More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 3 - June 1, 2024
“Never give up” could be the Caretaker’s motto. To you it seems disloyal, selfish, and unloving for you to even consider giving up on any relationship. This belief keeps you being a slave in the relationship to the BP/NP. You see the smallest positive response from the BP/NP as wonderfully giving, which keeps you from exiting.
Caretakers spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to come up with ways of saying and explaining things to the BP/NP that are more clear, that are more understandable, or that make more sense.
You constantly think of the needs of the BP/NP and are shocked and confused when the BP/NP sees you as controlling.
Your behaviors become contingent on what the BP/NP is doing, thinking, feeling, and wanting. You try to “handle” the chaos. You try to please the BP/NP. You try to make life calmer and more predictable.
As a Caretaker, you are certainly good at putting on a happy face, acting calm, and smoothing things over. Denial of the confusion and chaos and acting as if everything is fine may feel like second nature. You tolerate an amazing amount of emotional chaos before even noticing that anything is amiss. Behaviors that would drive a noncaretaker away quickly from a relationship often don’t even register with you. You may even be proud of yourself for how well you do in a crisis.
Even when things look relatively calm on the surface, the underlying feelings in the relationship are uncertainty, anxiety, distrust, and not knowing what is actually happening or what will happen next. This creates great anxiety in children and in you as well. Do you notice that you are always waiting for the next disaster?
Without social support or an outside frame of reference like friends or family, you can end up feeling stuck in a nightmare of confusion that seems impossible to get out of. You may even feel embarrassed to discuss what is going on in your relationship even on a casual basis with friends. If you do try to describe the truth of your relationship to a friend or relative, the gravity and level of dysfunction is rarely understood by the listener.
When couples believe that they must do everything together, the one who says “No” always determines what happens. However, the relationship between a BP/NP and the Caretaker is based on the premise that it is against the rules for the Caretaker to say “No.” Have you noticed that when you attempt to say “No,” the BP/NP emotionally erupts, withdraws, pouts, or attacks?
And since there is such a strong expectation in the relationship that you do everything together, eventually this, too, discourages you from doing the things you want to do.
When I ask Caretakers how they take care of themselves, I usually get blank stares or explanations that they would feel better if the BP/NP would just think of his or her needs.
You may have very little idea of what you want other than a vague idea of being happy, feeling loved, or being cared for. If you can’t put these general feelings into some concrete behavioral terms, you can’t get very far in filling those needs.
Giving up your hope and fantasy of someday having your needs met by the BP/NP may also seem like a terrible defeat. It may mean coming face-to-face with the fear that this relationship cannot be made to work in a give-and-take manner no matter how much you give.
Enmeshment results when you and the BP/NP merge into one, and it is exemplified by behaviors such as talking for each other, assuming that both of you think the same about everything, expecting to react or feel exactly the same in a situation, lack of privacy, assuming that everything that belongs to one belongs to the other, and always using “we” instead of “I” (e.g., “we think” and “we feel”).
Caretakers typically think of themselves as strong, positive, caring, and healthy, and much of the time you are. However, Caretakers too often carry an internal negative self-esteem and self-attitude that is often hidden, maybe even from yourself.
The constant demand for perfection in yourself, your need to seek approval from the BP/NP, and your failure to “fix” the borderline, to get the narcissist to love you, or to somehow make everyone’s life happy may make you feel that you are a failure and to blame for the all the problems in this relationship.
If you aren’t constantly in the Caretaker role, does that mean that you are uncaring, heartless, mean, and selfish, in other words, everything you have been told you are by the BP/NP when you aren’t doing what he or she wants?
Get over wanting to change the BP/NP, quit trying to change the BP/NP, and start focusing on what you actually have the power to change, that is, yourself.
Becoming mindful of what your fears are really about when the BP/NP is angry can lead you to changing your relationship with the BP/NP in significant ways. Being easily manipulated by anger means that you are giving up your power in the relationship.
You are more willing to put up with relationships that are not equal, to give up your needs for others, and to expect more adult and responsible behavior from yourself than from others when you have learned these patterns growing up.
It is really important to get help from others. In order to learn how healthy relationships work, you need models and directions. It is also wonderful to have healthy people around to help you practice new behaviors and to give you encouragement and support.
In addition, you may want to search out a knowledgeable therapist who has had experience working with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.
Instead of just hoping for the best and reacting to what the BP/NP does, real change requires you to invest in a whole new system of thinking, believing, and acting. This kind of change requires much greater time, greater resources, and greater courage than you have put in so far. Therefore, denial can seem much more preferable.
Anger is the first sign of your admitting that the BP/NP is treating you badly and that you don’t like it. You are starting to feel that the relationship with the BP/NP is unfair to you and that it really doesn’t fit what you want in an intimate relationship.
You may be angry at yourself for picking the BP/NP in the first place.
When you are already using up all of your energy just to cope with things as they are, it can seem too much to deal with actually making significant life changes.
It is very hard not to get involved in bargaining because you love (or have loved) the BP/NP, you’ve made a long-term investment in the relationship, you may be raising children, have a mortgage, and have a life plan that includes the BP/NP. Since the BP/NP can often look perfectly normal to outsiders, you have also probably been given a lot of advice about how to make things work from well-meaning friends, relatives, ministers, therapists, and so on.
Anger comes when negative events break through your denial. But since anger is so uncomfortable to Caretakers, you move to bargaining to try to change things without rocking the boat too much.
The longer the cycle continues, the harder it often is to extricate yourself from it because you think you will lose all of the investment and energy you have put into the bargaining solutions.
Often it is the effect of your relationship with the BP/NP on your children that finally gets you to take a serious look at the failure that is occurring.
You start moving into the stage of acceptance when you realize that you are powerless to change the BP/NP. Acceptance can actually bring a sense of relief and calmness.
You cannot move toward the goal of good self-care without setting some new and solid boundaries. In fact, you cannot even have a clear sense of yourself and your own life without boundaries. Boundaries are the invisible separations between yourself and others. They identify where you (your thoughts, feelings, responsibilities, wants, and needs) begin and end.
Self-care sets up a reverse scenario. That is, you fill yourself up until you don’t need the other person to fill you up. Then, whatever you give will come from a place of abundance rather than neediness. This keeps you from feeling that the other person owes you for what you give.
No two people can be exactly the same, not even if you were identical twins, which you are a long way from being.
Basing your life on what you hope will happen rather than what is happening has been part of the reason for how you ended up being so frustrated, angry, and hurt. This is not to discount that some of the experiences you have had with the BP/NP were quite unpleasant and disturbing. But a lot of the angst, confusion, and indecision has been the result of the conflict in your own mind between what you think should be happening and what is happening and between what you and the BP/NP pretend is happening and what is happening.
What the BP/NP says, thinks, and feels about you or what he or she accuses you of during the throes of an emotional storm may or may not be true. But they are always irrelevant to the facts at the moment.
Seek your validation from friends, coworkers, your therapist, and other rational people who can give you feedback on who you are and whether you are acting with kindness or selfishness. Being in a therapy group for family members of BP/NPs can be amazingly helpful for getting validation, strength, and support in handling this crazy-making relationship you are in.
BP/NP communication is often vague, convoluted, and confusing, starting out with one topic and morphing into a dozen or more topics with no conclusions and no decisions made at the end. You may find yourself agreeing to things you don’t agree with or thinking that one conclusion has been made but the BP/NP insists it was a different conclusion.
BP/NPs rarely negotiate because they feel certain that their own needs and wants will be ignored. They have learned to demand and grab to get their wants met.
Not giving a reason or explaining your decisions gives you control over your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. It allows you to state who you are without getting into a debate about right and wrong.
Very little gets changed with a BP/NP by talking. BP/NPs are masters of denial and delusion. They jump instantaneously from topic to topic, they are emotional rather than logical, and they usually forget any discussion that has been emotionally intense.
Get busy thinking about yourself for once. Are you in the career you want? Are you living where you want? Do you have the friends you want? Are you enjoying your personal life?
Many of the ideas and suggestions in typical books on relationships as well as the advice of friends trying to be helpful are just not relevant to your situation. These ideas may not be for your situation because very few people really understand the dynamics of personality disorders.
It is not uncommon for Caretakers to wonder what is normal. You may feel there is something wrong with you. And you certainly know there is something wrong with your relationship with the BP/NP.
If you already know there is something wrong with your BP/NP parent, adult child, or spouse, it can be very threatening to realize you are permanently attached to someone who is so dysfunctional. Therefore, it can actually feel more comfortable to think there is something wrong with you. At least then you can believe that you have control over changing it. So seeing yourself as not normal can be a way to stay safe and work at changing things without really making any waves with the BP/NP.
By working to become healthier and leave the Caretaker role, be aware that this could greatly disrupt your family and your relationship. You are stepping into a maturing process in yourself that eventually becomes irreversible. Whenever our understanding and our skills in the world increase and mature, we rarely, if ever, go back to being less aware or less skilled or wanting less of the good things that have come into our lives.
Feelings from the past that come into the present are called transference. These are feelings that are being transferred from a similar experience with someone in the past to a present situation. As a result, the feelings are much bigger and more dramatic than they should be.
Most people don’t even know that their present-day overreaction is really about unresolved feelings from the past. That is why so many disagreements and emotional conversations with BP/NPs don’t get resolved. The present situation is only the trigger for the BP/NP to feel exactly like he or she did in a past situation.
Having a trained, experienced therapist who specifically understands the BP/NP can really help you sort things out. Not a lot of therapists have this kind of training or experience, so ask specifically what training, reading, and workshops the therapist has had.
The BP/NP is very prone to blaming you for everything he or she thinks, feels, and does, and you need to come to terms with the fact that the BP/NP is not a reliable person to identify reality. About 90 percent of the time, whatever the BP/NP says about you is a much more reliable statement about him or her. This is called projection.
The BP/NP acts out, dwells on, and exaggerates feelings so that when you are around him or her, it can be difficult for you to think and make rational decisions.
