Last week, a newish but close friendship crashed and burned.
It was not the first friendship casualty in recent times.
There’s the friend who suddenly cut contact after she and her son had been a regular part of my and my son’s lives for eight years, including childcare swaps and sleepovers. The reason? My 12-year-old son making an ill-advised, childish comment in complete innocence that triggered her, and my failure to immediately take her side.
It was a momentary schism that seemed totally resolvable to me but was, apparently, a deal-breaker for her. I messaged her after a couple of years and her response was, “We both said things we regretted.” I let go of what felt like an untruth; my memory was of being attacked out of the blue. When I passed her in the street recently, she nodded coldly to me as if to a stranger.
More recently, a friend I’d been in daily contact with for two years, and supported in many ways, not only abruptly ended the friendship — suddenly deciding we had a ‘trauma bond’ — but tried to throw me out of a women’s group I had invited her in to.
And in March this year, I finally went ‘no contact’ with my biological sister after repeated trust ruptures in which I could see no way forward.
As I lamented the loss of this latest friend to my fellow autistic ADHD buddy, who I’ll call G, there was one key phrase he said to me that really landed.
“We’re nice, but we’re also grumpy and prickly, and have to have our space. We have strong needs and we need naps.”
I realised what was at the core of all of these dramatic crash-and-burns.
Because I’d be the last one to say that these friendships ending was ‘all their fault’ (much as parts of me would have liked to).
The truth is, these friends loved the kind, angelic, all-giving ‘me’ they initially met, but they did not like the ‘unmasked me’ that inevitably emerged, either gradually or suddenly, during the course of our friendship.
The ‘me’ that also has needs, feelings and boundaries and expresses them, rather than just being eternally available to hold space for theirs.
People are often drawn to the approachable, open demeanour that I (initially) present with. I’m an attentive and empathetic listener and my skills of reading people have been honed by growing up in a dysfunctional home where close observation of others’ moods, feelings and needs was vital to survival. I often let people into my life impulsively (another ADHD trait is lack of impulse control) without letting them show me who they are over time - and this has had disastrous results.
Since I discovered my ADHD and, later, my autism, I’ve been in a gradual process of unmasking.
Unmasking the less sociable sides of me, unwinding myself from people-pleasing tendencies and becoming more centred in my own experience. With this has come the sobering penny-drop that I am not, in fact, as ‘nice’ as people think I am, and how I’ve adapted to be. With this, has come a much higher frequency of people being annoyed with me — something I used to avoid at all costs (and still causes a lot of discomfort).
During my school days, where I was relegated to the outskirts of the playground, I learned that being kind and helpful to those who were even less fortunate — in other words, more frequently picked on — than me was the way to find friends. Yes, I’m a person who tunes easily into others’ feelings, but this was a matter of survival.
I swallowed my real feelings about people and pretended a lot. This grew into a tendency to attract troubled people, such as my best friend at age sixteen. With a rage-aholic, possibly narcissistic, mother and problematic levels of drinking in her home, her family seemed even more tumultuous than mine, and she had a self-harm habit to boot (as well as a propensity for trying to steal my boyfriends, even when, at one point, she had two).
In comparison to these kinds of friends, I could feel a little less fucked-up, rejected and weird. The ‘healthier’ people from more loving, stable homes never seemed attracted to me — an unfortunate relic of CPTSD, as I’ve since come to realise.
In adulthood, partners tended to be alcoholics, work addicts or sex addicts, and the relationships fraught with pain and turbulence. I do have several emotionally healthy, reasonably well-adjusted friends, who have needed therapy just as much as most of us but can ‘hold’ their own stuff and don’t tend to ‘act out’ in destructive ways. But there has always been, at any given time, ‘the troubled friend’, the one who leans on me a bit too much and then lands with a thud when I, inevitably, let them down.
Because after stretching my boundaries for a certain amount of time, giving and giving, something else kicks in.
A self-preservation instinct. A desperate desire for it all to stop, to escape being so needed by another person, which suddenly feels unbearable.
A drive for autonomy and freedom that manifests as an urge to retreat and underpins my autistic side.
It used to take years before it all blew apart, and now, apparently, it’s only taking months. This last friend was only in my life for less than four months, and we’d met just once in person, but the clear signs that she was developing an unhealthy dependency on me quickly became red flags. Her escalating demands and clear sense of entitlement to my time and attention alerted me to the fact that she had appointed me in the role rightfully reserved for a close, long-term friend, partner or family member.
I realised with horror that she seemed to expect me to be her sole emotional support figure, available, at the drop of a hat, to drive an hour to her home to support her with health issues, even though she knew I had my own fatigue issues and that longer drives are a struggle for me.
What tipped things over the edge? I started gently stating my boundaries, saying what I was not available for, or what I was nearing a limit on. Initially, these boundaries were accepted, at least on the surface of things, but there was still pushing and attempts to skirt around them.
Things came to a head when I hit my premenstrual week of higher overwhelm and exhaustion (like many women and AFAB, my ADHD and autism are significantly impacted by shifting hormones). Instead of feeling compassionate towards her, I was shocked to find that I had completely run out of patience. When her relentlessly intrusive texts, full of demands, kept coming in, I wished her well but told her I couldn’t help at this time. A week later, she sent me an angry ‘break up’ message, telling me to never contact her again.
What a relief it was, in contrast, to get on the phone to G, my fellow neurodivergent friend. G has taught me a lot about having good boundaries. When we met, volunteering and living at a retreat centre in South-West England last year, he impressed me with his ability to stave off unwelcome pre-breakfast conversation in the communal room with a simple “I’m not ready to talk yet.”
I remember looking at him incredulously, thinking, You’re allowed to say that?
The other side of this was that I felt totally safe to have a ‘no’ at any moment in my friendship with G. If we’d arranged to have a call and I no longer felt in capacity to have the call at the appointed time, he wouldn’t get into a mood with me if I postponed. He’d understand, because on another occasion, that could be him — and he would suggest a voice note catch up instead. We were both consistently there for each other, but just not in ways that undermined our own well-being.
Growing up in 1980’s/1990’s conservative South Africa, I was brought up to be polite and nice to a fault. Feelings were not mentioned, and your personal preferences didn’t matter nearly as much as appearing to get along with everyone. With autism in the picture, alexythmia, a difficulty with knowing or being able to describe what you are feeling, can also make boundaries extra hard.
The difficulty is that this capacity changes from day to day and week to week. Sometimes, I’m happy to text a friend throughout the day, exchanging titbits of our daily activities and emotional journeys. Other times, I need to totally withdraw, turn the phone off, and be in my own headspace.
I can see how this can be confusing to people. One takeaway from this recent friendship breakup is that I intend to be clearer with people from the outset about my relative inconsistency and the fact that I, too, have limits due to my own energy issues. Another is to listen to the first, or maybe second, red flag (because people deserve a second chance), and move away from a friendship where exaggerated dependency is coming into the picture from early on. If I’m getting alarm bells, I need to listen to those.
This is easier said than done, with the CPTSD-derived ‘override button’ that has me ignoring my instincts because my connection to them was so undermined in my childhood — but it’s a work-in-progress and I’m getting better. This last friendship took only 4 months to unravel, whereas the last unhealthy one took 2 years.
Yes, I’ve got a kind side. But I also have my ‘no’ side and I have to make room for that, too.
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I like your writing.
I found for myself, having lived communally a lot, that always having connection "on tap" actually blocked me from really owning the side of me that is just super-needy and desperate for connection. Spending some years traveling alone in countries where I don't speak the language actually helped me to see and move into that side, with my daily bioenergetics practice and pushing myself to keep going out and meeting people.
I remember reading about attachment theory years ago and the "secure" individual who had a good childhood and stuff. I'm not convinced these guys really exist though. It seems to me like some people look like happy and functional on the surface but, dig in a little, and it's clear they're really just doing whatever to hold it all together.
Thanks again.