if you look thru my post history you can see how much of a shitshow my life has been while i come to terms with my abusive behavior/tendencies in which BPD played a factor 

i am taking full responsibility for all of it, i am getting help and working to improve myself so that i don’t harm anyone else ever again. 

by posting this, i am not trying to justify what i did to others, i’m trying to understand how it reached this point. because for the longest time, i thought everyone else was the problem, but actually it was me. and now im waking up to that fact. 

did anyone else genuinely believe in their hearts that they were the victim when they weren’t? that other people were out to get them when in actuality they were the one harming others? i have been called manipulative, and looking back it makes sense, i thought i was being wronged and i acted accordingly. i portrayed the situation as i saw it, so i displayed the facts as i thought they were, while omitting or rationalizing my wrongdoing as unequal to what was being done to me. my brain collected a scorecard of the ways my friends “mistreated” me that i used again and again to get attention, and that scorecard was at the front of my mind anytime the other person criticized me. i never took criticism well, because i had the scorecard ready to throw back in their face. but that’s manipulation, right there. i held grudges too, for years, over things that had already been resolved through communication and/or apologies. so my brain told me “they aren’t doing enough for you! look at all the ways they hurt you!” constantly. i would have these long emotional talks where i would ask for more from my friends, and sometimes they gave in and coddled me. and i’m pissed at myself, for being so manipulative and convincing myself that this was the right thing to do. 

and the anger. god. it was constant and it was intense. everything made me angry. i always knew i had problems with it, since i was a child. there’s this youtube channel i’ve been watching by a guy named Austin James, who emotionally abused his wife for decades and finally snapped out of it. now he tells his story and talks about how he healed and stopped being abusive. he said the same thing i thought of myself, which is he knew he had anger problems, but he wrote them off as a character flaw. i remember someone told me i was aggressive and i retaliated by telling him he was being manipulative (projection much?). I think that word can be used to gaslight people (usually women) and control how they express their emotions (which is what i thought was happening) but it wasn’t in my case. i have had several significant angry outbursts over the years, but i always apologized after. i got so good at writing real, meaningful apologies. like, i didn’t guilt trip, pin my actions on the other party, or beg for forgiveness, and i was empathetic. i took ownership, but then went right back to doing everything wrong. because i didn’t know that i was the problem. 

and this isn’t even getting to the codependency, the copying other people’s fashion cause i lacked a stable sense of identity, the storming out of social gatherings, the desperate need for attention and validation from friends and partners, the clinging on to drama from high school for years after the fact, the cyberstalking, the reckless sex, the triangulation, the self-loathing.

i never thought i could be that abusive person, but i was, for so long. i hate this disorder. it prevents me from seeing reality. i’m not saying these things aren’t my fault, because they absolutely are, but the behaviors came from a seriously fucked up perspective that i didn’t understand until it was too late. even when i was in therapy before i realized this, my treatment went in circles because i didn’t know what i was dealing with. i was a 20 year old adult with the mind of a child. i hate myself for not figuring it out sooner, before i’d ruined some important friendships.