Quote:
Originally Posted by anais_anais
A friend stayed overnight to shorten a drive... I had very little notice but of course I was happy to help her, only... she's one of two friends who know anything about my past. Her favorite discussion topic is prodding me for details and then asking about the therapy tehniques and then comparing to her own trauma and offering life advice. She starts the convo with normal topics and then after a few minutes she'll get this concerned pout and lean in and say "Anais, you know I'm your friend and I want to know- how are you... doing?"
I hate this but she's just so insistent "because she cares!" and I don't want to create a bad atmosphere between us by clamping down.
Now she's gone and I'm left with all this stuff I brought up that usually only sees conversational daylight in the therapy office.
|
I had (note past tense) a friend like that until recently. In my reluctance to disclose, she'd subtly or not-so-subtly set up a hierarchy of trauma and then compare our lives right now with her always coming out worse (X 20,000 times gawdawful thing happened to me but only Y 5,000 times awful thing happened to you -- and so, you went to grad school blah blah whereas I didn't [nevermind that she'd early on decided to focus on buying a house etc and basically make fundamentally different life choices than I did]). And yeah, all of it was under the guise of "I reallly care about you. We have a special connection. Even if you don't feel like talking to me, I'm going to keep persisting coz you can't deal with the goodness of my affection for you etc".
As therapy got more intense, I realized I just couldn't talk about stuff that had happened with just anyone -- my usual method of giving a detached short-bullet-pointed version of a few select things to tell other folks wasn't working coz everything got overwhelming. And so yeah, dealing with any of it outside session or unless I have a ton of time / space and nothing else to do became rather impossible.
I finally emailed her and said that I'm not okay with talking as I'm sorting my own crap out. I then blocked her number and email but that hasn't stopped her from trying.
I have very little regret about it -- I realized I can't deal with my own crap if I had to deal with stuff like that.