A reminder in the importance of avoiding getting caught up in the drama triangle

by mxkx

I have been very ill over the past week. What started off as a fever, congestion, and sore throat has been creeping down my chest and I now suspect I may have the beginnings of pneumonia. Don't worry! I am going to the doctor tomorrow. However, it is important to know what kind of physical health I am in for this story.

Tonight a long time "best friend" contacted me on a messenger to ask if he could take me to another location so I could pick up a Netflix movie that was due to be in the mail by tomorrow. If he didn't get it in the mail by tomorrow, it was going to be a $20 late fee. He was going to be busy tomorrow so he wouldn't be able to retrieve it then.

I told him that I couldn't leave tonight because I am sick. I then offered to get it in the mail early tomorrow morning before the mail ran or even to pay the $20 late fee if it ended up being late. That was evidently not good enough for him though because he stated it was very rude of me to say that. I must admit that feeling as miserable as I was I enabled the situation by using some profanity and blocking him.

He showed up at my home raging. He let himself in and started threatening the lives of my family while swearing me off from his life forever and swearing that I was perfectly fine to go get the movie. I ended up injuring myself, again enabling, while he tormented me about what a "retard" I was for doing it. I have to admit at that point I had gotten in to such a primitive state I didn't care about anything any more but just releasing the pain.

I got him to leave. A long time friendship out the window, and a successful job on recovery that has slipped in to a relapse. I am a bit shaken from the experience, but I believe I have learned from it enough to do better in the future, and that's what really matters.

In reflection, I have been enabling this friend for years. He snapped and I and my husband both jumped. He often failed to meet commitments, changed his mind in the middle of the stream, and generally dragged his friends through a angsty storm of emotional drama. I told my husband when I started therapy that I had a funny feeling I would eventually end up having to drop this friend just for the dysfunctionality he represents.

Despite realizing all of this though, I held off on cutting things off. I kept so confident in myself being able to avoid any sort of drama with him from now out that I failed to see that just by being exposed to that dysfunctionality this early in my recovery I can very easily be pulled down in to a relapse, momentarily throwing away all I have learned because the reality is so close to what I experienced as a child that my brain decides it needs to protect me by switching on my defenses.

I wrote an apology email to him tonight. I apologized for enabling him for all those years and for enabling him tonight. I told him that I had enjoyed our friendship but that indeed it seemed it had came time for an end. And I wished him a long and happy life.

I feel that even though I have relapsed, the recovery from that relapse has been a success. I have learned new things about how I deal with my relationships and how I can improve upon those dealings. I have learned my limits in relationships first hand. And I have assigned the right responsibilities to the right people and taken action on apologizing for the behavior that on my part went against my personal values and enabled the situation to occur.

I am thankful that this has happened, not only because of what I have learned, but also because of the change that it has stimulated in my life. I have broken yet another old chain that was holding me back from my goal of a full recovery.

Now I realize how so very vital it is to start really nipping those dysfunctional relationships in the bud, especially when one is in the beginnings of recovery and they have gained enough confidence to move about normal life normally but still aren't quite strong enough to resist the pull that a drama can put on them.