Quote Originally Posted by playwithfire View Post
I'm realizing a relationship/friendship that was in my life for years and years was a lot more toxic than I ever realized, and it's giving me weird clarity around my own actions that I didn't have before (the tl;dr of it is that maybe I was much less bad than I thought I was, this shit seriously lowered my opinion of myself for like... the past 5 years).

I was talking about this stuff with my mom tonight, and I was describing how I felt about this person... that their mental health, which they refused to seek external help for, felt like knowing someone with a broken leg who never saw a doctor, treated it themselves, but if we then went on a walk would go "How dare you ask me to go on a walk! You KNOW my leg is broken." when their leg started hurting.

And my mom points out that the leg hurting and their reaction to the pain are two different things, and that some people would just say that their leg was hurting and that they needed to stop.
Feeling this. I still haven't figured out the best way to engage with a person I'm close with in my life who has untreated mental illness.

It's a difficult thing, cause I do feel you have to respect their autonomy and independence. You can't insist that that they seek out help, obviously. Also, sometimes it takes people a while to go through the motions and process things before they arrive at the point when they're ready to seek some kind of treatment. So even though I'll make little mentions of it here and there, I've always been reluctant to push them too strongly. But then I doubt myself and wonder if maybe I'm being a shitty friend. Maybe what they really need is someone who will assertively steer them in the right direction, and here I am letting them down. But then again, if the person really doesn't want to, that is their right, and you don't want to piss them off or alienate them.

So I don't know, I just go round and round in my head trying to work through this. It's tough. I think your mom's observation that the "leg hurting" and their reaction are two separate things is really smart though. I think it's good that you're processing through some of this stuff. It's weird how it can sometimes take years to get any real perspective on something.