I resent my best friend. I resent her hard. But I can't figure out why. My intuition is telling me that the resentment is coming from the remnants of my upbringing by BPDm. Deep down, I know that nothing my best friend has done is the true source of these hard feelings I have toward her. But I just can't seem to quiet this feeling or let it go. I'm hoping someone can offer me some insight as to where I keep hitting my emotional block, because I really would love to have a healthy friendship with this woman.
Some short-as-I-can manage backstory. I've known best friend (I'll call her BF from here on out) since the third grade and have called her my bosom buddy (Anne of Green Gables reference
) for the last 18 years. She's been there for all the hard times I've had with BPDm; I've poured my pain and confusion out to her over the years. At some point we had a shared journal where we would alternate writing entries to each other when we couldn't physically see each other for long stretches of time. We were pretty close.
In college we started dating boys and drifted apart here and there but always came back to one another. After college, she moved to a different country and took up permanent residence there when she got married. We remain in contact through Skype and e-mail but communication is not the same as it used to be.
Then while I was in grad school, BPDm suffered a major psychotic crisis that I was not mentally or emotionally equipped to understand at that time. I didn't know what I know now about BPD and schizoaffective disorder. That period of time was probably the most traumatic I've experienced. It was the first time I truly felt the deep shame of being me and a lot unravelled for me in terms of accepting what my BPDm was. At this point, BF was living in another country, but she happened to be visiting her family at just the time that all of the craziness was going on with BPDm. Somehow she was able to be there for me for a lot of the chaos.
Once BPDm's psychotic episode and its aftermath were resolved a few years later, I just couldn't bring myself to open up to BF in the same way as I used to. Just around that time, I also met my present signifcant other and felt less of a need to bare the details of my emotional life to her.
Now our communications are reduced to sending each other messages once every couple of months. For the duration of our friendship, I've felt that it was always me initiating contact, and I still feel that way. I feel I am more frequently asking her what's new in her life and how she's doing than vice versa.
Well she sent me a message today without any prompting from me, giving me a breakdown of recent happenings in her life, all of them very positive, and then she asked, "You?" And I dunno. I just don't want to respond. At all. I've sat with this lack of desire for the last couple of hours and tried to practice mindfulness in figuring out why I don't want to respond. I'm feeling resentment, jealousy, perhaps some inferiority, and discomfort at the thought of letting her into my world. But I feel like I'm missing something. Maybe I'm in denial about something; maybe I'm just not seeing something in our dynamics. I would really appreciate any thoughts on how to move past this emotional wall.
