Whats the worst thing you've ever been accused of while being completely innocent?

I have been treated as a gaslighting emotional and mental abuser by my gaslighting emotional and mental abusers.

Years of feeling sad whenever an event was over, years of feeling nervous during any meetup with them, years of tiptoeing on eggshells whenever we were together because anything could upset them, and years of never feeling like I actually belonged- with my best friend.

I would go full months without seeing them. One day they'd invite me to do something, we'd do it, and then another month would pass.

Saw them go to dinner at a restaurant literally a 2 minute drive from my apartment. Didn't invite me. Stuff like that.

Then they went to a yearly event i love to go to...without asking me. Saw the photos on facebook. A week or two later, they went...again. Without me. Again.

I spent a good 14 hours straight basically doing nothing but worrying what this meant. It was torturous. I got sick from it and had to call into work.

I got upset on facebook about it. He replied asking me when the last time I planned something was- implying that, because I didn't start any plans, I wasn't owed inclusion in any plans.

Unfortunately I didn't recognize that as shitty behavior and I acquiesed saying I'd try harder to plan things. And for a while, I did! I started making plans and our mutual friends were all for them, but said best friend, you could tell, was getting upset that they were not in full control of their social group anymore. I had taken some of it, and it was their fault.

This culminated in a situation where I started making plans...but they told me that our friends were gonna do their thing instead, not mine, and asked if I was coming. This really upset me. I had another "what does this mean" moment for a few hours. I remember trying to think of what to do for hours.

I said that I wouldn't go as I wasn't interested.

I messaged our mutual friend and said it was cool if they wanted to do that thing instead. It was kind of a special one-time event thing, so whatever. We can do my thing any time.

Then I learned from our mutual friends...they never agreed to this. They were never informed about this other thing. They never told my friend they were doing this instead. He lied to me saying that the plans had changed, to try and trick me into cancelling mind.

The mutual friend was now kinda torn, because this other thing WAS cool to them, and WAS one-time, and they DID wanna do it, but they felt bad ditching me for my thing. I said no, its ok, I already said its ok, so you can do it anyway. It really wasn't a big deal. They said, alright, I'll go do the other thing, sorry.

Another mutual friend thought this was shitty outright (the whole telling me plans had changed when they hadn't thing) and opted to say fuck that, we're gonna go do the thing I wanted to do.

Best friend got mad. Mad as hell. Implied that I made our friend "conflicted" and acted like it was the worst thing you could do, and exclaimed that this is what happens when nobody in our friend group communicates via group chat or knows how to say how they fucking feel.

I got mad. This was a "last straw" sort of situation. So I wrote out this big massive wall of "I feel" statements in a group chat with all involved. I didn't send it. I drove home from work that night and wanted to drive into oncoming traffic, because if I sent this, my social life was destroyed, and if I didn't send this, I'd continue having to deal with this crap.

The next day I sent it. Everyone saw it. At the end it said that if your response to treating me like garbage all the time, ignoring me, avoiding me, not inviting me to things, holding me to arbitrary and invisible doing-stuff quotas to even give me any level of attention at all, wasn't an apology- not to say anything at all.

Best friend of 15 years, blocked me no question. Their wife, blocked me no question. Then they told two of our mutual friends I was lying about all of it and everything that happened (despite it happening in front of their faces) and they too blocked me. I kept the friend who went to my thing instead. We went to my thing as planned and had a good conversation about it where they revealed more ways that these people had treated me like shit without me knowing, and their own concerns about it.

The two of us went on a littl vacation out of state to a theme park, and during this vacation they were messaging her to say that if she was going to be friends with me they couldn't be friends. That she was hurting them by associating with me. While we were on vacation out of state together!

That was basically it for her and she also broke contact with them.

And then for the past couple years we regularly remember things and go "oh my god that was emotional abuse" or "oh my god that was gaslighting" or "holy shit that was narcissism".

And to this day these people continue to pretend that they were victims of every single behavior they exhibited to us.

One will even retweet posts about abuse survival where they describe the ways narcissistic abusers will behave, and the descriptions describe them!

It's so disgusting and horrible.

I miss the two friends who left when they were told to, but not enough to not recognize how much better off I am with these people. I have new friends now who treat me in ways that I am partially uncomfortable with because I'm not used to them...except those ways are how normal people act to friends.

Shit sucked.

/r/AskReddit Thread