I ended a friendship that meant a lot to me, because the other person has some pretty serious trauma/mental health issues going on.

Without going into, you know, any identifying details: I had stuck by this person though a bunch of shit that was really traumatizing for them, made myself available to them for unconditional support, etc. And we were really close friends and they were there for me too.

But they just… were and continue to be in complete denial about the fact that their trauma affects the way they deal with every. Single. Person. In their life. Anyone who doesn’t agree with them on every single relevant issue is an abuser who can’t be trusted and must be operating on some twisted, malicious agenda. It’s like they’re splitting constantly.

This person is a good person, and I still really care about them. They get a lot of shit for unrelated reasons and they deserve to have people around them who will support them and stick up for them and validate their feelings and experiences.

But when someone is acting out of such a defensive place all the time, it’s hard to separate out “support” from “enabling” - mainly because they won’t allow for support that isn’t enabling. They won’t admit they have a problem, they won’t accept help for said problem, and if anyone doesn’t validate their perceptions of other people as either virtuous and perfect friends or evil, scheming enemies, then they must be the latter.

I stuck by this friend for a long time after I realized what was going on, because I wanted to see them through this and I thought if I could stay on their “good side” then maybe I could support them without enabling their shitty treatment of people who didn’t deserve shitty treatment, could help them get to a safer and more stable place in their life where they wouldn’t have to be so constantly on the defensive (the latter I actually did, but the constant defensiveness remained, because, well, trauma; the former… urgh, I don’t know, I guess).

And then, there came a point where I just couldn’t support them unconditionally anymore.

And as soon as that happened, in their eyes I was evil. I needed to be called out and publicly humiliated at every possible opportunity, to be taught a lesson. Like everyone else who wasn’t “good”.

It was like… they wouldn’t allow for any support that wasn’t enabling. And then, maybe inevitably, that meant enabling their shitty treatment of me.

So I walked away. Somewhat literally, actually - I walked out of a meeting with them and I haven’t spoken to them since.

I’m mad about the way they treated me, but mostly I’m sad, and worried about them, because I know that at this point they’ve systematically alienated every single person who was capable of talking them down even a little bit. But there’s NOTHING I can do without putting myself in the line of fire, so to speak, and even if I was capable of doing that, they probably wouldn’t trust me after my “betrayal”.

I have no idea what to do and it’s sad.

I miss my friend.

***

When I lived in Vancouver, I never thought of the activism I did as activism, really, because activism was something that college students and people with money did. We weren’t those people. Everyone I organized with was poor, young, and dealing with some degree of trauma. We were angry and hungry for change because we’d all been homeless, hungry, beaten, evicted, terrorized, discriminated against in violent ways, targets of racialized, gendered, etc violence.

People come to radicalism often through personal experiences of injustice. Sometimes we don’t think of these experiences as traumatizing, but they are. When you deal with shit like this on a constant basis, you get used to operating on the defensive. Your guard is constantly up, and with good reason. I say this without a hint of judgment, because I know I do it, too. There are things, survival instincts, I can’t forget.

But if trauma can tear relationships apart, like it tore apart my relationship with my friend, then it can tear movements apart.

Movements are built on relationships. Obvs.

So what do we do?

***

How do we deal with trauma in our movements?

How does that affect how we do/deal with “call outs” both off-line and on-line?

Why is it that the right can coalition-build like nobody’s business, but you can’t for the life of you even get a Marxist and a Trotskyist in the same room together without shouting?

I don’t know. I don’t have answers to these questions.

I just miss my friend.

I miss the people and places I’ve given up because they weren’t healthy for me to be around/in.

I’m tired of looking over my shoulder instead of looking people in the eyes.