ConcernedFriend Posted December 1, 2012 Posted December 1, 2012 Hey, As the title of this post indicates, I'm not suffering from a breakup personally. However, I have a friend whose suffering seems to have reached new heights. (Possibly new depths, you be the judge.) The dumping in question occurred two and a half years ago and she hasn't recovered at all. Despite constant hunting for someone new, no one lives up to the absolute fabulous-ness of the ex. (Despite the fact that the ex wouldn't commit, evaded all attempts at commitment while proclaiming he loved her and chose someone else over her.) I can't understand why she still thinks this person is so incredible, despite all the claims of how he made her feel. I mean, she certainly hasn't felt so fabulous over the past two years. I am completely at a loss here and feel helpless as a friend. There have been multiple attempts at suicide, some more serious than others, with frequent talk of more. And it's not the annoying melodramatic type of "I want to die" thing, it's all very calm and logical with well reasoned arguments (if completely nonsensical) given as to why it's the best option. There have been tentative attempts at counseling and one foray into medication that did nothing and have made her incredibly resistant to further attempts. There have also been very brief stints of hospitalization that didn't help and it's not really legally possible to keep her there. (She's very bright and is perfectly sane and normal about everything else.) Her family and friends all know about the situation and no one can make a dent in it. She still wants this one person and absolutely nothing else. He's 'perfect'. She acknowledges that her family, her friends her job, none of it matters without him. Life isn't worth living without him and she knows he wants nothing to do with her. Short of a lobotomy, I am out of ideas. I've seen some dark breakups in my skimming of the boards here, and I want to know: For the lowest of the low, what finally did the trick? What finally helped? I'm fairly certain that just about everything has been tried, but I've realized that a group of people with a similar experience is the only resource I haven't consulted. Anything you have to say will be most appreciated and I'll happily answer any questions if more info would help. Thank you.
Toddbt12y1 Posted December 1, 2012 Posted December 1, 2012 I am sorry to hear how much tragic pain your friend is going through. I never tried to kill myself...have wanted badly to doe after losing my lover to her cheating. I hit very low. It effected my daily life and communication with friends and family. I still have my moments. What worked for me was when I realized that the person I loves didn't even care anyway if I were dead or alive. She was happy, did it all with a smile on her face. I realized that. Since then I make efforts to recover. Sounds like she has become obsessive over her ex...I know the feeling. At this rate, if nothing else reaches her then she herself must help herself. In the end...we who fall low(many lower)...must help themselves from ruin. She has to come to the realization that he doesn't care for Her. Never did. All of that sweet moments was an illusion of love. She must see her potential: she is a remarkable person, who is fully capable of finding a man who will love her like she needs.
Exit Posted December 2, 2012 Posted December 2, 2012 (edited) I was going to use "time" as my answer, but then I had to reread your post and realize the two and a half year period you're referring to is not the length of the relationship, but how long it has been since the breakup. Two and a half years is a lot. Time doesn't seem to be helping. I consider myself the worst of the worst when it comes to handling breakups. I get suicidal and hopeless and all of that crap. But I have never seen it linger much longer than a year, maybe a year and a half. I either end up meeting someone else, or like I am currently going through, a year is enough time to just get used to being single and start caring about other things. "Time" probably isn't a good plan for someone who has given it two and a half years and still talks about suicide. I don't really know then. Aside from being a good friend which you clearly are, what more can you do? You can't make this your own personal burden. People have to want to get better. Some people want to remain stuck even if they won't admit it. I don't think anyone who "wanted" to move on could honestly still be this bad after 2 years, so your friend probably wants to keep missing this guy, whether it's on a conscious or subconscious level. Maybe it sounds like a strange accusation, but as I said, I think anyone with even the slightest desire to heal and who wanted to understand that the sun still rises in the morning and they are going to be okay, would have some progress in this amount of time. Some people get dumped and replace the person they lost with the grief they have over losing them. To get to the point that she doesn't miss him or feel pain over the breakup anymore would be losing yet another part of her relationship with him. At this point that's all she has left of him, the pain she feels when she thinks of him. So she still wants part of him and she's gonna hold onto that grief. I'm not really sure what "tentative attempts" at counseling mean, but if she hasn't given it a serious effort, she needs to try again. Some sort of wires are crossed in her. Something is making her act this way. This isn't about love anymore. I'm the most hopeless romantic in the world but even I won't try to justify missing somebody for over 2 years. It could be something related to her early life, her relationship with her parents, anything really, but something made her totally unwilling to accept when someone doesn't love her, and unable to love herself enough to move on. There's no way this guy can be worth feeling this way over, because as you alluded to, the only person worth loving this much would be a guy who wouldn't leave her in the first place. This happens with girls a lot who did not have the love they needed from their father. So they go out into the world and try to find it elsewhere, and when another man starts to reject them, they fight it to the death, because they feel like another rejection means that their father was right all along and they must not be worthy of love. So they'll keep up this battle, trying to win love from someone who doesn't want to give it to them, to try to validate their existence to themselves and to the rest of the world. Maybe she had a good relationship with her father, but something must be happening here on a deeper level. You don't just become the type of person who would obsess over an ex for 2.5 years without something else in your life having gone off track much earlier. Healthy people wouldn't do this. I'd say she has all the right in the world to mourn this for as long as she wants, but I draw the line at suicidal ideation and attempts. You can't expect people to want to be in your life and maintain relationships with you and risk that one morning they are going to find out you died. Watch a TV show like intervention where they are confronting people with unhealthy addictions, and all the friends and family members have to tell the addict that they either get better or they will no longer be able to stay in touch with that person because they don't want to watch them die. It almost seems like your friend needs something like that, although it sounds risky to threaten her with even more abandonment. She needs to realize that although she was victimized and wounded, she is also being selfish and hurting others, making her loved ones see her like this for 2 years. Tough love is a very touchy subject and I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. But she needs to realize that she could lose other people if she doesn't stop this. In a way, she is downright insulting everyone else by saying her life isn't worth living despite having friends and family, because she cares more about someone who would leave her in the dust. So if she isn't going to appreciate all of you and she thinks her life is so worthless, maybe she does need to be faced with the possibility of everyone else leaving her too, because she openly yet indirectly makes it sound like she doesn't value anyone else. Her friends and family should be enough of a reason to want to live, but nope, she has no problem with the idea of suicide, which would hurt all of you and insult you in the process. I would say maybe specifically draw the line at the suicidal behavior, you don't need to tell her that nobody will be her friend anymore unless she 100% gets over this guy, you can't force that on her, but you can try to tell her that taking it to the point of suicide needs to stop otherwise you are going to distance yourself because you will not be a witness to that or enable her. People do not change unless there are consequences, or rewards. The more I think about this situation the more I am starting to think she's a candidate for tough love treatment. We're not talking about someone who has been sad for 6 months here. For over two years she has been putting herself and everyone around her through this. And like I just finished saying, it is frankly insulting to all the rest of you who HAVE stayed by her side compared to this guy who dumped her, apparently you all aren't worth living for or being happy about. Maybe you could liken this to a drug addiction where an addict latches on to some unhealthy substance and acts like the rest of their life is worthless and never made them happy. Your friend's addiction is her grief. And maybe she needs some type of hard reality check along the lines of an intervention. You all can't keep babying her and enabling her. Just like how families and friends of addicts think they are being friendly and supportive when really they are helping the addict kill themselves. Your friend is in a similar situation, there might not be drugs involved, but she is stuck in an unhealthy rut that is going to lead to her death. Only when addicts are faced with their family and friends saying "we aren't going to support you doing this anymore, you can't come to our house, you can't borrow money, we won't give you a ride", do they ever even begin to consider that their behavior needs to change, or they are going to lose everything. Just like the families of a drug addict, this might sound scary to you and you might think it will just push her even further over the edge. Tough love is a scary tactic to use. But I'm sure you've tried many other things in the past two years and those haven't exactly worked either. It's just a thought. This was not even what I had in mind when I initially started replying to you. And then that comparison of an intervention slipped into my mind and I started to realize there were even more parallels there than I thought. It's unhealthy, it's a habit leading to only illness and death, and the family and friends who keep sending the message that it's okay to keep feeling this way are just enabling her. Something has to give. Do you want to keep going down this road until one day everyone gets the phone call that her newest attempt succeeded? Whenever you start to feel bad for her or too guilty to give her some tough love, just remember, she doesn't exactly think you're the greatest thing in the world either, she doesn't look at her life and think "gee I have great friends who have stuck with me through this entire mess". Hell even the fact that you're on this website speaking on a friend's behalf, I don't think I've ever seen someone posting on the forums to try to help someone else. You're probably giving an awful lot of yourself to this situation, time energy and concern, and at some point this becomes just as toxic of a relationship for you as your friend's obsession with her ex is. If she doesn't want to get help soon and get onto a different path in life, you can't keep trying to help her do this for years on end. When you give someone an ultimatum like an intervention, you basically say hey, we'll all be standing over here, waiting for you to join us. We're not going to keep walking down your road with you anymore. You are absolutely welcome to come join us over here, where there is health and happiness and a point to being alive. We're not abandoning you, but we do not feel that we are being truly supportive by helping you to continue doing what you've been doing so far. Quite the opposite actually, we're harming you by trying to pretend that this doesn't need to change drastically, and soon. We're not going to keep pretending until that day comes that you make another suicide attempt. So come join us over here, let's figure out what type of help you need, and you won't lose any of us. If she's unwilling to accept that, then the road she chooses is her own and nobody else's, and it's important to change your perspective at that point to realize SHE is abandoning YOU for her addictions, and not that you're abandoning her. Improperly directed guilt is what keeps people doing things like this for way too long. You feel guilty, you feel like you'd be giving up on her, but actually she is the one giving up on you and everyone else who cares about her. So stop feeling like the bad guy. Even her ex isn't the bad guy. At this point, it's just her, not loving herself and not loving the people who stand by her. The entire point of the ultimatum is to take the responsibility and the guilt out of your hands, and put it where it belongs, on the other person. She doesn't have to lose a single other person in her life, all she has to do is make a commitment to feeling better and everyone will stay with her. But if she doesn't want to get on board with that, then she is the one doing the abandoning and the giving up. And at that point it really is better for your health and sanity to walk away and not be so attached to her when she finally kills herself, if that's what she's determined to do. Edited December 2, 2012 by Exit
Author ConcernedFriend Posted December 2, 2012 Author Posted December 2, 2012 "Some people get dumped and replace the person they lost with the grief they have over losing them. To get to the point that she doesn't miss him or feel pain over the breakup anymore would be losing yet another part of her relationship with him. At this point that's all she has left of him, the pain she feels when she thinks of him. So she still wants part of him and she's gonna hold onto that grief." I think this might be one of the wisest things I've ever heard and it's really going to give me something to think about. Regarding the attempts at counseling, I should probably mention that this woman and I (I'll randomly call her Ann) first met in a Mensa meeting at our ivy league law school. I'd guess attorneys in general make the worst counseling clients possible, because we're trained to make arguments out of anything and present them convincingly. Ann actually recorded her last counseling attempt and let me listen to it and if it wasn't so horribly sad it would've been hilarious. Ann answers every question with what she feels is complete honesty, but at the same time, each answer is fractionally slanted to prove herself right. It's like everything is 98% fact and 2% neurotic, crazy bull*****. Only the counselor just couldn't process it quickly enough to latch onto and point out the bull***** parts. Even though the shrink could tell that the statements weren't completely logical somehow, she couldn't keep up with my friend's smooth and matter-of-fact delivery of it all. I could hear the counselor growing embarrassed and flustered, and by the end the woman clearly (to my ears) couldn't wait to get rid of her and told Ann she needed to go to a medical doctor and get medication immediately. At which all Ann mentally heard was, "I have no answers or hope for you and cannot help you, go dope yourself into a stupor." Ann has valid points and I don't really blame the counselor for having no clue what to say. Ann's first marriage failed because she was more interested in her hobbies than her husband and they didn't have much in common, and she was so thrilled to find someone who shared all her extremely unusual and limited interests. And after years of doing her thing alone, I'm not surprised that she fell so hard for someone who loved the things she loves and it was really the first time she got to experience the whole wildly glowy in love thing. Now she wants nothing BUT the wildly glowy in love feeling, and her interests truly are limited enough that she may never find someone like this guy again. I mean, she's right about that. I won't give specifics, but it's like a woman wanting to find a man who collects porcelain dolls with wild enthusiasm. This guy was an oddity, and there's no way to say otherwise. She's right, she may never find it again. However, in my mind he was an oddity who didn't love her and didn't want her, so clearly he's wrong for her either way. I'm also going to give the whole intervention thing some thought, but I'm not sure an intervention really works on someone who sees no point to living. I mean, I'm not sure what actions we could demand she stop doing. She gets up, she does her job - though she no longer enjoys it. She goes through all the motions of her old life. She's joined dating sites and has gone out with multiple people. She's even slept with a couple. It's not like she's sitting in the house with unwashed hair and eating ice cream all day, she just sees no reason to live while knowing she may never feel that way again. Anyhow, thank you both for your responses. I truly, truly, TRULY appreciate them!
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