Introduction/vent/support

[RDMaggie]

I have run across this site numerous times when googling questions related to BPD, I finally decided to join.

What brings me here is my friend of 20+ years. She was diagnosed at age 14 and again at 29 with BPD and has had multiple inpatient stays over the years, including a cluster of stays about 3 years ago which inadvertently got her dismissed from her psychiatrists practice (not the stay it's self but the manipulation she used to get admitted.) That was the last true treatment she has had, although she did recently see a GP and started on an SSRI.

Anyway, until a few years ago I had always referred to her as my best friend, until someone gently pointed out that it was in no way a reciprocal friendship. That coupled with her absence when my child was diagnosed with a lifelong (but thankfully not life limiting) disability helped me to reframe our friendship and accept that she just isn't capable and/or willing to have that level of friendship.

Now I find her behavior to be more of an annoyance. She "acts in" quite a bit, doles out the ST, makes vague FB posts that are intended for me but tonwhich she can back peddle and deny if she's approached, cancels plans last min, tries to upset me by talking to people/tagging them on FB such as my MiL (we don't talk but I also don't care that they talk, none of my business)

I'm not even 100% sure what I'm looking for, I'm just tired. I feel like it's been 20+ years of never ending crisis. I've set boundaries, some she isn't even aware of --- like when she makes posts suggesting suicide I will call the police for a welfare check but I don't personally comment on those posts.--- but I am human, and I'm starting to get to the point where I think "At what point does she get held accountable for treating me this way?" (Not related to suicide posts but the passive punishing) --- We personally never fight, she just starts mistreating me when she's mad at someone else in her life, and again, I'm just tired of it. Her expectations are ridiculous and her behavior is erratic. I'm just hoping someone here can relate. Thanks for reading.

[Kwamina]

Hi RDMaggie and welcome to our online community

I am sorry this particular friendship is proving to be quite difficult. BPD is a disorder which often really makes it very hard for people to have stable relationships. Your friend has been officially diagnosed with BPD but currently isn't being treated for it. Do you feel like she truly acknowledges her issues and accepts her BPD diagnosis?

I'm starting to get to the point where I think "At what point does she get held accountable for treating me this way?"

Perhaps it might help to ask yourself some questions here, like:
- Do you want to continue this friiendship with her?
- Do you perhaps feel obliged or pressured in continuing this friendship with her?
- What are the costs and benefits of this friendship for you? Do the benefits outweigh the costs?

As a result of her distorted thinking and perception, your friend's behavior unfortunately can be quite problematic. Ultimately, you cannot control what she does though or make her change if she does not want to. What you can do is focus on your own behavior and responses. You have set boundaries with her before which I think is very important when dealing with someone with BPD. Are there perhaps also other/additional boundaries you could set with her which would make you feel more comfortable in this friendship?

Take care

The Board Parrot

[strength_love]

I can definitely relate. Particularly to "she just starts mistreating me when she's mad at someone else in her life". This sounds SO MUCH like my sister. I wish I had some answers. I'm in a similar boat of trying to decide whether to return to no-contact with my sister. It's such a tough choice because it feels like I'm choosing between sacrificing myself and dealing with endless drama on the one hand, or protecting myself by no contact but experiencing the unimaginable grief of losing her on the other. Both choices are unappealing to me.

Are there still 'good' times with your friend or has it all gone bad?

[RDMaggie]

Perhaps it might help to ask yourself some questions here, like:
- Do you want to continue this friiendship with her?
- Do you perhaps feel obliged or pressured in continuing this friendship with her?
- What are the costs and benefits of this friendship for you? Do the benefits outweigh the costs?

Thank you so much for responding, hopefully my reply works ok, this my first time attempting it.

These are excellent questions to reflect on.

[Kwamina]

... .hopefully my reply works ok, this my first time attempting it.

Yep, it worked just fine

[RDMaggie]

Are there still 'good' times with your friend or has it all gone bad?

Hi, and thanks for your response.

Good times are few and far between and always on her terms. --- What I mean by "on her terms" is that there are specific activities she will engage in or agree to and that's it. For instance, there are two cable TV shows she enjoys watching, I have a DVR and I record them. She will come over to watch those two specific shows, if for some reason we have to stop watching them, she leaves.

She won't engage in conversations online anymore, the responses I get are "k" "wha?" "" --- and that's when there isn't even anything particularly "wrong".

So we occasionally get together and watch a show she wants to watch and maybe share a few laughs. Thats really the extent of the relationship at this point, unless of course she contacts me for "support". And then then the passive punishments when I refuse to enable her.

[RDMaggie]

Your friend has been officially diagnosed with BPD but currently isn't being treated for it. Do you feel like she truly acknowledges her issues and accepts her BPD diagnosis?

I meant to address this in my first response, I'll get the hang of it 

She absolutely acknowledges and accepts it, she brings it up frequently. As to if she truly wants to get better, I don't think so. I don't want to minimize her struggle, but I think she discovered during this last round of inpatient stays and eventual dismissal that the road to improvement required some discomfort and wasn't paved with constant sympathy and accommodations from others. She also puts a lot of weight into having a romantic relationship, when she isn't involved with someone she sees life as pointless and totally devalues herself, she would be more likely to seek help in the confines of a relationship, however it's a catch 22, she will enter into a new relationship and end up quickly sabotaging it because of these unchecked/unaddressed issues. I don't believe she would ever make any attempt to improve her situation if it hinged solely on her own well being. It's sad how distorted her thoughts are, she's 33, 5'8, and really lovely but she always says she will die alone because of how hideous she is. Ugh.

[strength_love]

I wonder if there's something specific to BPD people that makes them want to take the easy route all the time rather than really go through the rigors of treatment and personal development to improve things for themselves and the people who are close to them.

My sister does at times seem to want to improve herself, and actually seems to try at times, but overall she mostly gets by on 'enforcing' her view of herself in her various relationships. By this I mean she insists that she has the desirable traits she wants to have and if others challenge that perception she either attacks or guilts people for contradicting that view. I think of it as, "She'd rather badger, guilt and intimidate people into acknowledging she is a good person than do the hard work of actually being a good person."

For example in almost all conversations I have with my sister she spends the entire time interrupting me and 'reacting' to the first few words of my responses rather than hearing the whole thing out and getting a full understanding of what I'm saying before trying to reply.

Just for a totally invented example, a brief story such as "I like washing dogs. I had the pleasure of bathing a dog today that my friend had brought over and even though it was really messy and it sprayed water all over the bathroom it was a lot of fun and we both laughed a lot. The dog seemed to enjoy it too. It was really good to bond over this and it reminded me of how good it is to have a pet." In a conversation with her becomes:

Me: I like washing dogs... .
Her: But you've never washed a dog.
Me: I was just about to say, I had the pleasure of washing a dog today that a friend brou... .
Her: I washed a dog once and hated it. You say you like washing dogs but they make a huge mess and spray water everywhere.
Me: I was about to say, the process was messy and... .
Her: Yeah, it got mud everywhere that happens with dogs they get mud everywhere.
Me: Well no, it wasn't mud, it was water. It... .
Her: Well, yeah water too, but mud like you said
Me: I actually never said anything about mud, there was no mud we... .
Her: You told me it was mud.

And on and on. To the point where now I just say, "I was thinking today about how good it is to have a pet" and leave it at that. Trying to have an actual conversation with her or tell an anecdote is a pointless waste of time.

These conversational derailments are nearly constant. She seems to have a need to control and dominate a discussion to the degree that it's hard to get a word in edgewise. It also turns what might have been a 2 minute story I wanted to tell into a 20 minute struggle to get my message across. Then she claims that time as time that 'we've been talking about my stuff', now it's my turn to listen to her.

If I ever dare to say that I don't feel heard she will fly off the handle and yell and attack and guilt me about 'how great a listener she is' and how she just spent 20 minutes listening to my story. If I ever try to point out the obvious and constant interruptions she denies and gaslights. It's terrible. And she will routinely drift away onto her Facebook while we're talking and miss half of what I said and when I try to end the call she will yell at me for 'thinking she wasn't listening when she was.' She does this face-to-face as well. She will literally be thumbing through Facebook on her phone while we are sitting together supposedly having a conversation, but insist she's listening to me. Meanwhile not being at all able to follow the thread of conversation.

It's bad when we're on the phone because she will attack me for trying to stick with the conversation and keep her attention, AND she will attack me if I decide to end the call, even if I try to do so tactfully (i.e. saying, "I'd better get going I have a lot to do" rather than "you're not present in this conversation so I need to end the call". It's like she wants to control me by keeping me on the phone, but without having to actually have a proper conversation with me.

Worst of all, I am a monster for failing to deny how good of a listener she is. "But that makes sense because no one ever acknowledges me for anything I do. I might as well be invisible. I spend all my time listening to other people and never get to feel heard" goes her typical story.

Talk about crazy-making, last week we were talking on the phone and her attention drifted off and we got into an argument about it because I wanted to get off the phone and she said that she was - get this - "listening so hard that she lost the train of what I was saying." Literally she tried to tell me she didn't hear what I was saying because she was listening too hard. Later I saw on her Facebook a huge argument she was having with someone at the same time of our call.

Anyway, this got longer than I intended. Hehe. I guess I tapped into some pretty major frustration I'm feeling. My point being, it seems there are specific and unique resistances BPD people have to getting treatment or committing to the hard work of improving themselves.

[RDMaggie]

I understand, I kept going back to edit my post/reply because I felt I was beginning to go off in a tangent as opposed to providing pertinent information.

With my friend, I think her resistance to getting well is multifaceted. It's a combination of low frustration tolerance, low self esteem, and the fact that so much of her identity is tied up in being "not in a good place". I'm not sure she would know who she was if she wasn't always in the midst of a crisis.

The situation with your sister sounds very frustrating. I know I have 20 years of stories built up and what's funny to me is that so much has transpired, and what she's doing at the moment isn't especially heinous, yet my tolerance has just grown incredibly thin. Feel free to vent away, here (if appropriate) or in PM.

[strength_love]

Ah, yeah, I know what you mean. Sometimes I feel bad for letting 'little' things contribute to my overall feelings of emotional distance but then I remind myself that I have major 'tolerance fatigue'.

It's interesting you say your friend's identity is tied up with being in crisis. My sister is similar. She seems to be terrified of being seen as competent, even while she rails against any perception she isn't. I think maybe she's scared that if she seems capable people will leave her to her own devices rather than coddle and tolerate her. Maybe on some level she senses that people stick around her sometimes out of pity or obligation because she seems to need them.

[RDMaggie]

"Tolerance Fatigue" --- oh man, that's the term I've been looking for, how appropriate.

My friends low level assaults are wearing on me tremendously. She acted out more when we were teenagers but now that we are in our early/mid thirties it's all about acting in. She has learned over the years that I won't tolerate outrageous tantrums and verbal assaults, so she's modified her behavior in a way that she can easily deny/deflect/assign blame to someone/something else. Her behaviors (when done intentionally to provoke) are subtle and calculated. I don't react because I feel like that reinforces the behavior, but I do notice. What's funny is that they are mostly all very childish things that don't particularly upset me as far as the act itself goes, it's knowing that she's doing it to purposely provoke me that has me doing my heavy sighing and eye rolling (out of her view of course).

She had been giving me the ST since November for some invisible transgression (I think because she cancelled Thanksgving and I didn't beg her to come. Really, just saying "Ok, I hope you feel better" isn't enough. So she contacted me a week or so ago because she had met a guy and I was the *only* person she could tell --- she felt her family would be judgmental. The abridged version is it didn't work out between her and him and although I never met him or gave her any advice or did more than listen to her talk, I am being punished.

She was supposed to come over Friday. Never called, never showed. Later she posted something vague on FB and I posted a silly reply. She posted "I love you" and because I didn't reply within 5 mins she deleted my comments. She baited me. I asked if she was okay, she stated that she was extremely depressed and not in a good place. I asked what I could do, she told me she wanted to come over right then (12:33am) and watch 600lb life and spend the night and talk. I told her she was welcome to come over and spend the night and watch the show but I wasn't sure how long I would be able to stay awake as I had already taken my PM medicine. Also, I'm off all weekend. Her response "No offense but I need to do this right now to keep from going down hill." ---- So it was all or nothing, giving her the option to come over, watch the show, spend the night, and have my company until my medication kicked in was not enough.

The next day she messaged me to say she would be over later "depending on how I feel" --- and again, I never heard anything. She's on FB making posts, etc. So I know she's reasonably ok.

I just recently realized that she enjoys the power of cancelling and everything depending on her, which is why I imagine she mentioned coming over Saturday when I had not explicitly invited her.--- just so she could later "cancel" aka not show up, not call, not message.

I'm just tired. I have a busy life, I have enough on my plate, I don't have the energy for these games anymore.

[strength_love]

I just recently realized that she enjoys the power of cancelling and everything depending on her, which is why I imagine she mentioned coming over Saturday when I had not explicitly invited her.--- just so she could later "cancel" aka not show up, not call, not message.

If any part of you needs someone to bear witness that this really does happen, let me be that person. I have dealt with the same behavior from my sister and it's exhausting. She does petty, manipulative things to control situations or people, or to lash out at people she feels hurt or threatened by. I could list some real doozies here but let me just say, this is one of the most disruptive and destructive elements of dealing with someone who is disordered in this way.

It is true that many of these behaviors are subtle and calculated. That's part of what makes BPD people so difficult to deal with. They are so slippery, it's extremely difficult to hold them accountable or push back on the behavior even in subtle ways. You're right that it's usually best to ignore the behavior but that's not always possible. My sister has at times actively tried to sabotage things that were important to me as a means of taking revenge for some perceived slight. It's this type of behavior that makes me withdraw and withdraw from her until there's hardly anything left of the relationship.

It reminds me of a line from The Information by Martin Amis. One character is trying to advise another not to speak publicly about a topic he deems offensive and when asked why the character says, "Because people will start avoiding you." This is what happens to BPD people. They live in terror of abandonment, yet they are the engineers of their own abandonment.

[LeneLu]

I get "tolerance fatigue" with the learned helplessness. After a while, I just lose my patience.  My uBPD loves to do this around food.  She never prepares for being hungry and if she gets hungry, everyone has to focus on how to end this (predictable) discomfort for her.  It is everyone else's problem and we have to resolve it. It isn't her fault that she didn't stick a granola bar in her bag.

But, it is like we have all created monsters by not calling them on the carpet.  Of course, to do that is a huge pain, but now the expectation is, "I am hungry.  Everyone. Stop what you are doing and get me some food." Or as one of you mentioned in an earlier post about listening to them, but not talking.  If you just saying "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" it is perceived as agreement or support, when in actuality, you just don't want to contradict them and get in a fight. 

I have taken the tack of not reacting in the past.  Then I get labeled as not having any feeling for my sis. But they force you into shutting down and then are upset when you are distant.  It is so frustrating.  I feel like I can never win.

[RDMaggie]

But, it is like we have all created monsters by not calling them on the carpet.  Of course, to do that is a huge pain, but now the expectation is, "I am hungry.  Everyone. Stop what you are doing and get me some food." Or as one of you mentioned in an earlier post about listening to them, but not talking.  If you just saying "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" it is perceived as agreement or support, when in actuality, you just don't want to contradict them and get in a fight. 

When I'm experiencing extreme compassion fatigue (as I was when I originally made this post) I'm usually battling between going NC or telling her that her behavior/actions are inexcusable. What I end up doing however is giving myself a mandatory 48 hours to weigh things out before reacting.

NC is an extreme measure to me, and I do think it would be fair to tell her why she's upset me, because she honestly may not realize some of the things she does are as offensive or offputting as they really are. She has a tendency to be very self absorbed, that coupled with distorted thinking leads her to all sorts of weird conclusions.

The flip side of the coin is that if I do tell her, even in the most loving way, she will end up having a meltdown. So what is the benefit of telling her if I have to be on the receiving end of that?

So usually sometime after that period of imposed thinking I've put on myself ends, I'm over it and decided it isn't worth the battle and we just move on as if nothing happened.

It is my fault for not demanding certain levels of respect. A wiser choice would probably be "I know you're going through a lot right now, and I understand if you need to cancel at times, in the future could you please send a message saying you won't make it?"

There are times I get so fed up though, and I think "She isn't my sister, cousin, aunt, mother... .I can walk away whenever I want. Why am I putting up with this?"

[Kwamina]

Hi again RDMaggie,

There are times I get so fed up though, and I think "She isn't my sister, cousin, aunt, mother... .

That's true, yet bonds of friendships can also run very deep though. Do you feel like you mainly stay in contact with her because you genuinely care about her or perhaps more out of a sense of obligation, guilt or fear for how she might react if you were to change your own role in the relationship?

I can walk away whenever I want. Why am I putting up with this?"

Can you answer this question for yourself when you take a deep look inside? Are there any aspects of this friendship that you experience as pleasant?

I'm just tired. I have a busy life, I have enough on my plate, I don't have the energy for these games anymore.

This is a sign that you might be reaching your limits and that's ok. There's only so much a human being can handle at once. Do you generally feel comfortable setting boundaries with people? An important thing to note about boundaries is that they are primarily about us, protecting ourselves and preserving our own well-being. Also, boundaries don't necessarily have to be expressed verbally, they can also be expressed non-verbally just by changing our behavior and responses.