I (30f) have been friends with “Kate” (29f) for nearly 20 years. I live in different country from Kate and the time difference is about 5-6 hours (moved when I was a teen), so it is not a recent thing. I also need to add that at the moment I can not travel back to my homecountry and be safe there.
Now over the past few years Kate seems to have developed some mental issues, which became significantly worse with her giving birth to her first child late last year. Like genuinely she would come across as if she is spiraling. Like to give you a slight idea – she would send 40 messages to me in a space of 10 minutes or paragraphs of text and if i don’t respond within a minute she would start calling and crying or recording the voice messages saying she can’t do this anymore. That can happen at any time of day including when I am sleeping or working. I have tried turning my phone off but she would start contacting my family members making it sound like something might have happened to me so they would become worried too.
This behaviour started about 2 years and I am honestly exhausted. I did some therapy for myself and shared some solutions to help with anxiety and stuff, but Kate seems to be getting worse and worse and gets incredibly angry when I don’t have an immediate solution to “fix her” or tell her what is wrong with her.
Now a bit about Kate – her family is extraordinary wealthy. Like she can easily afford a brand new sport car without it making a noticeable dent in her account. She has a loving family, husband and an entire fleet of different helpers from a personal nail professional to 3 nannies for her child that are working 24/7. I am only saying this to show she can easily afford a good therapist.
Last weekend I have snapped and basically have told her that I am tired of her behaviour and she really needs to see a proper therapist as her behaviour is very concerning. I have told her I am available to talk when she needs me but i am not a therapist and she needs to address her issues professionally before they get even worse. Kate called me an asshole and blamed me for not supporting her and have been telling our mutual friends how “she was venting to me and I just cut her off”.
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I (30f) have been friends with “Kate” (29f) for nearly 20 years. I live in different country from Kate and the time difference is about 5-6 hours (moved when I was a teen), so it is not a recent thing. I also need to add that at the moment I can not travel back to my homecountry and be safe there.
Now over the past few years Kate seems to have developed some mental issues, which became significantly worse with her giving birth to her first child late last year. Like genuinely she would come across as if she is spiraling. Like to give you a slight idea – she would send 40 messages to me in a space of 10 minutes or paragraphs of text and if i don’t respond within a minute she would start calling and crying or recording the voice messages saying she can’t do this anymore. That can happen at any time of day including when I am sleeping or working. I have tried turning my phone off but she would start contacting my family members making it sound like something might have happened to me so they would become worried too.
This behaviour started about 2 years and I am honestly exhausted. I did some therapy for myself and shared some solutions to help with anxiety and stuff, but Kate seems to be getting worse and worse and gets incredibly angry when I don’t have an immediate solution to “fix her” or tell her what is wrong with her.
Now a bit about Kate – her family is extraordinary wealthy. Like she can easily afford a brand new sport car without it making a noticeable dent in her account. She has a loving family, husband and an entire fleet of different helpers from a personal nail professional to 3 nannies for her child that are working 24/7. I am only saying this to show she can easily afford a good therapist.
Last weekend I have snapped and basically have told her that I am tired of her behaviour and she really needs to see a proper therapist as her behaviour is very concerning. I have told her I am available to talk when she needs me but i am not a therapist and she needs to address her issues professionally before they get even worse. Kate called me an asshole and blamed me for not supporting her and have been telling our mutual friends how “she was venting to me and I just cut her off”.
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OP has offered the following explanation for why they think they might be the asshole:
> I might be an asshole for telling my friend to seek professional help with her issues after nearly 2 years of her complaining to me at unreasonable times of day and expecting me to act like a therapist.
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Contest mode is 1.5 hours long on this post.
NTA. You’re her friend, not her therapist, and she’s putting way too much pressure on you. Wanting her to get actual help doesn’t mean you don’t care, it means you do. She clearly has the resources for therapy, so it’s on her to take that step, not you to burn yourself out.
NTA
You could’ve possibly worded things nicer to her or brought it more as a concern, but from your story it sounds like she’s truly got some severe mental health issues going on. And calling and texting you all hours of the day won’t help that.
She sounds like she indeed needs a good therapist and as long as you’re not telling her that to just get rid of her, but because you’re genuinely concerned about her, that’s not an asshole move at all.
A certain amount of therapy duty is one of the unwritten rules of friendship, up to a point! Kate seems to have marched right past the accepted boundary and charged right into Trauma Dump Central.
NTA for prioritising your own health & wellbeing and if Kate can’t hack that, you are better off without her as a friend / millstone!
NTA
You’re not qualified to help her issues
Get space and go NC for a while, she’s clearly toxic and maybe tell your friends how you posted here and what the rest of the world thinks
NTA – total disrespect of your boundaries; especially your time differences. To feel that it is ok for you to be available to listen to her “rant” 24/7 is inappropriate. You are being used. I am unsurprised you blew up at her. She is not your friend.
NTA. She’s not treating you like a friend, she’s treating you like a security blanket. It’s okay to clutch objects at all hours of the day and night because they don’t have feelings, needs, or schedules, but people do have all those things.
Honestly, you should have told her this after a few weeks of this behavior, before she had time to build this kind of dependency on you. That’s your only misstep here. You can’t light yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. Hell, that’s not even accurate here. You can’t let someone else light you on fire to keep themself warm.
Alert her family, forward some of the messages she sends. Someone physically close needs to get involved before she hits bottom.
NTA