The Favorite Person Enmeshment & the Bonds You Lose When You Heal

There were many signs. 

There was my first poetry acceptance, made more exciting by the fact that it came from a writer I’d admired. 

Only a few hours after I shared my good news, I opened my email to find that my best friend was accusing me of talking about her behind her back, and she called me a “dumb bitch.” Our friendship was newer but close, and this language startled me; I never called my friends cruel names because it reminded me of the behavior of my mother, so I took the insult like a bullet. 

There was the time when, years later, I signed with an agent for a book of comedy essays. 

The next day, she called me, furious: she claimed that I used her talent to get ahead in my writing career, that I’d only been able to sign with the agent because we did a comedy show together, and that I didn’t give her credit. I set out to prove this was untrue by showing her my CV and book proposal in which I credited her and mentioned our comedy show. 

There was the time when my first book got published. 

She told me she no longer liked to read or write poetry, that she was going to focus on nonfiction instead. My sister, mysteriously, did the same thing, except she gave up writing altogether. Suddenly, the people who shared my passion no longer cared for it at all, so I had no one to celebrate it with. 

And there was the time when I told her I’d begun to write a memoir.

She immediately lashed out in a hostile manner: “What, you think you’re a memoir writer now? You know that thing is going to be a tome and no one wants to read all that.” 

There was the time I won a grant to write poetry of witness in a war zone.

She’d laughed with her roommate: “Anne keeps thinking her tits can save the world.” 

There were the conflicts she had with other friends. 

Just before our friendship ended, she’d become physically violent with another friend while on vacation, because the man she had a crush on was interested in her friend instead of her. 

But I didn’t really see any of this until, after 11 years of friendship, she left me in my darkest hour. 

Cluster B personalities engage in enmeshed, codependent friendships, called “favorite people” in the scholarly literature. We attract to other Cluster B’s who feel like family. 

My friend was a histrionic — a former invisible child in a toxic family — and I’m a borderline — a former scapegoat child in a toxic family. 

She had front-row seats to the most harrowing life experience I ever endured: being stalked and eventually repeatedly drugged and assaulted by my apartment maintenance man, a sociopath. 

She knew everything he did. She heard every tear I cried. She knew it was true, and she even suspected him of ill intent within the first week I met him. She felt his behavior was manipulative and suspicious. 

But once it was confirmed — once I was homeless and utterly broken fleeing him, dealing with police and lawyers — she stopped calling and answering texts. 

VANISHED. 

Without even so much as a goodbye. 

The event occurred simultaneously at a time when I’d just discovered my Borderline Personality Disorder in therapy, and I felt I had a true pathway to understanding my disorienting life and my depths of despair. 

Though I was shattered, the self-awareness was a glimmer of sunshine through a crack in a door that’d been long-sealed. 

And that’s when I lost my best friend I’d ever had.