Sometimes abusers pile on
I got a series of asks about someone’s toxic friend over at @tellmelittlethingsaboutyourday and it made me reflect on one particularly shitty ex-friend from my past. So let me ramble a bit.
Maybe I can save someone from years of similar heartache.
You see, one of the hardest friend breakups I had was my sophomore year of college. This former friend was someone who treated me terribly, pretty much from the moment we met in 7th grade, but we were also incredibly close most of those following 7-8 years. It wasn’t until he decided to cut me out of his life that I realized how terrible he had been to me. He said we couldn’t be friends anymore because I wasn’t good enough for him…his stated reason was that he didn’t have space in his life for losers who were 1) still dating someone from our hometown or 2) still living not far from our hometown themselves, both of which were true about me. It was humiliating. He declared it on Livejournal (I’m dating myself but yeah) and everyone knew it was about me, specifically.
Now if you’ve been around these parts or have read stuff from my long form blog, you know that I have a long personal history of abuse from my father. One of the biggest ways that he emotionally tortured me was by withholding affection unless I met arbitrary standards he set (perfect grades, losing weight, doing exhausting chores for hours, whatever else he decided mattered that day.) So for YEARS I tried my damnedest to be every thing he wanted and more, just to experience the VERY few and far between times he acted like he could actually stand me.
With some distance and time, I realized this was the exact dynamic that played out with that ex-friend I was talking about. He was able to position himself as superior to me (his family was rich/mine wasn’t, he was more worldly, having traveled and lived in interesting places/I had never been anywhere, he knew all the cool trends/foods/stores etc.) So I was forever trying to live up to HIS arbitrary standards too. I vividly remember him mocking my clothes, hair, etc.
So here’s the point I want to drive home…I put up with it from my friend because I DIDN’T YET KNOW THAT’S NOT HOW LIFE HAS TO BE. It was what I was used to from my dad and home environment. It was what I experienced everyday anyway. It was what I thought was normal. I had what I’ve refer to before as a flawed frame of reference. (And to be honest, I could be a really mean friend myself because of that flawed frame of reference. I had to unlearn the lie that love=mockery disguised as “just joking.”)
If you come from a home with abusive dynamics, other, non familial abusers will learn this and they will exploit it. Abusers will pile on. I’m not saying my friend consciously thought, “Shit! I can get high on my own superiority by treating this girl like crap!” I’m just saying that I ended up filling a certain abusive need he had within himself and I almost never pushed back because I didn’t know it could be any different.
If you have a history of abuse or you’ve noticed abusive dynamics in your family, keep an eye out for “friends” who will try to replicate those dynamics in your “friendship” with them. It would have saved me a LOT of hard times if I had realized that sooner myself. And lordy, if you’re treating a friend in an abusive manner you learned in your home, get real with yourself CUT THAT SHIT OUT.