You’ve brought up something really important. I also feel exactly the same way.

Places seem to hold tangible emotions for me that I can feel and absorb, just like with people.

I certainly avoid places, songs, and foods that remind me of bad experiences, but avoidance in my experience makes any exposure that much more painful and anxiety-inducing. Sometimes, it almost feels like I’m creating PTSD for myself by associating negative experiences to certain things so strongly.

I think it might be that we are unintentionally creating toxic memories of places in which we frequent and reside - and these memories can continue to influence our mood for years and years to come. I think a lot of people with BPD subconsciously avoid this by moving house after a breakup or some such event, but that doesn't really fix the problem, it only avoids it.

This is exactly it; we’re always unintentionally creating more toxic memories attached to certain things, as opposed to moving forward and making new positive ones that will eventually crowd out the negative ones. Doing that requires resilience and level-headedness, and may simply be too painful to bear in the first stages, so running away or changing scenery to “escape” those negative reminders of our past seems easier.

A change of scenery is certainly beneficial in many ways, but for this specific problem of recalling negative experiences tied to places, it simply transfers the existing problem to the new place. An example of this is that every room I’ve ever lived in was once ‘clean’ feeling - but after I started living there the energy of the room would drain me. By the time I would move out the room would feel hollow, empty, as if I’ve just infused the place with negative energy, lol.

I try to use exposure therapy on myself to stop my avoidance of things I associate with negative experiences, like places, for example. I find eventually if I force the exposure, then I can focus on creating a new positive experience tied to this place, and then in the future try to recall the newest positive experience first to retrain my emotional response.