I had a really weird thing happen to me a few years back, re the whole someone "turning on you" thing.
I had a best friend, who I met at 12 in high-school and we became best friends at 13/14 and were incredibly close throughout all the following years. We were literally sisters.
She came from a home as abusive as mine, so we clung to each other to survive.
A huge difference in our journeys was that at 21, I started doing trauma therapy.
And she just "kept going" as best she could, even though she was an utter, utter mess below the "I'm fiiiine" surface.
She was literally too scared of therapy. She's keep "trying it" but would always back out a couple of sessions into it, saying it was "too hard".
We remained best friends throughout my years of trauma therapy and she'd be like "Ugh I should be doing therapy too" but never doing it.
Instead, she fell in with a group of really bizarre people. I'll spare you the details here, but it was a bunch of people turning their trauma and mental illness into a way of life and convincing themselves that "everyone else was to blame". It was an incredibly negative, aggressive, destructive scene and she got deeper and deeper into it. It was actually pretty heart-breaking to watch and our friendship kinda turned into just staying in touch, trying to salvage the bits that weren't sucked into that vortex of the people she was spending her life with.
All throughout these years, she was spiralling worse and worse... Her trauma/ PTSD/ mental illness stuff just kept getting worse and more symptomatic each year, and her suicidalness was getting worse, and she'd "try" therapy at various times, but always with the result it was "too hard".
Thing just kept getting worse - every time I thought they couldn't get much worse, yeahhhh, they did...
I guess it was kinda like watching your child turn to drugs and just end up in every bad and toxic and destructive dynamic out there?
Anyway... she kept hitting new types of rock-bottom, eventually living overseas in really bad conditions, still associating with these horribly destructive people, and getting so badly suicidal that eventually I was like "come and stay with me - this is going to kill you".
So she did come and stay with me. And she started spewing out all the negativity and destructiveness and self-hate and blaming-others all over my life.
She did have some moments of clarity, where she actually said that she had "finally seen the error in her ways of associating with those destructive people" but she also knew that "the damage had been done" and that she'd basically left it more or less "too late" to turn things around now.
It was a pretty shocking mess and a super bizarre situation.
Like me, it was her biological mother that was her perp and who was cruelly abusive and totally insane, but unlike me there were zero "stable and kind" people in her life as a kid. So she had nothing to "cling to".
Hence, she never, ever felt able to stand up to her perp and say "no".
She ended up in total fawn responses each and every time, and hanging out with that hateful/ spiteful/ toxic group of people was her version of "rebelling" and "saying no" and "getting out of the fawn response".
So anyway, she was staying with me, she was hugely suicidal, spiralling badly, totally losing it, and then she started blaming *me* for what went wrong in her life :facepalm:
We had a few fights about it and at some point she had a moment of clarity and actually apologised and said "I know this is all stuff I'm supposed to be saying *to my perp* but I don't have the courage and you're a safe person to yell it all at instead" :facepalm:
I can't even remember all the insane stuff she vomit-screamed, but I think the main gist was that she's spent her whole life in a fawn-response and that if I'd somehow been a better best friend, then I'd have been able to help her stop that happening?
Dunno... the logic was very confusing.
She did end up vomit-screaming at me that our whole friendship (over 25 years at this point!) had been a fraud and a sham, because she'd been in 100% fawn mode throughout the whole thing and hence always said "whatever I wanted to hear" so she could get my approval. And somehow - the logic went - it was my fault for not having seen through this.
(I spent countless - absolutely countless - hours in those 25 years, trying to help her out of her fawn response, encouraging her to follow her instincts and wishes, encouraging her to trust and like herself, etc etc etc. So this accusation it had been "my fault" was just bizarre to the max. All those years, I was actually the *only* person in her life looking out for her, looking after her, encouraging her to follow her dreams, encouraging her to do therapy :facepalm: )
Anyway... long story, just to say that I think sometimes it doesn't matter "what we do"... Sometimes we invest everything we can, we do everything right, and when someone's in a bad place, they take all their pain and vomit it at the person who's standing closest, cos who else have they got to vomit it at?
I'd have found a way to forgive her all this obviously trauma-related dysregulation and emotional mess, but she actually *actively* started looking for ways to f*ck up my life, in day to day stuff. She'd create all kinds of drama on purpose (in addition to the drama she was creating accidentally) to do things like make me late for work.
And I was dealing with my own stuff and struggling with that too, and I was just like "You can emotional vomit at me all you want - but if you start actively f*cking up my life, so that I'll get fired from my job, etc - you are crossing every line in my book!"
And I ended up throwing her out. Gave her a week to pack her stuff and work out where she was going. (She came to stay with me in Europe, and was many, many miles from "home".)
I still can't quite believe I kicked out my previously best-friend from childhood while she was a dysregulated, suicidal mess... but her behaviour was so incredibly toxic that there was no other way and there would also have been no point in trying anything else, either.
She actually managed to manipulate one of the people from the toxic group she was hanging out with to *fly to Europe* to come and get her and her stuff :facepalm: So I assume she was "alright" and didn't land in the gutter due to my kicking her out.
But I've never heard from here since and have no idea whether she's alive or dead now. (I'm absolutely not interested in contacting mutual friends from school days to find out. It is what it is.)
Anyway, another long rant (sorry) as an example of how crazy destructive patterns can be and how people can play "blame games" as a way of making themselves feel better, that have 0% to do with reality.
(Sorry for the long blather, I'm reeeally bad at expressing stuff today!!! :bag: )
