Toxic Friend Syndrome

Grrrrrrr.........................

My least favourite subject in the world came up tonight. The subject of someone I used to consider to be one of my best friends. I'm not going to bore you all with the details of why I now think that his life story should be played by Gareth Hunt, if you get my drift, but I do feel compelled to write about what I call Toxic Friend Syndrome. There are many types of Toxic friend, but the one thing they all have in common is that they repay your trust and friendship with poison. Here are some examples (and no I've not experienced all of them).

They use friendship to steal your partner
They use friendship to steal your friends
They use friendship to steal your money
They use friendship to hurt your feelings for their own pleasure
They use friendship to stop you achieving your goals in life
They use friendship to strangle your spirit

Sometimes they do a few of the above. It is quite interesting to note that often other friends will warn you, but you don't listen until it's too late. Often they will undermine your relationships with real friends (as they recognise that these are likely to try and break whatever hold they have over you). How do yous spot one? It is really hard when you are a teenager and have little life experience. As you get older, you tend to get a bit better at spotting the signs, but sometimes only when it's too late. A female friend of mine once spent an evening telling me how her best friend nicked her husband. She said the thing that really irked her, was she'd told the friend all of the things wrong in her marriage and the friend was able to use this to snare the poor sod. Sadly, when you hook up with such pondlife it usually ends badly all round.

Friends who want to rob you are perhaps the hardest to spot. If they are plausable and pull the old sob story, they use your own guilt and good nature to get the better of you. Then there are the friends who steal your friends. This is where you have a really good friend, who you introduce to another friend and before you know it, they have shut you out of the loop. It can be hard to spot this type of scumbag and perhaps you only realise when it happens a few times. An auntie of mine told me of a certain character who was an expert at this and used to take great delight in it.

Then there are friends who are just cruel. You know the type, you need some help or advice and they just convince you that you are a pathetic idiot. They seem to take great pleasure in this and will usually seek to justify it by saying things like "I'm only telling you this because you are a friend".

Then you get friends who stop you achieving the things you want to do in life. I had a friend who decided that he wanted to travel. A group of us were up the pub and her best friend (supposedly) kept throwing up reasons why it was a bad idea. I realised that the friend just wanted her friend to hang around in a dead end job here, so she had company in her own dead end job. It was like a drowning person, dragging down the person who is rescuing them.

Lastly, there are the people who delight in crushing your spirit. These are the people who when you have done something you are really proud of, pick holes in it and make you feel bad about it. In the early days of the band, I had a few of these around. In the end, I realised that if people don't get what you are trying to do, then their opinions are really not worth anything. Recently, I bumped into one of these people. In the early days of the band, we did loads of fundraisers for things like greenpeace, friends of the earth etc. I happened to bump into this character and I told him about the blog and about the rally on the 30th. His response "Some of us have grown up" with a sneer. Strangely, when I started the band I used to think this guy was really cool and value his opinion. I asked what he was doing with himself "Divorced, boring job, playing a bit of golf, blah,blah". I wished I hadn't bothered. As he droned on, I found my mind wandering. How on earth could I have ever let what this bloke said bother me.

I've no real advice on what to do. You always realise when it's way too late. I'm sure there are American self help websites that tell you how to spot them, but franky who wants to spend their life looking at them, when the pub is open. It's true, in some ways I haven't grown up and sometimes I'm damn pleased I haven't.