Hello everyone,

First, I just want to say that I appreciate your openness and honesty about living with BPD. Reading through the posts and comments here, I am beginning to understand how things I take for granted can be a real struggle for others. 

I'm posting here because I have a small suspicion that my wife may be living with undiagnosed BPD. We've been married over 5 years, and have a couple children. She's an incredible person, she's hardworking and she loves me and our kiddos intensely. But our relationship has been punctuated by lots of intense fighting, usually triggered by weirdly insignificant things. When she's feeling great, I'm the best husband ever. When she's not, I'm the worst husband and she talks about divorce even though our marriage counselor made us promise not to say that word. She's extremely anxious, and has previously been on zoloft, which helped immensely (she weened herself off of it prior to her last pregnancy). I feel like she flies really high when she's on highs, but the lows are terrible. She's had suicidal ideations before. I previously thought that we were just both young in our marriage and that we would mature and stop fighting. Years later, nothing's changed. I'm beginning to suspect that she has BPD. I'm approaching this with incredible caution because wow, what an asshole I would be if she doesn't actually have BPD and I really am just an absolutely terrible and selfish husband. That may be the case, I know I fail her miserably again and again. But the reason why I'm beginning to suspect BPD is because it doesn't seem normal for a \~30 y/o person to communicate the way she does and react the way she does. It's like she compartmentalizes emotion and rationality and can only function on emotion when she's upset. I can see that she's suffering, and it breaks my heart. 

I want to find a way to enable her to explore that she may possibly have BPD. To be honest, I'm scared of her. Even the slightest criticism sets her off, and I've rehearsed different ways of telling her gently that something she's done has hurt me but it's never been met with compassion or understanding. I'm incredibly afraid of even saying the words "BPD" to her because I know she'll tell me that I think I'm perfect and that I think all of our relationship problems are because of her. I don't think that at all, but I don't know how to communicate that there might be some underlying reasons for her mood volatility, anxiety, and self-loathing that need to be identified in order for her to start feeling better. I called our health insurance, and she can access mental health resources but she needs to be the one to initiate it. Should I take the risk and try to bring this up to her? What if I'm wrong? How would you want somebody to broach the subject with you? Thank you all so much for your help.

TL;DR: I think my wife may have BPD and I'm afraid to bring it up to her, but she's not well and needs help.