For written version please check here

“(…)My dad: “That’s the way it is.”My ex: “This is normal.”My dad: “I still love her” (even though she causes you pain and distress)My ex: “You want me to end the friendship with her?! We’ve known each other for 15 years!” (even though it’s putting stress on the current relationship).

My dad controlled my feelings and reactions. I was easier to control than my mum. I was a child. I trusted he was my safe net, my security source. I trusted all he said and wanted me to do was for my good. Whenever he told me, “It’s normal, I love her anyway,” he asked me to stop listening to my feelings. He uncounsciously asked me to stop trusting what I saw, what I felt, what my body told me. And I did. I trusted him that it was good for me. It wasn’t… I shut down the connection between me and my feelings. I stopped trusting my instinct. I started seeing painful and dangerous situations as “normal”, accepting them and learning to live them… He subtly gaslighted me, whenever I said she was horrible to me. Whenever I was angry and crying. It was easier than to control her. The older I grew, the more anger I…”

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- Why do they get angry with me when I set the boundaries, why do they say I am stubborn and will always be alone/never meet a man if I don’t change and be more “do what I say” type?

- Why do they try to break me - sometimes I feel that they’re with me and see me as a challenge: “let’s see if we can get her self-confidence down, break her, see her crying on her knees so that she depends on us and can’t leave us”?

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"I was 36 when I heard from a psychologist, “It sounds like your mum has Borderline Personality Disorder. Read this book: “Stop walking on eggshells.”” And that was it. It was our 10th and last session."

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Therapy is not just tears or fear of “What's there I don't know about myself”? “

It's also laughter and joking about your trauma 😁.

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“We hope, one day, to have a loving romantic relationship with our partner. We hope, one day, they will have a change of heart and realise what kind of emotional and/or physical hurt they have caused us. ​We hope they will see how wonderful we are, worthy of their love and appreciation. This hope keeps us from seeing the painful reality, that our partner will not, and does not want to, change. They don't have our best interest at heart… Why? Because they are healing their own trauma using us. Just like we are using them to heal our trauma… So, that hope makes us believe that we can change our partner… — that’s a failure in itself.“

If you’d like to visit and read the post this podcast is based on, please click here.

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1. New name: Raised By Borderline

I’ve changed the name of the blog/podcast from LoveYourLifeAgain to RaisedByBorderline as I think this reflects better what this blog/podcast is about, what I’ve been through, who I work with, and it’s easier to remember the name of the publications and my website.

2. Disappointment - my second skin.

Was this how I picked my partners? 😳. I could pick the bad boy from a row of 100 men standing in front of me… “There you are! You’re my boy!” “You’re gonna disappoint me, and you’re gonna do it right.” 🤣. “And we’re gonna see how long it takes for you to disappoint me. Coz it will happen. You’re gonna do it.” 😂 And then I could say, “I knew it! I was right.” ☝️

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For written version, please click here.

“People talk about creating your own reality. But not as children. As a child, you come to other people’s reality, and your job is to survive, long enough to be able to create your own. We make decisions about ourselves, quite early, then we bury them, and they are there for so long, that we believe that that’s the way we are, that’s the way things are. You had to fight your mother. Stand up for yourself. And then everyone took her side.” Andy Bryce, EFT Master, my therapist.

And that’s the thing. They took her side, but, at the same time, they were telling me that she was wrong. They were telling me that I was right, and that she was wrong, but I had to shut up and play along. Did what she wanted. Let her have her will. I was right feeling that something was not right, but it didn’t make any difference, because she was still right. Her righteousness was “righter” than mine.

Thank you so much for reading. Please, visit my website loveyourlifeagain.com, my Substack profile substack.com/@loveyourlifeagain. If you liked this post, please share it. If you know anyone who can benefit from it, please share it with them.

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I was born into a reality of my parents: my mum with Borderline Personality Disorder, and my dad, Master of Ignorance. I would yell, argue and fight back my mum, who was treating me like rubbish. I'd fight for myself since I was a 5-year-old…

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Audio version of a post under the same title.

“It doesn't matter what it is, they just want you to listen and just to be the ear. From my own experience, it's not even that you have to listen, it’s about you being there. You can just let it in through one ear and let out through the other. You can just let it go around you. If you talk on the phone, you can have it on speaker, and you can cook your dinner at the same time if you want to.”

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Audio version of the post under the same title, that you can read here.

“I'm really sorry that it's like that. I really wish it was much easier, but it's not. And it's not your fault. If you grew up with a borderline parent or emotional, immature, unstable, unavailable, and narcissistic parent, you were born into a situation. And this situation did things to you on the inside. It shaped you on the inside in a certain way.

But it might be a shape that you never really wanted to be. That maybe it’s nothing you want to be, but that situation has shaped you somehow. You had to survive that childhood and those teenage years and your twenties, and maybe you're still being there. But deep down in your heart, you know that it's not what you want to be. It's not how you want to live your life.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit raisedbyborderline.substack.com