Recognizing abusive friendship is really hard once you get invested. I’ve been in so many and I still never recognize it when it starts. Abusers looking for targets will aim at someone who’s generally not very-well accepted in their community, struggles with isolation and desire to be acknowledged, is lonely or desperate for friends, because it’s easy to make someone believe they got something they desperately want to have.
They will share your interests and opinions, immediately have tons in common with you, make fun, engaging, supportive coversations, tell you stories that make them look good and sweet, make you feel safe and like you have a real chance in having a best friend in them. They will also want to test your compassion by revealing some vulnerabilties and painful events, to see if you will rush to comfort them and try to make them feel better. Once they know enough about you to use your weak spots against you, and to always be able to play the victim and make you feel sorry for them when they hurt you, it’s a game of time - either you will eventually realize this person has no empathy for you and is willing to put you thru horrible shit and feel nothing about it, or they will take the last piece of your energy and patience they can and then abandon you brutally, when you need them the most. They will of course, frame it as your fault, because how could you expect them to be your friend.
I’ll try to list some of the things I’ve noticed repeat in abusive friendships:
1. Lack of boundaries. This person will find one way or another to have problem with your boundaries, they might act like your boundaries are hurting them, or criticize you for “not trusting them” or “not caring for them enough” if you want to keep some things private. They will also make you feel like taking distance and space from them is hurting them, and act as if it’s an act of aggression or betrayal, and you were supposed to be there for them at all times.
2. Very fast progression. They will want to have won you over in shortest amount of time possible, so they could start getting what they want. They could start acting very affectionate, as if you’re already close for a long time, reveal too intimate, too vulnerable details about themselves, and get you to do the same, talk as if they already know all about you, or plan things as if it’s already settled that you’ll be friends for a long time. They will convince you that they’re a perfect person for you right away, and you’re the perfect person for them.
3. Feelings of obligation. You feel as if you’re the only one who can help this person, only one who they trust to never abandon them. You feel as if you lead this person on to rely on you, to count on your friendship, and you cannot bring yourself to take this away from them. You are the only one who knows how hard they’re struggling, how badly they need your help and friendship, and it feels like they’re always in some kind of a crisis and desperately in need of you. Even when they hurt you, you feel obligated to care about their situation more than yourself, and put your own feelings in the back to focus on what they’re going thru.
4. Fear of being the bad friend. You’ve heard so much about how others have hurt this person, and you grow scared that you’ll become one of those bad people. After comforting this person about their bad experiences, it would feel really bad to cause them another one, and make you look like a hypocrite. It gets so bad that you have to watch out what to say, how to put boundaries, and how to call them out on anything, out of fear that you will hurt them, they seem too fragile and too easily hurt to ever be able to handle even an implication that they’re doing you wrong. In the end, you let them get away with anything, convincing yourself they would never be doing it on purpose, and finding yourself unable to let them know out of fear that it would hurt them. If you do tell them, you end up having to listen about how bad they felt about having to hear it.
5. You can’t live up to their standards. This person has expectations of you, and if you fail them even a little, there’s consequences, and you might find yourself at the receiving end of criticism, verbal abuse, insults, humiliation and blame. There’s a narrow frame of who you’re allowed to be and how you’re supposed to act and feel, and you’re not allowed to exist outside these criteria, and you can tell that your friend will either hurt or abandon you completely if you grow and branch out beyond what’s acceptable for them. You end up fretting their backlash at any risky action you take, and end up hiding your opinions and general state of mind just to stay safe. You might end up changing for them, subtly, and feeling constant anxiety that they will abandon you if you don’t act as required. (Just to be clear, standards of “no racism, no homophobia, no sexism, no trashing minorities, no supporting dictatorships, and being against rape, fascism and genocide” are good standards. All of you should be having those standards. Bad standards are about how you look, what you weigh, what grades you have, how much you earn, how much abuse can you take without breaking, how much shit can you tolerate, which ones of your interests are good, what you’re allowed to feel and talk about - nobody should be inflicting those on you. None of that is for your own good.)
6. There are repeating periods of good and bad times. Even abusive friendships can have periods where everything seems just fine, calm, your friend is in a good mood, so you are allowed to be in a good mood as well, you get to have fun and you start to forget there ever was a time when this friendship made you feel awful. These periods are essential for keeping up the friendship, because any person would get away from a friend who made them feel horrible at all times, and abusers know this, and make sure you get nice and relaxed before they decide it’s safe to lash out at you, or throw another crisis at you. Friendships are not supposed to have intense ups and downs, they’re supposed to be your refuge, your safe place where you can count on things remaining stable.
7. You are getting stressed, insecure, upset and sad. Friendships should not make you feel this way. Of course, there’s always a possibility in long term friendships that something happens that gets you upset once or twice, but a new friendship, short friendship or any friendship should never be able to cause you repeated stress, pain, insecurity and drama. If a friend is cause of all these feelings, it is very likely they don’t have compassion for you, and don’t actually care what kind of effect they’re having on your life - which means they’re not your friend. Actual friend would care deeply about what they’re causing you, and would go far to avoid making you stressed, upset and sad - after all, don’t you make sure you’re not making their life filled with stress and anxiety?
8. Your instincts are telling you something is wrong. You might be getting surges of anger or feel trapped and repressed, you might notice you’re not able to express how you feel, and always have to play down your reactions and responses, you don’t feel free to take your time for yourself as you’d want to, you always feel guilty or like you failed your friend, and you know this is not how a friendship should make you feel. Still, you feel a lot of affection and care for this person so you can’t just walk away from them, even if things do feel wrong, and you want to give it another chance or wait to see if it gets better, so you bear with it and try to ignore your instincts, at least for a while, because the alternative has became scary for you.
9. You’re scared to leave. Even when you realize this friendship is adding stress and pain onto your life, and that it’s became toxic for you, leaving it becomes a big, almost impossible task. You’re worried about how your friend will cope, how will they react if you tell them, if there will be backlash, if they’ll be in the middle of crisis and you’ll add onto that stress, if they will start insulting you and telling you that you’re just as bad as anyone else in their life, if they’ll badmouth you to other people, and worst of all, you’re worried if you would deserve all that by leaving the friendship. And no, you wouldn’t. You don’t have to nurture anyone who hurts you, and you’re allowed to walk away from anything that harms your life.
If you thought of someone while reading this, I hope you will know that you have the right to be upset with this person, regardless of weather it would hurt or upset them. You have the right to consider that maybe this person isn’t the ideal friend for you, and that you don’t owe them your friendship no matter how obligated they make you feel.
I need to mention that you don’t have to prove or know that someone is abusive in order to cut them out of your life. There are bad friendships that aren’t abusive, sometimes two people just don’t mix well and if supporting one person is harming another, that’s not working out well, and shouldn’t continue. You have the right to demand only good friendships, only positive ones, that bring warmth and care to both you and your friend. You don’t have to struggle thru bad ones, you don’t owe anyone to make their life better at your own expense. Needing different type of friend is reason enough. There are friendships that are good for both people, and that’s the only type you should strive for.
germansingergirl
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