BPDFamily.com

When we meet new people and become friends, our relationship with these people start out ok.  After awhile my SO with BPD begins finding fault with the new friend(s).  When she starts having issues with the new friends, I find that she obsesses over the issues where she wants to talk about it repeatedly always in the negative.  In the discussions we have, I find that her perceptions of things that happened with our friends are distorted from my view.  Ultimately our friendships end because something happens that my SO w/BPD can't tolerate and she loses her temper or says something then walks away from the table in a restaurant leaving me there with the friends.

Do any of you have this happen by your SO with BPD and is there anything you have done to eliminate this behavior.

happens quite frequently; in fact, just about everybody that come around my SO eventually gets villainized in some way.  it is very easy to recognized the cycle, exactly as you described it.  Comes from fear of being abandoned--if they are no longer friends, they can't abandon, right?

I have not determined a way to eliminate the behavior.  The only thing you can do I think is maintain a boundary with your friends.  They are off limits!

It's not just my few friends for my udBPDw. It's acquaintances, neighbors, people she sees a few times a week and is barely on mutual-recognition-nod terms with. The crossing guard at the elementary school, really?

But the pattern is the same... . does this sound familiar?

1) She is standoffish to that person.

2) She is irritated by a negative-slanted interpretation of actual (but in all probability perfectly innocent) words/actions/facial expressions/tones of voice etc.

3) She is infuriated by an extremely negative imagining of something horrible that there's no way this person actually did/said/thought in real life.

4) Her only choice of action is to nuke the relationship.

The healthy thing for you to do is to maintain the friendships you enjoy, w/o your SO if she goes haywire on them.

Let her choose to be OK with it and join you with the friend... . or choose to not be OK, and stay elsewhere.

You may have to put up some boundaries around not listening to lots of grumbling about this (ex?-)friend, if it starts to bug you... . or not letting her shut down your r/s with this friend.

my BP-friend will frequently visit a small circle of guys for a while (usually a couple of weeks, sometimes months) but he would never call them his friends, allthough he would always adress them in a very warmly manner as "matie" or "chief" (when he has forgotten their first name lol )

usually these visits end sooner or later with an argument or a fight and afterwards he will hesitate to visit them for a while until he has more or less forgotten the problem or until he considers they will probably have forgotten the incident, than he returns and a fresh cycle begins... .   :)

I have often wondered why he still obtains any "credit-points" with those guys and I think it must be a mixture of goodwill (they know him a long time and they probably suppose it's his drinking that is causing the trouble), their own profit (when he's in a good mood he can be very funny, charming, helpful and generous, more or less "buying" their company) and something else that I would call "recognition": most of those guys are dealing with similar problems and share similar interests like music, gaming, blowing, ... .