Get Rid Of Friend Who Keeps Tolerating Npd Men In Her Life?

[Finchlet2]

I didn't mean to disregard anything you'd Bern through with your friend and I'm sorry if my last reply came across like that I am speaking with very limited experience as I have never expected nor received Jack shit from any of my friends. Please feel under absolutely no obligation to answer this question but when you say she lies to you? I ask only because lies and all their repercussions are something I do have experience of.

 

[casseti]

I didn't mean to disregard anything you'd Bern through with your friend and I'm sorry if my last reply...

I totally appreciate your reply, and everyone elses' too. It is very kind to get your reactions especially since I know my first post was so long and probably confusing. And that's on me. I had to put it all down to realize what the real issues are, and you have helped me reach clarity. So thank you! (And thanks everyone!)

So you're asking for examples of her lying? Here's a list:

-Says she's getting dressed/ready and therefore will be ready in 20 min. Yet 45 min later she is just getting started, therefore I am left waiting for her in my car outside. I know she is scatterbrained, but doing this 100 times is inexcusable. I have also witnessed her lying outright to other friends on the phone, claiming we are in the car and only 5 minutes away from a meeting spot, when we are literally still in a driveway and at least 20 minutes away from the meeting place.

-Conveniently claims she's having "phone problems" right when it's time for her to avoid being confronted. This has happened a million times. It's her most frequent lie. Sometimes I am sure it's true, but 95% of the time its really a lie, an excuse, misleading. Guess what, she has TWO ACTIVE OPERATING CELL PHONES on her at all times, but somehow with just one of them allegedly malfunctioning, she can't reach me, ESPECIALLY DURING URGENT/EMERGENCY situations SHE CREATED and REQUESTED my help/involvement in. She also exaggerates the drama level of such events while somehow being vague and evasive while they are happening, and then later explains the true details of what was going on.

-Asks me repeatedly to go on a trip with her to Texas. I tell her I am totally ready to participate in the trip and need her to just tell me what dates she is free, so I can purchase my tickets. A week or more goes by with no communication from her. I figure we're not going to Texas. She shows up to meet me for lunch one day and then starts complaingin about what drama happened in Texas!!!

-Complains heavily when a lunatic ex is blowing up her phone with texts or whatever. Claims she is ignoring and setting up BLOCKS on the phone and is refusing any contact with him. But if you just happen to glance at her phone for literally half a second, you can see she is responding to him in a string of messages.

- claims she has gifts for me during bdays, or holidays, but 6 months go by before I see anything. One time she gave me a gift 8 months late and the gift didn't even include all the pieces that were originally included in the box. She claimed she didnt realize it was missing. Months go by and I get a text saying she has found the missing piece of the gift... but more months go by and to this day I have never received the missing piece. All in all, more than 12 months pass and what you end up with is literally a fraction of a holiday gift, on an item than cannot be used whatsoever unless all the parts are together.

 

[Finchlet2]

Ok she seems incredibly confused and unorganized,in certain situations unreliable even but I can't see anything on the list that pretty much everyone I know doesn't do and fairly regularly at that ( the whole Texas thing was a bit shitty though she owes you an apology there). The first item on your list my husband does constantly but its no buggy you just learn the lingo for example if he says five mins I hear twenty if he says twenty I hear forty five. I never call him out on it just quietly devised my own interpretations that way neither of us get stressed out and i avoid nagging cos it only causes agro and slows the situation down even further. All her behaviours are super common and kinda normal just don't rely on her for shit till she's grown up a bit in her head. You don't need to ditch her as a friend you can be her friend and have a whole bunch of more reliable friends to boot!

 

[Casseti]

Ok she seems incredibly confused and unorganized,in certain situations unreliable even but I can't see...

Wow that's amazing! I have never had anyone but her do all of these things! She is my only truly Flaky friend ever in life. Although I have one aunt who is late for gatherings, thats the only unreliable thing you can say about her. Yeah we will still be friends technically, for sure, but I am not willing to engage in repeating any of the stuff on the list any more. I find these behaviors egregious and highly disrespectful and would never do any of them with freqeuncy or without profuse apologies. Every now and then we are all late for something, but in my world, disrespecting peoples time, money, resources, boundaries etc is unacceptable and nobody I have dealt with personally or professionally has been so flagrant and repetitive but this one person.

We all have different standards and values, which is why I took the time to test flexibility with these issues just for her. But since she doesnt follow through 95% of the time in even the most basic plans, I just cant deal. I am learning now that for me, this just can't go on. The list is too long and deep, and my examples were just a fraction of reality. When I look back at how many friends she lost in the past for these exact reasons, I am amazed I held on this long, and amazed she hasn't really improved. I love her, but its too upsetting for me, on several levels, do be treated with this kind of behavior any more.

I am okay with finding ONLY reliable people from now on to be my New Friends. I will set the new boundaries I need for myself to discontinue promoting/accepting flakiness. Honestly I'm sure it now it will be the best move for my ongoing cptsd recovery, etc.

 

[Finchlet2]

Sorry this is so short, insomnia got the better of me. I just want you to know I respect your decision. I suffer from cptsd too and for what its worth I would never flake out on you.

 

[Friday]

Then you walk away because she fails in her relationship with YOU, not because of her choice in her partners. You are confusing the issues. What I think upsets you, is her lack of commitment to you as a friend, not her relationship to her boyfriends. You blame the guys in her life, when in reality the issue is her, not them.

This. Everything I was going to say all neatly wrapped with a bow! :)

... I am amazed I held on this long, and amazed she hasn't really improved. I love her, but its too upsetting for me, on several levels, do be treated with this kind of behavior any more.

I am okay with finding ONLY reliable people from now on to be my New Friends. I will set the new boundaries I need for myself to discontinue promoting/accepting flakiness. Honestly I'm sure it now it will be the best move for my ongoing cptsd recovery, etc.

When you're doing this, just word to the wise, it will save a lot of time/energy/heartbreak to keep this attitude. It's very easy to start looking at what other people are doing "wrong". When, the truth is, it's not about them. It's about us. What we want in our own lives. There are people who blow in and out like the march wind, and who are loved for it by just as many people as there are who cannot stand them for it. If any kind of behavior/trait drives you batty? It doesn't make them wrong for doing it/ having it, & doesn't make you wrong for laying the boundary. Everyone is right. Them for doing it. You for not liking it, and not wanting it in your life. Others for liking it, and encouraging it in their own lives. Everyone's right & it's very much a win/win in that scenario. Once it changes into a "You're doing it wrong,"? It ceases to be a boundary, and becomes manipulation. It's a veeeeeery easy trap to fall into. Trying to use boundaries to change others. Boundaries don't change other people's behaviors. They change our own.

 

[Sideways]

With my ptsd, I need my life to be as organised and predictable as possible. One of sisters drives me round the bend.

I'll call you on Wednesday - she doesn't.
I'll be there at midday - she shows up at 1pm.
I'll bring dessert - we go without desert.

That's what she's like. Can't change it. And to her? What's to change? In her mind, she isn't "lying", she miscalculates, overestimates, under-plans, isn't concentrating, and just plain doesn't need the exact time, the exact details the same way I do.

That's my issue, not hers, you know? So we maintain a relationship that works for me by me asking less of her, expecting less from her, not being as close to her. Square peg, round hole.

And when we do catch up and the detail is important to me, I let her know. Like, "If you can be there at midday I'd love to catch up, but if you can't make midday, if you're too busy, let's do it another time, because last time I waited an hour for you and that didn't work for me..."

My issue. My boundaries. We aren't tight, but we never need to fight about it either.

 

[Fadeaway]

OP, You say you are self aware. I am not trying to be hurtful here, but I don't know how else to say this. You come across as having a bit of a "holier than thou" attitude when it comes to dealing with NPD and relationships. Doesn't that seem a bit narcissistic to you? I am not saying you are NPD far from it. Anyone can have narcissistic tendencies without being NPD.

A 15 year long friendship is a rare and beautiful thing. Something to hold onto.

Says she's getting dressed/ready and therefore will be ready in 20 min. Yet 45 min later she is just getting started, therefore I am left waiting for her in my car outside. I know she is scatterbrained, but doing this 100 times is inexcusable. I have also witnessed her lying outright to other friends on the phone, claiming we are in the car and only 5 minutes away from a meeting spot,

Not seeing the big deal here. The first one you mention is pretty common with a lot of people. You learn to adjust. The 2nd one you mention here, well I do that all the time. It just is another way of saying you are definitely on your way. It is generally assumed when people say that they aren't expecting you to be timing them. Maybe it is a cultural thing where I am from.

Asks me repeatedly to go on a trip with her to Texas. I tell her I am totally ready to participate in the trip and need her to just tell me what dates she is free, so I can purchase my tickets. A week or more goes by with no communication from her. I figure we're not going to Texas. She shows up to meet me for lunch one day and then starts complaingin about what drama happened in Texas!!!

This is the only one you listed where I believe you have a legitimate complaint.

The ones I am not quoting suggest signs of someone who is being abused and needs support not judgment. It doesn't sound like she feels safe from you judging her, and from what you have said, she is right.

claims she has gifts for me during bdays, or holidays, but 6 months go by before I see anything. One time she gave me a gift 8 months late and the gift didn't even include all the pieces that were originally included in the box. She claimed she didnt realize it was missing. Months go by and I get a text saying she has found the missing piece of the gift... but more months go by and to this day I have never received the missing piece. All in all, more than 12 months pass and what you end up with is literally a fraction of a holiday gift, on an item than cannot be used whatsoever unless all the parts are together.

I am actually a little horrified by you attitude about this. I wouldn't be as horrified if you hadn't been complaining about people with NPD. I don't know, maybe it is just my experience where people are a bit more gracious when it comes to receiving gifts due to culture where I am at.

I know you are venting, but and I get that, but sometimes we can the things we hate the most are the things we don't want to see in ourselves. If anyone thinks I am wrong here, feel free to call me out on it.

Trying to use boundaries to change others. Boundaries don't change other people's behaviors. They change our own.

Can we sticky this phrase on the forum somewhere. I think I need to write it out and stick it on my bedside table so I can look at it every morning. It is easy to forget and think boundaries aren't working because we are so focused on the person doing the offending action that we are putting up boundaries against.

 

[casseti]

OP, You say you are self aware. I am not trying to be hurtful here, but I don't know how else to say t...

Hey, you're not being hurtful at all. I fully understand everything you pointed out, and thanks again for taking the time to share such specifics!

I am experience an ongoing internal conflict, that has lasted for a few years. I both agree with what you are saying, and also disagree somewhat at the same time. This is why I have struggled and debated so much with myself about this. I am aware of all of it, and in effort NOT to judge too harshly or make brash decisions, I have remained her LAST friend, after these behaviors lead to her last 30 or so friends ditching her over the last several years! She is a good person, has a great heart, so I will not let my internal and occasional agitation throw away a friendship, but again I will increase or adjust MY OWN BOUNDARIES at this point, giving the increased awareness this thread has provided me.

Let me focus in on one of the examples you have highlighted -- about the gift giving. Okay, my personality is such that I strongly believe gifts are totally unneccesary. I always buy gifts for friends because I like to do that, but I fully expect nothing in return, I make it clear that having friendship is a gift enough. I have a long history of being the only one to give gifts. In fact with her specifically I have given gifts with nothing in return and that is a non-issue. My "trigger", if you will, is when someone decides to *SAY* they are going to do something and then do not stick to it. Nobody is pressuring or asking anyone else to complete a task, the person just decides to tell me that they are going to do x/y/z for me or with me, and then doesn't do it. She finds a way to repeat this pattern with many areas of life, and some of them I adjust to but some of them are beyond my boundaries of respect. When that happens 300x, that's called flakiness. Again, this is a person who was extremely popular and use to have a bajillion friends and literally has lost all of them involuntarily, because they got sick of her flakiness OR her lying, one by one. But I remain. Some forms of it I have adjusted to for years, some forms of though are too much. We seem to agree for example that the travel situation was too much. Well.... that travel situation has happened many many times, so I am already implementing new boundaries in that area.

When someone decides to proclaim, uneccessarly, that they "Have a huge gift coming for me that they have spent lots of time on, something very special..." (these were her words), and then my birthday passes, several months pass, and I do not ever bring it up (and also try to not even think about any of this, prefer to just let this stuff slide from my mind and write off as a non-issue), then she meets with me after months pass to give a half gift. When I open the box I am extremely excited, but at the same time she is explaining to me verbally that part of the gift is missing. So for whatever reason, I am the type of person who prefers no gift at all, because friendship alone is enough. Rather than getting a gift where the friend is telling me as I open it that it's a machine that will not work until she finds the missing parts. That's just how I am. When someone is giving me a gift while telling me why it's essentially defective, it doesn't feel good. She is the only person I have ever known who would give a friend a gift with missing parts, on top of the fact she didn't need to give a gift at all. An additional set of months go buy and out of the blue she tells me she found the missing parts, but that was... several months ago too as of today, and she lives 20 minutes from my house and works a job literally walking distance from my house, and I still haven't seen the missing gift piece. And I don't want the gift. What I want is a friend who either doesn't say she will do x/y/z at all, OR a friend who when she does say she is going to do x/y/z, fulfills her commitment. Call me harsh, but I have learned that this is just how I am. I like people who stick to what the said they would do.

By the way, I agree with you that clearly one way or another she is not comfortable sharing some aspects her emotional life with me. Which is totally fine. I know everyone in her life, and I know she is not comfortable being fully honest with anyone whatsoever. She just lies to everyone, and everyone knows it. She lies and hides huge chunks of her life from people. Sometimes she over dramatizes situations that (again, feel free to tell me I'm being too judgemental, I appreciate any criticism/suggestion etc) carry big consequences, I find myself feeling very conflicted/concerned about it. For example during a domestic violence incident, she sent me a dozen messages claiming that a boyfriend hit her and left bruises marks, naming body parts, and expressing her anger, and saying that she was packing up her stuff, but that she needed a safe place to stay. This is when I told her she could come stay with me, which she agreed to and said she was on her way, just needed like 30 min to pack up. So when hours passed and she didn't show up at my house, but fortunately was able to afford a hotel, I started to get gut feelings the she was actually trying to hide something from me. A wave of strange energy just came over me, but there was nothing I could do but just ignore it. Later on, long story short, she was hiding the fact that she did not get hit at all. She knows that I am the type of person who would have been tending to her bruises and whipping out whatever ice packs, bandaids, healing ointments etc, and she didn't want to show up at my house and then display to me that there were no marks on the places she had claimed in detail hours before. I also know she could have been so frazzled by the experience that it was easier to just be alone, very understable, again I just don't know why she had to embellish such a big experience. I guess I am only accustomed to people embellishing/lying about small everyday stuff. I don't know how to put into words.... it just makes me uncomfortable. I wouldn't feel comfortable saying a person hit me in the face when what really happened is that they threw a toaster, the same way I couldn't say a person stole $115,000 from me when they really stole $115. Bad is bad, I just like to be accurate about ... crime. If you call this holier than thou, alright, I accept I am a snob in some areas. And I can be as much a hypocrite as all humans are. Anyway, I do believe that hours later, when she filed a police report, she was honest with the police. She just wasn't honest with people in her personal life, she just has an urge to seek extra attention sometimes by lying or over dramatizing situations or outright sabotaging them. My brain is just trying to pick up her patterns, and my pattern, and reevaluate my own response, since that's all I can do.

Goes back to my concern there may be a generalized addiction to drama or perhaps attention, I don't know. I've been patient for years and I will still be in her life, I just will distance myself from some specific situations where I know she will sabotage/manipulate. It has been draining emotionally, financially, and even from a health standpoint to have been her friend in many situations, situations that were completely avoidable.

No matter what, what matters most to me is that she is safe and out of harms way, as health and safety are the most important things in life. I also need to not participate anymore though in situations where her patterns put me compromising situations too.

 

[casseti]

With my ptsd, I need my life to be as organised and predictable as possible. One of sisters dri...

Thanks for your response, well-stated. I am going to do what you do. I have already had chances to put this into practice, fortunately, just over the past 48 hours, and it has felt really, really good. I think in the long run this will be great not just for me, but also for my friend. I do love her which is why I have stuck around. I don't want to continue being angry about this stuff. She has stood by me despite my many flaws, and I have stood by her despite hers.

I realized through this thread and seeing my own venting as well as everyone's responses that what is going on with me is that I have some unresolved+delayed anger about some of the things I've been through with her, and venting helped get it all out (disorganized as I was, sorry!). What I need to do is find a healthy way to just release all of that energy on my own, in my own space. I also think there some mourning I need to do that has been hiding... like my brain has been trying to avoid crying about how sad it makes me feel each time I find out that she gone back to an abuser. I feel sad because it makes me think she doesn't realize how amazing she is and that she deserves to be with a man who will treat her with real love. Meanwhile I will continue forward with our friendship with appropriate expectations/boundaries, again like you and your sister. Although I "wish" things were different, I can't control anything but myself, so I need to achieve FULL acceptance of the round circle square peg stuff, and make changes on my own.

I think I have at times found it so hard to observe someone I love falling into the cycle of abuse again, and then whatever sort of... latent.. behaviors that sometimes go with that, that whatever anger and sadness I felt... made me want to run away. But I won't give up, I will NOT run away. I will still be her friend, I will just take greater responsibility FOR MYSELF regarding processing these emotions, and reacting/responding to these situations in a better way. There are shifts I can make that will be best for me and my ongoing improvement and CPSTD recovery process, that will simultaneously still allow us to be friends. I am going to address this with my therapist too of course.

 

[Sideways]

There are shifts I can make that will be best for me and my ongoing improvement and CPSTD recovery process,

Wow! That post could almost have been written by another person!

That's huge, and it sounds painful for you, but it also sounds like it's pain that was already there, and you've found it and decided to heal from it and move forward.

Wish i could have that level of personal insight more often:)

 

[Fadeaway]

OP, I am not sure if you are coming back to this thread. First I want to say that I now have much more understanding regarding your situation so I apologize for judging you so harshly. I also want to say that when I said Holier-than-though, it had nothing to do with the gifts and which I have a completely different perspective on, once you explained that in more detail. It solely had t do with you coming across as "I can cut people out of my life easily, so why can't they"