Ooh boy where to start.
I have this friend, I've known her for a decade - when we met she seemed pretty self-centered and talked about herself for hours, I figured she was insecure (it was an occasion where she was being introduced to several new people at once) but - well, it's ten years later and not much has changed.
She constantly has to project that she knows best for everyone - you know those people who see a tiny 2% slice of your life and think they know exactly what's going on in the other 98%? It's that. There's no such thing as a conversation with her - she always just sticks an opinion where the listening part of a conversation usually is, when it's clear she hasn't heard a thing you've said.
In the past I've tried to brush this off as her being quite 'solution orientated' when it comes to her friends' problems, but it's become clear it's way more than that. When mutual friends with mental health issues disagree with her it's 'because of their depression' or because their 'mental health is giving them a tough time' - not because she might be wrong.
Recently I had a spat with my boyfriend, which at the time was one of several ongoing spats - she told to get on with it because it was 'getting boring now' when I listened to her all the way through a months-long break-up when she was my age.
I know I'm not the only person who feels this way about her, but everything is on eggshells - if you tell her how you feel (if, on the off-chance she listens to you), she'll say I'm overreacting, or that she's too exhausted to hear it now she has children, or that we're ganging up on her, or etc, etc.
She constantly seems to want to tell me where she thinks I'm going wrong in my life, but tells me at the same time that she's 'the friend who tries to build you up' - it doesn't seem very supportive to deliberately, constantly make someone feel smaller and less secure than you?? She recently ignored me when I said I didn't want to talk about something, pushed me until she had a very partial picture, and then dismissed my feelings as 'fighting' her on it without letting me talk in detail about what was wrong in the first place. I've really just had it I think.
A mutual friend says she's scared of people not needing her anymore, and needs to put people down or just steamroller over their feelings to feel validated - but that doesn't feel like it has lasting friendship written in it to me. If I told her that, I know she'd drag out everything she feels she's done for me and why I should be grateful, without listening, again.
Sorry that was quite long. What do you think? Am I overreacting? do I owe her at least an attempt at an explanation even though she'd drag my name through the mud with everyone I know whilst pretending to be concerned for me? Maybe she's so blind she really would just feel betrayed without understanding that for the last decade she's really been a bit of a self-obsessed dickhead? It would be a cold day in hell before she acknowledged how hurtful she could be, it would be my fault for being 'too sensitive' or 'taking it the wrong way' - Argh.