Toxic Echoes

Sad and troubling story, here. Or a long and convoluted drama.

Just heard from a friend of mine we've known slightly (but for years). They wanted to talk to me about one of my former friends. Seems that they had a disturbing run-in with this person and wanted to talk about it.... I said, uh-huh? and let them know that yes, this person could act in unpredictable ways.

They then told me this story about how they had run into her the other day and how she had dumped a bunch of spurious, obsessional, dubious information on them concerning mental health drugs. Without getting into the sordid details, she is accusing certain doctors of nefarious deeds concerning said drugs. She has always been vehemently against any such drugs, even though some people close to her have been able to lead happy productive lives *only* through such drugs (or else they'd be dead or committed by now). Or as one friend likes to say, "better living through chemistry!"

This other friend of mine and their spouse have been so supportive of this woman over the years, through all sorts of trauma and trial. They are both very generous, big-hearted people. And they were a little taken aback (since they had also had family members and friends who, can we say, freaking *need* drugs to be sane), so the one friend tried to point out, very gently, this other perspective that, you know, such drugs can be literally life savers.

Well. She cut him off so fast--"don't start with me!" and left in a huff. Odd, yes? Well, not as odd as when they got home and found an email addressed to my friend's spouse but sent to my friend, accusing them of being rude and insensitive and maligning their character in the worst terms. She sent a poison letter ostensibly addressed to my friend's spouse to *them*?? Passive aggressive much?

So my friend, the big-hearted one, was understandably confused and wounded by this, wondering what they had done to receive such vitriol. And called me looking for perspective because they had heard that I and this other woman had had "a falling out" and there had been "incidences," and maybe I had a clue as to what was going on.

*pause to sigh*

What does one do with people who insist on making life toxic for themselves and others?

From my experience, I'd have to say: see it for what it is (don't sugar coat or minimize the damages) and then get far, far away.


Well, I was able to share some background of her seemingly irrational hatred of any and all mood-altering drugs, and her history of delusional and accusatory behavior.... And listened some more while my friend tried to explain what it felt like to be attacked.

Like me in my own version of this incident, they were very shaken and freaked out by this very personal attack. They felt very threatened and had a hard time sleeping, worrying what else she might throw at them. That's a scary thing to have to deal with.

I understood they were reaching out in an attempt to figure out the situation... so without getting into gossipy details, I tried to give them some perspective by sharing some of my own experiences and thoughts so they would understand that this woman's behavior was part of a pattern, no fault of theirs at all. I really hope they can shake it off. It's a freaky thing to be attacked out of the blue.



I try to avoid playing psychologist on other people because it's a little arrogant, but it has been helpful for me to come to terms with strange and toxic behavior in others. I have had a family member who had issues, and after many long years I had to learn to step out of the pattern and find new ways to be with them (or to not be with them, depending). And with this woman... well.... This has been the one person who scared me the most in my life in terms of crossing boundaries left and right, finally attacking me, and trying to manipulate me emotionally until I got so furious that I broke free of ever having to call her a friend again. It's made me very wary of having anyone try to place their own definitions of reality on me.

The closest I have ever come to defining how manipulative and infuriating she was was in the clinical definitions of a narcissistic personality. One characteristic is that as long as you could be a powerful supporter, the person butters you up, and if you ever disagree or show yourselves to be not in complete alignment with what they want from you, you are instantly a vile enemy.


So this is some back-story to clear my own head:


... When we first became "friends," she was so cute and endearing, buttering me up while also subtly putting me in the box she reserved for me, something I later realized was her way of keeping me in the categories of "inconsequential" and "inferior." She would include me in some of her gatherings with women friends, which worked well enough. She would compliment me, but only in a patronizing way such as continually telling the story of how when she first met me, she thought "what a cute little...!" as if nothing else I did was worthy of her attention. She did put the moves on a friend of mine who I was going out with in the time before I met my husband to be... (you can tell this was a number of years ago!).

Nothing in the beginning alerted me to how devious she could be. Even if one sees something that feels off, it's easy to minimize it and explain it away as no big deal. That started to change as we began spending more time together. She eventually married my friend (and I married M), and we sometimes did couple things together, but otherwise she did not socialize with her husband's crowd at all. She claimed to be overly-trustful, which I found odd considering how often she found fault with others for supposed sins of behavior against her. The friends and groups she was part of were THE best, THE most amazing and THE MOST wonderful people, and yet.... it was maybe not surprising in retrospect that any associate she held for very long eventually ran afoul of her. More on that in a minute.

We saw each other even more frequently as she and I and some other friends would get together regularly, and process some common threads in our lives, hash stuff out. It felt like we were bonding as a group. But after about a year of this, I started coming home after these lunches gnashing my teeth and complaining to M about how she was putting me down and trying to keep me in a weird place. It was so hard to define. She'd even play me off some of my other friends, ignoring or putting down anything I tried to share while fawning over other people, but if we were alone, she would cozy up to me. It sounds so petty, but it was so subtle, so consistent.

The worst part for me was the way she tried a weird variation of mind-control. If I (or anyone else) would state their feelings about something in a way that ran counter to what she thought, she would restate the opinion in a form more acceptable to her. This *sounds* like the reflective statements that some people learn as a way of active listening, but with her, it was her insisting on a different reality and trying to get us to think according to her version. In her voice, it was You Will Change It. It felt ugly, like she was trying to impose her own version of HOW we should think, HOW we should feel, HOW we should react. I always felt--excuse me, I think I know my own feelings better than you do! Don't tell me what to think!! It was very strange to have someone trying to exert their will one me like that, but like I said, it was so subtle, it was hard to find a place to object... the best one could do is resist back.

She joined a more formal women's group I was part of for a while, and it was the same old thing. After unsuccessfully attempting to mould the group to her own vision of how we should run the group, she became very silently disapproving and angry. It was not a good fit, and you'd think she/we would have figured that out, but still she held on. Finally, she concocted a situation to manipulate the group into feeling guilty for "not respecting her emotional needs" (to whip them into shape, I think), but calmer heads in the group saw through that and didn't buy it. That was the end of that.


God, I did so much for this woman... she could be so pitiful and needy and so in need of someone dropping everything in their lives to make her feel better. I once left work in the middle of the morning (I had very understanding bosses!) after she appealed to me to come help her deal with some trauma or other. I think she was testing me (and others) to see what she could get us to do, what would work to get us to change to suit her. She would come right out and ask for "what she needed" as if holding auditions to see who would step in and make small sacrifices for her, see if they had potential to fulfill that need. If making outright demands wouldn't work, she'd start hitting in with the emotional manipulations, trying to find the spot that would get you to feel awful enough to support her. She was a master at looking just the right level of haughty disapproval to get me to wonder what I should do to please her better. It was totally sick, but subtly so. As I figured out later, other friends were even more caught than I was, wanting to live up to that image of themselves as the good friend. She could also make generous gestures, but it had self-consciously magnanimous undertones of "see what a wonderful friend I am."


I felt I wanted to stop meeting her and pull back from being friends. I couldn't figure out exactly why all these little interactions irritated me so much, but I wanted badly to get away... We still has so many friends in common, including one good friend, and her husband with whom I was still close and had many other contacts with. With that web of societal connections, it was not so easy to extricate myself once I had been drawn in.

I say "drawn in" because I believe now that she intuitively looked for people who would support her and play roles for her. The best friend. The other best friend. The most wonderful rabbi ever. The most wonderful boss. The person with whom she would do anything for as long as they were fulfilling their role. The person who would say OMG you are sooo suffering, let me drop everything to do what you need! I don't think she enjoyed these gestures, except to the extent that she felt the power of getting people to do things for her. But I am cynical now, so I could be wrong.

This way of interacting was exacerbated when she lost her husband traumatically. It was bad for everyone. There's no doubt it was bad for her. It was also bad for her husband's family (who she shut out of a lot of info) and those of us trying to deal with our own sense of loss... Her neediness kicked into high gear, and many of us rushed to her aid. I don't know how many months we were in full support mode. You don't want to know everything we did for her... Another friend in particular tried to do everything right to be supportive... Those of us who were particularly sensitive and caring were complete suckers for this. Not that she didn't deserve sympathy and support, but giving that support fed right into her worst dynamics.

*sigh* Okay. Flash forward about 9 months...

I had to be out of state for a few months dealing with my own stuff. I would hear little rumblings about her in emails (from other people) like distant thunder, but I was burned out. From a distance, I was relieved to be out of range for a while. There were only a few passive aggressive things to ignore. One mutual friend confided to me that she suspected that this woman was making new stuff up just to get attention, and I was shocked that she would say so... We never figured out if that was actually true, but it turned out to be a foretaste of things to come.

Once I came back home, I had other things to deal with.... but one morning very early, I picked up a phone call-and got an earful of obscenities. Like a good girl trained on obscene phone calls and obsessive ex-es, I promptly hung up the phone. That was the next to last straw. I had no patience for further demands, especially those involving insults, but further screaming ensued. Then there was a lot of further nastiness.

The final straw was another episode in which she showed up in my backyard at 5:30 on a Sunday morning and acted out a little drama called "I'm totally grieving under your window." I was sympathetic for about 10 seconds, until I realized that the subtitle was actually "Let me slap you for not jumping through fire to attend to my every need, you bitch."

M was mortified, and I was furious. I didn't feel bad for her because I saw, finally, clearly, that she was doing everything in her power to manipulate me, and since she had a hunch that it wasn't working any more, she would scorch the earth to do anything to hurt me. Among the more colorful moments, she cursed me, and wished that my husband and any children I had would die. (Whoo, boy. At that moment, I was so grateful that she knew nothing of our IF story.)

I ended up demanding that she leave my property and slamming the door in her face. I was especially furious that she had caused my loving, dear-heart husband to fall into the trap of wondering what we should do to make her feel better. I hated to see him being played that way. He was grasping at straws, saying maybe we should try to appease her by doing this or that for her. I was adamant that after that naked attempt at manipulation, I wasn't going to give her a damn thing. No appeasement, no negotiation. Do you negotiate with terrorists? No!

After that particular episode, I was pretty traumatized, shaky and fearful that she would come back. I had a hard time sleeping for weeks. I was jumpy around town and anywhere near her neighborhood. I cried and raged. The one thing that gave me any kind of security was vowing that if she ever came back to my house, I would call the police on her.

And other people did not understand. Because, oh, that poor woman, they would say. Yeah, that poor psychotic! Even other friends for a while would laugh and say, "oh that's so junior high!"

You hear about the crazy ex. You don't hear about the crazy ex-friend. Nobody wants to think that this "poor little" woman is being an absolute shit. And then when I saw her a couple weeks later (in an official, public situation in front of other friends and associates), she was acting all buddy buddy again! I politely refused to engage or acknowledge her, and have refused to do so ever since. I still fear that someday she will show up on my doorstep and try to pull something.


I don't know what would have happened if I had caved into her demands or tried to appease her. It takes a lot of energy and fortitude to fend off an attack like that, but I believe it's more damaging to have to justify not standing up for oneself. I did feel like an asshole for a while even though I *knew* she was just mashing all buttons within reach. Now I just feel proud of myself (and relieved) that I did draw that line and put up a fight. Little ol' meek and mild-mannered me would come out fast and furious and slam that crap back into the ground. I can say that although I look like a push-over, I will defend my boundaries.
I know it wasn't a fluke because a few years later, I had an instance in which someone very insistently tried to force me to do something I felt was very wrong (Have you ever had someone try to bend you to their will? In public, yet? Not fun.), and I slapped him down so hard, everyone was a little awed. Somebody later said--why didn't somebody step in and defend her (me), and another friend grinned and commented, are you kidding? I wasn't going to get in HER way! I felt like a g-d transformer. Okay, so I am still a push-over who occasionally gets hulk-ified.



But here I have other friends who have their own little epiphanies about this woman, and I relive some of it all over again after working hard to step away from the emotional turmoil.

One good friend had a really hard time coming to terms that this woman who she *thought* was a friend was being so damaging to her and others. She finally felt forced to extricate herself also. She was another sensitive and caring soul who felt suckered. We don't talk about it much, but we comprise a mini survivors group.

One friend who lives in her neighborhood called me all concerned once and said he had run into her and she didn't seem to be doing so good and he was really worried about her... I was non-committal. Told him that for my own sanity I couldn't support her any more. Told him, yes, I could give him the name of her rabbi (but I didn't think it was going to help...).

I swear, it's like a bird dragging a fake broken wing! She sends out pity signals and anybody with a heart is moved... and eventually runs into this very weird dynamic.

And now this other friend, who has the biggest heart I know, who didn't turn their back on her on her craziness up to this point, has been slammed because why? They disagreed with an obsessive opinion/belief, and they suddenly discovered this other side of her. They were shaken, wondering WHY and WTF?! and concerned on top of all of that, realizing, OMG, she actually is delusional...

What can you do? It's beyond me. Not my job to "fix" her, even when I have some residual sorrow over her sorry state. There are trained people who devote their careers to helping people adjust their mental health. But there's a whole list of conditions that need to be in place to make that worth pursuing. For one, the patient needs to be willing. And of course, she doesn't believe in any kind of therapy or meds... I doubt that anyone can save her from herself. If I step waaay back, I do still feel pity for her, but it's likely that the most emotionally generous person is the most likely to get hurt in this situation.

And even if I had any kind of power to help her, I wouldn't go anywhere near her. Thank you, I am not that self-sacrificial. This is one instance when "toxic" really describes it.

I had hoped that she would eventually settle down and get back to some kind of stable reality, but then people will call me about her or say little oblique things such as, I ran into so-in-so... And they are furtive and unsettled... and I can tell that they have come up against her crazy, and there's nothing I can do except say sincerely, I'm so sorry, and You're not the only one... and live my life coming to terms with the experience, trying to not think of the day that, someday, I cross paths with her again.

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