Dear Tineoidea,

sorry, I got the wrong impression, since you said there was some romantic interest from your former friend towards you in the beginning of your relationship, plus your name sounded female to me, so I concluded that you were a woman. Sorry about that.

This throws a different light on the problem, since of course, she isn’t confused about her sexual identity, but she really turned 180 degrees for seemingly inexplicable reasons.

I’ll quote those same paragraph I quoted before, which shows her confusion:

What surfaced during this interaction is that she indeed still loves me, misses me a lot and doesn’t feel romantic love when it comes to my former friend.
Yet she still wants to try things with him and absolutely doesn’t want to give us two a chance, she wants to move on.

Why would she want to “try things with him”, if she doesn’t feel any romantic attraction to him? Why is she breaking up with you if she still loves you and misses you? It’s a mystery… Perhaps he managed to manipulate her so thoroughly that she doesn’t trust you any more? Perhaps she had some reservations or worries about you in the past, and he confirmed her doubts, telling stories about you that portray you in a bad light? She did say “I don’t know myself”, so maybe she is easily swayed and manipulated?

Based on your description, she doesn’t sound like a narcissist to me. What makes you think she is a narcissist?

Dear Tineoidea,

What happened with my friend and her, is uncanny similar to the “triangulation” performed by narcissists where they put your friends against you and then may use them as their next supply.

Actually, your former friend sounds like a narcissist. He first tried to manipulate you against her, and when that didn’t work out, he turned against you. This is how he behaved at the beginning:

A “friend” I’ve known for a long time, became jealous and angry about her “replacing” him and began to project all sort of delusions onto her, such as her being a pretender that will only harm me, will tear us two apart and so on (ironically prophetic).
He became rather nasty with her, treating her like a lesser being.

He told you she was a pretender that will only harm you. I can imagine he later said the same about you – that you are a pretender who will only harm her. And for some reason, she believed him. In fact, you said she admitted she was the one who sought contact with him, even though he treated her badly in the beginning (I’ve had a very heated conversation with her recently, with a lot of emotions, mixed signals and her saying that it is her who chose to engage with him actively and let him in).

For some reason, she sought his company and wanted to stay close to him. Could it be that she used him as a source of “confidential information” about you because she didn’t know you well enough, while he was your long-time friend? You also said: My legal and economic situations are very convoluted though and so the progress has been slow, nevertheless we had the plan B or simply marrying to get me out of this swamp.

Could it be that she didn’t like your “convoluted legal and economic situation”, and that this, together with the manipulation and lies by your former friend, caused her to give up on getting married to you? I don’t know anything about the legal situation you find yourself in, but I can imagine that a problematic legal status can repel a person, specially if they are risk averse and fear getting in any kind of legal trouble by associating/being married to you (this is just an assumption, please disregard if it’s not applicable to your situation and you didn’t represent any kind of legal risk for her).

Because she exhibited complete lack of empathy and care towards me, who was also her closest friend when all of this went down. I’ve been discarded as if nothing had happened in between us, treated very poorly and emotionally abused for weeks.

She was conflicted. You said that at times she was loving and affectionate, at other times she was rude and angry. It’s like two sides fought inside of her, and in the end, her mistrust prevailed. Clearly, she didn’t treat you well, but still, she doesn’t seem like a narcissist to me, however your male friend does.

Dear Tineoidea,

My legal situation isn’t anything “illegal” per se, and certainly not something which could have put her in trouble.

Right, so it cannot be a reason for her withdrawing.

Well, her behavior is certainly weird, starting from the fact that she sought contact with him, even though he attacked her and badmouthed her, and then refused to apologize:

He became rather nasty with her, treating her like a lesser being. She had suffered a lot over it, cried a lot. I was intent on cutting him off since he simply refused to reason, apologize and own up, instead he kept doubling up on his abuse of her and made me lose more and more trust in him. Meanwhile, she kept wanting for things to work out, didn’t want me to lose an old friend, and so I kept trying to mediate.

Usually, narcissistic people don’t tolerate someone talking rubbish about them, so the fact that she did tells me she isn’t a narcissist. It’s almost as if in the beginning she cared more about your friendship with him than she cared about herself? She had some strange attraction to this rude, abrasive person, even if he’s offended her multiple times, and he also worked against you (I must say that he also endangered my livehood, and she was aware of it.).

In any case, whatever her psychological profile is, she is a troubled person, and I do believe she has some self-destructive tendencies. You said she has a history of being stuck in abusive relationships. It seems to me that she rejected a promising relationship with you for an abusive, manipulative relationship with your former friend. And it can only be because of her unresolved emotional issues, probably stemming from her childhood.

I think there won’t be any revelations until she disengages herself from him and re-arranges her mind.

I don’t think you should hope for her to renew the relationship, until she’s worked on her issues. Because she is unstable and unable to assess the situation properly, and as she herself admitted, “she doesn’t know herself”.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Tee.

Dear Tineoidea,

Another thing is that she began to spend disproportionately large amounts of time with him, going as far as pushing away her friends and me. Likewise she’s been “babying” him a lot as well as excusing him of everything bad he did and fiercely defending him against any criticism. It seems she sees him as some sort of “victim” who needs to be saved.

All of it is very unlike the healthy yet deep relationship we two had where our friends were never neglected and we always exchanged fair criticism.

It appears she was able to function normally with you, but there is a part of her susceptible to this man’s charm and manipulation, which overtook and made her lose her compass. This susceptible part is like her Achilles heel, her weak spot, and she completely lost perspective. Your former friend maybe reminds her of one of her parents, and that’s why she got so blindsided? Do you know anything about her childhood?

Dear Tineoidea:

“Help me make sense of this”  is the title of your thread which you started 2 weeks ago, August 20. On the same day I tried to do just that, make sense of it and I posted to you (“M” and “he”/”his” stand for your former possessive male friend, “W” and “she”/”her” stand for your former girlfriend; the boldface feature is my addition in this post):

“You were strong enough to overlook his possessiveness, strong enough to endure a rocky relationship with him. Sometime after W entered a relationship with M, she was not strong enough to overlook his possessiveness, and she was not strong enough to endure a rocky relationship with him. She felt too much empathy for him, and too much of a desire to please him. So she pleased his desire to possess her… His possessiveness found its satisfaction with W, he finally succeeded to possess someone. And so, he replaced you with her. As a result of being possessed, W is confused, lost and troubled“.

On the same day, Aug 20, you responded to my post above with: “Thank you for the insight, this is similar to what I and my friends came with. Now I just don’t know what to do about it“.

The day after, August 21, you posted: “I’ve had a very heated conversation with her recently, with a lot of emotions, mixed signals and her saying that it is her who chose to engage with him actively and let him in. Not sure if that was just her way of defending him but it projects and even worse scenario, that she actively chose to betray me“-

– at this point on, your perception of the situation has started to change from M being the strong, possessive, dominant of the two (the two being M and W), the one who was betraying you to===> an “even worse scenario”, one where W is the strong, possessive, dominant of the two, the one betraying you. Your focus then shifted from M to W as the cause of your pain, the one who hurt you and the object of your anger.

The day after, August 22, you posted: “We’ve had a very emotive call and she decided to cut off the communication for good.. she still wants to try things with him and absolutely doesn’t want to give us two a chance, she wants to move on. She also refused to meet face to face and give it a proper closure, which sits very wrong with me as I think it is only the decent thing to do when it comes to such a lifechanging decision“-  another very emotional call and you are very angry at her for choosing another man over you. M is now in the background, not important to the story: it is W who is strong, dominant, the one betraying you.

Seven days later, August 29, and your perception of W as strong, dominant and rejecting cemented into the popular name calling and synonym for evil, used massively online against rejecting romantic partners: a narcissist (A NARC is the more degrading term): “I believe I had managed to unravel the mystery. After countless hours of reading.. I came to the conclusion that she suffers from the Covert version of NPD (Narcissist Personality Disorder)“.

“According to her, she always felt some sort of unexplainable empathy and draw towards him.. She did mention feeling an unexplainable attraction and empathy towards him”, “she’s been ‘babying’ him a lot as well as excusing him of everything bad he did and fiercely defending him against any criticism. It seems she sees him as some sort of ‘victim’ who needs to be saved”, “She.. .began spending every day with him and also turned against me, now parroting his hatred against me“-

– what all this means is that she saw the hurt, sad child inside the angry, possessive and insulting adult M, and she will do anything to make this child happy. She wants to save that child (a child who does not exist except as a mental entity in the adult M). During the emotional calls you had with her around Aug 21-22, she was like a fierce Mother defending her minor-age son, a boy who she feels needs to be defended and protected from a dangerous world.

“her saying that it is her who chose to engage with him actively and let him in. Not sure if that was just her way of defending him but it projects and even worse scenario, that she actively chose to betray me“- her intent is to defend him, not to betray you.

“she denied romantic involvement with him, saying that she doesn’t know what’s going on exactly“- like I said, I think that her attraction to him is her strongly-felt need to protect the hurt, sad, weak boy that she sees in him. When you spoke against him during the emotional calls, she saw you as part of that dangerous world that is against the boy, and she pushed you away farther.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by .

Dear Tineoidea,

she has a heavy dislike for her brother. She mentioned that when they were growing up, he always belittled and discredited her even though she performed better academically and such

That’s interesting. I see a similarity in her brother discrediting her and your former friend discrediting her too in the beginning. But then your former friend “turned around” (unlike her brother) and probably started flattering her and praising her… and it could be that she felt finally validated, like she never felt before. If this is so, your former friend is like a proxy for her brother and soothes her original wound, inflicted by her brother.

If so, she really wants to hear those praises from someone who reminds her of her brother, and she is blind to the fact that this person has a bad influence on her and is manipulating her. She sees him through rose-colored glasses and demonizes you, because that’s the only way her relationship with him can survive.

Dear Tineoidea,

As things between me and him took a nosedive (I cut him off), it seems he decided to be nice to her and “apologize”, even though this apology just shifted all the blame onto me, that I was the root of all the issues and responsible for his vile behavior.

Right. So he’s turned around and acknowledged her – something her brother never did. And she was hooked. She then opened up to him, and indeed, very inappropriately shared your relationship issues with him. He became her confidante and pretended to be very kind and supportive. When in fact, he was like a snake, injecting more and more poison into her. And she trusted him – because he gave her what she was craving for (validation).

It’s hard to imagine whant kind of mental gymnastics were at work there.

Your former friend sounds quite manipulative and toxic. How come he was your friend for such a long time?