The real cost of his friendship

Lavin is someone who I really want to protect! She’s been emotionally abused by him, and I don’t want to hurt her further. So, I want to be very delicate with what I write here about her. I didn’t protect her when I had the chance and I want to try to do that now. Lavin was a former friend of his. They were friends for around several months, he even once called her his “best friend.” I met Lavin during the later part of their friendship. They used to play League of Legends together all the time and she was what Clover and I were to him, minus the romantic aspect. She was kind, loyal, and very supportive of him. She would often encourage him to strive for better during their gaming sessions. She tried to make him understand that if he wanted more out of life, he could make it happen.

He’s been stuck in a dead-end rut for the last 10 years now. He pretty much wakes, goes downstairs to eat, and then returns to his attic to play video games day/night. While they were friends, she encouraged him to go back to school or take some courses online to continue his education. He dropped out of high school, so he didn’t have anything going as far as education or any form of employment. Other than his job as GOT Discord moderator Alucard, a job that only pays in Black diamonds, that he feeds to Peggy’s (NoONE) account. Every time he would be going through something, Lavin would come to me, she wanted me to fix whatever had saddened him.

She cared for him, loved her friend, and wanted to protect him, always. Like myself, and Clover/Detelina, had been conditioned to do. Her son is autistic, and often times Radu would refer to people/players as “retarded” when they spent time together. He just asked me a few days ago if I was “retarded”. Anyways, Lavin hated this. She found it offensive and asked her friend many times to not say it around her, but because he doesn’t understand how his words affect others, he never stopped using it.

A few months ago Lavin came into some GOT-related information, a source had shared some information with her. Radu wanted to know who the source was, but she refused to tell him because she had previously given her word to her source. She promised to keep the source’s name out of things. Well of course this set Radu off! He hates to be denied anything. Once he believes you are in the wrong, this is when the abuse starts and it starts quickly and it continues until he tosses you away like trash.

He told her that if she didn’t share the name of her source, she was basically his enemy. Yes, she was his enemy, the very same person who had supported him emotionally, encouraged him, and never betrayed him, was suddenly his enemy because of GOT. He told her that she was either with him or against him. They went back and forth for about 2 days, as she desperately tried to de-escalate the situation, and get him to understand that she had given her word, and didn’t want to break it. It wasn’t about keeping secrets from him.

Of course, since everything is so black and white with him, there’s very little understanding, or compromise, once he brands you a traitor to him. I foolishly thought that two good friends could work it out, if they just talked. I proceeded to set up a group chat with Lavin, Radu and myself. In this group chat, we tried to explain the situation to him, we tried to explain why his behavior was so detrimental and hurtful to someone who he had previously called his “best friend”. But he didn’t understand it, so he started verbally abusing her. She wasn’t attacking him, she backed down (like we all do) and she just took his verbal abuse. And I’m ashamed to say, that I allowed it to happen to her. I was so conditioned to his toxicity that even hearing him call another woman a “cunt” was so normal to me because he’d called me one before.

But this was the first time I had allowed him to inflict abuse onto another woman. I allowed him to hurt her. After his verbal tongue beating, she abruptly exited the call crying and shaking. She’s an adult, I won’t reveal her age. But she’s an educated woman, someone who is furthering her education, she has children, and a very loving husband, she’s not some weak, unstable woman.

This was one of two incidents where he bullied her to tears. Like with most abusers, it’s never just one time. After the first time, I managed to get through to him to make him realize that he needed to apologize to her. He tried, but she had blocked him. She would later unblock him because he tried other methods to contact her. A few weeks later, it was round two and this time it was worse. He’s like the abuser who punches you in the face and then goes to the fridge to grab a bag of frozen peas for your swollen eye. He would later direct his hate at me when he suspected I was on taking her side on things.

Later, Lavin would find herself in a battle once more with him. She was accused of spreading a rumor that he had physically abused Clover. She vehemently denied it was her who started the rumor. Dee named her as the person who spread the rumor. I was once an acquaintance of Dee’s, and I was also friends with Lavin, so I didn’t know who to believe. In the end, Lavin got blamed for it, and was sent to exile. Of course, Clover ran to defend him against these malicious lies. But it’s what we always do, we rush to protect him because he plays on that motherly instinct that we women have, where we believe that he’s somehow being hurt and he is somehow the victim, right? He turns people against you, because he’s a master manipulator that will try to control every situation, while simultaneously behind closed doors he’s bullying, abusing, and calling you a cunt, and telling you to go “fuck yourself” and everything else. He’s no victim! He never has been.

Lavin did the smartest thing she could do for her mental well-being, which was to cut him from her life completely. But you also have to understand that narcissistic abuse doesn’t just end because you cut them off or you break up with them. The effects of their abuse can carry on for months and sometimes years. She still struggles with what he did months later. Narcissists prey on empaths, they build you up, try to force you to live up to impossible standards, then when you fail, they abuse you, devalue you, and ultimately discard you. By the end of our entanglement, I felt suicidal and my self-esteem was non-existent.