Quote:
Originally Posted by Open Eyes
Ugh your friends sound like emotional vampires Rose
And that’s awful that they shut down like that when you try to share things important to you.
No wonder you like the nicer facility. The staff and others are willing to listen and have patience and compassion. Have you looked to see if there are grief support groups around you. I know it’s harder with the social distancing rules however people still meet outside. Yes there might be some alanon meetings that are held outside. That’s what they have been doing around my area where they are having AA meetings outside.
People are getting creative in an effort to socialize despite the COVID social distancing challenge. Even if you find an alanon meeting you may find individuals that have other groups they are involved with that meet in creative ways.
I think one thing you learned in this experience is that you do better with people that are different than these women you know around you.
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O.E., I want to thank you again for this post. Since coming home from the hospital yesterday, I have thought hard about how much I want to let, or not let, these persons back into my life.
I postponed responding to some calls and texts I got from them. I believe I would do very well to seek out other people to be in contact with. I do think I underestimated how much they were sucking life out of me. Actually, the problem was my willingness to let them. I felt I was strong enough. I figured they just didn't know how to meet my needs as well as I knew how to meet their's, since I'm trained to do that.
The truth is they weren't trying all that hard. It's time I wised up to that. I had figured they weren't self-aware and were relating to me as best they knew how. Even if that were true, I don't have to go along with it. Maybe they had some bad habits, but I don't have to enable that behavior. Once I stop enabling, they will either adapt and be less attention-hogging, or they'll lose interest in my company. There probably should be a limit to how much I will tolerate just to preserve a connection to another human being.
O.E., You might remember some of my earliest threads here at PC that were about my brother. He expected a lot of attention and was draining me. Eventually I said "No" to him, and I haven't heard from him since. In the years since, I've felt bad that I didn't handle my encounters with him differently. I've believed that he wasn't capable of being different from how he was . . . but that I had more options and could have been more patient and diplomatic with him.
After my s.o. passed away, I really mourned my lost relationship with my brother. I imagined his presence would have been a great comfort to me now, if only I hadn't alienated him. That wish probably belongs in the realm of fantasy. Once, when we were still seeing each other regularly, I told my brother that my s.o. was back in the hospital and quite sick. All my brother said was, "Well, we all got to go sometime." I guess empathy wasn't his strong suit.
It's hard for me to believe these friends I've leaned on have a true lack of empathy for me. Yet there's not a ton of evidence to the contrary. One texted me, when she heard my s.o. had died, "Well, you two had a lot of good years together." That seemed a bit sparse on sympathy to me.
I figured any human contact was better than none. I think I need to refigure that.