Does anyone else here have the experience of being called the most authentic person someone else knows? If so, how did it make you feel?
Also wondering if commenters can describe the person in their lives they see as the most authentic? What does that look like to you?
Wanted to know if anyone had a similar experience. I know I shouldn’t even pay attention but it still haunts me, all the lying and the switch being flipped off.
Technically, he is not my ex. We were talking and things were going well. But at a certain point I felt really pressured to start having sex and I don’t do that outside of relationships…also being that I’m a virgin and have not yet had a relationship.
He somewhat egged me on when I explained these things telling me to live it little. I know it’s lame and stuff but it ended up with me crying on the phone and asking him to leave me alone if he wasn’t okay with me just wanting to wait.
I feel really embarrassed about the whole thing and wondered if it would be fair and within my rights to just reiterate to him that that conversation was between us and was not for him to repeat. I felt humiliated by the conversation and being seen as a prude, which he said outright. I just wanted to send him a text saying that was between us and was not for him to gossip about, just to cover my own butt I guess.
So my relationship last year started with about 4 months of really intense love bombing. She told me about trauma and stuff and told me how I was everything she was looking for. When my circumstances changed such that I was able to date, it was like she pulled away and shut down all positive regard for me.
Basically everyday, she couldn’t help but make mention of how she doesn’t really care about our relationship, “it’s not that deep”, and things along those lines. It felt like everyday a new fight would get picked, and I found it all really destabilizing. It led to some teary phone calls from my end and especially after how invested she was to just being completely cold, I felt really abandoned. But like, I was being abandoned, clearly. But she just used my emotions to tell me it was driving her away. But everyday it was a new jab and what felt like provocation and her entering the relational field in bad faith. Yes, I cried a ton and began to hate myself because she would blame and criticize constantly, after gaining my trust so deeply.
I recently brought up the idea to my therapist that I have a problem that may be associated with being borderline. She was astounded and kind of quietly noted that it seemed from what I shared that I was much more likely to have been involved with someone displaying behaviors that are generally recognized as that.
Can anyone help me make sense of this?
I am largely trying to make sense of an incongruence between BPO and BPD. Of course, the connection between the two really is based just on the word borderline…if it was called Splitting Personality Organization perhaps I wouldn’t be posting this question. But Kernberg notes the BPD diagnosis operates at a “low-borderline” functioning.
It seems to me that someone could meet 5 of the 9 symptom criteria for BPD without actually meeting Kernberg’s criteria for BPO. Someone can have intense anger, fear of abandonment, feelings of emptiness, impulsive behavior and rapid mood changes but be able to reflect on these things in a way that is incongruent with identity diffusion.
Looking for anyone to point me in the direction of readings (or personal insight) about working with these kinds of clients. Over mentalizing, working with them for months on end and listening to very strong insights about their relationships, feelings and internal world leading to some level of changes to their symptoms of depression and anxiety. But no new relationships get formed, no career steps get taken, and the therapist comes to realize they are complicit in the same sort of situation the client lives in…simply living in their mind and not in the world.
It is fairly easy to understand and grasp as to what is going on here, but I don’t know how to break it and am not sure what the literature says for working with clients such as these that seemingly can make insights forever and even have a sense of accomplishment with each new one.
So this is in regards to a relationship that ended about 3 months ago but I had some lingering thoughts on the girl I was with. She got diagnosed with BPD like 3 years ago but said her therapy had gotten her out of the hole and she no longer met classification for it.
After splitting me, so often she’d criticize me and note that “even” her therapist agreed. I think my overarching point is that isn’t it destructive of someone who is the definition of an unreliable narrator is describing their relationship to someone who may not be curious? Do others have this concern? I think the affective instability side probably always gets improved through therapy but I would witness on a weekly basis how her view of me as this weak and burdensome boyfriend would become more entrenched, regardless of my behavior. I was stuck completely in this role of being completely and utterly devalued, which reinforced her poor treatment of me all in the name of “setting boundaries.”
I was also curious there are therapists on this sub that can perhaps speak to this. Like, is this a challenge in the field to some extent?