I've known someone like this and they are terrifying. She's a representation of what he dislikes about himself. It's no so much dedication as what she represents, which to him is everything that he lacks. He most likely never actually had strong feelings for her but he thought she was easy/desperate or naive. When she turned him down he felt as if his flaws were being seen by someone beneath him. Instead of looking inwards he placed them all on her, her destruction is the destruction of the negative feelings/flaws about himself.
I’m no expert but so far I like Discover’s HYSA. It’s not as high as some of the others that people recommend, but I use their card and love the mobile app.
We moved a lot; I went to twenty different schools in total. So I have no "childhood friends." Often times it really stings. But honestly? It just seems like childhood friends end up being drama-filled albatrosses. You almost always grow apart and end up causing a ton of damage trying to hold together a relationship that was never based on anything more than your parents having jobs near each other at one point.
Honestly it’s a roll of the dice. I lost the vast, vast majority of my childhood friends through a combination of them moving away, getting sent to other schools, and eventually, the world’s stupidest drama (this post x100) in college.
I believe that "Relationship test gone horribly wrong" angle. Because both OOP's wife and Amy are dumbasses who have their own malicious intentions. Not sure if that wife's reddit is real, but maybe she wanted an excuse to cheat on him?
This actually happened with my little sister! Only I was the one that was right. I was 3 when she was born, and I kept insisting to everyone that would listen that the baby was going to be a girl. Well, they said that the baby was a boy, and my prediction was dismissed.
It’s so cool that you got a video of them!! And yeah it’s most likely a Pompilid (spider wasp, the family that tarantula hawks belong to), and quite a beautiful one at that. They’re solitary (rather than social, so no hive to protect) so it’s highly unlikely that it will attack you, just don’t touch it because its sting can hurt.
Depends on the circle and age group you’re in. The people I knew from HS? Absolutely common, hell at least 4 of my childhood friends had diagnosed bipolar siblings, if we want to get that specific. Just within my antisocial-teenager-sphere, I knew three people with diagnosed PTSD, at least 5 autistic people, and two people with heavily self- or externally-suspected BPD (although both were so resistant to being honest in any psychiatric setting that it’s impossible to confirm).
Holy shit yeah. I was lucky that my parents are chill because I got stuck in a similar setup— freshly 18, had a joint account, went specifically to make a solo savings account, and found out months later that they’d only given me a solo checking account & the savings was still joint. Honestly now this is making me wonder if it was purposeful, or if that incompetence is that common 😬
There were many times: One of them was when I was living in a residential psychiatric unit, and my mum called me after a depressing call with my doctor about how i am not getting better and I keep hurting myself even with 24/7 supervision. She broke down crying begging me not to kill myself, saying that she wants me to come home some day. After that I made more of an effort to get better.
Holy fuck. I actually had a similar experience with seeing the stars. I was a horrendously depressed 17 year old on a school-associated trip, and we were out somewhere with zero light pollution. The guide told us to lie back and look up, and then they turned off the lantern we’d been using.
I've shared this a few times but I think it bares repeating. I knew Danny. Not well but I hung out with him enough that I had his number and would have felt comfortable calling him. He was actually friends with my roommate. My roommate was really creepy.. I mostly ignored it because I never saw him do anything outwardly weird. But man he just really loved talking about sex. Claim to have had sex with girls that no one believed actually happened. Really had no game at all. But he never seemed dangerous. I ended up moving when they lease ran out and we lost contact.
To elaborate on what others have said, this reminds me of how people have blind spots for their friends, but also how a lot of times abusive/predatory people can flock together.
Literally. "Imagine you've been in a codependent friendship with a complete asshole since childhood." OOP, I am ten years older than you. I'm not perfect. I still have many things to learn about the world, but I have stood where you stand many times. There may come a day when you don't talk to any of these people anymore, and this whole situation feels like a weird fever dream.
You make a really good point, and I’ve been through it too (although technically less than a year fully out of it). It’s weird— when I was going through it, I was convinced that my toxic codependent friend group was just such a unique situation and no one understood that it was actually good, but then the moment I was out of it, I could finally see that SO MANY people had been through something similar and come out the other side. I just wasn’t ready to hear the advice they’d all give: “leave them.” And yeah, they were right!
This reminds me of a girl I knew once who took the “he’s like my brother” thing to a weird extreme. Like, I was friends with her for years, and it got to the point where the moment she described a guy as being “like her brother” I knew she was into him and would inevitably end up flirting with him. Sometimes she’d even describe a guy as being “like her brother” AND say that she might be attracted to him in the SAME SENTENCE.
This is one of the things that annoys me the most these days. For me, it's not even in relationship contexts since I'm a lesbian, but this also happens at work, in social settings, anywhere.
That is SUCH a pet peeve of mine. In HS and college, I was a part of a majority-ND friend network (I have diagnosed ADHD and suspected, but not diagnosed, autism), and the difference between the behavior of the autistic men and the autistic women was stunning. The autistic men immediately started using their diagnoses as excused the moment they had them, and were infamously creepy and eventually, abusive. The autistic women kept quiet and were held to a higher standard than the NT women and men in regards to social cues and behavior. It drove me insane ngl.
I’m going to be seconding the other commenters by saying that cutting them off will improve your emotional life immensely, even if it’s really hard at first.
I agree with this comment. I’ve known abusive people who just have autism, autism and BPD, just BPD, or none of the above. Ultimately, the way that you treat others, and the way that you deal with your own emotions and fears, matters far more than any specific diagnosis.
That was informational and helpful, so thank you for that. Guess it is rather silly to worry about that like its some life sentence as opposed to treating what would lead you to have those worries in the first place. I haven't had much opportunity to talk to a professional much anyways yet, so I feel sorta silly for commenting that while I was anxious a while ago, didn't mean anything negative against borderlines.
It’s all good! Curiosity and anxiety just led you to asking this community for everyone’s perspectives, so no harm was done. I also learned a lot from the other comments and from the post itself. It’s completely normal to feel fear from a possibility that society itself portrays as a death sentence, especially when social media is designed to whip people into a frenzy to maintain engagement. Thank you for your comment, I’m glad that I could offer my little sliver of experience
I am very nostalgic for this series, but in the first book of the Diviners, the best friend of one of the main characters is brutally murdered. It’s a major plot point. He is completely forgotten about in the second book, not even mentioned once. Either the third or fourth book acknowledges him again but it frustrated me so much as a kid.
She was jealous of you and threatened by you. She thought that having an obsessed stalker validated your worth/attractiveness, and as a way of showing that she too is worthy of that unhinged attention, tried to get him to stalk her as well.
Yep! Lived through version of this. I was emotionally abused by a crazy male friend (super possessive, threats of suicide or homicide, you know the drill) for a year, and a year or so after it ended, I opened up to my then-best friend about it. She proceeded to put a TON of time and effort into befriending him afterwards, and would further the abuse by policing my behavior, such as by helping him control when I could hang out with other people, or getting mad at me in public if I didn’t give him enough attention.
Matching bestie tattoos aren’t a good idea anyway, I got one with mine and we fell out about a year later and haven’t spoken since. I got one with my mum too but thankfully we’re still good with each other.
Yeah. My roommate had the same issue— she got a matching tattoo with her best friend of 14 years, and within a few months, they had a catastrophic falling out. Now I’m wayyy too scared to even contemplate getting a matching tattoo with anyone but family.
A lot of abusers also get worse after individual therapy, or any therapy that is not specifically focused on rooting out abusive behavior via group therapy. Lundy Barcroft talks about it in “Why Does He Do That,” where he says that since individual therapy doesn’t involve the perspective of the victim, the abuser is able to perpetuate their own warped perspective, and see it continually validated, which worsens the cycle of entitlement leading to violence. An individual therapist works with what they are told, and abusers will never tell the full story, so they get therapy based off of their own fucked-up, justified and minimized view of their abuse.
Sorry if this is intrusive in any way. You dont have to answer. But holy shit this comment made me feel so fucking seen. Could you expand on these thoughts a little bit? You dont have to go into details of your particular situation if you dont want to... Just never thought i would see my current life so accurately mirrored in a random reddit comment.
Ok so I’m not the person you asked, but this also isn’t my first time going through this or seeing someone else go through this, so I figured I could offer my words.
Now. There’s that ex-friend. I knew her longer than she knew her Eddie, and I knew her Eddie for longer than he knew her. If you asked her now, she’d describe their relationship as positive. He’s one of her best friends! They’re so close! He’s different in private! But if you get her to be honest, she’d go into how she thinks of him as something of a stalker— a stalker she lets in. Their relationship is obvious to everyone but them. Every group event, she’d spend actual hours comforting him based on whatever woe he conjured up that day. He follows her when she moves somewhere new. He constantly acts out in group settings to get her attention. He sits between her and any BF she has. She’s not attracted to him and never will be. She’s “turned him down” a million times. But their dynamic still sits squarely in between mother/son and bf/gf. Caretaking with a side of sexual obsession. When she got a boyfriend, she had to console her Eddie over and over for MONTHS as he wailed on about “what does he have that I don’t” and “why don’t you love me.” He’d talk shit on her boyfriend— and she’d join in. Her boyfriend publicly hated him, but they hang out with her simultaneously now, so evidently it’s worth it for both of them.
I can unfortunately speak to this experience. In my childhood friend group, things started off normal, but slowly, over the years, the norms shifted imperceptibly. The norms slowly became that you couldn’t publicly question two people in particular (Mr Grabby and Ms Politician), and beyond that, if someone ever talked shit to you, you were never allowed to ask the person being shit-talked their side of things. Now, you couldn’t question Mr Grabby because he was extremely volatile and was known to get violent (or threaten suicide), so that would just be putting too much on the poor guy. Ms Politician had a squeaky-clean image, but was Mr Grabby’s closest friend, and everyone kind of knew that she held enough power over particular people to erase you if she wanted to.
Yeah, I don't think people understand that everyone remaining friends with the rapist is kind of the norm. He denies it or describes it differently than the victim and typically, people (especially his friends) believe him. No one wants to believe that someone they like and respect is a predator.
I always wonder whether the members of my former childhood friend group (which I was ostracized from due to questioning the fact that a guy had nonconsensually sexually touched multiple women, incl me, but no one was allowed to even talk about putting rules or boundaries around him) hear someone saying this and think “not me— not my friends.”
I've known someone like this and they are terrifying. She's a representation of what he dislikes about himself. It's no so much dedication as what she represents, which to him is everything that he lacks. He most likely never actually had strong feelings for her but he thought she was easy/desperate or naive. When she turned him down he felt as if his flaws were being seen by someone beneath him. Instead of looking inwards he placed them all on her, her destruction is the destruction of the negative feelings/flaws about himself.
Your commend gave me chills because (especially the first paragraph) it mirrored my experience.
You’re right, I didn’t know or think about it too hard. Still learning. Will work on the HYSA ✅
I’m no expert but so far I like Discover’s HYSA. It’s not as high as some of the others that people recommend, but I use their card and love the mobile app.
I honestly think this is an unusual and beautiful combo! The band is distinct while still maintaining the flow
We moved a lot; I went to twenty different schools in total. So I have no "childhood friends." Often times it really stings. But honestly? It just seems like childhood friends end up being drama-filled albatrosses. You almost always grow apart and end up causing a ton of damage trying to hold together a relationship that was never based on anything more than your parents having jobs near each other at one point.
Honestly it’s a roll of the dice. I lost the vast, vast majority of my childhood friends through a combination of them moving away, getting sent to other schools, and eventually, the world’s stupidest drama (this post x100) in college.
That is an absolutely gorgeous ring!
I believe that "Relationship test gone horribly wrong" angle. Because both OOP's wife and Amy are dumbasses who have their own malicious intentions. Not sure if that wife's reddit is real, but maybe she wanted an excuse to cheat on him?
Wait I have to know which post your flair came from
This actually happened with my little sister! Only I was the one that was right. I was 3 when she was born, and I kept insisting to everyone that would listen that the baby was going to be a girl. Well, they said that the baby was a boy, and my prediction was dismissed.
It’s so cool that you got a video of them!! And yeah it’s most likely a Pompilid (spider wasp, the family that tarantula hawks belong to), and quite a beautiful one at that. They’re solitary (rather than social, so no hive to protect) so it’s highly unlikely that it will attack you, just don’t touch it because its sting can hurt.
[удалено]
Depends on the circle and age group you’re in. The people I knew from HS? Absolutely common, hell at least 4 of my childhood friends had diagnosed bipolar siblings, if we want to get that specific. Just within my antisocial-teenager-sphere, I knew three people with diagnosed PTSD, at least 5 autistic people, and two people with heavily self- or externally-suspected BPD (although both were so resistant to being honest in any psychiatric setting that it’s impossible to confirm).
Tell me this is wells fargo without telling me
Holy shit yeah. I was lucky that my parents are chill because I got stuck in a similar setup— freshly 18, had a joint account, went specifically to make a solo savings account, and found out months later that they’d only given me a solo checking account & the savings was still joint. Honestly now this is making me wonder if it was purposeful, or if that incompetence is that common 😬
There were many times: One of them was when I was living in a residential psychiatric unit, and my mum called me after a depressing call with my doctor about how i am not getting better and I keep hurting myself even with 24/7 supervision. She broke down crying begging me not to kill myself, saying that she wants me to come home some day. After that I made more of an effort to get better.
Holy fuck. I actually had a similar experience with seeing the stars. I was a horrendously depressed 17 year old on a school-associated trip, and we were out somewhere with zero light pollution. The guide told us to lie back and look up, and then they turned off the lantern we’d been using.
I've shared this a few times but I think it bares repeating. I knew Danny. Not well but I hung out with him enough that I had his number and would have felt comfortable calling him. He was actually friends with my roommate. My roommate was really creepy.. I mostly ignored it because I never saw him do anything outwardly weird. But man he just really loved talking about sex. Claim to have had sex with girls that no one believed actually happened. Really had no game at all. But he never seemed dangerous. I ended up moving when they lease ran out and we lost contact.
To elaborate on what others have said, this reminds me of how people have blind spots for their friends, but also how a lot of times abusive/predatory people can flock together.
Literally. "Imagine you've been in a codependent friendship with a complete asshole since childhood." OOP, I am ten years older than you. I'm not perfect. I still have many things to learn about the world, but I have stood where you stand many times. There may come a day when you don't talk to any of these people anymore, and this whole situation feels like a weird fever dream.
You make a really good point, and I’ve been through it too (although technically less than a year fully out of it). It’s weird— when I was going through it, I was convinced that my toxic codependent friend group was just such a unique situation and no one understood that it was actually good, but then the moment I was out of it, I could finally see that SO MANY people had been through something similar and come out the other side. I just wasn’t ready to hear the advice they’d all give: “leave them.” And yeah, they were right!
Wow! This is an incredible offer. I’m commenting to try to win it for my bf :)
This reminds me of a girl I knew once who took the “he’s like my brother” thing to a weird extreme. Like, I was friends with her for years, and it got to the point where the moment she described a guy as being “like her brother” I knew she was into him and would inevitably end up flirting with him. Sometimes she’d even describe a guy as being “like her brother” AND say that she might be attracted to him in the SAME SENTENCE.
This is one of the things that annoys me the most these days. For me, it's not even in relationship contexts since I'm a lesbian, but this also happens at work, in social settings, anywhere.
That is SUCH a pet peeve of mine. In HS and college, I was a part of a majority-ND friend network (I have diagnosed ADHD and suspected, but not diagnosed, autism), and the difference between the behavior of the autistic men and the autistic women was stunning. The autistic men immediately started using their diagnoses as excused the moment they had them, and were infamously creepy and eventually, abusive. The autistic women kept quiet and were held to a higher standard than the NT women and men in regards to social cues and behavior. It drove me insane ngl.
I have a “friend” who is very similar and I am slowly starting to see her for who she really is.
I’m going to be seconding the other commenters by saying that cutting them off will improve your emotional life immensely, even if it’s really hard at first.
Hoping to win this for my boyfriend!
I'm going to say what I keep saying upthread: You may or may not hurt people, whether or not you have a scary diagnosis.
I agree with this comment. I’ve known abusive people who just have autism, autism and BPD, just BPD, or none of the above. Ultimately, the way that you treat others, and the way that you deal with your own emotions and fears, matters far more than any specific diagnosis.
That was informational and helpful, so thank you for that. Guess it is rather silly to worry about that like its some life sentence as opposed to treating what would lead you to have those worries in the first place. I haven't had much opportunity to talk to a professional much anyways yet, so I feel sorta silly for commenting that while I was anxious a while ago, didn't mean anything negative against borderlines.
It’s all good! Curiosity and anxiety just led you to asking this community for everyone’s perspectives, so no harm was done. I also learned a lot from the other comments and from the post itself. It’s completely normal to feel fear from a possibility that society itself portrays as a death sentence, especially when social media is designed to whip people into a frenzy to maintain engagement. Thank you for your comment, I’m glad that I could offer my little sliver of experience
I am very nostalgic for this series, but in the first book of the Diviners, the best friend of one of the main characters is brutally murdered. It’s a major plot point. He is completely forgotten about in the second book, not even mentioned once. Either the third or fourth book acknowledges him again but it frustrated me so much as a kid.
She was jealous of you and threatened by you. She thought that having an obsessed stalker validated your worth/attractiveness, and as a way of showing that she too is worthy of that unhinged attention, tried to get him to stalk her as well.
Yep! Lived through version of this. I was emotionally abused by a crazy male friend (super possessive, threats of suicide or homicide, you know the drill) for a year, and a year or so after it ended, I opened up to my then-best friend about it. She proceeded to put a TON of time and effort into befriending him afterwards, and would further the abuse by policing my behavior, such as by helping him control when I could hang out with other people, or getting mad at me in public if I didn’t give him enough attention.
Matching bestie tattoos aren’t a good idea anyway, I got one with mine and we fell out about a year later and haven’t spoken since. I got one with my mum too but thankfully we’re still good with each other.
Yeah. My roommate had the same issue— she got a matching tattoo with her best friend of 14 years, and within a few months, they had a catastrophic falling out. Now I’m wayyy too scared to even contemplate getting a matching tattoo with anyone but family.
Narcissists often get worse after they go to therapy, I can’t help but wonder if something similar is true for this domestic violence perpetrator.
A lot of abusers also get worse after individual therapy, or any therapy that is not specifically focused on rooting out abusive behavior via group therapy. Lundy Barcroft talks about it in “Why Does He Do That,” where he says that since individual therapy doesn’t involve the perspective of the victim, the abuser is able to perpetuate their own warped perspective, and see it continually validated, which worsens the cycle of entitlement leading to violence. An individual therapist works with what they are told, and abusers will never tell the full story, so they get therapy based off of their own fucked-up, justified and minimized view of their abuse.
as someone who was once in andrew's position, this is like the world's worst funhouse mirror.
Sorry if this is intrusive in any way. You dont have to answer. But holy shit this comment made me feel so fucking seen. Could you expand on these thoughts a little bit? You dont have to go into details of your particular situation if you dont want to... Just never thought i would see my current life so accurately mirrored in a random reddit comment.
Ok so I’m not the person you asked, but this also isn’t my first time going through this or seeing someone else go through this, so I figured I could offer my words.
Now. There’s that ex-friend. I knew her longer than she knew her Eddie, and I knew her Eddie for longer than he knew her. If you asked her now, she’d describe their relationship as positive. He’s one of her best friends! They’re so close! He’s different in private! But if you get her to be honest, she’d go into how she thinks of him as something of a stalker— a stalker she lets in. Their relationship is obvious to everyone but them. Every group event, she’d spend actual hours comforting him based on whatever woe he conjured up that day. He follows her when she moves somewhere new. He constantly acts out in group settings to get her attention. He sits between her and any BF she has. She’s not attracted to him and never will be. She’s “turned him down” a million times. But their dynamic still sits squarely in between mother/son and bf/gf. Caretaking with a side of sexual obsession. When she got a boyfriend, she had to console her Eddie over and over for MONTHS as he wailed on about “what does he have that I don’t” and “why don’t you love me.” He’d talk shit on her boyfriend— and she’d join in. Her boyfriend publicly hated him, but they hang out with her simultaneously now, so evidently it’s worth it for both of them.
Thank you for posting this! PSYC isn’t my field but it was still really helpful to read this
Within a friend group people are usually not afraid to speak up, all are equal. I wonder what kind of group this actually is.
I can unfortunately speak to this experience. In my childhood friend group, things started off normal, but slowly, over the years, the norms shifted imperceptibly. The norms slowly became that you couldn’t publicly question two people in particular (Mr Grabby and Ms Politician), and beyond that, if someone ever talked shit to you, you were never allowed to ask the person being shit-talked their side of things. Now, you couldn’t question Mr Grabby because he was extremely volatile and was known to get violent (or threaten suicide), so that would just be putting too much on the poor guy. Ms Politician had a squeaky-clean image, but was Mr Grabby’s closest friend, and everyone kind of knew that she held enough power over particular people to erase you if she wanted to.
Yeah, I don't think people understand that everyone remaining friends with the rapist is kind of the norm. He denies it or describes it differently than the victim and typically, people (especially his friends) believe him. No one wants to believe that someone they like and respect is a predator.
I always wonder whether the members of my former childhood friend group (which I was ostracized from due to questioning the fact that a guy had nonconsensually sexually touched multiple women, incl me, but no one was allowed to even talk about putting rules or boundaries around him) hear someone saying this and think “not me— not my friends.”