Friendships and BPD

I have always looked from afar with longing at those who have maintained lifelong friendships successfully. Those who have belonged to sororities or groups who have a special bond that has endured the test of time. As I embark on this topic in the realm of the land of Borderline, I have flashes of Teresa Giudice from Housewives of New Jersey flipping a table and the movie Fatal Attraction. Where to begin.

The first point I want to discuss is that every BPD person is different. Like snowflakes, we are unique in our display of symptoms. We have varying degrees of healing or not healing that have transpired. We have co-occurring disorders that lend even more to our uniqueness. We are male, we are female, young or old, the journey is different for each of us and to lump us all into a one-category fits all, is a severe injustice to those of us living with the disorder.

In doing research on this topic before I wrote one word, I was horrified and sick to my stomach with the lumping of all BPD person’s together, as if we would each display the same way in a friendship situation. My anger rose as I read the stigmatism and mocking way “having a friendship with a Borderline” was depicted in article after article. Some even went so far as to suggest that the mere thought of engaging in such a relationship with a Borderline was one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life.

In the articles I read, BPD persons were described as everything from monsters to vampires, narcissistic to sadistic, psychotic, murderers, sluts and the list goes on. Then there were the comments sections to the articles of those who had dared to engage in a friendship with a Borderline. The thought being depicted is that you might as well been in a friendship with Satan himself. I am numb from reading such blogs and articles and left wondering where to start to disseminate some fashion of thought that would leave a person even wanting to engage in friendship with a Borderline.

The first thought that comes to mind from the side of having BPD and co-occurring disorders, is to speak on behalf of our “race” if you will. To comprehend the battle as we face each day we choose to live, in itself gives insight into our makeup as warriors, survivors, and just trying to make it through life. The fact that the suicide ratio for those of us with BPD is 50% higher than that of the general population, should give a glimpse as to what we deal with on a daily basis. When you live with the notion everyday as a BPD, that you are better off dead; then you must come at us with a different microscope of understanding.

Before we encounter you, and a relationship, we are first forced to encounter the relationship we have with ourselves. That relationship is as tumultuous and destructive as any that we could offer to another. Most of us are in the daily battle of fighting for our lives and trying to understand and deal with our symptoms to the best of our ability. So therefore, before we even get to you, we must disentangle from our own barbed wire entanglements with ourselves and find some peace within.

Don't get me wrong, we want desperately to indulge in friendship with you. We want to laugh, share fun things, be understood, hold you and be held and experience love just like everyone else. We didn’t ask for our brains to be wired incorrectly so that we may be incapable of conducting ourselves in such a manner to have the very things we yearn for reciprocated to us. It is not our intention to hurt, manipulate, and come at you with rage, emotional outbursts, jealousy, anguish and pain. Those are just our daily demons that we must calm down before we face you.

With BPD, as with many mental illnesses, perhaps all... we construct a mask or a wall or whatever you wish to name it, from a very early stage. It becomes apparent to us immediately in life that our behavior, emotions, responses, and expectations in relationships are off kilter. We are made aware very early in life that we are different and we start to establish a mask that we will adorn when we go out into the world.

With our mask tightly affixed, we are ready to try to establish a relationship with you. We hold and cling to the belief that we will also be able to experience the joy of love and friendship that we see displayed around us and in movies, the stuff we read about in books, but alas, our masks do not hold. They slip; they come undone, and may eventually fall off totally. Then you see us. You experience the true us. Then the fun begins.

I have lived through many of my years, undiagnosed, without proper therapy and or medication to keep my symptoms at bay. Looking back on relationships during those years brings tears of torment and anguish. The shame and guilt are indescribable for what I did to others when my symptoms were full-blown. They are a boneyard of discarded friendships, jobs, lovers, all in one big heap of tortured failure.

It has taken much time and effort to understand why this happened, the part I played in it, and to be able to forgive myself. Then, like in the AA 12 step program, I have also gone back where I could and tried to make amends. I have asked forgiveness from those that I have hurt with my symptoms and tried to explain the nature of my disorder without freaking them out. I have sent flowers and cards of apology. Some have reacted in forgiveness and accepted my outstretched hand. The truth be told, the relationship was never truly rectified in 99% of the cases. It was helpful to me though to go through the exercise.

As I grew and developed in the understanding of Borderline and my other coexisting disorders, I began to unpeel the onion of BPD and my friendships got better. The other thing that happened simultaneously, was and still is something that I am reckoning with. That something is the acknowledgement of the type of people I choose to surround myself with during my bad years.

Because we as Borderline sufferers do not always see ourselves as being worthy, we may seek out those who are hurting too. They also wear a mask of their own and together we live gleefully in our dysfunction. I was drawn to narcissists, martyrs, fake people, codependent people and the like. People who, like me, pretended to live a life of perfection on the outside, but suffered severe torment and dysfunction on the inside.

What I found in my journey to wellness, as my healing was taking place, the truth was being replaced over lies. Instead of rage, I learned to feel empathy and love. I began to understand and take into account the feelings of others, not just my own. I became more aware of the world around me and not just my own suffering. It became important for me to reach out to people and try to help instead of hurt. On the days and times when my symptoms wanted to come out, I would dismiss myself from activities instead of destroying the day for everyone else. In my journey to wellness, I found alternate ways of dealing with my symptoms that work constructively not destructively. Instead of taking out my pain, anger or rage on others, I would exercise, refurbish furniture, listen to some great music or just take a walk in nature. This has been a lifetime of learning not to allow my symptoms to disrupt other people's lives.

Because of these new skills and choices, I have found myself in better friendships. Friendships that are give and take where I am not always the focus and acting out in my disorder. It is a blessing and a true honor that I am actually at a point in my life where I can make a difference and give back to society in a fruitful way. A point where I can touch lives with empathy and love, not pain and rage. Where I am not looking for others to fix me, but rather to fix myself. What has it taken to get here? Just everything. Everything imaginable.

Due to this journey, I have lost or ended relationships with two of my closest friends that I managed to have relationships with for over 20 years. Like me in the beginning, we were wrought with dysfunction, fakeness and lies. We clung to each other like ships in the storm, and always joked that one always had to be up to help the other who was down. We could never both be down at the same time. Both of these relationships that I maintained were with very similar women. They were codependent, martyrs to the max, abused women, and they lived a life of lies and facade to the world. Just as I did for so many years.

My heart is broken by the fact that as I began to deal with my demons and come out of the lies and darkness and into the light of truth, I was no longer able to continue the facade of friendship with these two women. What hurt the most is that I had to be the one to make the decision to end it. Never in my life have I thought that I was worthy of a more healthy discourse. These women knew my demons, but they also knew how to push my buttons. They were well conditioned to my emotional outbursts and manipulations. We were used to hurting each other. That's the sad fact of the matter. We knew how to call out each other's dysfunction, while trying to pretend like our own did not exist. It was an exercise in futility. Back and forth, we would go on a consistent basis of whose life was worse. It became a contest of who could handle the most crap and still survive it. It also became who was better at hiding what was really going on in our marriage and our family. We would pride ourselves as the fake persona we would show the world and laugh and remark “if people really knew the real us.”

Then came a day, when I realized the jig was up. I was willing to take on the change necessary in my life to live out loud. To walk in truth and honesty as to who I am. All of me, the Good the Bad and the Ugly. It was on that day and in the same week that I chose to discontinue those two friendships that I had used to prop me up for over 20 years of my life. In doing so, I went through a pretty rough mourning of the death of these friendships. I was also mourning the death of my old self. The realization that the bridge was burned for me, that by coming out as a mental health advocate and writing my book, blog and living out loud, I was choosing not to hide in the shadows anymore.

Therefore, this whole topic of friendship with a Borderline can come to an end with a few summations. The first, we all have crap that we deal with. It is up to us to own it and deal with it. When we bring it into a friendship, BPD or not, boundaries need to be set for what we will or will not accept from the other. If you choose to love or live with someone with BPD, you will need to take some responsibility yourself in knowledge of the disorder and how to effectively live with the symptoms your loved one will display. You will also need to deal with symptoms you may have, either from living with someone with BPD or perhaps trauma you have had and not dealt with in your own life. As I've said so many times, boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.

The second point I want to end with is that it’s not just the person with BPD who can be used as a catchall dumping ground for everything that is wrong in the relationship. Like my friends I described above, what are you bringing to the table? What is it that you need to deal with in your life? It is so easy to blame the BPD person for all the mayhem in the relationship. Yet, I have noticed that those around us who get to know our symptoms, also know how to push our buttons to get us to act out. For instance, abandonment is a huge issue for someone with BPD. I have had it used against me time after time, because my friends knew it hurt me to not return my calls or text messages, or show up late or not show up at all. We must each take stock of our own actions.

I don't know if this has helped you? I did not want this to be a discourse of displaying the symptoms of BPD and how to cope with them. There are a multitude of blogs that exist such as that. Rather, I wanted it to be an equalizer conversation. It is important that we all realize those of us who love and care for, or have a loved one with BPD, or have BPD ourselves, that there is a level of responsibility in having a friendship with us. The responsibility goes both ways. There will be good and there will be bad on both ends. I pray that you give us a chance, those of us with BPD, to be loved and to experience friendship in the same manner and fashion that “regular” people do.