BPD: Intense And Unstable Relationships With Friends

Today I will be talking about intense and unstable relationships when it comes to BPD. This is the second post about this topic and this time it has to do with friends. 

I’ve had lots of different friends come and go throughout the years. For some people with BPD, we might have a “favorite” person. One person that we would prefer to spend all of our time with and latch on to them and kind of suffocate them with how attached we are. With my childhood, it was always a friend. When I got into my late teens and young adulthood, it became my significant other (when I had one). I will talk more about my relationships with significant others in a separate post. 

I usually had a best friend every year of school. It was almost always someone different just based on who was in my classroom. I never had more than one best friend. Life was so great whenever they were around and when they were absent from school, life was difficult. I got jealous whenever they wanted to play with other friends, because I didn’t want to play with other kids, I only wanted to play with my best friend.

I was very seldom allowed to do anything outside of school, like hang out with friends. Every once in a while I was allowed to hang out with friends, but they had to come over to my house, I was not allowed to go to their houses. So, with that rule in place, that made keeping friends very difficult as I got older. 

As a teen, I really did not have any really good friends. I spent all of my time outside of school either at home or at dance class. Because of the strict rules in my house, it made it hard to keep friends. I felt like an outsider because I didn’t really connect with anyone. On top of that, I had a harder time picking up on social cues. Some things weren’t that obvious to me. 

Now that I’m an adult, I have gotten better at keeping friendships. I’m still not the best, but I’m working on it. I have a few friends who have stuck with me through my ups and downs and they’re the only ones that I trust whenever I’m having a crisis. I still have a hard time opening up to new people because whenever I’ve opened up about my mental illness too quickly, they don’t want anything to do with me. 

In the next post about BPD, I will be talking about unstable relationships with significant others.