Who can lift my luggage?

Dearest St. Monica,

I had the most curious and disturbing exchange with an individual who has now been placed on the former friend list. M. is a gentleman who I met shortly after I got into Al-Anon many years ago. Shortly after our meeting there were couple of circumstances that developed which lead me to believe the friendship was not going to be an easy one. But given I was new to the program and thought seeking friends within the 12 step community might assist me in my quest for healing, I made the decision to keep investing the time and energy into the relationship.

The results were decidedly mixed.

While there were moments that M. had the ability to be very charming, entertaining and fun to be around. Most of the time, to be blunt, he was merely just a pill. He did what I’ve watched so many other guys do in recovery, in that he used recovery as a tool to become ever more dysfunctional rather than heal from the wounds of his past.

Which meant rather than being as is taught in the program, self-focused and self-reliant, he became self-centered and self-absorbed. His needs became all important above those of others. Each time we were to get together it became an endless and tedious session of negotiation and re-negotiation to make sure that M.’s needs were being met, and everyone else’s be damned.

As we were initially establishing our friendship, I thought I was doing the right thing by being accommodating and always taking his needs into account first when making decisions. And while on some level I knew he was being a passive-aggressive control freek, I often overlooked the behavior and rather than cut him loose as a friend and instead worked to find a common ground in our mutual love of music and movies.

However eventually as with many relationships the common ground could not sustain the friendship.

As the years went by, I began to watch M. make decisions that were less and less in his best interest. However, I knew that trying to provide any feedback at that time in an attempt to guide him toward understanding what he was doing would have proved to be a fruitless effort. So I refrained.

Through final few years of our friendship M. became ever more inflexible and nearly impossible to deal with on most occasions. And again, at that point rather than cut my loses in the friendship, I stuck with it thinking that perhaps there come a point that he’d bottom out and then perhaps gain some awareness of his behavior.

I received a letter a couple of weeks ago from him in which he shared some rather disturbing revenge fantasies he’d had about this boss and a contentious relationship that developed between she and him a couple of years ago. Apparently he became so consumed with the revenge fantasies to the point he began to make careless mistakes and was nearly fired as a result. While it was troubling to read about his experience, it sounded as if he might have finally bottomed out through the process and perhaps gained some awareness about himself.

However, as I read the rest of the letter it became obvious that this was not the case. Instead the experience became yet another opportunity for him to believe himself a victim. And the situation with his boss ignited within him the need to confront his family about various abuses he believes perpetrated upon him. All of which appears to have culminated in him believing himself one of the persecuted.

While I was initial somewhat shocked and horrified by the letter. As I read through it several times thereafter, it merely annoyed me. It annoyed because it was obvious that it was just another attempt by M. to elicit pity and continue to manipulate our friendship in a passive aggressive manner.

So I fired back with a letter and in it I let him have it. I made it clear to him that I understood what he was doing and why he was doing it. And but of course in true professional victim fashion he sent me an email when he received it claiming that I was being abusive and that he no longer wished to hear from me. It took all the self control I had to not fire back with a reply asking him why on Earth he’d think I’d actually *want* to speak with him again.

So while there is a part of me that’s quite happy to have dumped the baggage of our dysfunctional friendship. There is also a part of me that feels very conflicted about it. Conflicted in the sense that it’s so incredibly sad that M. continues to live a life of struggle and suffering. A level of suffering of which he’s not even aware and most likely will never gain an awareness of for that matter. And I guess what bothers me is that I had wished that I might help him to come an understanding about it. But it’s quite obvious he has little desire to work toward the discovery of such.

That’s one of the things I find so difficult with my spiritual journey. The fact that I have to accept there are those individuals in the world who enjoy needless suffering and feel it their place to create it for others as well.

I used to be one of them.

Give a bit hug to Rita for me?