Hi, I would like your advice on the following situation:
My childhood best friend (F30) has mental health issue since she was 10 years old. She was in therapy from age 10 till 28 and got hopistalized once for 6 months.
I had always the thought that you always need to be there for your friends no matter what, even when it would inpact your own life. I developed mental healthy issue myself few years ago and I worked on this. This includes setting more boundaries. I’m doing fine now, I’m just need to watch my boundaries.
My friend has health anxiety and seeks reassures via text. She will text excessively about problems. Sometimes every 5 minutes for days (sometimes with me responding, sometimes it is more a solo dialoge). I helped her a lot during my day every day for around 7-8 years, the last 3 years I still was there for her, but not the whole day.
My own mental heatlh was suffering so I did the following things:
September: Talked with her and said I did not want to talk about problems via text, it was better to email me or call me (did not work, although I repeatedly talked about it)
October – February: I told her that did not want to have contact via text, but I wanted to call with her or email. (We would set up call meeting, she cancled almost every time last minute).
After this we started texting again and it was good for 2 months. Than her mental health was not going great and I would get 20-30 negative messages/problems a day. I had the feeling she only asked about how I was doing, so I would respond to her problems.
I’m all for helping friends. But I hurts my feeling that when I told her multiple times my mental health was decline because of the constant problems she would dump on me. I got panic attacks (when she texted me) few times and I told her, she would still continue. I do feel not respected and feel more like a therapist than a friend. I was always nice to her, I never reacted irritated when she was spamming me with problems in all these years, even do she ignored my boundaries.
But two months ago i kind of flipped. I again told her that is was getting to much for me. She continued with problem texting. She said: “But what if I get disease x from that guy” I respond with: “so what?”
She responded with: Sorry I will shut up. I’m a bad person. I did not reply, I still did not reply and it is two months ago. I wanted to say to her: no you are not a bad person! But this is always the way it goes. I’m than making her feel good about herself, and the orginal topic is than not discussed and it is all about her feeling bad that she is a bad person or a bad friend.
Thanks for reading, what would you advice me to do?