I had lunch with some friends yesterday. I hadn’t seen these folks for any appreciable length of time since well before Christmas, so it was really nice to be able to sit down and catch up.
Around the middle of the entree, the conversation turned to the problems that one of my friends had been having with someone who’s given me trouble in the past. The person in question has proven herself to be ultra-high maintenance, easily offended, and tenacious in her insistence that people pay attention to her; the kind of attention doesn’t really matter - bad is just as good as good. Actually, judging from her usual behavior, bad is better than good.
I have had several run-ins with this person including, but not limited to, a public face-off where she accused me of being overtly rude to her. If I continued to treat her the way I seemed to enjoy treating her, she told me, she was going to have to do something about it. Exactly what she would do is anyone’s guess, but I calmly explained to her that, while I wasn’t friendly to her, I wasn’t rude to her, either. Following that little encounter, I chalked her up to being a psycho attention whore and proceeded to ignore her entirely.
Yesterday at lunch, my friend told me that while the hostilities may have ended for me at that point, they most decidedly didn’t end for the psycho attention whore. She began a campaign of bad-mouthing me to anyone who would listen (and quite a few people who wouldn’t) and got herself so worked up that she composed and mailed a letter to my boss at the health club, ostensibly demanding that I be fired. When my boss told her to back off, she redoubled her efforts and made hating me a focal point in her life.
What. Ever. I was blissfully unaware of all of this.
As the waitress came to clear our plates, my friend continued her story by saying that she put up with the psycho’s rantings for only so long and, at one point, told her flat-out to either come to me and work out her grievances or shut the hell up (of course my friend, being one of the most even-tempered and kind people I’ve ever encountered, worded it much differently, but the gist was the same). It turned out that this was a HUGE mistake on her part. The psycho’s target has shifted. My friend is now in the sights.
I wish there were something I could do to help her with this, but there’s really not a whole lot that can be done in the face of this kind of irrational behavior. I have the advantage of not giving a flying you-know-what about what the psycho thinks or says or does, but my friend is not so immune. She has to deal with the psycho a lot more than I do; she happens to live in the psycho’s neighborhood. Like I said, she is a very sensitive and kind person, and takes it to heart when someone is mean to her. I’m going to keep reminding her that none of this is about her and that I expect it won’t be long before the psycho finds another target.
Until she does, though, I plan to keep a close eye on my friend, and to step in if the opportunity presents itself.
Maybe the two of you should hire a stranger to “insult” her, and shift the attention again.
She needs to get a life.
The thought of hiring someone to do *something* to her had occurred to me, but “insult” wasn’t what I had in mind…..
In the “about me” section of my blog, I say that I have no patience for personality games. The kind of thing you (and your friend) are experiencing now sits squarely in the middle of what is covered by that sentence.
Were it me, I’m not sure I’d care to try to figure out why PsychoAttentionWhore is targeting people. The part of me that is working on developing compassion would say that it is important to do that, and to make a connection with her that might allow her to find a more appropriate way to interact with people. The part of me that takes very seriously threats to my peace and livelihood, however, says that maybe a more efficient, memorable approach is called for.
[in New York accent...] If you want, I’ll call my cousin Vinny. Vinny from Brooklyn. He’d be happy to come up and, you know, help you wit’ your problem.
I had a Psycho-Attention-Neighbwhore like this and recently she moved. I danced all afeternoon when I saw the last of the moving trucks drive-off. Very mature, right? However, after several ugly encounters (one in which my husband got in the middle of one of her Mommy-Dearest-Moment) I chose your path and removed myself 100%. It was painful yet the healthiest thing I could do for me and my family.
Not that my above ranting paragraph helps you or anything but I could most certainly relate.
This story makes me think that maybe the splendid isolation in which I live ain’t so bad. I hardly ever speak to anyone outside my family. Oh, sure, I speak to clerks is stores and things like that, but otherwise no social intercourse. It makes me think I’m missing something at times, but your post gave me pause for thought.
It’s really sad when the experience some people choose in life revolves around making the lives of others miserable. I recently had a conversation with my mother about my MIL and she postulated that all the bullshit and backhanded, passive aggressive, mean-spirited (ok, MY words) stuff she concocts comes from a place she got stuck in - she thinks that the world was crappy to her so she is therefore justified in behaving like a malicious brat. My mom thinks she can almost be understood because she was programmed by her experiences. I think people always have a choice.
I am sorry to hear that a venal infant with a big mouth is plaguing your friend. What a pathetic thing to do with a life.
A real charmer. she sounds like five or six of my sister-in-laws~,:^)