i've figured out the cycle that me and my narcissist FP have been rotating thru the last 10 months:

\- our relationship has what i consider to be a good amount of emotional and physical intimacy

\- he complains about me idealizing him

\- he either uses what he knows about my trauma history to hurt me or abruptly stops with emotional and sexual intimacy "because you have BPD" (despite the lack of BPD symptoms - i think that intimacy over an extended period of time makes him feel insecure)

\- i split and use self-harm, suicide attempts and threats of fucking his friends to manipulate him to come back to me

\- it backfires and he becomes more distant

\- i start to move on and form other deep relationships

\- he gets jealous and asks me to go on a date with me

\- we go on lots of dates but i am still actively being mean to him

\- i admit that i like him and i don't want to have to act otherwise

we're currently on the step where he's being abusive "because you have BPD" and it's fucking killing me. i've been flipping between wanting to just be chill for long enough for him to get out of this devaluation phase and fantasizing about fucking his homophobic, toxic best frenemy and his beautiful white best friend to hurt him. when i'm in the revenge fantasy mode the thought is always that i wouldn't be responsible for my actions because *he* was the one who broke the beautiful intimate phase of our relationship and *he* is the one who needs to be punished. but at the same time i know that i would be responsible and that i don't actually want to hurt him - i just want him to stop hurting me, and i don't know how to do that without hurting him. already just going low communication and periodically sending hateful text messages has worked wonders. i hate that i'm like this, and i hate that he's responsive to it.

there's something really difficult for me about taking responsibility for things i have done, and only things i have done. i was raped by an ex-boyfriend in december after i cheated on him with current FP. current FP is opposed to trauma-bonding outside of trauma he is creating in his partner, as i have seen in his other relationships, and so i still have not told him about it. i've processed the physical elements of the rape and i don't really have an issue having sex even when it's intimate; it's just like the emotional element of it, the possibility that someone i trust with my body and the stories of my trauma and knowledge of my BPD could use those things against me. that's the part of it that i don't know what to do with. how do i come to terms with the fact that i am not responsible for my rape while also accepting my responsibility for cheating, when my ex-boyfriend says that the rape was justified because i cheated?

in my current situation i am having a hard time separating our responsibility. i know on a factual level that i'm responsible for manipulating and idealizing and splitting on him, and he's responsible for idealizing and devaluing me as well as manipulating my expectations of his behavior. but when i look at the narrative big picture, though, it's hard to not see it either as 'i wanted too much from him, and it's all my fault' or 'he is incapable of intimacy with me and keeps making these shitty half efforts anyway, and it's all his fault'. it seems almost like one of us should be responsible for the entire causal chain of events, but i know that it isn't actually that way. it's both of our faults and it's in the sense that each of us are responsible for specific things

why is that so damn hard to internalize