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Author Topic: My friend is in serious trouble. How can I help?
Shanna
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Earlier this week, my best friend lost a friend to suicide.

Even before this happened, he was pretty down on life. He was hating his job and feeling very alone.

Maybe I should mention that my best friend is my recent ex and this is a big source of pain for him. The backstory goes like this: We dated for a year. He's my first love and I'm a huge change from other girls he's been involved with. But when our relationship became long-distance while I finished school and he moved to a new city, things started to fall apart. We broke up the first time back in September. A little more than a month later we talked things out and got back together. We broke up again in January after a vicious New Years Eve fight. We've had this weird off-and-on relationship since then. He knew we weren't going to work out but kind of strung me along and kept my hopes up because he was afraid of losing my friendship. Some stuff happened that became the last straw for me and I cut off contact. His behavior in those last few weeks turned him into a stranger.

After a couple of fights and apologies, we're talking again. He explained some secretive problems he's been having in the past few months and why they affected his relationship with me. After hearing him out, I think I've decided that I don't want a romantic relationship with him. But we're still really close as friends. There is no one in my life who knows me as well as he does. And he trusts me more than anybody. Things between us could probably finally be okay if it weren't for what happened this week.

The death of his friend has really crushed all his hope. Sometimes when we talk, its playful and he sounds more like himself than he's sounded in months. But today he was telling me how he doesn't have anyone, that his life just feels dark and terrible. This has been going on for awhile since his brother had a horrific bicycling accident and I was in a car wreck a week later. He said he felt like Job. But now he doesn't even feel like Job who atleast got back his stuff in the end.

I explained our history because this is the problem...I want to help him but I don't know how. I don't even know if I should or if he wants my help. He talks about how I'm the only one he has but he doesn't want to ask my help because he doesn't want to end up hurting me anymore. He has this terrible guilt about the pain he caused me during our multiple break-ups and he refuses to believe me when I say I've healed myself and moved on. I'm graduating six-months late because the stress from our drama heightened my anxiety and delayed work on my thesis. But I've already formulated a plan for the change and I'm happy with it.

I'm just such a mother-hen. I want to help people in trouble. I just don't know what to do. I live four hours away but I offered to drive in to see him and attend the funeral with him, just so he'll have a friend at a his side. And I know he wants me there but I can tell that he's angry at himself for wanting that. I'm afraid of showing up in case my presence brings on his guilt and sends him into another round of self-loathing.

But he just sounds so depressed and so ready to self-destruct. I've already decided to contact a few of his old friends and mentors and ask them to call and check in on him. But he really is alone in the city and I don't know if anyone has the right words to bring him out of this dark world that he's in. I know therapy would be ideal but he hates therapists and wouldn't go short of me bodily dragging him to one.

We've been through so much and while I don't love him romantically anymore, I love him almost like he's a member of my family. I can't turn my back on him.

Posts: 1733 | Registered: Apr 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Amanecer
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I think that when one person wants a romantic relationship and the other person doesn't, it's near impossible to not cause each other pain. I don't know you or him and so I don't feel I can say what you should do. But I do think you should ask yourself whether you becoming more involved in his life right now would contribute to a safe, healthy environment or whether it would just create more drama and pain.
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jeniwren
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Pray.

I think it's great you're going to contact his old friends and mentors. Just don't get your hopes too high. Ultimately, he is responsible for his own happiness, and sometimes it takes being at the bottom of the pit before a person realizes that getting out of it is primarily their own job. Not that we don't help people who need it...I don't mean that. I just mean that if a person is determined to be unhappy, as I am generally getting the idea from your post that he is (hates therapists, alone in the city, etc.), it's an exercise in futility to jolly them out of it.

See, no matter what our circumstances (death of a friend, and so forth -- understand, I'm not being flip -- my SiL passed away from a drug overdose some weeks ago and we're struggling with it as a family; I do have a fresh sense of what it is to lose someone tragicly), we still have the power to choose what we're going to do about it. I don't mean we have control over our feelings ... I just mean we have the power to choose what we do. Lots of people decide they'd rather be unhappy than face the work of dealing with pain and problems. Someone once told me that loneliness is a choice...another friend agreed, but added that it doesn't feel like a choice. I agree. I used to be a chronically lonely person, but I'm not anymore, and it took work.

From what you've written, he sounds like a manipulative, controlling person. It probably doesn't sound that way to you, but as you said, you're a mother-hen. He knows this about you and uses it to manipulate you. It sounds like that's why you broke up and don't want him as a partner. But maybe I read too much into your post. Hard to tell. [Smile]

Personally, I think you should call his friends and mentors that are close. Determine an amount of time you're willing to listen to him over the phone (say, 3 hours per week), then stick with that. Then pray that he'll decide to take care of himself like he should.

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Will B
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It sounds like he's been too dependent on this one friend, and on you -- so he needs other sources of support, other ears to bend. If he agrees, he can seek them out. I imagine that if you rely on several people, it feels better for all involved than if you rely on just one or two.
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