In the process of trying to make sense of how my marriage suddenly fell apart, I’ve come to the realization that my wife very likely has quiet BPD. Her actions over the past 6 months have hurt me, but I still feel immense love and care for her, especially because it’s clear that her actions are the result of deep inner turmoil from her childhood. With that said, I’m curious if those who are aware of their personal struggles with quiet BPD might be able to provide any insights on whether I should say something and/or how I can help her going forward.

For context: 

My ex-wife had a profoundly tragic childhood. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say she would score a 10/10 on the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) test. I think the difficult experiences she went through played a part of in making her the deeply loving, empathic, and creative person I fell in love with. It’s also clear, unfortunately, that she is still deeply suffering from those experiences. She hardly remembers her childhood and continues to have issues with memory. While she is very opinionated when it comes to particular things, she struggles to know how she feels about a lot of things that I assume most would have an intuitive sense for. For example, she periodically started to fear that she was actually gay and was lying to herself about it despite her not feeling any conscious attraction to women. 

She has a very complex relationship with sex. She was very sexual at the beginning of our relationship, but it became increasingly scarier for her as our marriage progressed as she would have fears of turning into her parents or fears that she was just having sex because she felt like she had to in order to keep me around. I kept insisting that that wasn’t the case and would give her as much space as possible and would always let her be the one to initiate. She would often express fear that she was asexual and that I was going to leave her because of it, but she ended up being the one who eventually left me in part to her saying she couldn’t feel sexual feelings for me anymore. 

I feel a lot of cognitive dissonance when I read accounts of people who’ve been with people with BPD because she never showed any classic BPD symptoms as she was never explosive, mean, or vindictive. She would just go into deep dissociative episodes when triggers would arise. In fact, I genuinely feel like we had an exceptionally loving and fulfilling 4.5 year relationship up until our marriage abruptly fell apart. I think our marriage fell apart due to something deep being triggered earlier this year by the culmination of several circumstances that sent her into fight-or-flight mode (e.g. isolation during pandemic, sister being left by her husband, regretting career choices). She had been in a deep depression for several months before this and talked about not feeling alive. Despite the fact that she was the one who had pushed really hard for us to get married, she started to express fears that marriage was actually a trap and dangerous for women, which made sense given that she was witness to a number of abusive marriages in her family and friend group over the previous year. She looked up to the women from those abusive marriages and how they had reinserted their independence after divorcing their husbands. 

All of this seems to be what culminated in her abruptly announcing that she wanted a trial separation while she figured out what she really wanted. We started going to therapy and seemed to be making good progress. Then out of the blue, a male friend of her’s found out she was separated and confessed to having had feelings for her for years. She jumped at this and told me the marriage was over. This was hard to take, but also super confusing because she had had serious problems in the past with this guy. It was almost like she became a different person. My theory is that the feeling of being lusted after by this guy did something to boost her otherwise poor self esteem and make her feel alive and full for the first time in awhile. I don’t know what the latest is on their relationship, but the last time I talked to her she said it wasn’t going well. She feels immense shame about everything that she’s done to me and has distanced herself from her family because she can’t handle talking to them about it. Sometimes when I talk to her, she feels like she did the right thing, other times she’s terrified that she made a huge mistake. She has said a couple of times that she’s sad because she thinks that she won’t be with someone who is as nice to her as I was again. She has nightmares about me abandoning her even though she was the one that pretty much abandoned me. This is all so confusing for me. 

With all of that said, I keep wondering if I should say something to her about BPD. She has a friend who was diagnosed a year ago and at the time my wife questioned if she had it, but then brushed it off because she didn’t have any of the classic borderline symptoms. Now that I’ve learned about quiet BPD, part of me really wants to share that info with her, but I’m worried that it could backfire and make her feel worse. Also, since she no longer has insurance because of the divorce, she probably wouldn’t be able to afford treatment. If we were married and things were the way they were in the past, I feel like I could have talked to her about it without any problems, but now everything is different. I just want to help her and hate to think that me not saying anything could keep her from beginning a journey towards healing.

I would be very interested to hear what people who themselves know what having quiet BPD is like would think about this situation. Thanks so so much in advance.