Reply to Changing a rescuer-victim relationship

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You are unwittingly acting as her unpaid therapist.

It’s a sign of mental illness if she “starts talking like a little girl.”

Get her to into therapy.  Then you can begin to (hopefully) have a healthy, adult relationship with her.[/quote]

No. The whole problem with this dynamic is that OP is trying to substitute her own judgement for her friend's. Instead of "getting her into therapy" (like she's a small child? how is this OP's job?), OP needs to learn proper boundaries. She needs to stop thinking of this other woman as her responsibility, and stop viewing herself as an authority on her friend's life and choices. She probably need to learn to let things go when she thinks her friend is making a mistake, too. All of this is stuff OP needs to work on. We don't really know anything about this other woman, other than that she sometimes has a high or childlike voice.

I have been on the receiving end of this dynamic, and the way I have resolved it is by distancing myself from my "rescuers" and in many cases choosing to simply end the friendship. There have been times when I participated in creating the dynamic (it once happened with a mentor and I definitely gave that person way too much power in my life), but in several situations I actively fought against it but could not convince my friend to simply let me be. Like OP's friend, my voice tends to go high when I'm emotional, so I could see someone saying I was "talking like a little girl" when expressing sadness or frustration. But I'm not a little girl. I'm an adult and I've never tried to outsource my adult responsibilities to anyone, much less a friend. However, people who have rescuer tendencies seem to be drawn to me. I have had to learn to spot this dynamic early on in a relationship and to set firm boundaries as early as I can, before someone falls into the habit of giving me advice and treating me like a child.

This is an OP issue. Her friend might have her own stuff to work through, or not. But it is within OP's power to stop this dynamic, and it's not via forcing her friend to go to therapy in order to facilitate that relationship.[/quote]

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