Discarded by quiet bpd friend.

[idk123]

I have severe OCD and have been through a bunch of trauma recently. My friendship with a man with quiet bpd was really what was getting me through (I didn't tell him that because I knew the pressure would destroy the friendship). We were close and communicating everyday for the past 9 months. Seeing each other every week for the past 2 months. We slept together three times early on. It always felt like he really cared about me, but was scared by it and stopping himself. I confessed I loved him about a month ago because I was in a very bad situation and was scared. He rejected me and discarded me and I miss him so badly and he has completely stonewalled me. I'm struggling so hard to stop contacting him, but I am so isolated and alone and I miss him so much.

[ILMBPDC]

This sounds a lot like my experience - we communicated almost daily, had deep, intimate conversations. In my case he love bombed me with thoughts of the future, marriage, babies, told me how amazing I was and how he wanted to be like me.  I fell in love before we ever slept together. 

I was discarded twice - the first time in early February once he met another woman who "he saw a future with" (because apparently despite the talk of love and babies and future, he didn't see that with me?), though he kept a tether to me by not cutting me off completely. The second time was at the end of July when I called him out on feeling like he was using me (at this point he and the other woman broke up and we were back to talking daily and sleeping together). Instead of having an adult conversation about my feelings, he cut me off 100%. Boom, 19 months of deep friendship, gone.

It's hard. Devastating, in fact. But to be completely honest, I realize it was the best thing that could have happened. If he had kept contact, I would still be on his string and still attached to him and still wanting to be with him. I would never have had the opportunity to move on and find someone who actually cares about me. I would have never looked back and realized there were so many red flags and incompatibilities that were masked by his love bombing and mirroring.  I realize I would have ultimately been miserable in the relationship.

I do still miss him. I miss our talks, I miss the connection that I thought we had (which I've come to realize was just his mirroring my personality so it seemed like we were soulmates, which I didn't even believe in until he came around), I miss the hope I had of a future with him.  But every day I have distance, it gets better. And the people on this forum are so supportive and actually understand the issues with dating a BPD (so many other people just don't get it, no matter how much you try to explain).

I encourage you to read people's stories here- you will see it gets better over time, it truly does. And in the meantime, we are here for you.

[idk123]

He never love bombed me or idealized me. I absolutely wasn't his FP. Our "relationship" seemed to be very unusual from what I've read of other people's experiences. It was a lot more naturally forming and slow. I suspect that it scared him because he didn't "choose" to care about me in anyway. He often seemed very confused about where I fit in his life, because we were friends, but the intimacy between us kept growing (despite him periodically pulling back a little). We did sleep together 3 times, but it was spaced out by months and he viewed it as him "succumbing to temptation." I read A LOT about bpd as I got to know him, and we discussed his bpd often. My ocd is VERY severe and affects my ability to function daily (I'm actually on disability its so bad). We bonded a lot over our struggles with mental illness.

This discard is affecting me so badly because my ocd limits my ability to distract myself or reach out to loved ones. I am very isolated. I have not seen my family in 3 years. I have spent every birthday and holiday alone in that time period.  He was one of the very few people I knew in the city I'm stuck living in, and he was the only one who actually invited me outside my apartment and it was very good for my ocd. I can't stop texting him begging him to just talk to me, but he is VERY good at stonewalling. I get zero response and I'm pretty sure he doesn't even read anything I send.

[poppy2]

Hi,

I'm really sorry to hear what you're going through. In my experience, once they do this stonewalling thing, it will definitely drive you crazy. In my case of quiet BPD ex I can say it was a form of punishment as well, in your case I cannot say. Mindfulness and detaching are the only things that help, but honestly I know how bad it is when you deserve that recogniton from them and you're feeling really lonely and they just cut you out. It really takes time to get over it, also because of all of the stress it causes in your brain. My quiet BPD ex was also really someone I relied upon for social contact and this is also why it devastated me when she left. This forum has a lot of really good tips and tricks about how you can learn to cope... and as I say, mindfulness exercises will also help you. For me, I put all that crazy energy into reading about BPD but it sounds like you don't need to do that... I hope it gets better for you soon.

[idk123]

Thank you for responding. I'm still doing quite badly. I almost wish I hadn't known so much about his bpd and bpd in general before this happened. I obsessively researched it (emphasis on obsessively), so part of me always anticipated something like this happening. I still wasn't prepared for it, and now I don't get that tiny bit of closure that a lot of people seem to experience afterwards when they start discovering more about it and gain some insight into their partners behavior.

I guess the thing that is driving me most insane is that our friendship didn't seem to follow the patterns I'm seeing repeatedly. He often seemed confused about me, because I knew so much about him, there was a mutual attraction, but my own mental illness sort of places me on the fringes of social convention a lot. I never leaned on him, and didn't tell him much about the intricacies of my illness, beyond the noticeable aspects of my behaviour, and some of the trauma I'd been through that is public knowledge. I was quite happy to just have our friendship be about him, because I desperately needed a respite from my own brain and issues. In his own way, without really knowing it, he was helping me immensely.