I have very recently had to end a friendship. This is the third time I have had to do this in my life (and fifth overtly emotionally abusive situation I have been in), and every time it has carved parts of my heart out and left me trying to pick up the pieces for months to years. I am starting to recognize some of the warning signs that I desperately try to ignore in my efforts to make it work, and I want to share them with you. Some of these are signs from my recent experience and some are signs from older experiences. Please add your own, because some of you know exactly what Iâm talking about and have your own stories, whether in friendships or romantic relationships or even familial relations.
People outside the situation express concern about you and this person. You shut them down with the phrase, âBut youâre wrong. You donât know them like I do.â You are frequently trying to defend them, even while you are crying about something they said or did.
You say âBut itâs different this time.â
You keep brushing aside discrepancies between what they say at different times, or discrepancies between their words and their actions, because you think you couldnât possibly be right.
You are afraid to broach certain topics you disagree with them about because you think those topics are rooted in their past trauma so much that your own points become completely invalid.
You enter conversation with this person with a solid boundary in mind, and by the time you leave the conversation you have been completely turned around. You only realize what happened when you start speaking to other people.
You start to feel like your brain gets turned inside out whenever there is conflict with this person.
You have to justify nearly every statement or decision you make whether you are in conflict or trying to talk them out from a dark place.
You are frequently measured against the actions or misdeeds others have enacted on this person in the past.
There is always room for the other personâs trauma and traumatic reactions, but rarely, if ever, room for your own.
You find yourself having to assuage their guilt over being a âbad friendâ or ânot doing as much as youâ or ânot being as good as youâ on a regular basis.
Your fear and love are so bound together you canât tell one from the other, and when you think about leaving the friendship, everything inside screams in anguish because you have genuinely come to love this person and are afraid that they will kill themselves.
You come to believe you will be a murderer if you leave this relationship, because the other person WILL kill themselves.
You try to normalize everything the person does, believing and explaining that itâs a traumatic reaction, glossing over the fact that there are other people who have suffered trauma in your life who do not use it to hurt you like this.
If you really and truly honestly look at the effect of this person on you, compared with people who have honestly really and truly proved their care for you, you see a vast discrepancy that is incredibly painful to account for.
You dim your own shine so you do not hurt the other person. You apologize for your good things, or hide them away, or stop showing them because you want to protect them from feeling jealous of you.
You try very very very hard to take responsibility for all the things that go wrong in your relationship somehow, because if you do then maybe you can fix things and keep it going. But no matter what you do, or how much you change, things do not get better.
When you try to make changes that benefit you as a person and change your personality for the healthier, you encounter pushback and anger.
When you raise an issue with this person that hurts you, by the end of it you are apologizing and taking full responsibility.
You have no idea, every time you speak to this person, whether you are going to speak to the funny/loving/witty/kind person or the angry/despairing person who may or may not, then, lash out at you.
You find small, vindictive measures taken against you. Your personal items are âborrowedâ without permission. Your hard work is glossed over. Your space is used as a general meeting place without warning. You are locked out of your own room(s). (this locked-out-thing has happened to me in three of the five relationships I mentioned)
You think you are a terrible person and that if you were just a better person/friend these things wouldnât be happening. You refuse to leave because only the worst kind of monster would leave a friendship where the other person needs you so much.
You find yourself running in mental circles, trying to figure out if they knew what they were doing, but saying thereâs no way they could have meant to hurt you like that and defending them again, but how could they not understand the damage, but no they love you, butâŚ
Boundaries by Cloud & Townsend. Written by Christian therapists, but I still recommend it as general reading (unless anyone has a secular rec?) because the principles in it are applicable whether you are a Christian or not. I never understood boundaries as well as I did when I read this book.
Healing from Hidden Abuse by Shannon Thomas. Also written by a Christian therapist, but much less overt and strongly acknowledges the concept of abuse within the church.
Listen to your instincts. Listen to your loved ones.
A good friend will never ask you to sacrifice the most important parts of yourself in order to sustain the friendship.
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