Friend seems overly eager to help vulnerable people then lose interest

[Mangochunks]

I have a friend and her behaviour in my opinion is kind of odd. Maybe it’s just me so what do you think?

We befriended and she is very super eager to help, like all the time and I don’t really need help. I mean i appreciate it and all and when needed I help but she is very eager. I have noticed over the years that she does this a lot. For example will try and friend someone who needs help, one person during a divorce. The lady did not want help and my friend felt very slighted when the other person didn’t really reach out and take her help. She is doing this again with another person. This person is vulnerable and my friend is in there offering all kinds of help. She goes from person to person who needs her most. It is very intense. I have backed off because it feels kind of weird and it’s always something. When there is no reason for her help to be needed she just seems to move on and get bored.

What is this if anything?

Why bother wasting time thinking about it.

It's probably performative on her part or she needs to be needed.

If you don't like it, ignore it. Or move out of the friendship completely.

Some people seek out people they perceive as having a lack they can fulfil, or who they think need their help, because their self-esteem is too poor to think of friendship as involving someone else just taking pleasure in their company without services being offered.

If the person refuses the help, or things improve for them and they no longer need it, the ‘rescuer’ experiences it as rejection.

It’s not a particularly healthy mechanism for making lasting friendships.

My circle is very small after I restarted again after a long abusive marriage. I feel a pattern in my friends behaviour. Im just don’t want to be wrong. I used to be someone who needed “rescuing” and I’m very aware that this person seems to love being a rescuer.

It’s probably a mix of a power/lack of self worth thing. My mum is like this (we are NC for other reasons). She is helpful in a very patronising way. She likes to feel good about herself rescuing people (hence why the men she’s chosen are grim, also hence why we are NC). It’s part of her identity. But also it makes people beholden to her in her mind. When they don’t then play along, she gets angry and turns on them. Tells everyone about all the things she did to help them. All the money she gave them. And how awful they are to not do as she says.

I saw it happen for years with friends and family. But it finally turned on me when I wouldn’t toe the line about something she wanted me to keep quiet about.

I think it’s a thing people do when they have quite low self esteem, but want to feel power over people in a situation. It’s very much a them issue, the sort of people who ‘help’ because of what they get out of it. Not because they genuinely care at all; they don’t.

I have a friend who is a bit like this, always doing too much for others at her own detriment (and health) and then she suffers such disappointment when its not appreciated or reciprocated and the cycle begins again. It's like she can't help herself. And then we all hear her tales of exhaustion or poverty because she brought something for somebody else that she absolutely couldn't afford as well as pay her council tax.

Its hard to watch.

Yes my friend has terrible verging on abusive relationships with broken men. I’ve spoken to her a few times that she has to make a choice to stay away from chaos. But she can’t. I made a joke the other day that chaos seems to follow her and she said yeah it’s like I’m actually just attracting it.

What is this if anything?

What it is, is just part of your friend's personality.

Not everything has to have a label and be 'something' 🤷‍♂️

Yeah I get that. Sometimes some people’s personality is disordered. I have heard the term BPD used by her family member about her. I don’t judge having coming from abuse myself but her behaviour to me seems odd. Just wondered what others thought.

Is her family member a trained MH professional like a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist? If not, I think you can safely discount their comment having any weight whatsoever.

It was her mum, I think she said it because of the types of relationships she chooses. I think the friendship might be coming to an end. It’s too much chaos all the time. I can’t keep hearing about it when she can’t leave it all alone. No one is that unlucky, there had to be a point you actively choose it

I have a friend who's like this. I took me a long time to realise it, but she befriended me just after DH died and I was very grateful - as often happens my old friends seems to drift away quite quickly and it was lovely and fun to have a new social lfe.

Then, as I got settled in my new life and was less "vulnerable" she seems to have started picking fights. Gets really easily offended over the smallest things, often something that's going well in my life. I think she struggles with the fact rhat I no longer "need" her, which is a shame because it was her help that brought me to that place.

I posted about it here and someone said she "likes her toys broken" and I do think there's some truth in that. She gets to feel she's doing good.

I've stepped away a bit and I've noticed she's moved on and taken under her wing a middle aged man, who seems much younger, chikdlike and young woman who is very. vyulnerable and always posting about her MH.

The toys being broken makes a lot of sense. She picks out all the broken ones. I wasn’t broken but I needed friends after leaving my old life. I think I’ve overlooked some flags here. Shame really. Good genuine people seek hard to find.

It doesn’t mean she’s not ‘genuine’ (it’s perfectly possible that she chooses her friendships entirely unconsciously), it just means that she experiences her friends being well and happy as rejection, because it means there’s no ‘need’ for her any more.

But obviously that doesn’t mean you need to continue a friendship with someone who prefers you to need rescuing.

She just focuses all her attention on the ones who need her help. Which means that she just has no need for those who don’t. I am the one who has to deal with the rejection, it doesn’t bother me, I can see she has some issues going on. It’s not a very reliable friendship and because of the types she chooses it’s always drama. I’m getting too old for all the drama

Maybe she could work in a care role which would mean it could be channelled and she would learn better boundaries

I have suggested this before. She absolutely gets taken advantage of in this current situation. I don’t think she has the awareness though of what happening.

I have also suggested therapy. I can see she has low self worth. I’ve been there after my marriage to my abusive ex. I do see she gets her worth from helping people but it’s very self destructive and she looses good friends. I know lots have walked away because she prioritises the relationships differently. If she didn’t need her worth constantly pointing out she’d have more time for the good stuff.

So tell her that. Tell her she's making poor friendship choices because of her need to be needed. Tell her that the exploitation she's continually complaining about is largely her own fault because of her choices. And tell her that it's boring and depressing watching her do it over and over again and complaining to you about it.

She knows this all already. She knows she makes poor choices.

But make it clear that it's going to lose her another friend.

Could you signpost her to proper voluntary roles, many charities and local community groups are really struggling for volunteers. Maybe frame it that she would be able to help more people that way, and also that there would always be people new to the charity needing help when those that have been helped move on. It would save her money as well as she could better refer people to other sources of financial help. A bigger organisation might be better as they usually have a volunteer coordinator who keeps an overview so that volunteers don’t over commit themselves.

I think she is too intense for this. The more I’ve thought about it from the replies I think she really needs some therapy to work out why. I think she would be too tied to it. I had therapy a while ago. The therapist told me they have to work on their boundaries and make them strong as they can become to attached. I think my friend would blur lines when she helped people. At the end of the day people need to be helped to end up being able to help themselves and then she would feel threatened. She’d keep them all. I’m not sure what to do anymore, can’t fix her or help her really, she has lost many friends over the years.