hey everyone! i’m here to talk to you a little about a symptom that is a huge problem for ppl with bpd, dpd, and hpd but that most ppl without cluster b personality disorders aren’t educated about. it’s called relationship object permanence.
object permanence is the developmental skill to realize that an object continues to exist even when you can’t see it. that’s why peekaboo is entertaining to babies – they haven’t developed object permanence yet, so they really believe you stop existing when your face disappears behind your hands. then you come back into existence, and they’re amazed!
a lot of borderline, dependent, and histrionic people don’t have this developmental skill, but specifically in a certain area: we lack relationship object permanence, the ability to understand that a relationship continues to exist when it is not actively being reaffirmed.
this is why many borderline, dependent, and histrionic people can fall into a depression, irrationally believe that someone hates them, or develop bitterness towards someone if they are not actively reaffirming their relationship to us. our lack of relationship object permanence can often be triggered by people not contacting us for an extended period of time, acknowledging or interacting with other friends without acknowledging or interacting with us, and especially actively ignoring us.
(seriously, don’t ever intentionally ignore a borderline, dependent, or histrionic person person. when you do that, you are intentionally triggering someone. please understand that nothing feels worse for a person with a cluster b personality disorder than being ignored. i understand sometimes these things can happen by accident, which is ok, but doing it on purpose is nothing short of cruel.)
please be aware of this developmental problem when you interact with us. just understand that if we seem needy or cagey, this is often the reason. most of us aren’t trying to manipulate you, we just literally can’t understand that you still like us unless you give us some active indication of that.
i understand that being friends with borderline, dependent, and histrionic people can take a lot of spoons and not everyone has the capacity to have such an intense relationship, and that’s ok. i just want to offer this post to help you understand and hopefully be sensitive to your borderline, dependent, and histrionic friends and family.
when you get in a fight with someone close to you, but your brain decides partway through that you’re in the wrong, the argument is your fault, and you’ve fucked everything up by being an intrinsically awful person
but instead of healthily addressing your faults and expressing remorse like a normal-ass person, you have a complete and total breakdown and end up uncontrollably crying and incessantly apologizing for being the piece of shit that you are
and you know that you’re probably being manipulative or something because now the other person is going to feel bad and have to comfort you, but you just? can’t stop?? you either have to sob about how much of a horrible monster you are, or somehow find a way to bottle up all those feelings, but the latter really isn’t feasible, so you’re kinda just left to haphazardly spill your emotions and make everything about the situation 100x worse than it has to be
and the fact that you’re doing this terribly manipulative thing by forcing the other person to be there for you when you’re the one who’s supposed to be there for them just furthers your feelings that you’re a trash person who honestly just doesn’t deserve to be alive
Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops
