A friendship that faded
No event, no conversation, and no permission to mourn it. Extremely common after a period of illness, and one of the most under-acknowledged losses there is.
Chapter 27
Grief
Grief with emotional dysregulation is not ordinary grief turned up. It arrives faster, goes higher, and comes with an urge to do something about it — and the something is frequently destructive. That last part is what chapter 27 is actually about.
The losses that count
Grief is licensed for deaths and rarely for anything else, which leaves a lot of people grieving something they have been told is not grief.
A version of your life
The career, the relationship, the years. Not a person and it grieves like one, and this is the loss most often dismissed as self-pity.
A relationship ending
Loaded with everything else when the person was also doing the regulating. This is the loss most likely to produce a destructive turn, because it removes the thing that would ordinarily manage it.
Estrangement
A living person who is gone. Harder than a death in one specific respect: it never closes, and every anniversary is a decision rather than a memory.
A loss you are not surviving well
If the grief has turned into not wanting to be here, that is the point to contact someone. The crisis page lists lines that answer immediately, and this is exactly what they are for.
The first fortnight after a significant loss
Not stages. A holding pattern, designed for the period when capacity is lowest and the risk of a permanent decision is highest.
Suspend everything decidable
No moves, no messages to the person or about them, no resignations, nothing permanent. Write down anything that feels urgent and revisit it in a fortnight. Almost none of it survives.
Tell one person, badly
Not to be helped. Being witnessed is the mechanism, and it does not require the telling to be coherent or the listener to say anything useful.
Keep the physical floor
Food, water, some sleep, outside once a day. This is the whole expectation. Grief plus no sleep plus no food is how the fortnight turns into something worse.
Let it be disproportionate
It will be, and fighting that adds shame on top of grief. A friendship of eight months can hurt more than it 'should'. Nobody is auditing this.
Take stock, do not evaluate
Note what has changed rather than judging how you are doing. Grief does not run to schedule and comparing yourself to an imagined timeline is a reliable way to add self-attack to loss.
What people ask
Including the ones about doing it wrong.
Why does it hit so much harder for me?
Two reasons that compound. The emotion arrives at a higher intensity to start with, and if the person was regulating you, the loss also removed the thing that would normally have managed it. That is not fragility — it is a double loss.
Why do I want to destroy something?
Because the pain has no action attached and an action is what the urge wants. Chapter 6 covers this mechanism directly. The intervention is delay rather than argument: nothing permanent for a fortnight.
How long should it take?
There is no schedule and the question itself usually comes from someone else's impatience. What is worth watching is direction rather than duration — if nothing has shifted at all in several months, that is a reason to involve someone.
Is it normal to feel relieved?
Yes, including after a death, and it is one of the most common sources of secret shame in grief. Relief and grief are not in competition; a difficult relationship generates both.
What about grieving a relationship that was bad for me?
You are allowed to. Grief is not an endorsement of what was lost, and the fact that leaving was correct does not make the loss less real.
What if I can't feel anything?
Numbness is a grief response, not an absence of one. It usually lifts, sometimes suddenly and inconveniently. If it persists for months alongside not functioning, that is worth taking to a clinician.
Educational disclaimer: this page supports book discovery and general learning about borderline personality disorder. It does not diagnose, replace individualised professional care, or provide emergency support. If you are in crisis, contact local emergency services or a crisis line — see the crisis support page.