Hi there.

I have an unusual post about a situation I have with a female friend and would really appreciate any insights or advice - especially from ladies on the forum - that anyone can share?

Basically a female friend's relationship with her boyfriend has turned very emotional abusive and manipulative. I'm merely a friend to her and although I see the logical answer I'm not sure how to help beyond comfort and support, as this is something that revolves around the emotional aspects which she's completely chained to.

She's significantly younger than me and we became friends at work in an unusual dynamic but she seems to have formed an almost 'family' emotional attachment to me. As if I'm the older brother she never had or, (embarassingly for what it may say about the age I come across as ) even a quasi-father figure, especially based on what I know from her upbringing with an absent father.

I'm wise enough to know that I cannot simply wrench her out of the situation and say she must just leave him - even though she keeps asking, even begging, me in tears to solve the situation for her. She does indeed still have deep feelings for him but it's troubling even me now and her confidence and self esteem seem to be collapsing under the weight of what I see as subtle emotional abuse and manipulation from her partner.

Her relationship with her boyfriend originally fell apart after they had become engaged and his parents rejected her, resulting in a huge family fight. He himself is a psychological mess, is passive aggressive, submissive at work and has an inferiority complex even though he was originally beholden to her. He has also recently taken a motto that 'good guys finish last'. I suspect infidelity or the will to commit it too due to the encouragement of a self proclaimed pick up artist. He's been encouraged from reading Neil Strauss' 'The Game' too to behave that way. Bitterness paints his actions and I think he has lost friends too.

He however perversely blames her for his own weaknesses to make a decision and/or to stand up to his over involved parents. The perversity of it too is that he is demanding that she must change and submit to him because he thinks his submissiveness is somehow tied to her having been the dominant partner previously in the relationship.

He accuses her of infidelity over a situation when she actually chose to be faithful to him. He says he knows he must change but it's clear to me that that change is tainted.

She is utterly fearful he wil leave her even though they've already broken up several times and she could have men lining up to date her (two friends of mine awkwardly enquired from me about her availability). Her boyfriend also refuses to give her any security or certainty and his beahviour reeks of the motto 'Treat them(women) mean to keep them keen', which is another pick up artist/abusive spouse thinking that espouses manipulativeness, narcissism and near psychopathy.

There are other aspects but I won't go into now other than how she now has a 'Mother Theresa' complex, where she suddenly believes she must 'suffer' for his sake - both as punishment and to endure his bad behaviour and pain for him.

And, indeed like a father figure to a daughter, I've even had passing thoughts of finding and then giving her boyfriend a physical hammering to knock some sense into him - as foolish and self defeating as I realise it is (she would also probably come to hate me for doing that).

Any thoughts?