On the other side of BPD smear-campaign
Hi!
One of my best friends has BPD and we recently had a pretty bad falling-out where, to be fair, both of us have messed up equally.
But now, they’ve reached out to our mutual friends, and completely distorted the events to fit the hurt they feel, casting me as an absolute deranged villain.
I have acknowledged my friend’s feelings about the falling-out (because their feelings are real and I don’t doubt them) while simultaneously denying the distortion of the actual facts. But all of those attempts are nitpicked to only focus on the fact that I am not unequivocally acknowledging that everything they’re saying happened happened and that I am therefore not acknowledging their reality/feelings. When I AM! In all the communication I constantly reiterate that I believe their feelings, but the accusation about the way I caused them (intentionally or unintentionally) is just NOT TRUE.
The worst part is, all our mutual friends have completely cut me off, not even hearing my side. Those friends don’t know that the friend has BPD. If I bring it up along with the perfectly-fitting “feeling-based facts” tendency that probably pushed the narrative forward, it’ll seem like I’m devaluing them as a person. It doesn’t matter how much I reiterate that I truly deeply believe they are feeling what they say they are feeling, and acknowledge the part I played in that (to an extent). But their depiction of the falling-out is just simply untrue.
I have the suspicion that my friend with BPD and our mutual friends are stuck in an echo chamber / feedback loop where they’re each reinforcing what everyone’s saying. I don’t know what to do. I feel so betrayed and alone. I feel pushed against a corner. Anything I say is deemed a lie, and I have lost all my friends.