To ask if you’ve ever had a toxic friendship?

[PumpkinSpicedLatte21]

-As an adult not a child/teenager.
What were the signs and how did you cope with it?

Yes, she love bombed me at the start and cut me off from some of the friends I had at the time: she succeeded with a few, but she made an early error in targeting one of my oldest and best friends, which made me draw something of a line with her.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn my lesson and ended up being employed by her: she became progressively more toxic as I was now fully under her control, though by this point I had started shutting down the friendship and blocking her on social media.

She apparently told a mutual friend recently that she couldn't understand why I'd disappeared, and that it seemed to her that as soon as I didn't work for her I disappeared. Disingenuous bastardry. I'm glad to be out of it.

Do we sometimes mistake stalkers for "best friends"?
JFC talk about a 'penny drop' moment!

How's this for weird; I had two of these at the same time. One was my lodger, and the other I used to work with, who tried to convince me to be her lodger.
I introduced them once hoping they'd hit it off and fuck off together. That backfired, they each tried to convince me that the other hated them. I've never met people so embroiled in so many dramas and feuds!

Yes.

It did not start that way, we were friends at university but ended up living in the same part of London after graduation. Over time she developed a very self destructive jealous streak and became increasingly territorial over my social life. There was just too much drama and my life just seemed way more complicated then it needed to be with her in it. We had an argument over an aspect of her shitty behaviour and I just mentally flicked a switch and from that point on ceased contact. I think she had plenty of unresolved issues and I hope she is doing okay but I just had to look after my own mental health and having her in my life was not assisting in that objective.

@Poppins2016

It was only when I started thinking about how much easier and drama-free it was with my other friends, and how much relief I felt not to be stepping on eggshells and worrying...

This resonates with me. It becomes eye opening when you realise that all your other friendships seem so easy in comparison.

It’s funny isn’t it! Often you don’t realise how much energy you spent tiptoeing around those friends until you have a bit of distance from them.

Yes - I can't really even bring myself to type out how bad she was. It took me a long time to realise the full extent of it. She is a pathological liar. i sussed a fair bit of the behaviour early on but it took me far too many years to realise the full extent.

Her lies were both outrageous and scary - the small embellishments you could take with a pinch of salt, but when she started lying about other people and it affecting their lives etc it was scary to see how twisted she was.

She has no friends left, her siblings have no contact with her, she has gone through multiple husbands and boyfriends before they cotton on.

I don't want to write war and peace but she displayed stalkerish behaviour (deleting numbers from our phones etc) and stole off people - she was very clever and difficult to pin down, if you did call her out about her behaviour she would get aggressive and defensive.

She went too far one night and I left in the morning and never spoke to her again. I did see her at a party about 5 years ago and she approached me to "make up" but I just blanked her and have heard recently she has moved far away.

I found the whole process quite traumatic - I was friends with her for about 10 years and it took a long time for things she had done to me come to light or for me to make sense of strange and odd things that had happened.

In recent years, yes, and it was the first time in my adult life. A new friend.
I very quickly realised she 'one up-ed' and belittled every single thing I said. She made backhanded digs about my job, my home, my hobbies. She's a very active user of social media but would ghost me for a couple of months at a time (whilst continuing to like others' posts). She barked her opinions at me until I felt like I was being bullied.
I used her paranoia about covid as an excuse to slip away....

Yep, a couple in particular. One was very good at dishing out advice but rotten at taking it, used to turn on the waterworks if you said anything that upset her (even though she'd been far, far harsher herself); lousy with money - never take a bus where a taxi will do, and never pay for it herself where she could get some patsy to pay for it; always going on about how wonderful and clever she was, and then doing so little work she almost failed her degree; driving one of her boyfriends into a full-on nervous breakdown due to her treatment of him; always, always, always late (in the days before mobile phones); really horrible to housemates (sneaking into their rooms and damaging their electronics) - and that's just the stuff I can remember.

The second wasn't quite as bad, but had a tendency to invite people who drove to stay with her for a weekend so she could get them to ferry her round to various stores in town to do her errands. The final straw for me was when I arrived one blisteringly hot summer day and wasn't even offered a drink of water on arrival. It made me realise this person needed to go from my friends and family list....(her partner realised the oversight and offered me a drink, but she remained completely oblivious....)

Not toxic I dont think. Maybe actually? I dont know?

VERY intense. Angry when id planned something that didnt involve her. We were speaking about a certain attraction but made no plans to go. My mum was visiting me and I went to said attraction with my mum. Said friend was outraged that id done 'her' plan with my mum instead. Could be quite mean and jealous. Cant keep down a relationship, tried to convince me once that she wanted a guy she was seeing at the time to propose to prove he liked her. Always seems to have a new best friend that tends to fizzle out after a few months.

I moved away and used it as an excuse to minimise contact. Was that a toxic friendship? Im not sure if it counts. I was defo glad to be free of her though.

Yes. I didn’t notice the signs but thankfully DH did.

Everything about them, felt unable to share my problems, took more and more from me without giving back, everything was very one sided.

The crunch point came when I posted on MN asking for help on their behalf and I was accused of being my friend - basically I knew so much because it had taken over my life.

It completely opened my eyes to the fact a massive boundary had been crossed. The friendship ended very soon after when I tried to express my feelings, was told I had no idea what they were going through (understatement of the century, I couldn’t have been any closer to the situation). Blocked them on every channel I can, life is happier without them.

@FirewomanSam

Yes. I seem to have attracted a few people over the years who have wanted to compete with me or who have been very jealous of me, and it has not been pleasant.

I’m not sure why because I’m not a very competitive person and I am far from wildly successful or anything, but there’s a certain type of person who seems to come into my life every now and again. They will strike up a ‘friendship’ with me but I’ll quickly realise that all our conversations go down a kind of ‘anything you can do I can do better’ route which I just do not respond well to. I start to feel like I exist only as a foil for their own insecurities. Any success I have or good thing that happens to me, they get funny with me because it’s not fair and my life is too good. Any bad thing that happens to me, they’ve always got it worse somehow. I end up feeling really shit about myself either way.

I’ve recently taken a massive step back from such a ‘friendship’ where I realised I was constantly expected to big up this person and their every success, or commiserate over every setback, but every time I shared something from my own life it was completely dismissed or even totally ignored. I suddenly had this light bulb moment where I realised I felt completely and utterly worthless in every interaction with this person and I don’t know why I would ever be friends with someone who makes me feel like that.

I could have written this word for word.

I’ve only realised it recently when it dawned on me that after meeting up I always felt stressed and I didn’t look forward to doing anything with her.

She also manages to include my dc and her dc in this competitive type behaviour. Hers work harder, have things tougher, are hard done by etc. Mine are lucky, have it easier.

I am expected to sympathise at times and big her up at others, while I’m being adversely compared. The moaning is incessant. Exhausting!

I didn't notice anything was wrong until the first time I said 'no' to something they wanted. Both times I was surprised how badly they took it - very personally, as if I had insulted them.

Constant below the belt belittling and humiliating public sniper remarks but nuanced enough that you would look like an absolute loon if you called her on it.

JFC @ESGdance have you met MY sister?! This is her to a tee.

Re Toxic Friends. I ended a 20 yr "best" friendship this year and I'm convinced she probably STILL doesn't think she did anything wrong. Basically a case of amateur dramatics and attention seeking at my expense over very little and in the process of manufacturing nonsense drama produced a total betrayal of me as a person, my privacy and our friendship.

I should have let the friendship fall post graduation in hindsight, and I think had we not had a Long Distance Friendship it would have terminated years sooner, as the signs would have been in my face much more.

Her hysterics have impacted her children massively and I don't think her marriage will last much longer. On reflection, I think she is the most egotistical person I have EVER met, but you can't see it from the trenches sometimes.

Not so much a toxic one, more a puzzling one at times, most of the time we get along, but sometimes I'm never quite sure if I've annoyed the person, as sometimes it can be things that I don't give much thought too that can cause the effects, then at other times it's almost like I'm ment to guess what the issue is, as I can be following one set of instructi ons but then its presumed I would of been following another set of instructions

@User5252727

I hope you don’t mind my asking (of course you don’t need to answer if so) but was this in the last couple of years/quite recently? I think I know this person! If not, there’s two of them which is worrying!

Yes, two ‘friends’ came together to make my life a misery. One was a friend id had from childhood and who literally followed me to Uni (a year behind me) and ended up sharing my room. She befriended one of my other friends and they became a really toxic duo. I stopped all contact a few years later after much drama and a couple of years ago I tracked both down on social media and blocked them - my rationale being if I could find them, they could find me. I never intend to make contact again.

I’ve had such a bad experience with someone, I’m now in therapy. I did so much for this woman over the course of a couple of years. Bailed her out of some truly shocking situations, she used me and she dumped me on my arse at the lowest point in my life; a true narcissist who twisted the narrative so that I was the bad person to our mutual friends. The mutual friends fell out with me and she sat back looking pretty acting as though she had nothing to do with it. I still to this day don’t know what on Earth I did to warrant the mutual ‘friends’ turning against me but I’m trying to move on and not dwell on it. In hindsight, I’ve no idea why I befriended her as her lifestyle and moral compass were worlds apart from mine. I’ve recently blocked her on all social media and blocked and deleted her number. So has my husband. I felt anxious at first but feel soooooooo much better now! A heavy weight has been lifted. I told my therapist that every time she messaged and her name popped up on my phone, I would feel ridiculously anxious. He told me that was the biggest indicator that she needed the chop! If anyone ever asks me why I cut her off, I’m simply going to say “I don’t owe her an explanation. She knows what she’s done” and leave it at that.

Yes, best friend from university. When I was pregnant with my second she started being spiteful. I had many years of listening to her issues.
She had always had a bigger problem when I needed help, at that point I had too much going on to be there. So she was horrible to me.

@Newnameneededxx sorry to hear you’ve had a similar experience. It’s hard because part of me wants to sympathise with these people who are obviously deeply insecure and unhappy, but it’s so hard when they basically make you a target for all their own issues isn’t it?

This one woman would ask me all the time how I was doing, how work was, how things were going with my partner etc. I found out after a while that if I ever answered with anything positive, she would rant to a mutual friend afterwards about how she was sick of me ‘bragging’ and rubbing it in her face how good my life was. So I tried to avoid telling her anything, but she would ask me these direct questions and I couldn’t exactly lie!

The mutual friend then told me that this woman had been complaining bitterly to her that she found me hard to be friends with because my life was too perfect, I’d had it too easy, and nothing bad ever happened to me. At the time I was going through one of the worst years of my life after a bereavement and some other horrible family stuff. When mutual friend gently tried to point this out she apparently just rolled her eyes and said something like ‘oh whatever, everyone has problems’. Basically because I had one or two things she envied, my life was perfect and I was spoilt and nothing else mattered to her. Horrible cow.

@FirewomanSam

Thanks, yes that sounds familiar.

We had a lot of issues related to gcses and a levels as our dcs are all the same ages but went to different schools. Friend got herself wound up into a frenzy about the exam situation and how unfair it all was on her dcs. It was ok for my dc’s and they had it easy apparently but I never did find out why she thought this as they were all in the same boat! Lots of little hints that my dc’s school marked generously and practically told them what to write compared to her dc’s school who were strict! Absolutely no evidence for this at all and despite my protestations it is what she genuinely believed!

Then we had judgemental attitude about everyone we knew, which became embarrassing as I didn’t want to hear her slag off mutual friends and was pretty sure she was doing it about me to them too!

And having to listen every week to problem after problem, most of which were all in her head…. What if….? What if that? I listened and sympathised but never even got to mention my own problems- couldn’t get a word in! Only once, when I’d had a really stressful day at work, I talked about my day and she couldn’t hack it at all. Told everyone how stressed I’d made her and how I was normally a calming influence. Made it all into a big joke…

@Newnameneededxx ohh yes they sound so so similar! The constant put-upon act, where the world is always sooo much harder for them than anyone else and you aren’t allowed to have problems of your own because you’re just trying to muscle in on their territory or steal the attention from them.

I was once having a really horrible time with an awful, awful male flatmate. It was really getting me down and affecting me really badly. She heard me crying about it once to another friend, shortly before I was (thankfully!) about to move out of that situation. She got this gleeful look in her eye and started telling me she felt sorry for the guy, how it sounded like I was bullying him, and how I should stop being so selfish. I could see from her face that she didn’t really believe any of this but she was just relishing the opportunity to give me a kicking and make me feel shit. I tried to defend myself by telling her something really fucked up that this guy had done to me and her response was ‘oh don’t be ridiculous, nobody would do that, stop making things up’!!! She didn’t even know the guy, she just hated me. God, looking back I don’t know why I ever entertained her ‘friendship’ for a second.

We had a lot of mutual friends and after we mercifully lost touch, I would occasionally hear about the latest dramatic bust-up she’d had with yer another ‘friend’ who she had now decided was cruel and evil and a horrible person. After hearing a few stories like that you do start to realise ‘ah… it wasn’t just me then!’ I honestly don’t think she will ever be happy with her life and that makes me feel sorry for her but if I never ever see her again it will still be too soon.