“You’re My Favourite Person”: When Love Turns Toxic For Those With BPD – Refinery 29
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Content Warning: This article mentions suicide.
Throughout my life I have become fixated on specific people. In hindsight I see them as regular people but at the time I idealised them. The intensity of my emotions and the inability to control them always bothered me. It wasn’t until I got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) at the age of 22 that I began to make sense of my experiences.
Broadly, BPD can be characterised as an unstable sense of self, identity and emotions. Symptoms vary from person to person but can include emotional instability, disturbed patterns of thinking, impulsive behaviour and unstable relationships with others. In the UK, studies have shown that around one in 100 people live with the disorder.
Hannah Larkin is a 20-year-old student in the very early stages of her BPD recovery journey. “It’s broken down my relationship with everyone in my life, to the point I don’t have a home anymore,” she says. “I am in hospital and have no IRL friends.”
Like Hannah, I too found that my familial relationships got to a place I thought was unrecoverable. It was only after I was diagnosed, four years ago, that I was able to understand myself. For instance, I was only recently introduced to the concept of having a favourite person (FP). From there, I was able to see how the term had incredible relevance in my most intense friendships.
Within the context of BPD, an FP represents a person who is a source of comfort and an anchor. They are different from a best friend in that they are a person on whom you depend emotionally. They provide emotional validation and security and you may start to believe that they are the only person who can make you happy.
Read the full article here.
