Insights gained from "breaking up" with a friend with BPD

[How to communicate after a contentious divorce...]

Since the beginning of my final breakup cycle with my most recent ex with BPD, I have been in contact with another ex with BPD. We were supposed to spend the holidays together since we're alone. Platonically. Neither one of us has family and we planned to spend time binge-watching Netflix and whatnot.

She blew me off rather suspiciously after we had a minor disagreement about the holiday plans. She phrased it "Maybe it's best I spend Christmas alone as I'm full of my own venom and it's best for me to just brood alone in a drunken stupor". Well I did not take that kind of manipulation and general emotional hijinks lightly and we started fighting.

She proceeded to dig out months-old instances of me being disrespectful towards her and admitted is afraid of giving me direct feedback. Even went on this tirade about harboring every disrespectful thing I did and how she thought "it would get better but it didn't". And that "this was the way for all the women in my family [to be disrespected by males], but it ends now with me".

Yawn.

I apologized for having been disrespectful and said I wanted to end this relationship. I very nearly went in with the whole "You have BPD, get into therapy" jab but ultimately decided against it. It doesn't help, probably makes it worse. She just wants to "be alone and heal herself with respectful relationships". Sure, that's the energy of the face of her right now. Six months from here she might be up to her old habits of hooking up with the worst possible type of man and then six months later from there complaining to another guy about him.

It's the same bullPLEASE READ as in a romantic relationship, man. They don't deal with emotions in a healthy manner and when you apologize, they think it's an opportunity to get free kicks in. I pointed this out to her and she started getting into semantics of apologizing. "I am sorry" followed by declaration of guilt was not an apology so she felt free bombarding me with only thinly related issues. This was the same for my recent ex too. I apologize, they seem to get even angrier because they see the vulnerability as an opportunity to escalate in a safe manner. Then when I get angry again, I'm the abusive tyrant who doesn't allow dissenting opinions and negative feedback.

This most recent interaction was like looking at the romantic r/s but in a safer manner and it really opened my eyes. This older ex is relatively high functioning and yet even she exhibits the same exact beats of dysfunctional behavior. It's less destructive in a non-romantic relationship and her arguments make a touch more sense but the mechanisms are eerily similar. When you take out the personal investments of romantic emotion you're left with the face of the disorder.

[Tupla Sport]

Since the beginning of my final breakup cycle with my most recent ex with BPD, I have been in contact with another ex with BPD. We were supposed to spend the holidays together since we're alone. Platonically. Neither one of us has family and we planned to spend time binge-watching Netflix and whatnot.

She blew me off rather suspiciously after we had a minor disagreement about the holiday plans. She phrased it "Maybe it's best I spend Christmas alone as I'm full of my own venom and it's best for me to just brood alone in a drunken stupor". Well I did not take that kind of manipulation and general emotional hijinks lightly and we started fighting.

She proceeded to dig out months-old instances of me being disrespectful towards her and admitted is afraid of giving me direct feedback. Even went on this tirade about harboring every disrespectful thing I did and how she thought "it would get better but it didn't". And that "this was the way for all the women in my family [to be disrespected by males], but it ends now with me".

Yawn.

I apologized for having been disrespectful and said I wanted to end this relationship. I very nearly went in with the whole "You have BPD, get into therapy" jab but ultimately decided against it. It doesn't help, probably makes it worse. She just wants to "be alone and heal herself with respectful relationships". Sure, that's the energy of the face of her right now. Six months from here she might be up to her old habits of hooking up with the worst possible type of man and then six months later from there complaining to another guy about him.

It's the same bullPLEASE READ as in a romantic relationship, man. They don't deal with emotions in a healthy manner and when you apologize, they think it's an opportunity to get free kicks in. I pointed this out to her and she started getting into semantics of apologizing. "I am sorry" followed by declaration of guilt was not an apology so she felt free bombarding me with only thinly related issues. This was the same for my recent ex too. I apologize, they seem to get even angrier because they see the vulnerability as an opportunity to escalate in a safe manner. Then when I get angry again, I'm the abusive tyrant who doesn't allow dissenting opinions and negative feedback.

This most recent interaction was like looking at the romantic r/s but in a safer manner and it really opened my eyes. This older ex is relatively high functioning and yet even she exhibits the same exact beats of dysfunctional behavior. It's less destructive in a non-romantic relationship and her arguments make a touch more sense but the mechanisms are eerily similar. When you take out the personal investments of romantic emotion you're left with the face of the disorder.

[Sappho11]

I was going to start a thread on this topic but this is literally it...

One of the best things about our dysfunctional BPD relationships is that they finally wake us up to how deeply most of us tend to be mired in other destructive relationships. Some of us have simply never known any different. If you grew up with permanently invalidating or even abusive parents, got manipulated into being the second-rate sidekick by narcissistic childhood and teenage "friends", then you likely went on to be in a string of lopsided, exploitative romantic relationships, the culmination of which tends to be the BPD relationship.

Over the course of the past two years or so, almost all of my previous "friendships" crumbled. At first I thought it was Fate being cruel. Then I slowly, gradually realised that all of those "friendships" were falling apart because I had started working on my own issues of codependency and lack of self-worth. As I began to assert my boundaries, the narcissistic personalities fell away one after the other (often in search of easier victims, which many of them sadly found).

It's only in retrospect that I realise just how much of even the "good times" with these (to me, beloved!) "friends" consisted of me feeling profoundly confused, lonely, sad, exhausted, because virtually everything those people did was manipulative and didn't serve to create a human connection, but to confer advantages for them and to put me at the bottom of their vile power games.

It's a tough pill to swallow but there are countless advantages to this realisation. Once you recognise all the people who exploit you, you'll also start recognising those who mean you well. They tend to be much quieter and much less glamorous about it and that's an excellent sign – it means they realise that acting normally is just that, acting normally; and that respect, decency and consideration is something you deserve by default, not some kind of reward you have to earn like a lab rat struggling to press a button.

Leave the exploiters and emotional, financial, physical freeloaders. Just leave them, even if you think they're your only friend(s). More often than not, their presence in your life is EXACTLY what keeps you trapped under this terrible glass bell jar of "I don't deserve any better so I best take what I can get". Step One is realising that you can survive on your own. And once you do, and start seeing through their dirty tactics, it'll be infinitely easier to socially separate the wheat from the chaff, and to form relations with people who truly care for you – for you as a person, not for what you do for them.

[Tupla Sport]

Over the course of the past two years or so, almost all of my previous "friendships" crumbled. At first I thought it was Fate being cruel. Then I slowly, gradually realised that all of those "friendships" were falling apart because I had started working on my own issues of codependency and lack of self-worth. As I began to assert my boundaries, the narcissistic personalities fell away one after the other (often in search of easier victims, which many of them sadly found).

A few weeks back, I was opening up to this older BPD ex about the betrayal I felt from the end of my more recent breakup where my girlfriend cheated on me with my best friend. She replied with something that was, to me, implying that perhaps the two love birds were made for each other. She had a knack for those kind of spiritually narcissistic and rationalizing points of view where she zoomed out so far from the emotional reality that you were lucky to still see the planet at all, let alone people. I firmly asked her to not please imply that the people who cheated on me did it for a valid reason. She gave me the silent treatment until days later I asked "do we have a problem?" and she said she "cannot give any kind of feedback because she is dealing with her own issues."

Really. I ask a person not to passive-aggressively insult me to my face and that's a tall order because they too have issues. I tried touching her core and she responded by turtling.

Broadly speaking, the same thing with the more recent ex. Ask them a personal, interpersonal favour and they go "I have no idea what you are talking about", "I can't read minds" or "Why is that my responsibility?"

[BPDEnjoyer]

It's amazing when you recognize the emotional dysregulation now isn't it?  This is what you got to do from now on. More out there suffer from BPD traits than you know.