a little help please

That sounds horrible Shanc. My heart goes out to you. As a highly sensitive person, you would have felt her words like a thousand cuts to your heart.

I can't offer you any advice Shanc. I'd have handled the situation exactly the same way and whilst the "professionals" will tell you that avoidance via alcohol is not healthy, it's sometimes what's needed just to get us through a challenging situation.

Hope you're feeling better today Shanc. Your "mother figure" sounds like she has a few issues to deal with herself, so it's certainly not your fault.

Ellie.

Hey @shanc

A voice message like that would be enough to rattle anyone. That's pretty full on for her to tell you that you are responsible for her desire to drive off a cliff. And it sounds from your previous posts that maybe this isn't new behaviour from her. So good on you for making contact with your therapist and getting a good result. Getting support with managing the relationships in our life that bring us the most pain is integral to building resilience and skills to cope.

What's that saying about families (blood and other)..."They know how to press our buttons because they installed them."

If you ask me the world would be perfect - sane, balanced, fair, organised - if it wasn't for other people!

The trouble is Shanc that we do tend to learn how to negotiate situations, then at the drop of a hat, we're repeating all the same mistakes again. There is help out there in the form of therapies that work such as DBT or ACT, but sometimes it's hard to find or too expensive (the latter case being true for me) and we always seem to miss out.

I remain my own worst enemy. I have a friend coming out today. My friend (K) is a rarity in that she's stuck with me for over 14 years. She's been down her own path with MI and is very understanding. Our friendship has always worked because we have a good time when we're together, swill a good deal of grog and party hearty etc, but she's always set a firm boundary of letting me know she'll be leaving at such and such a time and that's it. Yes, it hurts and I've begged her to stay, even live with me, but she sticks to her boundary markers and won't budge. Painful as it is at the time when she leaves, it keeps me grounded in reality.

However and after all the years of hell she's been through, she's taken a job she's studied hard for, that of a peer support worker with a well known organisation and since then I've become insanely jealous and it's probably what caused my recent melt-down at work. I feel like the job is stealing her away from me or that perhaps she's putting herself into a setting where she has access to a potential partner and our friendship will be swept aside for someone else and I can't stand it. I want to try and explain how I feel about this to her, but I know I'll only end up in tears and she's seen enough of those, plus I'm soooo scared she'll get sick of my whining and leave for good.

I have my TC coming out to see me next Tuesday and I'll tell her about it, but she really dosen't have any life experience. She could easily be my grandkid she's soooo young! Maybe I'm underestimating her, but she really is fresh out of college! The worst of it is that I'm struggling against another meltdown, yet I have to get through a month of full time work and really want to do that as it might be my last hurrah.

Sorry Shanc. I'm really struggling this morning, probably not helped by forgetting to take my meds last night 😞 I've hijacked your post I know, but I simply don't have the energy to cut and paste it into a new post. I'm just so glad you have your fur person to help you through the bad times.

Ellie.