* This post is a little scrambled. I was written in a Daily Thought Recorder. How it works;
- You describe the Event is detail
- What was the Impact of the Event
- What was the Intensity of the Emotions
- What were your Initial Responses
- Thought Fallacies (finding and labeling the distortions of the thinking)
- Reasonable Responses (talk back and change the distortions to more reasonable thoughts) With this you use the Common Thinking Errors, this was in my *Thinking* post.
With all that being said, here is how the break-up started.*
Day 1 and 2:
Event: A got a part time job at a bar that he starts this Friday and he will work Friday, Saturday and Sundays. He didn’t tell me he applied, we had plans like a wedding to go to soon. We never talked about him getting this job, or the fact he was low on money. I then got really mad and started a horrible fight. I attacked him with words. He was hurt, and wanted to leave me alone. I started cutting myself, trying to get him to pay attention and start fighting again. It didn’t work. I cried myself to sleep with him laying right by me. He then went to work and didn’t say goodbye. He then came over, attacked me with words, called me names and left. Before he left, I gave him the book Stop Walking On Eggshells.
Impact of Event: rage, sadness, abandonment, no understanding
Intensity of Emotions: 10, 10, 10, 10
Initial Responses:
- Maybe he just is setting me up to break-up with me (Emotional Reasoning and Catastophizing)
- He’s just like them all (Dismissing the positive and All or Nothing)
- He is standing me up like every other guy (Dismissing the positive)
- Why am I like this (Labeling)
- He wants to sleep in his house because when I’m like this I am mean and hurtful. (Labeling)
- I hate being in my head ( Emotional Reasoning)
- I want to stop thinking and feeling (Emotional Reasoning)
- He wants to leave (Emotional Reasoning)
- He can’t stand to be around me (Emotional Reasoning, Flaw)
- He made me waste my make-up (Blaming)
- He got want he wants, he will never takes me out (Assuming, All-or-Nothing)
- It’s good that I know he didn’t like to dance, it makes sense why he found a way out of being with me (Blaming, Emotional, Assuming)
- I wish I’d never meet him
- He’s going to leave me and be happier (Assuming)
Reasoning:
- He is only doing this so he can be more comfortable
- He still wanted to try and work on us (as of last night)
- He stayed last night
Day 3:
He ignored me all day and then said that he didn’t know if he wanted to be with me.
Day 4, 5, 6, and 7:
No contact. This drove me crazy. I was crying, and doing a lot of self destructive things. Being ignored triggers me to become my worse. I was Borderlining.
I couldn’t eat, sleep, do anything productive. I feel behind on my summer classes to the point I wasn’t sure if I was going to pass them. I was a horrible time. All I could think is how worthless I was, how I deserved this and that he was better off. I want to call him and beg him to come back. I wanted to beg him, because I knew it had worked once before. But this was different. I had never been ignored for this long. I couldn’t figure out how to talk to anyone, I was locked inside my own head.
Day 8:
He finally decided to talk to me. He was done I begged him for another chance. I told him that I would do anything that he wanted me to do. I told him that to at least notice that I didn’t go crazy when he ignored me. This (to me) was proof I could get better and that I was. He didn’t care, but somehow I got him talk into talking with my therapist.
My normal therapist was out of town that week, but my IOP therapist said she would talk to him.
He said that he was scared of what I would do to any children we had, he didn’t think I was mentally ready for a serious relationship, he was scared of me in a way. Even though he wanted to talk with her without me, I listened in. There was no way I was going to be able to not listen. My mind was going too many places to not listen in. Looking back, I wish I would not have, those words sometimes haunt me and they have taken a every long time to recover from.
After they were done talking, he was still ready to leave me. I used mindfulness and some DBT skills to handle him coming over to get his things. I even gave the jerk a hug. I was using my distress tolerance skills, regulating my emotions, and using interpersonal effectiveness. I had to use a observe breathing technique, use my self-soothe kit, and I continued to catch myself starting to act instead of just feeling. I thought I was doing really good showing him how much I changed within the last week. Looking back, I think I did learn how to better handle “extreme” moments, but I was really just acting like I had changed a lot. I know it was going to take longer than a week to really implant these skills, but I had to show him I was different. I had to prove to him I was worth his time. It didn’t work. I even gave him my Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotional Regulation, and my Distress Tolerance worksheets, mind you they were all filled out to catered what he might want to read and not what would actually help me.
Before he left, he told me “maybe in 5 years we could try again.” I held on to this for months. That was until I remembered I had told him this is what I told me crazy ex when I finally broke up with him. I was now the crazy ex and he drove away.
Borderlined 