To have cut off my friend who stayed in an abusive marriage

The problem you had was you invested yourself. When I used to visit friends and their relationship was on the rocks my partner would always tell me don't give advice or bad mouth their partner. When they make up I would be mud and she would tell him everything I said.

The reason why your friendship lasted so long is because you only listened to her until the day you involved yourself. It doesn't matter if she asked you for help you gave her strength and made her relationship stronger and closer because of how involved you were. She didn't want to leave him she wanted him to change.

It is easier for us to think that women stay for the nice house and lifestyle than to try to imagine what it is actually like to walk out on the home that is all your children have known all their lives and to leave with absolutely nothing.

I remember being told by a Samaritan (!) when I rang in distress that he didn't believe that I wanted to leave my exh because I would already have done so. I had owned the house before I even met my exh. This man was suggesting that I needed to walk out of my own house? Also, I knew that women get killed when they leave and so had to bide my time and work out a way of leaving safely.

No-one knows what it does to your mind when you are in such a terrifying situation, and no-one who hasn't been through it would be able to understand why you might put on a front of being in a loving relationship, even claiming to be in love with the perpetrator. If you have children you are in an even more terrifying situation because you want to do your best to protect them. Believe it or not protecting your children can sometimes mean staying in the situation and doing what the abuser tells you to do because if you try to escape he will harm you and your children. The law isn't able to protect people in this situation because there is no evidence that they need to be protected.

The only way I can explain it is that it can feel like having a sniper with a gun trained on you and your children and you know that if you step out of line the sniper is going to give the order and destroy you. To everyone else it looks as though you are free to go as you please.

And victims very often do come across as arseholes. Living with that kind of stress really messes with you and it is impossible to be "normal". The perpetrator can often come across as much nicer and more stable than the victim for that very reason.

Apologies for the long post.

I can see your point of view. However, from someone that eventually escaped a narcissist, she probably really needed you. Personally I would have stepped back but still remained friends. He finally won and totally isolated her. Blocking her seems so extreme.
if you worry about it still why don’t you reach out to her. See how is she?

This. You tried your best for her. I personally think she’s told the cretin you were helping her move on, and he’s turned it all around, probably saying she’s triggering him again, and who know what else. You did your best for long enough. If she really wants your help in the future, she’ll reach out.

Been here myself. In all honesty you really can't help anyone that won't listen. It has to be her decision to leave. Wish I had a friend like you that was so supportive.

You aren't responsible for her safety.

I do think DV perpetrators manipulate people and he may have forced her hand, who knows. But it was now taking a toll on you, keeping you from your family and marriage as you worried about her.

It's OK if you hit your limit, sounds like everyone else hit theirs sooner.

You can't help someone who isn't ready to be helped.

Don't be so hard on yourself, this isn't your fault, it isn't your responsibility.

I think you were unreasonable to block her, as you were her only safe person. You’ve played straight into his hands. I’m sorry but you should have left the door wide open for any time she might decide to leave him and need you. The most dangerous time for a woman is when she leaves her abusive partner. She also stood to lose her child. It’s not as simple as just leaving.

I'm not sure if you saw my previous message, I suggested reading up on the drama triangle and codependent relationships as it may help you make sense of how you ended up in the situation you did.

But op wasn’t abusing her friend so why should she take abusive behaviour from her friend because her friend is being abused? What if the abusive husband acts out of fear of something when he is abusive - is that ok then? Maybe he had a bad childhood and he can’t help it or ptsd or whatever. Being abused doesn’t give you a free pass to be horrible to everyone in your life who isn’t abusing you.

An abused person can also be an abuser. Personally, I believe that some people are very selfish even while being a bona fide ‘victim’. OP’s so-called friend totally monopolised the friendship by making it entirely about her situation and never giving anything in return. That is wrong regardless of the situation. In fact, OP you would have been more than justified to just walk away ages ago without the horrendous behaviour of your former friend in your last meeting. You needed to protect your own mental well-being before it really caused you major harm. Although it sounded like it already did.

I was in an incredibly abusive relationship for nearly a decade. I probably made it worse by never sharing the abuse and downplayed it to myself because it had not been physical, although the coercive control and abuse caused serious health repercussions. I since realised that I had some responsibility for putting myself in this ‘martyr’ role. I am not at all saying I deserved it, but I do recognise the way I prolonged the dynamics and very much learned from it. However, I was never that selfish or self-absorbed as your former friend and highly valued and treasured my friends. A friendship is sort of like a joint account of care, goodwill and mutual support. No one expects it to be absolutely equal in contributions, Sometimes, one person just needs more and gives less but no one should just constantly withdraw and overdraw and never contribute. In essence, sad situation for your friend – boohoo and all that jazz but she is also a massive, selfish and self-centred cunt. And a spiteful, cruel, vindictive one at that who let out her own feelings of inadequacies on a wonderful person. Please just focus on yourself and better friendships. 8 years is a long time to invest in a bad friendship. You deserve better! Shame about her situation but she really cannot play this kind of shitty game with other people.

I think the the ‘failure’ to act on advice given in good faith is part of what underlies the narrative that its six of one and half a dozen of another, that it’s an abusive or toxic relalationship and you can’t help. And that the victim is coercively controlling and gaslighting those seeking to help them escape.

Part of the isolation is not being able to disclose how bad things really are but how powerless you feel to leave. Friends may understand how bad things are but fail to understand how hard it is to leave an abusive relationship. Especially one where the abuser alternates between nice and nasty and you don’t know left from right. So you disclose when things are nasty but then the abuser switches to love bombing and tells you to not listen to or avoid friends who supported you when he was nasty. You dread with your whole being mr nasty coming back. So you sacrifice friends. Next time mr nasty comes back (as he will) you have no friends.

You can be angry that your friend is in this situation but don’t waste that anger feeling sorry for yourself. Help her in a way that she can accept. Her controlling partner wants you gone. Stay present whilst expecting nothing. Don’t make it either you leave or I’m gone. Or worse of all claim you are the real victim just like the abuser is the victim. You are not a victim of gaslighting. There is a mismatch between what your friend said and what she does because of coercive control. It is driven by fear of her partner not a desire to control you.

It’s worth listening to Laura Richards on coercive control. The victims behaviour might look like abuse on the surface but the motivation is fear and survival not control.

A good example of this is Gabby Petito who looked strong and in control and as if she had abused her partner but who was murdered by him because actually she was the victim and he was the abuser no matter how it looked to outsiders.

I wouldn’t confuse explain with excused, but yes abuse quite often explains poor behaviour on the part of victims. That’s the sad reality of abuse. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to have empathy for the victim, partly because of compassion fatigue but also because in some cases victims mirror the abusive behaviour towards others as part of a trauma response. Some abuse victims can become very unlikeable people!

But to explain is not to excuse. Children come first and that’s why, as awful as it is, some children are removed from parents for “failure to protect”. It would be fairer to live in a society that does more to condemn abuse and give victims real options to escape it so that children don’t need to be removed, but until we live in that world, children need to come before adults, even adults who are victims themselves.

Endless sympathy without change simply condemns the cycle to be repeated in the next generation.

I don’t think anyone thinks you’ve been treated ‘fairly.’ I think you just got over invested and over embroiled in matters that are very difficult to resolve. And - I do think some of your responses here are a bit sulky and immature, if I’m being honest. I’m not saying that to hurt you, it is how they read to me.

The comments on here sound like the abusive husband talking to his wife - nothing she can do is good enough and as soon as it is, goalposts change and abuse ramps up

I had exactly the same thought

Op, you did the right thing for you and your family. You gave what you could give and stepped back to protect yourself. One sided friendships are exhausting at the best of times, but add in abuse and constant requests for support and it can be all consuming. She could have handled the situation in a very different manner, but chose not to. She chose to lie to herself and to you, to gaslight you, and rewrite history and then deign to maintain the friendship like she was doing you a favour.

She may have felt the need to do that for her mental health because of the abuse, but it wasn’t ever your job to trade your mental health for hers, and it was never your job to give more of yourself to help her than she was willing to give of herself. After 8 years you had gone above and beyond.

You don’t owe her anything. She was not your friend. When it came down to it, she didn’t care about you except in the ways you could support her. Ignore your mum, and enjoy(?!) the film!

The moral of this story seems to be don’t help friends who are in abusive situations unless you’re willing to take training in DV, never expect any friendship back, take gaslighting on the chin and do whatever they say whenever they say it regardless of how contradictory that is or how difficult and stressful it is for you and most importantly never ever have your own feelings, problems or baggage as that means you aren’t capable of being a good enough friend.

The comments on here sound like the abusive husband talking to his wife - nothing she can do is good enough and as soon as it is, goalposts change and abuse ramps up.

Well said. I am shocked by all the accusatory replies saying OP is doing this for her own benefit when she literally said she's been doing it to the detriment of her own family and because her friend specifically ASKED her to help her leave him.

Bloody hell- OP has gone above and beyond for this friend for almost a decade and yet that still isnt enough according to some on this thread- she now has to STFU in the face of being lied to, accused of breaking up her friends marriage and she's supposed to just stay quiet but remain permanently "on call" for this friend should this friend suddenly decide she needs her at some point in the future. I dread to think what such people expect of their friends if they feel people can be used, picked up and put down at will when its convenient and can put up with all kinds of verbal onslaughts just because said friend is going through a rough time.

ALL of us have issues to deal with- I have been through plenty of trauma in my life and managed not to treat my kind and supportive friends like utter shit in the process.

Very articulate.

A few people seem to have rewritten the narrative in their heads to make it so that the OP was the driving force behind the plan to leave, whereas OPs posts make it clear that it was the friend pushing it by constantly sending messages about how awful her husband is and repeatedly asking for help. I suspect what happened is that the husband found out or friend told him about the plan to leave and then he’s convinced her it was never her idea and that OP is a terrible person who is trying to sabotage their true love that only they understand. The trouble is, there’s really nothing OP can do in that situation other than walk away. It’s one thing trying to help someone who is begging you to help them escape their abuser, quite another to try to help someone who has sided with their abuser against you. It’s obviously very sad for the woman who remains trapped with this man, but there’s just no way OP can continue to help so she had to protect herself. She does not deserve all the nasty comments about saviour complex or trying to force her own way onto the friend, the story she’s told doesn’t indicate that in the slightest.

Yes, she may well have done, and that’s where it all becomes very messy. Ultimately you end up with two vulnerable people who rather than supporting one another are dragging one another under. In this scenario, one needs to be the strong one and one the subversive one. When both become strong, the relationship ends, as the OP found out.