I have now been in two very toxic relationships. The second just ended a couple of months ago. Undiagnosed BPD definitely led me to be a toxic person who didn't have enough awareness or understanding to prevent a lot of things I regret. But I find that I am also very easily manipulated into believing I am the sole reason for everything bad that happened, and both of my exes became abusive. I will not be entering into another relationship for a long time, but I am trying to understand what led to this so I can work on it at the root of it within myself. I am able to list out very concrete examples of abuse from both exes, but I still struggle greatly to accept that I was a victim as well. I am trying to understand what happens in my mind that makes it so difficult to accept that I could have been abused. This has been a pattern throughout my life, starting from a young age. 

I idealized my mom from a young age and was brainwashed to believe she was "the good parent" who saved me and my sister and sacrificed everything for us. As an adult in therapy I came to realize that I was groomed to be my mom's validator and emotional support, and to keep her feeling good about herself. This pattern of idealizing seems to have continued into many of my relationships as an adult. I have had two very toxic relationships, and I was a large source of the toxicity in both, as a person who had undiagnosed BPD at the time and didn't have enough awareness or tools to manage it. Luckily, that has changed a lot in the past couple of years with a lot of therapy, so I have hope that I will be able to avoid another toxic relationship. But I am trying to understand why I idealize these people the way I do. Both exes became abusive, and both manipulated me into believing I was the problem. Both refused to take responsibility for their abusive behavior, and in turn I idealized them and devalued myself. I believed that because I have BPD, my thoughts and emotions were not reliable, so I trusted them instead. Both exes were very emotionally unhealthy and did not have awareness of this fact, which created a perfect storm - me not trusting myself and struggling not to internalize all of my shame from my unintentional toxicity, and them also telling me I was at fault. This dynamic is very dangerous as I've learned.

I am now in a safe place, with people I trust to not manipulate me. I am trying to understand how this happened so I can prevent it ever happening again. I both need to learn to trust myself (which means I need to continue working to unlearn harmful thought patterns) and to also stop idealizing other people. This feels so overwhelming, because I've been manipulated so much at this point that I feel unable to trust anything I feel. I have concrete examples of abuse, and I still find myself trying to find rationalizations for the things that were done to me. I think my self-worth and my trust in myself are so broken down that I choose to believe other people know better than I do. Even when my gut told me he was being abusive and people in my life confirmed it, I still ended up rationalizing his behavior and convincing myself I deserved it.

How does this happen? I feel so stupid and crazy and alone in it. Not only do I carry all the shame of my own toxicity, I also carry the humiliation of allowing myself to be manipulated and abused. I have to figure out how to recover from this, and somehow understand how it got to this point and unlearn those thought patterns and behaviors. I am struggling right now to believe that's possible, but I'm trying.