Learn from my mistakes

She sat in the padded rocking chair with the cushions wearing a crumpled face full of tears. Shoulders drooping, head cast down.

"I just don't feel I have anything to live for," she sobbed, looking up at me. Expectantly?

My mother liked to threaten suicide by implication. She was clever enough to always have plausible deniability. She never directly said, "I'm going to kill myself."

She'd "have nothing to live for," her "life has no point that I can see," or she'd "always be a failure and there's no point in getting up every day."

When a person relates this way to you one time, during a rare crisis, it's a cry for help. When she does it repeatedly for decades, it's abuse.

I fell for it every time. Until one day I stopped falling for it.

If you watch my show, Disaffected, you know I take a hard line on Borderline Personality Disorder manipulation. I take a hard line on Borderlines. A lifetime in my mother's prison was plenty.

The hard—even cold—wall I put up to keep out borderlines is necessary. For all my tough talk, I'm vulnerable to them. Seeing someone in desperate sadness breaks my heart. When it seems like someone doesn't believe anyone loves her, it hurts me.

I cry. And I open my heart, my wallet, and my home. The last time I followed my heart I went into $100,000 of debt I couldn't afford, and I invited the biggest emotional vampire of my life directly into my home. It's a mistake I'll pay for for years to come.

My shrink says my relationship to the concept of suffering is distorted.

"You want to swoop in and stop the suffering immediately, no matter what," he said. "But suffering is a part of life. Suffering will always happen. And it can teach us lessons we can't learn another way."

He's right. As a parentified child—I was the caretaker, mother the taken-care-of—it was my job to soothe the suffering. It began early; it's there in my first memories.

It's a mistake I made again recently on a smaller scale. "Gary" was a social media mutual I bantered with. He was from a similar upbringing. Narcissistic mother, poverty, derangement everywhere he looked.

Gary is poor and doesn't have much to get by on. He admits to being crippled by his emotional instability, an instability that he came by honestly. It's a miraculous wonder that any of us emerge from these emotional workhouses that were our childhood with any stability at all.

Gary is also very funny and clever. He's entertaining, and he has insight about how people work.

He pulled at my heart. Some of his traits are also my traits. I wanted to soothe him, to let him know that he wasn't worthless or universally unliked. Let me be fully truthful: I wanted to save him. I was aiming to be the savior in the drama triangle. This is one of my consistent failings.

So I invited him to the private Discord server for my show, for free (we ask people to contribute at least $10 a month to the show for access, but freebies are my perquisite). Our server is, as one member just put it, the Island of Broken and Misfit Toys. Most of us are from Cluster B families. We get a lot of (pardon the word, but no other will do) genuine validation from comparing experiences and talking about how to approach our lives more clearly and sanely.

We're also fun as hell.

I invited Gary despite the warning chimes sounding in the back of my head. I knew he probably had Borderline Personality Disorder, but he seemed aware enough of his failings to take responsibility for it. I challenge myself not to forget that some people with BPD or who live in the BPD neighborhood can grow and change.

Sometimes it's a mistake.

For the first couple of weeks in the Discord it was fine. Gary has a habit of talking really fast into to his phone (voice transcription) without adding punctuation. This makes his posts hard to parse. I decided to let that go personally, and most people seemed to do the same, or just not engage if they couldn't figure out how to respond.

Then the mood whiplashes became more apparent. "I'm sorry I know I'm emotionally unstable and sometimes I say things I don't mean and I don't mean to hurt other people and I feel bad when I do and I just want you to know I'm sorry and I get it and . . ." That's a typical "Gary" post.

Then the beginnings of paranoia peeked out. Gary would "vague" post, wondering "why everyone suddenly stopped responding to my posts like I was toxic or something and just yesterday so and so was joking with me but today it just nothing I guess I'm toxic and shouldn't expect anyone to be a real friend. . ."

I cottoned on to the fact that he was doing the same emotional manipulation game, with the same steps, I've seen other Borderlines do. It works like this:

1. Appear to take ownership of your character faults

2. Say that you understand that they are off-putting, and that you don't blame others when they respond negatively.

3. Apologize.

4. Then act as though acknowledging your faults and saying "sorry" allows you to act out those traits as much as you like.

5. Get angry at people who distance themselves, and accuse them of being heartless when they won't accept any and all nonsense that comes out your mouth. After all you SAID YOU WERE SORRY SO WHAT MORE DO THEY WANT?

And then there were the private messages to other members. Messages they started contacting me about.

Gary was getting way too emotionally intimate, way too fast, and acting perturbed when his interlocutor didn't respond in kind. And then he'd get accusatory. "I guess you weren't being honest when you said you thought I was cool."

This behavior is unacceptable to do to anyone. But it's dire to do it to a group of people who've suffered damage from Cluster B parents.

The member who contacted me about this was gaslighting herself. Asking what she'd done wrong. Agonizing over whether she was being a persecutor by asking me to look at the issue and possibly step in. She spent an hour crying over it.

This infuriated me. She wasn't being crazy, she was being normal.

When I stepped in and messaged Gary, I took a neutral, business-like tone. Not hostile, but not friendly. Brief, factual, and to the point: I'm sorry you're in a bad way, but stop with these private messages. It may be a good idea to talk to a professional.

That did it. Gary turned on me. Vague posts about how "people" were dishonest, and only lied to fool him into thinking that they liked him. They were "going gray rock," he said, which showed him they thought he was toxic. ('Gray rock' is a term used to describe being boring, brief, and not engaging with a emotionally unstable person. It's a recommended technique for distancing yourself).

Since he wouldn't stop with the posts, and because I won't subject my members to this behavior, I banned him from the server.

Since then, he's been on social media vague posting about me. How I'm probably a covert narcissist, how I say I've managed my own toxic traits but I really haven't, how I misled him, etc.

A few years ago, the things Gary was saying about me would have had me crying, second-guessing myself, feeling guilty, and allowing my entire day to be ruined by one emotional stumble.

Not now. It doesn't hurt me anymore because I know it isn't true. I know the difference now between honest criticism from a friend who cares enough to tell me the truth, and Borderline manipulation.

I'm second-guessing myself a bit writing this, because aren't I doing the same thing? Aren't I vague-posting behind someone's back?

Well, yes and no. "Gary" isn't his name. Nothing in this piece would allow any reader who doesn't know the recent situation to determine who I'm talking about.

And, I've set myself up as a public commentator on the danger of Cluster B behavior to our relationships and our society. When it happens in my own digital living room, I'm going to talk about it. When it has negative effects on people I've gathered around me, I'm going to talk about it.

Yes, Gary is probably reading this essay. I don't care. Gary's life is Gary's business. I don't hate Gary; I don't think Gary is worthless.

But I have lost respect for Gary. He came in to my space because of my kindness and invitation, and he used it to extract narcissistic supply from other members of my online group. He doesn't have to be this way. He can make choices that will benefit his mental health, and his relationships. He can grow, if he wants to grow. I hope he does.

But that's not my problem, and I'm never going to know what happens to Gary. Because I cut people dead after the first time I see them exploiting me with Cluster B bullshit. And I'm sure as hell not going to allow them to do it to people who have lingering vulnerabilities because they were raised in abuse the way I was.

It's not clear how to wrap this article up. What's the lesson for me? What do I hope you, the reader, will take away?

I'm not sure. Experiences like this push me to be even harder, less charitable, and less willing to give people a chance.

On the other hand, perhaps the lesson for me is, "See how you can manage this now without falling apart emotionally yourself? Maybe you're skilled enough now that you can afford to let your guard down and give people a chance. Even if they disappoint you, you can move on quickly."

What I'd ask you to think about, reader: Be aware of your own vulnerabilities. Check yourself when you're acting out of sympathy. When you extend that hand of friendship, are you doing it because you want to soothe and save someone? Are you relating to others the way you related to your narcissistic parent who made you into a confidant, a fixer?

Talk to me please, readers. I'd like to know what you think.