Carrot On A Stick

This has been truly the worst 2 years of my entire life. Especially this last year. I'm starting to see a little light at the end of the tunnel, but I still have a long way to go.

I think the hardest thing for me to deal with is acceptance. I haven't even seen my ex in almost a year, (she moved away) yet she still hoovers me. Nothing serious, but if I want I can keep my foot in the door as one of her little playthings if I play by her rules, which I refuse to do. There really is no other way to describe it. I realize now that I never had a chance in the situation. I projected the fantasy of what I've always wanted into a dysfunctional relationship/person.

Being involved with a BPD is a classic example of "Carrot on a Stick". Meaning they always keep the illusion of joy and absolute love and harmony just out of reach. There is always something holding it up. Some excuse, no matter how bizarre, that is putting an electric fence in front of our ideal relationship. Understanding that the fence is BPD, and that BPD and the wonderful person you love and cherish are the same person, is when you can truly begin to heal. I'm blocked from the woman I loved by a fence with barbed wire, electricity, and a host of other defensive mechanism traps. The codependent in me is telling me "She needs me. I can save her.", so I try and climb the fence to rescue her. It always ends up the same way. I get violently shocked and emotionally injured. You'd think I would learn not to try and climb the fence.

It's very hard to give up on the people we love. I'm wired exactly like my mother, and I wish I wasn't. She "stayed" in a relationship with an abusive BPD (My father) and now that he's gone, she doesn't know what to do with her life. She was completely enmeshed with an abuser, who even at the end of his life when he was lost in morphine, was choking and hitting her. It was the most horrific scene I've ever witnessed in my life. My abusive father, dying and emaciated, lost in some memory from the past beating my mother as she's screaming.

Granted he improved when he quit drinking, but just because the physical abuse stopped, doesn't mean the emotional and verbal abuse got any better. It didn't. I don't have any negative feelings against my mother, but damn I wish she would have got us out of that situation early in my life. It has crippled me emotionally to where I can barely function now. It's been so hard to overcome. I've tried to mask it by going to the gym like a madman most of my adult life to build a solid exterior, but inside, I still feel like that cowering child waiting for the beatings. I realize now that BPD/Codependents are cut from the same mold. It's why we get involved in these dysfunctional dances. I could have very well ended up BPD myself, except my mother was an all engulfing co dependent who smothered me and tried to protect me, so I adopted her ways through childhood idealization. It's all unconscious. You don't do this purposely, it just becomes who you are as you experience life I suppose.

I have to stop thinking I'd be happy if only my exbpdgf wasn't severely mentally ill. Nobody can make me happy except myself. I have to learn to love myself. I wish my childhood and lifetime of abuse hadn't made that possibility feel like climbing Mount Everest.