I have to explain before I go into what’s going on so you understand, so please bare with me.
People with borderline personality disorder have this thing we do where we latch on to someone and make them the MOST important person in our life. We put them on a pedestal and think they can do no wrong. We look to this person to help regulate our emotions as well; we think we can’t live without them. This “favorite person” can destroy us by doing things like not answering a text fast enough or by having other friends etc., but the second they text back or ask us to hang out, we feel on top of the world again. Our fear of abandonment plays a huge role in all this. As someone said in a video I watched about favorite person, “we want them to live in our pocket.” Without awareness on both sides, this is a recipe for disaster and usually ends up with the favorite person ending the relationship because we are just too much. Or us cutting (aka splitting) them out of our lives because they didn’t live up to our unrealistic expectations (that they probably don’t even know we have). We can go back and forth from putting them on a pedestal to devaluing them pretty quickly.
Before I became aware of what a Favorite Person was; I had one who I didn’t treat very well. I didn’t respect her boundaries and I put unrealistic expectations on her. I tested her friendship to see if she really cared about me and because of my extreme mood swings made her walk on eggshells. She had her own struggles but a lot of our conversations ended up about me because I looked to her for validation. It was a very unhealthy relationship, but underneath it all we loved each other like sisters…it’s just that my untreated BPD was in control of me.
I won’t go into details, but I ended the friendship because in my eyes she wasn’t putting me first in her life. Now after therapy and learning about my symptoms I have realized that wasn’t true. At the time, I only focused on what my BPD was telling me… that she was rejecting and abandoning me. Of course, that wasn’t true at all, but by not having any healthy coping skills, everything went to hell in a hand bag.
I sent her a one paragraph message and deleted her from my life. This was almost 2yrs ago.
A few months ago, I learned thru a mutual friend that she was asking about me, so I reached out. We talked about what happened and why. I educated her on what favorite person in the BPD world is and am hoping she understood. I told her about all the therapy I’ve recently gone thru and how I’ve learned healthy coping skills. That I’m really working on myself and that I changed a lot (I’m really not the same person I was back then). She tells me she is proud of me. I don’t know if she’ll ever get to the point of following me on Instagram or joining my Discord server again, but at least I can talk to her again in DMs here and there.
We were talking tonight in DMs and in the middle of a topic, she logged into a game and stopped talking to me. I fought the urge to say something like, “oh you’re in a game, I’ll leave you alone” or saying something to make her feel bad. These things only bait and are a desperate attempt to bring the attention back to me. It’s not manipulation, but can be interpreted that way. Manipulation requires planning, but this was impulsive and survival.
I felt that fear of abandonment in my chest again and it scared me. Voices started in telling me that she hates me, she doesn’t want to be friends, she doesn’t care about me and all the other horrible lies they tried to make me believe. I struggled, but I’m ok now.
I know that I did good by not falling back on unhealthy coping skills but the fact that those same familiar emotions and fears came up so fast scare me. I’m not really sure how to handle this because the last thing I want to do is hurt her again. At the same time, I don’t want to fall into that black hole of despair and pain I felt almost 2yrs ago.
I really don’t know how to handle this…