About two decades ago, I went through 5 years of CBT to recover from what I now recognize as BPD. My life got a lot better over time. I became mostly pretty stable. A couple of years before I got treatment, I felt trapped in a high conflict relationship. I told myself for years afterwards that I had been emotionally abused. Fast forward to two years ago, I got into my first relationship with another person with BPD. Didn't know it at first and was very confused. But I looked up all the symptoms, read posts here, and realized what was going on. Then I had distant memories of what I used to be like years ago and saw these feelings and habits reflected in this present day person (now recent ex). After constant conflict, push-pull, picking fights, rages, verbal abuse from him, I began developing PTSD and also my own BPD started getting triggered again. Then it hit me one day. The relationship where I had thought I was being abused two decades ago, I had acted just like this person. I had been the emotionally abusive person, not the other way around. At the time I felt out of control with my BPD, I was deeply hurting others and bringing about mutually harmful situations. I'm not saying this is always the case with pwBPD, we can attract abusers too, but this person I thought had abused me, I went back to read his old emails, my journals, and honestly I don't think what he said was abusive in hindsight. It took me years of stability and being put in the other person's shoes to realize how I had tormented and exhausted others with my hair trigger emotions, constant sudden breaking up and pulling back, paranoia, suspicions of infidelity, neediness, and need to fight. And now that I've experienced it all from a less stable pwBPD, it's honestly been hellish. It's like a form of torture.

I guess besides having compassion for the long journey it takes, one can recover to the point where you forget what it was like, exactly, to be this way. It becomes a sort of fuzzy distant memory. And one big difference now is no matter what hurtful things others say and do, and some things do hurt terribly or deeply trigger me, I can find a place of where I believe in myself. I generally like myself. Now, I hope to focus on my recovery and get to some peace of mind again. And maybe I've worked off some karma.