Help me to Help Another (Emotional Issues)

APZonerunner

Ugh. So yeah, guys. I've got this friend, and she was once upon a time very happy and popular. She had a lot of friends and stuff, and things were good. She's a pretty combative person though, and this has always been visible in her relationship with her family. She's got a difficult family life. Her dad's recently left her mom and remarried literally a few months later, her brother is for lack of a better term an emotionally maladjusted psycho, and because of how combative and independent she is, she's constantly at loggerheads with her mom. Her mom is pretty crazy and old fashioned, and despite the girls all being older now she's not one to shy away from swearing, scratching or hitting her point across. Or plain out telling them she wishes they were never born.

Despite all this, she's been fine. She has two sisters, too, and has a very good relationship with the younger sister (she's middle), and a classic elder sister love/hate relationship with the older one. Her biggest ally in the family was ironically the crazy brother. To sum that guy up, from what I know about him he was bullied through school and had a difficult youth and came out a bit messed up. He's in his mid twenties, still living with his parents with little education and a lot of debt. He's basically the totally negative nerd stereotype, I guess.

Over the last few months, there's been some difficult things happen to her. She accidentally got emotionally involved with a guy, and while it didn't go past the friends stage, he wanted it to. She turned him down and upset a lot of people in the process. This came in her last week of school too, so she fell out with a lot of people she'll never see again.

One day she catches her brother up to no good (I'd rather not go into this on the forever-logged pages of the internet, but trust me when I say it's bad) and they ended up fighting. Long story short, he beat her up fairly bad. It was only when one of her sisters walked in and yelled at him to stop that he relented beating into her. She actually coped with this quite well, but what was difficult for her was he took back all the gifts and such he'd bought her in the time they'd been best buddies - he took her DS back, her laptop, etc and presumably sold them all on. She doesn't particularly want to report him - she feels bad for him - but the two are no longer talking.

Since then, her dad's new wife has passed a decree that he's not to see them anymore, and he's pretty much abandoned all of them but the youngest. And across the last week and a half or so she's been totally out of sorts, and has had massive arguments with two of her best friends. The one has a new boyfriend and pretty much completely abandoned her and blew her out in her hour of need, and the other has been clashing with her for a while now and she ended up lashing out and saying some fairly unforgivable things (in his eyes, anyway)

She's now a bit of an emotional wreck. Past me, she hasn't really got anyone. She keeps talking about running away to a new city and starting anew, she's exhausted, she's frustrated, she's hurt - and she's too proud really - she'd never call either of those friends and say she needs them. She's gearing up for college, too, and the few people she has who are at least friendly with her are all also getting ready, and mostly leaving for faraway places. She totally doesn't have the income to leave, either. And I don't have it to help her.

I'm trying to help but I'm finding it difficult. The whole thing is blowing my fucking mind and I'm at the point where I don't know what to say or do to help. So.. eh. Any suggestions?

noir_blood

Is 'your friend' you? Cause otherwise, sad as it might be, there's not much you can do. I mean, defiantely be supportive and ready to listen, but at the same time, it sounds like she has a lot of issues to deal with, that might best be helped by a therapist.

APZonerunner

Nah, it's not me. Promise. I'm actually on the phone to them now, and have been for most of tonight. This person is really my best friend, though, which is why I'm so worried. They've still got me, but one person isn't enough. Not for anyone. I'm personally perfectly happy, and none of these problems really effect me in any great way - though one thing I neglected to mention was that one of the two people she's fallen out with is also one of my best mates, which is obivously making my life incredibly difficult as they're both expecting me to take sides and such, and it's just doing my head in.

The reason I posted here was less to do with the problems themselves and more to do with the fact I'm now struggling to help or contribute anything, and even worse that I'm beginning to get frustrated with her, which is the worst thing that can happen right now - if we end up fighting and falling out, she will genuinely have nobody.

EDIT: Okay, well she's dropped off the radar now in an upset mess. I'm not too worried, she won't do anything dumb, but I'm staying by the phone.

TrueHereticX

The only thing you can really do is be there for her when she needs it

ceres

Be there for her, let her talk when she needs it. What more can you do? It sounds like you know she'll be (mostly) okay, and what the whole thing really needs is time. She sounds like a survivor.

DrFrylock

She keeps talking about running away to a new city and starting anew, she's exhausted, she's frustrated, she's hurt - and she's too proud really - she'd never call either of those friends and say she needs them. She's gearing up for college, too, and the few people she has who are at least friendly with her are all also getting ready, and mostly leaving for faraway places.

She's going to leave her hometown and go to college? Based on your description, it sounds like this is probably the best thing she could be doing. As a friend, there's little you can do except help steer her in a direction to become successful and independent.

You can't fix these issues. Many adults have a lot of these deep-seated issues and NEVER get around to confronting or addressing them. I think that getting some initial distance from the situation is actually probably healthy. There's a difference between establishing healthy distance and running away. If she left and never talked to anyone in her family again, that would probably be running away. But that's something to assess a long time from now.

The lashing out is a sort of coping mechanism that she's developed as a way of being part of a dysfunctional family unit. One difficulty with this particular strategy is that, while it's served to help her survive her family thus far, if she applies it outside in the real world, she's going to have a lot of trouble. If you tell off your Mom, she's still your Mom. If you tell off your professor, your boss, or your landlord, you're out on your ass. The reason I'd worry about this is because people tend to use the problem-solving skills that have worked for them in the past (or that they perceive have worked for them in the past). If you see her doing this, you want to discourage it, as she'll end up burning these new relationships she needs for an independent life. This will quickly create a vicious cycle: she makes a little progress, she has a (normal) setback, she gets depressed, she lashes out, because of this she loses the progress, so she gets more depressed, etc.

The first order of business once your friend moves away is for her to establish an independent life for herself. This doesn't mean not having a support network, although it may mean building up a new one, and starting small. But she needs to start being more OK all by herself. Independence is a big self-confidence booster, and after living in an environment like this, self-confidence is something that will be in terribly short supply. You might even say that the lashing out behavior is a symptom of low self-confidence, but this is a little bit of interpolation at this point.

She doesn't have to cut off ties with her family. However, if she wants to be healthy, she will have to go through a long and arduous process of re-establishing boundaries with her family members. Neither you nor your friend will be able to fix the family, and they may never get better. However, once she's established some emotional distance and independence, she will be able to slowly start to recreate relationships. The people with whom she does this may still be dysfunctional, but she will decide on what level she wants to - and can - deal with each of them in a way that's healthy this time.

Although it may be a little premature to think about this, she could use some therapy with a counselor that's well-versed in family systems theory. This won't tell her how to fix her family, but it will help her get some perspective on the situation and guide the boundary-resetting process.

As her friend, I think you should encourage her move and her independence. It doesn't have to be financial. You guys can just learn to shop and do laundry together, or whatever. At this point in her life, having a boyfriend might not be the best idea. When someone has just left a big support system (even a dysfunctional one) and then gets into a relationship, they have a tendency to move all that emotional burden onto their new partner. This almost never ends well for either party because it generally takes the unhealthy family boundaries and transferring them to the partner. Her focus should be on being OK with herself.

hippofant

First of all, she needs to deal with her brother. Someone needs to deal with her brother. Regardless of whether he stole her property or whether he'll beat her up again, he was violent towards a sister he apparently loves. I don't like what that could mean for other women in his life. She's not reporting him to the police, because she feels bad for him? Fine, I get that, she feels partially responsible for his situation, but you can't take half-responsibility for a person's well-being. You can try, but you can't. The next time he hurts somebody, she's going to, rightfully, feel responsible.

I don't mean to say that she should necessarily report him to the police, which might be ineffective anyways - I am not knowledgeable about the British legal system - but not talking to him isn't a responsible response. His violence against her is either her problem or not her problem. If it is her problem, she needs to find a way to address it, perhaps with support. If it isn't her problem, then she should just report him to the police and leave it. I don't know how not doing anything about it is a conscionable act, and assuming she has a conscience, it's an emotional damage bomb liable to go off. I could write entire pages about the brother situation, and how it relates to battered wife syndrome, the recurrence of violence in domestic relationships, violence against women, the whole shebang, but I do not see how this act was tolerable.


Secondly, you lose friends moving into college. It happens. Nobody's ever convinced of it, but it happens. I shed more than half of my high school friends, staying on good terms with most of them, but still. She shouldn't beat herself up over it. The terrible truth about friendships is that they end, and they can break your heart just like romantic relationships. And just like romantic relationships, you get over them with time and by meeting and making new friends. She's going to have a hell of an opportunity to do so in September, so encourage her to go out and do so. The first few months of university is tough as you jump from one social circle into another, even if you're rooming with your best friend (as I was).

Thirdly, she needs to get away from her family. I don't mean cut contact entirely, but she needs to get away. I don't know why she can't leave for somewhere else for school, since at least here in Canada, the government will provide financial aid for study away from home. But clearly her mother and her brother, while not necessarily horrible people, are creating a vitriolic home environment for her, and she needs to get away from that. I don't know that that's entirely feasible, since I'm unaware of her financial situation or how university funding is provided in the UK, but when your home environment is causing you stress, that'll do a number on anybody's emotional well-being.



As for you, there's not much you can actually change. Mention these ideas to her, if you agree, and other possible solutions, but it's ultimately solely on her to make these changes. (Except for the issue with her brother. You can do something about that, though you'll have to weigh the repercussions of that on your own.) You need to reflect on you own needs and tolerances. Assert the former, and prepare to stretch the latter. I would tell both your friends that you're not taking sides, and toss in a few, "You're both fucking idiots, and here's why"s.

And you will get frustrated and pissed with her, as her stress levels increase and she starts taking it out on you. But again, I think candid, polite, assertive communication is the way to go about it. Seek her out and apologize if you blow up at her. Tell her why she upset you or why she's frustrating you, and don't be condescending about it. She's probably fully conscious of the shit spiral her life's taken and its toll on her personality, so....

But be ready to not achieve anything. All you can do is be there, make suggestions, and firmly establish your own limits. If she chooses not to confide in you, or listen to you, or blow past your limits, that's that, you know?


Anyways, I'm hardly the authority on this. I too have a similar situation with a younger female friend in university, who drinks every night to the point of not remembering what she does or, distressingly, what was done to her, and sleeps with sleazebags who drop her, publicly accuse her of giving them STIs, or hit her. The above is the approach I've taken, not that it's changed anything, but I'm somewhat resigned to it being all I can do. I hope somebody later in this thread has a magical solution, but....

DrFrylock

hippofant wrote: »

The next time he hurts somebody, she's going to, rightfully, feel responsible.

No, absolutely not. She is not responsible for her brother's actions, her brother is responsible for her brother's actions.

Anyway, what is she supposed to realistically do about this? It sounds like lashing out, physically and emotionally, are "in the family way" here. Her brother has a lot of the same problems she does. What is she going to do that's going to help her brother deal with 20+ years of optimizing his existence for a dysfunctional system? She hasn't even gotten to the point where she can deal with it herself. This guy needs a therapist, and so does his sister. His sister is not qualified to be his therapist, and given her state of mind can likely only make things worse.

Furthermore, many people do things within the family unit that they would never consider doing outside, because they know they can't get away with it outside. I can't tell you how many knock-down drag-out screaming matches I've seen between family members, where neither one of them would consider saying the same things to friends or coworkers.

I understand the argument about violence being unacceptable (against women or anybody else), and as I pointed out, people tend to take the coping strategies that they perceive worked for them into future relationships and situations. This includes violently lashing out. At some point, you have to contain this behavior, simply because it's dangerous. That's what the police are for. But the police and the correctional justice system aren't going to make this guy stop WANTING to lash out. They might make him afraid to, but do you really want this person to be in a state where he really wants to beat people up, and the only reason he doesn't is because he doesn't want to go to jail? To a first order, I guess that's good, but of course it just encourages him to become more creative, so he lashes out in ways that he won't get caught. Abusers can be devious. They know that nobody gets arrested for verbal and emotional abuse. They know that things like hair-pulling don't leave marks. It's sick, I know, but I've seen it happen.

If anybody besides the brother should feel responsible for his actions, it's his parents. If they don't, then it's an awfully big burden to drop on any single individual, especially one who's not an authority figure and who didn't raise him. This is why interventions usually involve the family and wider circle of friends as a whole, plus a third-party facilitator who doesn't know the people involved. At the moment, however, it seems like the whole family needs an intervention.

This is why I'm so strongly in favor of family systems theory, by the way - because it addresses systemic root causes. Attempting to "fix" the brother's violence problem while ignoring the dysfunctional family system that created it is difficult, if not impossible, and ultimately it's counterproductive. Although it's imperfect, this book is a very good place to start. Once you start to understand all the connections in the family system and how they subtly pushed people into different roles and behaviors, you can start to understand what's out of balance and how to maybe put things back together.

hippofant

DrFrylock wrote: »

hippofant wrote: »

The next time he hurts somebody, she's going to, rightfully, feel responsible.

No, absolutely not. She is not responsible for her brother's actions, her brother is responsible for her brother's actions.

She's already taken emotional responsibility for it, because she "feels bad for him". At some level, because he's her brother, or because she feels as though she instigated the conflict, or because they're coming from the same environment. I'm not saying that she's should take responsibility for his actions, but having already taken some emotional responsibility for it, proceeding then to deny the event ever occurred is not a good coping mechanism. Without a good faith effort to mitigate his violent behaviour, I would imagine this emotional responsibility would grow if he were to commit future acts of violence.

The best way I can put this is, if one of my friends beat up his girlfriend, and not only did I not stop it but then I did nothing to prevent future beatings as well, that would weigh heavily on me. Maybe I'm weird in that respect, but they're not strangers in an abusive relationship, who I -intellectually- know are out there but -emotionally- do not impact me. I think with situations such as this, you either need to attempt to address it in good faith or be able to cut the emotional tie and treat the person as though (s)he was a stranger.

I'm not saying she needs to single-handedly resolve the situation, but I see her as being in this neither-here-nor-there denial state, and she (and APZonerunner) needs to commit to either "This is my problem," or "This isn't my problem", not lie in between. If, via your reasoning, she can convince herself that she was not responsible for his action, then yay, but in that case, then his brother is responsible for his actions and she needs to behave as such. Right now, her inactions indicate that she's absorbed responsibility for the previous violence against her and will be absorbing responsibility for future acts of violence, and that's no good.