Friend sucking the life out of me

[LittleMermaidRose]

I feel like I'm being a terrible person, but I really want to dump my friend of 23 years, I'm so sick of her.

She's suffered from depression for the last 5 years, which I've always tried my very best to support her through. Think, crying phonecalls in the middle of the night, having her stay for days, changing my plans to accommodate her. We meet up every week for coffee, text almost daily.

The problem is, she has become so self absorbed, rude and uncaring. She can't see anything beyond her own problems. All we do is talk about her and her problems. She never asks how I am, and even if I try to talk about myself the conversation gets shot down in flames.

It's becoming really draining, I don't think I can take much more. I try to offer her advice, sometimes I just sit and listen, but nothing seems to ever change or get better for her. She refuses to get professional help. I feel awful saying this but sometimes I think she enjoys being so miserable.

I don't think I'm her friend anymore, I think I'm just a sounding board. My partner got in a car accident last week - she hasn't once asked how he is. I told her I wouldn't be able to meet up with her for the next few weeks due to some health issues I've been having. She asked if I was ok, but then went on a big rant about how nobody wants to be around her, making me feel terrible! But what about me and how I'm feeling?

It's all so mentally exhausting. I don't want to lose her as a friend as we've been friends for so long. But it really is no friendship anymore, she's not the woman I used to know.
Am I an awful person for feeling like this?

@MeridianB funnily enough the needy friend I broke contact with had 3 of her family members write/phone/email me to ask me to find a place for her in my life again.

Seems a common thing.

Lots of help lines online or tell her to call the Samaritans .She needs to make an appointment to see her GP and ?get medication

This is scary! How many people are dealing with a ‘friend’ like this or have in the past. I’ve written a thread about my friend of 40+ years like this. They just have zero self awareness or they do and are too selfish to care. They really are emotional vampires and do suck the life out of you. I blame myself too as I don’t set proper boundaries and don’t like upsetting people. I’m not assertive enough. After retiring DH and I decided to moved to the coast but decided against our nearest coastline as it was within a reasonable driving distance. We moved 4 hours away which I knew would be too far for her. It’s the best thing i’ve ever done!. I now let the landline go to VM and ignore her calls on my mobile. My excuse is always I’m out on the golf course, no phones allowed 😉. I phone her back eventually when I have the emotional energy!

You have lots of advice on strategies OP, good luck. I’m sure you’ll handle it better than I did. To use the airplane analogy, put your own oxygen mask on first, before helping others!

@ilikemethewayiam

This is scary! How many people are dealing with a ‘friend’ like this or have in the past. I’ve written a thread about my friend of 40+ years like this. They just have zero self awareness or they do and are too selfish to care. They really are emotional vampires and do suck the life out of you. I blame myself too as I don’t set proper boundaries and don’t like upsetting people. I’m not assertive enough. After retiring DH and I decided to moved to the coast but decided against our nearest coastline as it was within a reasonable driving distance. We moved 4 hours away which I knew would be too far for her. It’s the best thing i’ve ever done!. I now let the landline go to VM and ignore her calls on my mobile. My excuse is always I’m out on the golf course, no phones allowed 😉. I phone her back eventually when I have the emotional energy!

You have lots of advice on strategies OP, good luck. I’m sure you’ll handle it better than I did. To use the airplane analogy, put your own oxygen mask on first, before helping others!

I am actually becoming far less tolerant now of people and their issues, I have had many friends like this due to the circumstances and situations I have been in, I got to the point where I was getting really exasperated with one friend, she would hand her bank card over to her boyfriend, then complain weeks later that he had stolen all her cash from bank, she would then change the PIN number, make up with him and then she would come crying to me about him stealing the money again from her account, and I would ask how did he get the new PIN number, she would answer “I gave him it” and I would be boiling! She never handed him the PIN out of duress or anything, it w as because she couldn’t be arssed going to the shops or whatever so she would send him and then cry about him spending her cash, and when I bitched about him only from the info she had given me, then she would go back and tell him what I had been saying! One day I went psycho on her, told her to give herself a fucking shake and stop being so pathetic, I was like “your nearly fucking 50 years old, start taking some responsibility for your own actions, you’ve been around block enough to know what he is like, yet you take him back time and time again because your so god damn needy that you would rather be miserable with him than without” and I cut her off for good that day, and please nobody say “oh but she was being abused, she was vulnerable blah blah blah” because you can be vulnerable and aware all at the same time!

I do think that some women just need a good bloody shake up and with some then the more you pander to their lousy decision making then the more you are enabling them to stay with the man, I remember once someone very intelligent taking the piss out of my abusive exes letter to me saying sorry for XYZ and his declarations that he will never do it again, and because it was this particular person that did it this way, then I immediately felt like a right tit for taking him back and I never ever went back to him, this is what I mean, I was vulnerable but at the same time I was aware of what was really going on, not all abused women are victims.

I had a long friendship which I had to get out of. It ended up that her problems were “bigger and worse” than mine. When I wanted to speak about mine they were things which “were nothing, insignificant “ in the scheme of things. It became one sided in lots of ways and was affecting my mental health. I told her I couldn’t do it anymore. No argument or disagreement, I tried to explain but she was in denial about how she was.

I don't think some depressed people want 'solutions' - they just want to talk. But it's very draining for you. And absolutely not your responsibility to be an on-call counsellor providing a 24-hour service!
You need boundaries OP, that's what you need ... it's not selfish to put yourself first. Because my guess is, the more you give, the more she is going to take. And why not, if you don't stop her?
If you don't look after yourself, you can't look after anyone else.

But Be Kind.

I still remember a friend of mine signing off a phone call years ago with the words, "I'm not going to be touch for a while because you're starting to drag me down!" and off she went.
It was the patronisingly cheery upbeat tone she used that pissed me off.

We didn't speak for a while after that!

YANBU at all and I say that as someone who suffered from serious depression for quite a few years in my 20’s, to the point of hospitalisation in both voluntary units and also once in a psychiatric ward.

Depression can make people codependent and very self absorbed. It’s actively encouraged by some therapists to find the cause of your illness with everyone but yourself. Of course there are always reasons we are the way we are and feel the way we feel, but ultimately we have to take some personal responsibility for our emotional selves if we begin to hurt/emotionally danage others around us.

I genuinely think that the people who recover are the ones who find the strength to pull themselves out of it. If you always have a crutch, for example a friend or partner, to care for you and shoulder the burden of your problems, you stay in an endless spiral where, when things get tough, you don’t even attempt to find the strength to deal with them, because you know you can lean on other people. It’s very draining for them. I’ve always been very self sufficient and never called on my friends or family much, but became very codependent on my then husband. For me, the short stay in the psychiatric ward was the wake up I needed to start to help myself.

Your friend is draining you and you are doing her no favours. Time for some tough love. It will probably result in histrionics, but stay strong. What she’s doing is because she’s got into a cycle of other people being her emotional crutches and it’s not intentional. However, that doesn’t make it right or fair on the people around her and she is never going to get better until she faces her problems head on and starts taking some responsibility for her own feelings and how to manage them.

I’ve had to do this also. I was there for her through thick and thin, as she was for me up until her marriage started failing. She then became very self absorbed and had no care in the world for what I was going through, which at the time was a pretty nasty DV situation.
I still tried to be there. I listened. I sat with her while she cried and I offered her advice that in retrospect could have saved her marriage. I was good friends with her husband and knew the problems they were facing. He was made out to be the villain when in fact he was suffering too ...
eventually they divorced and her world crashed. Again, I was there.
A couple of years later I fell pregnant & remember vividly the conversation of me telling her;

‘I’m pregnant’

‘I wish I could be happy for you, but this is just too devastating for me. It’s what I wanted. What should be happening for me. I’m sorry, I can’t hear about it. Please try not to talk about it around me’

I understood but it’s not something I would have ever voiced to a best friend.

I distanced myself from that point on & the negativity that went away with that friendship was the best thing that happened for me.

I still keep in contact & ask how she is. Offer advice if she implies she needs it but it’s always rejected.

Sometimes letting go is what you have to do for your own sanity. Seems selfish & it very well may be, but it’s what I’ve had to do.