My husband has a tendency to see things as either all good or all bad, the result of being raised by BPD/NPD mother....
But what that results in is that he gets very worked up about things and I try to just listen and be neutral because he needs to just vent it out. However, often he gets more and more worked up to the point that he is crabby with everyone while he is "working through his frustration" and I can see that he has gone completely off the rails and is not being rational.
For some reason I feel compulsively motivated to try to help him see reason or calm him down or change his perspective....I know it never works, I KNOW this...but I cannot seem to stop myself. I am more aware of it than ever now because I have been doing more and more research on BPD. More than one P-doc and counselor have assured us that though he has behavior patterns that might fit with BPD, he does not display signs of a full blown diagnosis and thus it is just learned behavior.
How can I stop myself. He tells me when he calms down that all he needs is just for it to be okay for him to be temporarily messed up (of course it is) without me trying to "fix" him. He claims he just needs time alone to work through things...but often he comes and starts to talk to me and talks until I get frustrated or hurt by his grouchiness because he will see something someone is doing or whatever and get annoyed and say really crabby stuff to me or the kids...so then I start trying to calm him down.
I need a strategy for how to just walk away and be cool and calm while he works through it, even when he acts like he needs me to talk to while he works through it. I think if I can figure out a way to stop my involvement in the cycle that then it will be his issue and I don't have to use energy trying to fix problems that result from me trying to fix him!
Any advice is very much appreciated. I don't want to go through this cycle anymore. Last night I just refused to engage....and we didn't have a big blowup - probably one of the better instances of him getting upset. But he comes home from work upset about something and starts just bouncing negative off of everything.....like watching a Leave it to Beaver with the kids and he is getting upset at the way Ward was handling things and he just kept calling the TV an idiot etc....I just get tired of that so I just left the room and did my own thing...he came after me when the show was out and started talking about a lot of negative stuff....so I just listened a while and said it sounded like he needed some time alone to blow off steam and I went to bed. But then he was still upset because he feels like I expect him to be perfect. I totally don't. In fact, if HE would quit trying to be perfect life would be a lot easier!
Fortunately, because I just went to bed, today is fine....if I had tried to calm him down, figure out what was wrong etc, the entire weekend would have been destroyed. I know that he is very damaged from his extremely physically/emotionally/verbally abuse childhood and I try to be really considerate of that...but sometimes I just don't want to have to deal with him being in a bad mood at the times he is! It isn't every day, or even 3 days a week, just once in a while, and most of the time there are not huge blowups anymore because I take anti-anxiety medication so I can be calm through it...because I realized with the help of my counselor that I was internalizing his negative stuff and making it directed at me when it wasn't, and my anxiety reaction to that was part of my compulsion to calm him down....
But I just want a strategy. Something I can say and walk away that isn't offensive, superior sounding, rude or anything like that. I am more than willing to own what I do to contribute, but I just don't want it to happen anymore so I need a way to diffuse the situation when he is just getting crabby without sounding like I am his mom and sending him to his room to cool down...you know what I mean? Thanks for any help here.
But what that results in is that he gets very worked up about things and I try to just listen and be neutral because he needs to just vent it out. However, often he gets more and more worked up to the point that he is crabby with everyone while he is "working through his frustration" and I can see that he has gone completely off the rails and is not being rational.
For some reason I feel compulsively motivated to try to help him see reason or calm him down or change his perspective....I know it never works, I KNOW this...but I cannot seem to stop myself. I am more aware of it than ever now because I have been doing more and more research on BPD. More than one P-doc and counselor have assured us that though he has behavior patterns that might fit with BPD, he does not display signs of a full blown diagnosis and thus it is just learned behavior.
How can I stop myself. He tells me when he calms down that all he needs is just for it to be okay for him to be temporarily messed up (of course it is) without me trying to "fix" him. He claims he just needs time alone to work through things...but often he comes and starts to talk to me and talks until I get frustrated or hurt by his grouchiness because he will see something someone is doing or whatever and get annoyed and say really crabby stuff to me or the kids...so then I start trying to calm him down.
I need a strategy for how to just walk away and be cool and calm while he works through it, even when he acts like he needs me to talk to while he works through it. I think if I can figure out a way to stop my involvement in the cycle that then it will be his issue and I don't have to use energy trying to fix problems that result from me trying to fix him!
Any advice is very much appreciated. I don't want to go through this cycle anymore. Last night I just refused to engage....and we didn't have a big blowup - probably one of the better instances of him getting upset. But he comes home from work upset about something and starts just bouncing negative off of everything.....like watching a Leave it to Beaver with the kids and he is getting upset at the way Ward was handling things and he just kept calling the TV an idiot etc....I just get tired of that so I just left the room and did my own thing...he came after me when the show was out and started talking about a lot of negative stuff....so I just listened a while and said it sounded like he needed some time alone to blow off steam and I went to bed. But then he was still upset because he feels like I expect him to be perfect. I totally don't. In fact, if HE would quit trying to be perfect life would be a lot easier!
Fortunately, because I just went to bed, today is fine....if I had tried to calm him down, figure out what was wrong etc, the entire weekend would have been destroyed. I know that he is very damaged from his extremely physically/emotionally/verbally abuse childhood and I try to be really considerate of that...but sometimes I just don't want to have to deal with him being in a bad mood at the times he is! It isn't every day, or even 3 days a week, just once in a while, and most of the time there are not huge blowups anymore because I take anti-anxiety medication so I can be calm through it...because I realized with the help of my counselor that I was internalizing his negative stuff and making it directed at me when it wasn't, and my anxiety reaction to that was part of my compulsion to calm him down....
But I just want a strategy. Something I can say and walk away that isn't offensive, superior sounding, rude or anything like that. I am more than willing to own what I do to contribute, but I just don't want it to happen anymore so I need a way to diffuse the situation when he is just getting crabby without sounding like I am his mom and sending him to his room to cool down...you know what I mean? Thanks for any help here.