Playing Favorites (The Bad and the Ugly)

I told you the good part about having favorites, but there's some major yucky gross hard sticky bad ugly things about it too. Every emotion with Borderline Personality Disorder is felt with extreme intensity so although the good can be really good, unfortunately the bad can be really bad.

A lot of times I have been labeled as being extremely "jealous" (even the word feels yucky to type!) but I would like to shed some new light on this. This is truly the ugly part of having favorites because I do, at times, feel "off the chart" feelings of fear, panic and possessiveness. I become the personified jealousy monster - the big, green, ugly villain with one eye and slimy goop arms, leaving a trail of sticky yuck behind me wherever I go.

This is not the kind of "jealousy" you feel about your friend's new car or house. It's really unfair that I have to use the same word to describe it because I believe the way I am using this word now has an entirely different context. It is not the same feeling you feel when you want something someone else has -rather, it is an overwhelming fear and panic, an anger over imagined or perceived betrayal.

Imagine the most extreme emotion you've ever felt in your whole life - the most crazy, fierce, off-the charts time that you were passionately happy, angry, sad, etc. Picture that moment. Do you have the moment? Get the exact moment in  your mind! Now take that emotion and multiple it by 10. That's how strongly I feel almost every emotion every day. That's why there is so much bouncing around between extremes, because I am constantly trying to allow myself to feel my emotions while also greatly limit them. I am constantly trying to over-correct my feelings to make them "normal." I understand that I am off the charts. I am trying to get back on the charts. Even a "10" would feel calm to me. 

Remember the BPD Lenses? Let's put them on. Here's what the view looks like:
My friends don't really know me or love me. They might think they love me but if they actually knew all of me, they wouldn't like me. Once they get to know me better, they will reject me. Anyone I love will leave me as soon as I feel safe and comfortable with them. My friends don't actually like being with me, they find me annoying and dramatic but they put up with me because they don't want to hurt my feelings. They feel I am a chore to hang out with. They will get tired of me and I will be rejected at any moment.

My brain already "knows" I will be rejected so it is looking for any moment to prove what it already believes to be true. When this filter is on your brain and a friend spends special time with someone else, your brain automatically fills in the blanks that you are being abandoned. This is not a conscious thought process - when the BPD lenses are on, this happens without even being aware.


I don't know if you've ever felt abandonment- true real abandonment, being truly alone. It is not like sitting alone in church or like when your husband takes a long vacation. It's not like a pain that you know will go away with time, it's an all-encompassing pain that you believe will never end. Abandonment is when 
you wake up and everyone in the world is dead and it's only you alive. You get in your car and there is nobody on any street, not one animal or car moving. All is silent and deserted. You drive to a store and you only hear the hum of the lights because not one single person is there. You run frantically through the isles screaming for anyone but your noises echo from the ceiling in the empty building. You look desperately in the parking lot, scanning for any movement of anything - a person, an animal, anything - but all is completely still. You feel a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. You call someone, eager to hear someone -anyone- and it goes straight to voicemail. You call another person and another and another but no one answers. Your body begins to physically panic and your brain feels like it's going mad. You try to swallow but all your saliva feels stuck in your throat. You scream as loud as you can but your screams echo in the sky and no one can hear you because no one is there. Your body feels hollow and EMPTY. Dread overwhelms you and covers you from your head to your toes. There is no one there - you are completely alone. 

I have felt this before, a lot of times. When a favorite person leaves, I feel this way every single day all day long, sometimes for months at a time. The feeling is more intense then I can even describe.

That's why I say this is not "just jealously" that we should "pray about." It is so much more intense than simply "needing attention" or feeling "the loss of a friendship." When a friend might possibly reject me, I am so so so afraid that I will have to feel this feeling of abandonment again. That feeling is worse than any other pain I can ever explain. The panic and emptiness is more overwhelming to my body than any physical torture I could ever imagine. I would do ANYTHING to never feel that feeling again. I avoid it at all costs. When my brain calculates there is a slight possible risk that a favorite friend might leave me, I feel thrown into a terrorized hysteria that I might have to go through that abandoned feeling again and I work to frantically avoid it.

It's like life is everyone living in the ocean together and everyone else is swimming fine, but you have drowned before so when you see a wave coming you can't ever tell if it is going to drown you again or not, so you automatically panic at every single wave. (which makes life exhausting because there are a lot of waves!)

When I feel "jealous" it is difficult to react normally and calmly because the pain it triggers is so intense. I work really really hard to accept the facts, to believe what people have told me is true, and I work excruciatingly hard to not overreact. But it is not easy and it is not automatic. My brain calculates "perceived risk" and fights me at every turn.

I have heard for twenty years what people tell me: People can love more than one person at a time. People can have multiple friends. Friends can hang out with other people and even be really close to them and yet still be close to you. 

It's so hard for me to believe that is the truth because it is not the truth in my brain! In my brain, I take my love away from one person to give it to someone else. My brain is singular focused. In my sinful shaded heart, when I don't spend time with someone it's because I am purposefully rejecting them. That makes it difficult to accept that others are not doing the same to me.

I tell myself that what I feel is not the truth. I tell 
myself that my brain is scared of that empty hollow  feeling and that is why I am being a psychotic green possessive monster. I tell myself that people can love more than one person at a time and my friends do love me and they are allowed to have as many close friends as they want. I try to convince myself they are not rejecting me or punishing me by showing love to another person. It is difficult to accept these statements as facts since my mind doesn't operate the same. I am working to believe this is the truth in my hearts of hearts but for now I am satisfied when I can even pretend it's true and not overreact. 

This singular focus brain makes having favorites a "bad" thing when the friendship ends. When a favorite friendship ends, my life is in a state of emergency for an agonizingly long time. I feel that feeling of abandonment every moment I am awake. I feel an overwhelming emptiness like I am walking around without any internal organs. I believe that I might never smile or laugh ever again. 

Each new favorite friendship I value more than the last and each new loss makes me believe I won't live through it. Each ending of a favorite person friendship brings a wave of suicidal thoughts and the belief that life can never feel complete again because no matter where I go or who I meet, there will always be an empty space where that person used to be.

It still feels this way. Honestly, I still miss my favorite boss who became my best friend and that was two and a half years ago! I still do feel an empty space where she used to be. I still do miss my favorite work friend in Tennessee who giggled with me non stop for eight hours straight every day. Each new favorite friend has something so diverse and exceptional to offer and each time, my brain tells me I will never ever have a friend exactly like this again. And that's not a lie - I will never have a friend exactly like that again - but there will be other friends! My brain argues back that I don't want any other friends, I only want that one particular friend. The passion with which I feel that I only want that one particular friend is what causes the problem. 

But I am trying. I am not trying to not have a favorite, but I am trying to believe the truth about their motivations. I am trying to diversify my investments more. I am trying to remember that each new favorite friend brings a new light into my life, teaches me new things, and grows me in special ways. I want to remember how many wonderful people are in my life this year that I did not even know last year. When a friendship ends, I want to remember that in a few years I will have beautiful new friends and while they don't replace the empty spaces of the old, they somehow always create new spaces they fill.

When I look at the timeline of the favorites in my life, I see hope in the wonderful people God provided for me at exactly the right moment. I see hope in the ways God has enabled me to turn to Him as my steady and unfailing stability, even when my life is marked by instability and uncertainty. 

I am thankful for the good, I still need to work through the bad, and I will try to change the ugly. 

Playing Favorites (The Good)

This is the most intimate and personal post. I cannot believe I would ever share this with anyone. This post more than any of the others feels as though I am naked before a crowd but way worse because its my heart and soul that are exposed.

I have been learning in grad school that the difference between a mental disorder and a "quirk" is the way it affects your life. If it interferes with your functioning in employment, family, or interpersonal relationships, then it is a disorder. If it's something silly you do, such as checking the lock on the door three times, but it doesn't keep you from having a job or social life, then you are just silly without a disorder. At first glance, I don't have a disorder. When you first get to know me, I don't have anything "diagnosable." I have quirks maybe, things that may seem a little "odd" but I don't act in any way that leads anyone to believe anything is actually wrong.

Not at first.

At first, it's all good. I appear charming and charismatic. Smooth sailing! But then, a favorite person arrives on the scene, and then, well...then I have a disorder. Then my ability to function becomes impaired.

My Favorite.


This is my favorite way to say it!! In all my researching about Borderline Personality Disorder, other people talking about having "a favorite" is my favorite thing!!! This is the main part of my disorder that I never thought could be understood. This is the main reason I felt so isolated for years and years. I tried to explain this phenomena to people and no one knew what I was talking about. I tried to tell counselors but I had to change the subject when I was met with squinted eyes and raised eyebrows. People didn't understand. I learned at a young age that I was different because of this "favorite person phenomena" and that people did not like it. I learned in high school that I had better not tell anyone about this or my life will be destroyed. I learned to keep quiet and I learned that this - this whatever it was - was bad. VERY bad.

The words obsession and love addiction are gross, yucky, disgusting words. I HATE THEM and I NEVER want to hear them again and I certainly never want them associated with me. They were written on me like scarlet letters for the past twenty-eight years until a few weeks ago when I discovered the term "Borderline Personality Disorder's Favorite Person"

It was a sigh of relief. A breath of fresh air. A cold glass of water. It was life breathed into me that there wasn't something devastatingly wrong with me, that I wasn't certifiably insane and most importantly that I wasn't "BAD" or if I was, at least there were others like me.


I LOVE that they call it favorite person. That sounds so much less threatening and scary than what it had been labeled for me before. I was labeled a threat, a scary person. I was told I was sinful. I was told to go away until I could fix it. And I wanted to! I really really wanted to go away and fix it! I felt humiliated at my own feelings and I wanted so much to change it but I had no idea how. I spent so much time in recent years trying to suppress all my thoughts and never let anyone see. I spent so much desperate energy trying to not have a Favorite Person.

I will not have another favorite, I will not have another favorite! I pleaded with myself. I made promises to myself. I demanded from myself. But no matter the amount of ignoring, pretending, suppressing, it proved impossible. Those favorite people kept rolling right along, one right after the other. A familiar song kept playing on in my life - New favorite person, extreme high, rejection, extreme despair, new favorite person, extreme high, rejection, extreme despair, new favorite person....on and on it goes.

I kept trying to interrupt the song but I was constantly failing. I see so clearly now how I got so discouraged - no wonder all the cutting, no wonder all the self-hatred. I remember my counselor praying over and over that I would stop having favorites (although her vocabulary was different) and I remember the intense anger I would feel. I was angry with God for making the "rules" so hard that I could not comply. I was angry with myself for not healing right. I was angry with others because I felt I could never meet their expectations of loving others normally. I was angry with my counselor because I felt she expected healing and for some reason no matter how much I tried to work through my past with her, I could never "fix" myself.

Each time I had a new favorite person, I would throw myself into a pattern of self destruction and pain, hoping that if I punished myself enough I could stop the bad cycle. Each time I would sit in a puddle of defeat, believing death was the only way out of this. I used to think if I could just be Christian enough I would be able to not have a favorite anymore. If I could just have my own family, then I would be distracted enough that I would be fine. If I could just get married, if I could just find the right medicine, if I could just go to enough counseling....

For years and years I believed that when I became a mother, I would no longer have a favorite because my life would be full. But last year I became a mother and I loved my kids with my whole heart and my entire day revolved around them...and yet, I STILL had a favorite.

Last year I didn't know anything about Borderline or the favorite person phenomena, but I began to realize I might always have a favorite, no matter what my life looked like. I realized that even when my life was full, my brain still played favorites. I began to try to grapple with the fact that this will most likely continue as a pattern in my life even when I am happily married, even when I am reading my Bible daily, even when I am being supported, loved, cared for, even when I have friends, even when I am healed and full.

The moment I realized this might never go away, things changed for me. Accepting this part of me and learning to work with it instead of desperately fighting against it, has given me an enormous amount of hope and energy that I never thought possible in my life. The defeat I felt every time I created a new favorite friendship was shattering me and the hope I feel now that I am not the most sinful or bad or crazy person in the world for my brain working this way, it feels redeeming.


It is so interesting to me that in every article I have read about BPD's Favorite People, none of them ever suggest to stop having a favorite, they simply give tips and tricks on how to live your healthiest life with it. They empower healthy choices within the situation. They give work-arounds and good boundary ideas and encouragement. I have yet to read something clinical that is critical or tells me to avoid, to ignore, to turn it off, to try and stop, or to "heal" better.

I remember so vividly my first favorite person. I was four years old and she was a cool older pre-teen. I remember the moment I met her and the moment she left and I remember the next person who came into my life when I was five to replace her. I can make the whole list for you of every favorite person I have ever had and exactly how long the relationship lasted.

"How do favorite people work?" you ask. Beats me! It's the craziest thing I have ever experienced, like straight out of some teen fiction novel with wolves imprinting. I haven't read anything yet that can adequately describe all of it, but Jacob imprinting (yes, my friends, I am comparing a real life devastating phenomena to a vampire teen fiction novel) is honestly a good way to describe it. I have no control over it and I don't get to pick the people it happens with. If I could, I would! It's like some cosmic force pulls my heart in and I am enthralled in platonic love that can often be misread or misconstrued since people have no frame of reference to compare it with. Most people only experience two types of loves in their life - one type for their family and friends and one type for their crushes/boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses. BPD favorite person love is a whole different category of love. When people see it, they can't fit it into one of the two types of loves that they've experienced, so they get scared.

I love writing about this because this is something I felt shame about for so long. This is something I felt no one could possibly understand about me. I had years and years of people scrunching their noses and asking, "Do you have a crush on her or something?" Nope. I don't. I am saved by God, loved by God, choosing God and someday I'll marry an amazing man. I am struggling with a mental illness that has a type of intense attachment that you haven't seen before. It's a third type of love that you haven't experienced. I can't tell you exactly how favorites work but I CAN tell you how they don't work. It's not an idol. It's not a crush. It's not me trying to find my identity in someone else. It's not a sin. It's just the way my brain works. Accepting that I play favorites, because that's how my mind works, and trying to learn how to honor and worship my Creator in the process, that has been the most freeing thing of my life.

(Side note: this does get into a sticky topic of where the boundary lies between mental illness and God's laws. What is the answer for the Christian person diagnosed with anxiety and yet facing the reality that God says worrying is a sin? Where do we draw the line between what is mental illness excusable and what is sin? Idolatry is still wrong no matter what, even if you have a mental illness! I will write a future post on this and delve into this topic but for now, I am resting assured that all these struggles I had for so long were not me failing God or God failing me, but rather, it was the result of the fallen world I was born into that caused all types of sickness, illness, and sin to abound.)

Imagine a person with an intellectual disability believing if they could only pray enough, their brain would work like everyone else's. It won't friends! It won't. Imagine those with cancer believing if they could only "get it right" and not sin for awhile, their cancer would be healed. God is The Healer and He does heal people, but it is not by anything on our efforts! It is not because of our sins that we struggle with illness and disease and it is not by purifying ourselves that we are healed or made holy. God alone does the work and He does it in His timing and to whom He chooses. I have come to understand, much like an intellectual disability or autism, that this is how my brain works and I can learn to work with it. I see for the first time now that I can still be pure and holy and honorable before God without feeling like I am living in sin because of my brain working incorrectly. I had so many people tell me I was idolizing others, tell me it was a sin to love anyone that much, tell me I was sinning for finding my identity in others. It's so difficult to function when you feel like you are a sin for being you, a sin for being alive, sinning from the moment you wake up to the moment you close your eyes. But I want to take off the BPD lenses and think differently. The way I want to see this part of my life now, is what a blessing it is that I always get to have someone so special in my life. I always have someone who means the world to me! What a blessing it is that God has given me such a tangible way to understand His intense love for me and His unfailing favoritism of His children.

Accepting that this is the way my brain loves and trying work with it has changed my prayers profoundly. What used to be devastating and desperate pleas to make my life as short as possible so I don't have to sin by being awake, have turned into prayers learning how to ride this roller coaster with God by my side.

Make my favorite person ever point me to You. Let me worship You instead of any favorite person. Let me love You more than I love any favorite person. Let me hold them with open hands because they don't belong to me - they are yours and you have blessed me with them for a short time. Let me never cling to them but instead be thankful for every moment with them and know that you are my steady rock. Let my heart seek to be with You first and foremost. And if You choose, if you will allow me, God, make You my favorite person. But if that cannot be so here on earth, let me worship and honor you in the meantime, until we meet face to face when You will forever and ever be my heart's sole focus and absolute favorite.


Helpful Links:

What it's like to Have a Favorite Person

5 Things to Know If You are the Favorite of a Person with BPD