there is genuinely no better feeling than the dopamine rush you get when you see a text from your favorite person
taking up space and being perceived is so embarrassing how do some of you not want to get hit by a car every time you talk
*me thinking it’s so coincidental that whenever i’m thinking about my fp they text me*
*me realizing that i’m literally always thinking about my fp*
i think it’s so sad how you can go from someone being a big part of your life, them knowing everything about you and talking to them 24/7 to them being non-existent in your life anymore
me: wow im lonely
also me: *disassociated from everyone, doesn’t respond to texts or calls AND doesn’t go out*
Some Symptoms of my DPD
These are some symptoms of my DPD (dependent personality disorder). Not everyone with DPD may have these same symptoms but I thought I’d share since it is hard to find info on us. Also when researching DPD make sure you search co-dependency. I’m going to number these for later reference so I don’t have to retype.
1. Not wanting to eat alone or until I’ve had some sort of social interaction or the hope of social interaction after eating.
2. Sleeping in my parent’s bed until I was locked out the room on a nightly basis (I slept in the room until I was about 9 years old or so.) I continued to check to see if the door was locked every night for about a month.
3. Would sometimes scream in the middle of the night in hopes that someone would come to check on me so I knew if I was in trouble I would be safe
4. Would always want my mother’s attention when she was talking to someone else.
5. Feeling anxious and scared when alone, and not expecting anyone to be around for longer than a day. This would often lead to panic attacks as soon as they’d leave.
6. Feeling like I was alone and therefore had no reason to be alive because my friends couldn’t physically be around me everyday.
7. Sometimes not wanting to figure things out because I knew others would help me.
8. Instinctually asking certain people (people I regularly depended on and saw as capable) just about anything because I always expected them to know something I didn’t.
9. Not even thinking about what I would want for myself when given a choice but instead what others would expect me to want or what others would say I should do.
10. Literally feeling the solitude of being the only person in the world and therefore not having a reason to anything let alone breathe or use the bathroom because other’s weren’t around.
11. “If I can’t help this person then why am I even alive? I’m a waste of space and a terrible human being.”
12. As a child I would sometimes just fake being sick. No even to get out of school but just to know that if I were to be sick that I would be taken care of.
13. I used to hug my mother upwards from 80 to maybe a couple hundred times a day. I would literally feel empty and anxious if I wasn’t hugging her. It’s like having a million spiders crawling on your body and knowing they’re there but having to resist the urge to brush them off of you. That’s how I would explain the anxiety.
14. “I’m alone. No one is around to know if I’m alive or not. So I might as well be dead. Why am I even moving. What’s the point if no one knows.”
15. Having an opinion that I believe in and know it’s right because of research I have done but not calling out an authority figure because “I don’t want everyone to hate me. Everyone will hate me and I’ll embarrass myself because I’m probably wrong anyway.” Also note that an authority figure doesn’t have to actually be an authority figure but can literally just be anyone that I’ve assumed to be more capable, popular, or admired than me.
16. Only doing my homework and school work with the hopes that I can be useful to my friends who didn’t do there work. Or not doing my work because I assume my friends will help me.
17. Motivation?? For myself?? Doing things because I want them done? Lol. More like, “I’ll take care of this thing so that it doesn’t bother this person in case they happen to come by it.” or “I’m doing this project because otherwise my teacher will be disappointed in me and I want them to like me.” or “My dad just told me to eat so I need to eat because he wants me to.” or “People need this so even though it comes as sacrifice to myself I have to do it. I need to. It’s my job. If I don’t I’m an awful disgusting waste of space.”
18. Doing something for myself and solely for myself, by myself makes me feel so horrible that I want to cry and self harm. It makes me feel more useless than empowered because I am so grossly aware of the amount of energy it took up for me just to do this one things and how can I live like this? It should be simple? Right? But it isn’t. It takes so much out of me and I don’t know why.
Co-morbidity with BPD
Those are some examples, I may add more later. But now let’s go through some things. DPD is often co-morbid with BPD. I haven’t seen a case of someone who have DPD who doesn’t at least have traits of BPD.
Note the black and white thinking in 17, 14, and 11. There are also traits of self-splitting in those. Note the general dependency of social interaction for means of value.
Now think of other things like impulsively putting yourself in unsafe and generally not good situations when around others that you depend on because you know someone will either talk you out of it or tell you that it’s not safe. You do this because being reminded that other’s will take care of you is one of the only ways you actually feel safe and worthy of value.
Lack of impulse control is a key characteristic of BPD. That coupled with traits of DPD can result things like what I mentioned in the passage above.
It can also result in a impulse to self harm when alone.
The addictive personality trait of BPD when co-morbid with DPD can also result in things like:
- addiction to online communities because of validation and being able to almost always talk to or interact with any of your online friends
- addiction to pseudo social interaction like Youtube videos. - I used to marathon from the time I woke up to the time I fell asleep hour long live streams of my favorite Youtubers just because it helped me from feeling like I was alone. I would eat because of them, I would have the energy to take of things I needed because of them, I would finally go eat or go to the bathroom because of them.
- the people you have come to rely on and want to be dependent on are also your FPs (people who your emotional stability is highly dependent on and who you want to be around all the time and receive constant attention form. People who you would literally sacrifice and do anything for because you tie your reason to being alive to them. Whether they are actually good people or not you are likely to be believe they are and split (or suddenly hate) anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.)
- “I need you.”
Causes of DPD
Let’s talk about some causes of DPD. There are probably more than what I will mention here but DPD is something that is not heavily researched. It’s an old personality disorder but many professionals barely know what it is. I’m guess because it’s just not “edgy” or “interesting” (sensationalized) enough.
But one cause can be being often physically ill as child. I for example had severe asthma from birth to about 3 years old. From a young age my brain was trained to associate others actively keeping me alive with my ability to be alive. Yes, I know that many infants are aware that they would not be alive without care-givers but the difference here is that I was regularly on the verge of death. I was only ever brought back to not having my life in danger because of the interference of others and the attention that others needed to give me. I still had pretty bad asthma until about the age of 7 but I was in the hospital about 11 times a year form birth to 3 years old. They even diagnosed me at about 10 months of age because of how severe it was (when they typically don’t diagnose you with asthma until about 4 years old.)
Another cause of DPD can also be growing with a narcissistic abuser. You are only alive because of them and they remind you of this constantly to the point of which you are afraid of doing things without them being there. They have convinced you, that you are not capable on your own and that you need them to survive. Without them you will die or your life will fall apart.
Anyway, please do more research on DPD it is greatly neglected by the psych community.
One of the worst things about BPD is when you’re feeling good and motivated but you know you’ll be crying and contemplating suicide again in no time so you can’t enjoy the moments that you feel okay