💕 sugar | Tough to Write About Part 2

This part has been even harder to get started writing.. I have to talk more specifically about my personal experience with BPD which has always been really hard and shameful for me ‒ NOTE: having BPD is not shameful! I, me, personally myself, feel ashamed for the ways that I have hurt people and for the aspects of my feelings and thoughts that I feel that I cannot control. Even in my own therapy sessions I find this very difficult to discuss. I’ve been with my wife for almost six years and only over the past few months have I been able to tell her about some of the deeper parts of this.

-> See part 1 here

I’m also not looking forward to the fact that I will have to admit to some embarrassing truths that are current.

I guess it’s probably easiest to go through the common symptoms, but first I want to talk about where BPD comes from. The current leading thinking says BPD can develop due to childhood abuse and/or neglect. It’s been a struggle for me to admit that I was not merely neglected as a kid but actively abused. So I’m not particularly surprised I ended up with BPD. And I want to offer up something to keep in mind as you continue to read: a person with BPD is often in intense emotional pain. We are struggling very hard.

Yes, I am asking you, the reader who does not have BPD, to hold sympathy for people with BPD. No, I am not asking you to ignore the behaviors of someone with BPD. As I stated in the previous part: one is fully 100% responsible for their words and actions, for the abuse they may inflict and the harm they may cause. And if you are someone with BPD, or even suspect you may have BPD, I especially want you to hold these two truths together: You are in pain and you are hurting and that’s not your fault, and you are responsible for your behavior that comes from your pain. These are difficult truths to hold together, and it gets even harder when you have BPD. Which segues nicely into the symptom set. I’m going to borrow and paraphrase from four main sources for this:

These pages are super worth checking out but certainly are not the only sources or authorities on the subject. I will also be expanding with my own lived experience as well as shared experiences that people have discussed in BPD communities, as there’s some stuff missing from those “official” symptoms list.

Before we start (I know I keep putting it off, this is the last time I promise!), if you recognize yourself in any of this, please bring it up to your therapist if you have one or try to find a therapist experienced with BPD and/or DBT¹ if you have the means. Perhaps finding some online BPD communities could be helpful, but I fear some of them may just feed certain symptoms. Be careful and scope a place out, get a feel for if it seems like it fuels toxicity or not. There are unfortunately some people out there with BPD who are all too keen to let their BPD drive them and see no issue with that. Thankfully, I believe that I have never encountered anyone like this and I hope none of you have to either.

the favorite person and all or nothing thinking

While these sources seem to list items 1 and 3 differently, they all have the same number 2: Unstable, intense and chaotic personal relationships. I feel like this one is the most noticeable both to people with and without BPD. For me, and perhaps many with BPD, this mostly seems to affect romantic relationships, but it can also be present in familial, work, friend, or other relationships too. As part of this intensity and chaos, one with BPD may find their opinions of the other person(s) in the relationship changing drastically and rapidly. Mayo Clinic describes this as:

believing someone is perfect one moment and then suddenly believing the person doesn’t care enough or is cruel.

Which hints at a few more direct explanations of symptoms than any of these sites go into:

all or nothing thinking / black and white thinking / splitting
the favorite person

You generally won’t see these on “official” symptom lists for some reason, and I think that really does a disservice. You’ll find more discussion of these in BPD communities and on actual therapy practice’s websites, but it feels like you have to know what you’re looking for to find it:

NOTE: I do not endorse any particular practice or therapist, I am just a blogger-of-BPD-experience trying to find some external websites online. Nor am I writing a research paper, so don’t expect me to have vetted and cross-referenced every-little-thing.

As someone with BPD, I think these two premises are highly intertwined: all or nothing thinking and someone being your “favorite person” feel like they go hand in hand. The favorite person is a kind of colloquialism that you’ll read mostly in BPD communities and in therapy environments, it’s never really talked about in “official” symptom lists for some reason even though I really think it should be. At first it sounds kinda cute and sweet right? Like “aw I’m her favorite person!” But no, it’s really not like that.. You don’t want to be the FP of someone with BPD.. Basically, it’s an over-attachment to a specific person (I have my wonders about whether it’s possible to attach to maybe, say, two specific people in this way, especially if those two people can be seen as a single “unit,” but I’ve never been able to find anyone who has and understood it, nor has it happened to me). I would even say it can and sometimes does reach obsession levels, from personal experience.. I don’t know what drives this attachment. Why do I attach to some people like this and not others? Why has my wife never been my favorite person (in terms of BPD symptoms, that is)? How do I stop feeling this way about that person? I don’t have these answers. Typically the only way I’ve been able to slide someone out of being my favorite person is to encounter someone new who becomes my favorite person. I hate this, a lot.

It’s incredibly frustrating because I can’t control who becomes my FP like that. Of the dozen or so relationships I’ve had in the past sixteen years (roughly my adult lifetime, if that number seems high remember that polyamory can rapidly inflate partner count), only six people have been an FP. And I keep saying it but it’s worth repeating: my wife has never been one of those people. This is probably a really good thing for our relationship, but it’s just so confusing. Why is she so unique like that? Is that why our relationship works so well? What about everyone else I didn’t over attach to, why didn’t they turn into healthy relationships?

So, when I say obsession, I kinda mean it. Like, thinking about them all the time kind of obsession. Being very careful about what you say or do around them because you’re constantly trying to anticipate their reaction and get a good one kind of obsession. Talking about them constantly to anyone who will listen kind of obsession (and thus driving away the people who were listening to you). The kind of obsession where when things are good, they seem perfect, and when things are bad they seem like hell. This is all or nothing thinking. There is very little in between space and the process of bouncing between these extremes is called “splitting” in BPD community vernacular. Either this person is the greatest and everything with them is fantastic and always was, or they’re the most awful person and their role in your life is completely and absolutely miserable and always was (this is taken to an extreme; you, with BPD, may have a better grasp on your feelings and thus may not swing to these extremes in the same way; the point remains though that there is a swing and it’s often drastic).

Before I had a handle on my BPD, I found it nearly impossible to remember the opposite state of mind when I was splitting on someone. It was like a compartmentalization of two completely different views of the same person. As I’ve done some DBT and worked on things I’ve had an easier time integrating and softening these two different extremes, but I still often find myself caught off guard when it happens. Some days a thought will just pop into my head “she’s the worst person I’ve ever met”, WHICH IS SIMPLY NOT TRUE! And yet it still pops into my head and I have to sit there and do the work to bring myself back to a centered position.

This is not limited to favorite persons, though in my experience it does show up a lot more often in that dynamic. I have definitely caught myself splitting on other people before.

It can be real petty at times too especially if you don’t really understand what’s going on and are not super self aware of your BPD symptoms. One of the websites above gives an example of someone cancelling a hangout/date with you causing you to split, but it can also be something as small as calling you out on not cleaning up your dinner plate or pointing out that you were wrong about a certain inconsequential fact. Both of these are from my personal experience, as the person with BPD. How dare she ask me to clean that up? I was going to get to it later anyway! Why did she have to prove me wrong like that? Couldn’t she have done that better? She’s so mean.

When you’re in this kind of state, where all you feel is anger and hurt, you may lash out at that person, you may punish them by ignoring them or sniping at them, you may yell and scream. You may even desire to hurt that person in an attempt to make them feel the pain that you’re feeling.

And then when you’re in the other state and everything is perfect roses, you’re probably sweet as pie and super lovey and offering to take care of things for the other person to make their life easier. It gets pretty whiplashy and extremely exhausting and confusing for all parties involved.

At one point for me it was so bad that I was splitting like this mid-conversation with people. Sometimes even within my own statement or message (I used to do a lot of my toxic shit over text or email; my lashing out was mostly with words, either yelled or withheld…).

Splitting like this is agonizing – hell, simply obsessing over your FP is exhausting and agonizing too. Going from joy and elation to pain and anger hurts so so bad. Thankfully a large part of DBT treatment is designed to synthesize a truth out of two “competing” points of view. In fact, that’s exactly what the D, for Dialectical, means. You work to pull yourself out of the extremes and find a middle ground truth that comes from all of the facts as well as your feelings good and bad.

It should come as no surprise that splitting is also especially very painful and exhausting for the recipient and it will push them away. If this happens too much the recipient may just fully end their relationship with you, which is absolutely their right to do because they need to protect themselves. I have had relationships painfully ended with me because of my regular splitting, and I have had to painfully end relationships when people were regularly splitting on me.

This is probably where the favorite person thing is most obvious to me: when the relationship is over and that person is gone and it’s time for me to move on.. and I can’t. I’m still thinking about that person constantly, perhaps even more than before because I no longer have any interactions with them. In the past the only way I’ve found to move on from someone like this is when someone else starts to fill that same FP slot. But bouncing from FP to FP? That’s not healthy! I’m trying my best right now to purposefully not seek out anyone new as I continue to struggle with still not moving on. This is its own form of agony too. I desperately want someone new in my life to fill that gaping emptiness. But I can’t do that yet. And then I get all up in my feelings: Why am I so stuck on this person? Why can’t I let them go? Why does everyone around me move on so much quicker than I do? Why does no one relate to me? I’ve already been stuck on this person for months and there’s many more months ahead, if not years, and I just want someone else to relate to it so I can feel a little more normal. I’d really like to not feel alone in these feelings.

fear of abandonment

I feel like talking about your favorite person leaving you glides into the next major symptom, from my point of view: fear of abandonment. Fear of abandonment is huge, so it’s pretty ironic that our behavior often pushes people away. It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy sometimes. We are so desperately afraid of abandonment that we’re constantly on the lookout for signs of it. Why didn’t she look me in the eyes when we were talking? Did she just ignore what I said? Why won’t she tell me when she’s coming over? Why won’t she tell me what her feelings are? None of these inherently mean abandonment is happening, but the hyper vigilance gets the best of us and we start reacting to perceived-imminent abandonment in an attempt to prevent it. Usually this happens in two ways: either we try to pull that person closer and closer which can be an undue burden on the favorite person and push them away, or we, paradoxically, distance ourselves and push them away ahead of time to somehow avoid being abandoned.

Again, I don’t know the psychology behind this, nor will I purport to know everyone’s personal experiences that may drive this behavior. Let me just say that my parents have always been emotionally absent, and when I was young they often punished me by becoming further absent or by isolating me. So when someone shows me actual connection, emotion, and attachment, I become desperately afraid that it will disappear at any moment for any reason.

The problem here is that splitting and fear of abandonment can feed each other. You can go from thinking someone is an angel, to hating their guts, to thinking they’re an angel again but realizing that when you hated them you said really nasty things and you begin to worry about how much more they’ll put up with before they abandon you, which causes you to start pushing them away more or trying to keep them real close to avoid abandonment, which then does push them away which triggers the abandonment feelings and then how dare they want to spend less time with you, oh my god they’re awful I hate them, and… Well.

Yeah…

It’s so shitty. It’s so shitty for me, it’s so shitty for you, and it’s so shitty for everyone who has had to deal with this on either side of it.

i’m getting exhausted again

I need to end this here, this is so emotionally taxing for me to talk about. The thing you don’t learn about mecfs² until you have mecfs is that all kinds of exertion will wear you out, not just physical but also emotional and mental. And wow this is a lot of emotional effort to write and edit this..

These symptoms (favorite person, all or nothing thinking, and fear of abandonment) are what really define my personal BPD. I believe that everything else I experience comes from these. The sites above list other symptoms, some of which I experience, I believe through the lens of these two. e.g. Lack of individual identity, for me, feels like it comes from my obsessions over my FPs. Like I’m thinking about them and their wants and needs so much that I barely spend time thinking about myself and figuring myself out.

Again, this is my personal interpretation of my personal BPD. I do not speak for anyone else. I have found comfort that some other people with BPD experience it the way I do though and I hope that what I’m saying resonates with other people and helps them figure things out and start working on the things they need to work on. And if you don’t experience this the way I do, hopefully something here still felt relevant and informational. And if you don’t have BPD at all, I hope I was able to provide some insight and better understanding to the way some of us are.

I was going to do a part 3 to talk about more of this (there’s always so much more to talk about when it comes to BPD) but for my sake this has to be my last post in this series. This has been a weird little break about constantly thinking about a person because instead I’ve constantly been thinking about these posts. But spending this much time just rolling different BPD thoughts around in my head and writing and editing this post over a week has wiped me hard. It’s been so hard to be present in my life and enjoy day-to-day things while this has been outstanding and I just want my brainspace back!

I felt I should write about this because I’ve been dealing with my BPD a lot lately after a bunch of stuff happened in my life. It’s been so eye opening to see my former behaviors from a new perspective and it’s been such a struggle fighting so hard not to dip back into those former behaviors. I know it’ll only make things worse if I do yet I feel like I have no other outlets. Part of my hope was that writing about my personal BPD like this might provide an outlet, even if just metatextually. I don’t know if it’s helped or if I just made things worse for myself, but I don’t see a public harm in sharing these experiences of mine.

Thank you again for your patience and for listening to me. It always means a lot.

I’m so glad to be done with these posts.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy - Therapy designed specifically to treat BPD ↩
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome ↩