hard by love that has many needs (and kind of lays bare the red truths underneath the feels). BPD women are experts at concealing this side of themselves from the world, except the one whom they're really intimate with. Other relatives and friends might not have a clue what she's capable of or might have rationalized her milder episodes as normal. They. have. no. clue. Whatsoever.

The glare of the borderline. There is one thing about BPD that you can't unsee - that fierce, far away look in their eyes when they're triggered. I know how my ex was normally - she actually would be sweet, bubbly, chatty, surprising her family, an excellent cook, a keen sense of setting up the house. Her facial expression was normal, even happy. This was also how she was when her friends and family would be around. But when she flipped, that look in her eyes was that of a killer - she was a different person. My mum recalls that there were times when she and her friends felt something odd in her changes of facial expression - these are things known as microscopic facial gestures, they come and go in the blink of an eye, and not everyone is sharp enough to observe them - women however are sharp at noting other women's facial expressions. When I took a closer look at footage of my wedding and other occasions at home, we spotted it. It was the intensity of the change that was startling.

For months, I had no choice but to play peacekeeper as it was either that or endless fighting. A BPD woman will die first before losing the argument, and she won't hesitate to blow herself up if it means she can do some damage to you. BPD women have the mentality of a fanatic suicide bomber. My ex literally told me that they could keep fighting till she dropped dead, which meant either I had to accept defeat or her family would make me pay for her death.

Then she'd flip the script, and make me feel guilty for making her feel miserable. She had a wonderful life, and I destroyed her happiness. This actually got to me. I felt toxic shame and guilt. It was a friend who was in on my secret who heard us arguing and immediately yelled that I had the worst case of Stockholm syndrome ever. He was shocked to hear the threats she was making. BPD women are absolute masters of making you feel that it's all and always your fault.

And this -- she didn't even acknowledge anything was wrong with her. It was always me, and only me, and I had to apologize for even suggesting the fact. When I suggested that we see a doctor (because she admitted she was very depressed) or go for couples counselling, she screamed at me, told me I was just trying to get out of the marriage (I sincerely wanted to help her out). She declared she'd rather die than for the world to know that she's been to a doctor. BPD women get a kick out of their insane emotions, even if they know rationally it is destructive. It's an addiction.

The worst part was that I became a shell of my former self, always apologizing, pleading, begging, and she hated me all the more for it. I had no identity of my own left, just obeying mindlessly and hiding in my room when at home. It only convinced her I was a loser. She systematically rejected, or put down each and every aspect of me till all of me was rejected, every day, one way or the another. She would repeatedly threaten me with divorce, or expose me to our families or threaten to disappear before I returned home from work. I feared she might kill herself all the time. I contemplated suicide often. My home was a hell I wanted to escape from. I had a lot of mental strength in reserve, but I have no doubt that for all her extreme episodes, if I reached my breaking point, I'd be the one jumping off my apartment balcony first.

She stopped me from talking to my friends and relatives. I was to give no hint even in my voice and she'd censor every word and call. If I didn't "include her in all my actions", she'd tell her family about how I had the gall to be independent without involving her. Every message I sent had to be seen and edited by her or else there was hell to pay. She even threatened me if she ever found out I deleted any messages. She never showed me what she ever spoke on her phone though, the phone I bought for her. My mother never did that to my father.

It didn't help that my brother in law was a white knight who boasted how he wouldn't even spend a cent on himself without 'respecting his wife'. He once lost his temper and screamed at me for an hour over this, saying that he'd never lost his cool with any guest ever, and vowed never to send my ex home again (no idea what she'd been telling her relatives, she had conversations with them in my absence and I never knew what they spoke). Her relatives also made fun of my nerdiness and poor social skills, and that deepened her revulsion to me. That incident was in fact the fatal blow that sealed the fate of my marriage. As it turns out, her father himself is a beta who doesn't speak up at all and her mother walks all over him, feeling that she "owns him" and has the right to dominate.

It was Rollo and Dr. Robert Glover's No More Mr. Nice Guy that gave me the courage to walk out. When my ex was raging and I pleaded that we can split, she went mental. She told me she'd not leave before she tortured me and my family and left us on the streets. She even mocked me for thinking that I could just leave.

Words. BPD women simply can't control their tongues and are prolific at verbal abuse. Most normal people can't either, but it's a question of how vicious your words can get. Most of us would be aware that we're talking to our wives or husbands or someone we love. BPD women use their tongues like swords. Verbal diarrhea is what I call it. It was the harsh words she used on me that were the most painful of all, words I would think twice about using on my worst enemy.

I once saw a 35 point checklist on abusive relationships - there wasn't one point I did not tick off. In all the marriages I'd seen of my previous generation, nothing was ever like this. However, in my generation, a lot of relationships are increasingly becoming crazy. All of a sudden it feels like every 3rd or 4th case out there is having some sort of PD or the other.

Despite all this, others are worse off. When I read on quora about the guy who went out for a walk after an argument, only to find that his wife set herself on fire and when he tried to save her, she tried to burn up his balls, so that he'd never be able to have a life with any other woman again, I know I dodged a bullet.

I see my uncle's best friend struggling through a family court for years, where his wife seems to agree to divorce mutually and then comes up and tells the judge she doesn't want out and gets it cancelled. If he tries to go for a one sided filing, she threatens to have him thrown in prison. She's promised him she'll let him go when he's too old and alone. My uncle's other friend had a bitter battle where his ex used their son to play games with him. He won custody of his kid, but later the son left him as he was conditioned to think dad was the villain. I thank my stars I didn't get to that point.

When you try to get out of a relationship with a borderline, you must be very smart to get out intact. Your best bet is to be separated by quite a distance before you can take the call. Two things can happen.

a) She literally makes a complete 180 degree U-turn, rewards you with sex, acts overly nice, promises to change, for a while. Until the first mistake.

b) She goes nuclear. It's not easy to get these people out of your place, they know every dirty trick in the book.

The only solution is prevention itself - never get into a relationship with a BPD woman. Screen carefully. It ought to be the 11th commandment. And if one has hooked up a hose to you, frame and strength alone cannot deal with them. You need to be extremely cunning to deal with the kind of dirty tricks she can throw at you, tricks that need to be prevented before you're sucked into them. And you need to be very cunning to get out.

I spent the last few months keeping a secret recorder app running in my PC hidden. She even checked my phone and PC to find out if I was recording her, while she was busy recording her interrogation sessions to show her family that I admitted it was all my fault. She would have also told her relatives I was too scared to discuss stuff with her.

Fortunately I got out. It was when she went home after a major fight (her folks wanted her home for a relative's wedding, they didn't know) that I called up my family and told everything. Before going, she wanted me to change totally or else she'll leave without warning. She had gaslit my own relatives so much that only after I showed the footage to them, they realized what happened. I called up my lawyer, who heard one excerpt of one recorded quarrel, broke into a sweat and just said, "Get out now. Get out!" My uncle literally shivered because he recognized the signs from what had happened to his friends and told me "This is not at all normal. Get out, or everyone will be destroyed down the road."

Well we tried to talk it out with her and her family. Her family refused to believe it and laughed at me for being so unmanly that I would be hit and dominated by a girl. She denied ever having hit me, said that I made it all up. She didn't even try to claim she did it because she was depressed. My folks tried to reason with them that even if such issues exist, we'll support and help her recover - but they were offended by the very mention of it and walked out. My brother in law was probably the only one upset with both of us - he felt we should have told everyone and dealt with it at the start. Her father flatly called me a liar and accused me of pretending and all the dirty tricks she used on me, while her mum just made enough hysteria to make a discussion impossible. He then told my family before leaving that he regretted that his daughter ended up marrying an immature boy who wasn't even half a man who could handle responsibility. He did acknowledge that she was feeling depressed though, but he thought I was responsible for it all. She had in the past violently stopped me from telling her folks anything, despite her parents assuring me that I could and they'd help. Her father felt that if it had got that bad, any sane man would have told him, which I didn't.

The problem was, he had suffered a heart attack and his own health wasn't too good. My ex blamed me for stressing her dad out - his heart issues had given her a paranoid fear of her dad dying. She had warned me she'll go insane for good if anything happened to her dad and might even kill in her rage. Yes, a death threat.

I however managed to get a mutual consent divorce, and she hated my guts so much she didn't ask me for anything. But before I secured it, when I called her and told her I wanted out, she totally flipped and started saying we were in bad times (I lost my job sometime after my marriage, that made things much worse), she knew she made mistakes, she'll change, everything will be fine, she'll doesn't want the marriage to end, blah blah... calling me, whatsapp, messaging. Never mind the days where she would hold me up for hours with divorce threats, threatening to call her relatives, making me beg for the sake of the marriage and playing mind games with me till she was done.

In fact, I remember the scene in the court where she was acting as though I didn't exist, or never existed. They waited till I made the call to get out, and it was actually a few of her relatives who called me up, discussed what happened between us, heard me out and told me to proceed. They then told their circle that it was I who wanted the divorce. Speaking of the court, a whole bunch of couples were ahead of us, with kids and property and ugly legal battles over several years involved and at the end of the day, I realize our split wasn't nearly the worst there was. My lawyer told me, "Stay here and see what all cases and characters come in a few months. You'll know the other side of life." The lawyer also added that he was doing some serious yoga and meditation because seeing and handling so many bitter cases for years puts lawyers under a lot of work and emotional stress.

It was then I read TRM in detail and realized Rollo had faced a similar situation and the way he writes about it, he still dreads that experience. I myself can't help but get into a cold sweat recalling the days when I began to babble to myself before the mirror, laughing and crying senselessly in despair, fearing every morning and even beginning to feel my dreams to be real and waking up every day of real life to be the nightmare. Back then I just wanted to go to bed and not wake up in the morning.

Fortunately it's over. I wake up in the morning to the sunrise again. Since then, I've found TRP (from Rollo's blog), I started lifting, do yoga, meditation and I'm improving myself. I don't have PTSD from this - I have thrown it behind me and enjoy even small stuff now, the alternative was to brood over my past and go crazy. I do not hate people with these kind of issues, but so long as they are that way, and refuse to acknowledge their problems, and start taking responsibility for their lives and get treated, one can't have a relationship with them - they're too destructive and a danger to themselves.

If there's one force in the universe that a man has to fear, it's BPD.

PS : I had to leave when I was convinced the issue was beyond help. It was hard, but it was the best thing I did for everyone - they wanted out as well, but were waiting for me to make the first move. If it had continued, it would have affected 4 families on both sides. As far as I've enquired, she wasn't anything like this before marriage (or so claim the people in her hometown and her friends). I doubt this - such extreme behaviours are rooted in genetics, some people are wired that way. It may be that mild episodes were known but weren't seen as abnormal. She also seemed totally normal while dealing with her family and relatives. It was only with me that this side of my ex emerged. Perhaps the circumstances didn't give an opportunity.

Some more red flags. She had some severe psychosomatic panic attacks. A perceived tension could leave her sweaty, breathless or hyperventilating. Her dad made a remark at one point that she was very emotionally sensitive and that sometimes he himself would be scared to handle her. Her sister's husband made a curious statement that she and her sister can't take pain and they can get into a state where you have to handle them carefully for a while, then they'll be ok. I remember that I felt startled at the oddness of such a statement, my gut feeling sank, but I thought nothing about it at the time, but strangely I never forgot these statements till today. She also hated natural light and fresh air. Her house always used to be dark with all windows closed and the AC on. Now when I think about it...