Let me start by saying that dysfunction in relationships has a sneaky way to sneak in.
At the start of any relationship we are all so consumed with the newness of our partner. We fall in love with all the little things we have never experienced in any other relationship before. Sometimes being together really starts off from a rooted place in total compatibility. Our whole world is in awe. A surreal feeling this cannot be happening to you, thinking I made it at last. It was worth the wait.
But then months later, maybe a year later, at least longer than any relationship takes to show tell tale signs of something is off. It is like your partner gets you deeply rooted in the personality, in the part of their being where you feel safe, cared for, the part that makes you commit on a deep level.
Now here’s the thing. There is always a sudden twist. An unbelievable moment that you get confronted by what just happened? This can’t be happening. We have a solid and beautiful relationship. This relationship has already stood the test of time, 16 months. You have this creepy feeling that something serious is really off, but you convince yourself that this must be a mistake, and cannot be real.
And this my friend is exactly where the next season of drama in your word to be specific your relationship starts. Believe me this is far beyond your imagination. The contradictions too many to tell, the inconsistencies, the lies, the half truths, the irrational thinking, the Jekyll and Hide moments like you could never have imagined. Boom right there in your face. A personality disorder. Now what?
Let me first say that as of late we are bombarded with mental health and the vast array of mental disorders. There are times when I do wonder if this maybe just maybe isn’t fostered by society. The need to give something the blame for abnormal or unacceptable behaviours is growing, a place more and more people seem to navigate to. There seems to be a movement to label society as one messed up crowd with a vast array of mental health problems.
The DSM is the American Psychiatric Association’s standard reference for psychiatry, which includes over 450 different definitions of mental disorders.
So what do you do when you are in a happy and committed relationship and one morning you wake up and there it is, your loved one is having an episode, a fit or just something that you have never experienced before. It is immediately evident that their actions are not within the boundaries of normal behaviour. The scary part is that at the end of the episode he or she just carries on as if nothing happened. Worst of all, they end up twisting the facts to lay the blame solely on your shoulders for the way they acted.
Total Shock! You are confronted with a part of your partner that you have never seen before. In fact you don’t actually don’t know what you just experienced. Just there at that very moment is the beginning of a very long winding road gathering information, doing self reflection, searching and completing online personality assessments trying to get to the gist of what are you dealing with.
This is the most tiring journey you will ever embark on and the reason for this is, that not only will the episodes escalate, your relationship dynamics start to change day by day. All of a sudden you have this extra personality that you will have to manage in order to navigate through all the accusations and try to move within the lines of normality. At first your partner will keep it under the lid, but as the episodes start to escalate their focus will shift to you start blaming you more and more for the issues you two are dealing with.
Not sure how to navigate back to normality you will start to convince yourself on a daily basis that they are inherently a good person and that you have up to now only experienced the best of them. You will downplay every episode against the good dynamics the relationship had for the better part of 16 plus months. You will start to make excuses and start covering their iniquities. Thinking that you will guide and assist them, trying to see what is happening from a different viewpoint. In other words you will stand in the fire, being blamed for 90% of the problems, and you will end up facilitating him back to a space of rational thinking. Over and over again. A deep disturbing cycle wrapped in normality for the world to see. You will be isolated and alone, the only one knowing what is happening behind closed doors.
You will start to take accountability for your actions and end up taking accountability for their actions, and before you know it, you will wake up one day realising that you are in an abusive relationship. You will start to realise that they need therapy and whatever is happening, it is more serious than an episode. It is a warzone and you are in a battlefield with the one you love, the one that need to keep you safe and the one where you can let your guard down. Unfortunately that will be the first day of many realising you have lost the essence of a love relationship. Being valued, loved and sheltered.The monster has two faces, the one you love and the other that hates you.
