Bad at Good-Byes?

[bb12]

So was I just better at parting ways when I was younger because I was too excited by what else was out there to try?

Or did every relationship before the borderline end respectfully and appropriately, so there was no pain and I was free to move on with full closure and an open heart?

Is there something within all of us as humans that struggles with good-byes as we get older?

My own feeling is that 'object constancy', traditionally an area associated with BPD, actually affects all of us incrementally. Despite it being a law of nature, sometimes we just don't want things to change.

And the intensity of our desire for things to stay the same compounds as we accrue a growing back-catalogue of friends, lovers, family members, even pets that have either died or fallen away.

All struggle comes stems from not accepting the truth... . the current reality. As I reflect on my borderline break-up, I feel that a large part of what kept me stuck (depsite the abuse) was the suddenness of the discard. But does our own age, desire for constancy, and changing relationship with loss, exacerbate our feelings of regret and desire to maintain the status quo?

Have any of you struggled more broadly with the concept of 'ending' as you've gotten older?

Is our growing desire for a sense of permancence or emotional security a factor in how affected we were by this particular break-up?



bb12

[lemon flower]

hi bb,

I don't know if it has something to do with age, but I have always been bad in leaving and going on... .

I am still in touch with my last BP-ex on a very regular base but I also still have (a less frequent) contact with the one (not a BP) before him and in general I do not easily "loose" people, they just become less important or we might not meet very often but still keep some contact during the years

- I think it might be a matter of character, I am quite a reliable person, and I hold on to my friends and family as they are not so numerous anyway, so they 're precious to me

- I am also HSP (higly sensitive) and it is in the nature of HSP's not to like changes that much, it takes us a lot of time and "meditating" on things before we would make a permanent decission like splitting up or "bannishing" people out of our lifes

- I hate fighting and war so keeping in touch is also a way of avoiding bigger trouble and outbursts I guess

- I might be afraid of losing control on the situation if I shut down the doors, I learned from myself that I am holding on to controlling things out of a fear for the unknown, however in the end you never can control anything and I know that, but the impulse is still in me I guess 

- I can't ever see anything in black and white, to me there's always something good in a person or in a situation and that makes it more difficult to letting go

about age, what might be counting is that lots of people get a little more isolated when getting older which may enforce the fear of "giving up on those who left" and also maybe people become more sentimental when they grow older, at least this is something I see happening in people and I feel it growing in myself... .  

[happylogist]

H Bb,

I also ask myself the same question: why I struggle with letting intimate partners go out of my life. I found the same difficulty before: the same negotiations of redefining friendships, getting hurt, distancing, coming back...

Now when I am in my mid-life I find it even more difficult.  I look around at people who struggle as I do and the ones who are more easier to let people out of their lives and find that many situations are similar, but reactions are so different. There is certainly an egoistic thing about being and staying in contact - it is the fear of being abandoned or annihilated, even to the point of being dead for someone. Where else people stop talking to others they at least slightly (and often more than slightly) care for? Doing it abruptly  - when there is something unforgivable or they are dead.  I guess this is why it is so difficult to say good-bye for me, it is either accepting my death to someone or accepting my guilt. Also breaking all communication and going no-contact somehow resembles at least in my mind of killing someone: I declare the person's absence in my life, it is aggressive and cruel.  So we stick to half-friendship, half-acquaintance, until the moment when we are more busy with something else and not staying in contact does not make us dead or guilty, or when (and this can happen though very rarely) we redefine our friendships with those people when feelings are gone.

Not being able to say goodbye has a lot to do with the family of origin, with the past traumas in other relationships and abandonment issues of a co-dependent.

I struggle with goodbyes a lot. I just can't stand the idea of being dead for someone and "killing" someone myself. Interestingly, just because of that "killing" aggression, I prefer people turning back at me rather than me being the propagator. It happened with my uBPD-ex after I asked him to leave my life because he did not want to move with me or leave me alone, sticking to very hurtful friendship for me. For a year I tried to break the contact, because it was deteriorating to be in that relationship. But I always felt that I deceived our relationship, tried to change my attitude towards him, playing for more time "we are just friends" games and then feeling jealous after all his honest stories about others, constantly being pushed and pulled, and hoping for the magic transformation.

Well, after he reconnected me for another try of the same friendship after six months of no-contact, I asked him to leave me alone and explained how difficult it was for me. I did not feel that he really understood me, I unfriended him in facebook. For three months I felt that I made a mistake, that I shouldn't have left him, that he never understood why I did it, that I simply needed to try harder to change my attitude towards him. I contacted him in skype (he was still in my contact list there) and this time he told me to leave him alone. Funny thing I felt that I gave the responsibility of killing me to him.