New to the forum and extremely hurt by my university flatmate

Hi,

I haven't really reached out like this before but I've had such a horrible experience this week, and whilst I'm getting a lot of support from my loved ones and all my other flatmates have been amazing, I feel broken and just wanted to try and talk to people who might understand.

I've been having terrible trouble with one of my uni flatmates; we'll call her E because obviously I don't want to call her by her full name on here. Due to my own experiences, I know a troubled person when I see one, and E is a very troubled person. She talks a lot about her mental health difficulties and her behaviour has often been hard to deal with, but I've stuck by her because I believe in forgiving people and treating others as I would like to be treated, and because I've suffered myself so I know that difficult behaviour often comes with poor mental health and I don't believe anyone should be left to deal with things alone. She claims that she has had horrible things done to her, and at one stage I wholeheartedly believed her and was desperately upset for her (and still am, I suppose) but then I spoke to my mum about it: my mum is a 55-year-old woman of the world and she's noticed irregularities in E's stories and says her gut feeling is that they don't ring true. Having had my own mental health problems, E and I bonded quite a bit and were close, and at first it felt like an equal friendship, then she started taking the mickey a bit, and for the last few weeks she's been actively picking on me. I won't go into details of every incident but basically she's been going out of her way to humiliate, undermine and disrespect me in front of our other flatmates, both in person and on our group chat. I knew it was happening because I'm not daft, but it was all quite insidious -- she kept saying it was 'banter' or that she was 'just trying to help' etc -- and I didn't feel I could say anything because I've been oversensitive on lots of occasions in the past and got things wrong, and I really did not want to mess things up with any of my flatmates. I kept making allowances for E, telling myself she's got her own problems and that she was probably just trying to reinvent herself as a more 'sassy' person, but then our other flatmates were approaching me, asking if I was all right and saying they could see how E was treating me and that it was mean and unfair. The worst thing was that two of our flatmates confronted her about it, and she just laughed and said, 'Is it that obvious?' which was completely devastating for me because that was like her admitting that she knew she was doing it, and suggested that she was doing it deliberately. I was crushed because I had so much deliberate bullying at school (which until recently I thought I'd deserved) and I thought that stage of my life was over and that I was getting on well with all my flatmates and that it was all going to be OK. I had to go out to clear my head and when I got back she was in the kitchen and came out and saw me, and said I was welcome to go into the kitchen if I wanted -- which cheesed me off in itself because it's like, yeah, I know I'm welcome to go into the kitchen; it's my kitchen as much as yours! But I said no, I was fine, I was just going to bed (which was true). Then she asked me to give her a hug and I'm usually quite a huggy person for someone who is on the spectrum, but seeing as I'd only just heard that she knew she'd been deliberately picking on me, I really did not want to give her a hug and I knew that it was my being a pushover with her that was feeding the problem, so I refused, then ran upstairs because I was about to burst into tears. This situation left me feeling even worse: it felt like she was almost gaslighting me, like she was trying to pretend everything was normal, that we were mates and she wasn't doing anything unfriendly to me at all. I said the same thing to my psychologist earlier on this week -- I said that if she'd said sorry and we'd had a conversation about it and it had ended with a reconciliatory hug, that would have been different, but she was just expecting a hug without admitting she was in the wrong and apologising, or without having any sort of conversation at all.

Anyway, I'm a writer and I often deal with things by writing things down, so I wrote down everything I could say if I could talk back, and showed it to three of the girls from the flat who convinced me to send it to her. It was extremely polite and I considered all her problems in there; I just said that I knew what she was doing, and could she please show me some respect. Part of me regrets doing it over Messenger but I wasn't going to see her again until January (she'd said she wasn't coming back until January because she didn't want to see me) and I had to get all these things off my chest; I thought if I didn't do that then it would have exploded at some point after Christmas and had really unpleasant consequences. So I sent this message, and she came back with the vilest things I've ever had said to me in my life (and I've had some horrible things said to me) -- she called me a 'clingy ****hole', said I 'angered and triggered her', that she'd only ever been 'joking' and, worst of all, that my autism was 'a sob story'. She'd once been in the kitchen with her friend when I was a bit tipsy and having a bit of a cry to one of our other flatmates about living with autism (the first time I had mentioned it in any detail) and in this message E said that was when she'd 'started hating me' and 'her friend had seen I was pushing her away, and had made her realise she didn't need people like me in her life', and that she 'didn't want to listen to my ****ing sob story'. She said 'I angered her but she didn't bully me'. I was absolutely devastated, but didn't argue back because I knew it would only make it worse; instead I placated her by apologising for 'triggering' her; not that I did anything apart from be me. When the other girls found out what she'd said, they were very angry with her, because from their point of view she'd at first bullied me and then gone on to say these horrific things. E accused us all of 'witch hunting' before seeming to apologise and saying she 'hated herself for what she'd done to me' and 'hadn't realised how much it was affecting me' and that 'her depression made her lash out and pick on people', and that 'in the New Year she was going to resolve to be a better person'. However, she then started messaging me again, telling me I had to go into the flat and tell everyone that 'she wasn't a bully, I'd just said she was'. She kept saying highly emotionally manipulative things, such as, 'I cried all night when you wouldn't give me a hug' (referring to the night I mentioned above) and, 'I might never be coming back to uni because of you and how you've turned people against me' (I never set out to turn people against her; people saw her behaviour for themselves and didn't like it) and worst of all, 'Don't tell anyone but I'm having suicidal thoughts'. Then she said, 'So many people laugh at you -- why shouldn't I? Why am I the only one being punished?' (The girls then insisted this wasn't true, and despite a couple of doubts I do mostly believe them because they are all genuinely honest people and some of them have been pretty brutal with me before; they don't tiptoe around me or treat me like I'm made of glass, which can be hard sometimes but I love it really because I always know where I stand.)

Fortunately it's been a few days and she hasn't messaged me since -- I would delete and block her but that feels quite Jeremy Kyle-ish, and I have to live with her for the rest of the academic year and I'm hoping things will settle. The other day she messaged the group chat, basically making herself look like the victim and, while no one was rude or unpleasant, they still weren't having it, and now she's been putting underhand things on social media about how horrible we all are. I'm scared she might do something silly but people have reassured me that it's very unlikely she'll actually act on the things she's been saying. I'm trying to be strong about it all but I'm exhausted and those words, particularly the thing about my autism being a 'sob story' and that loads of people laugh at me behind my back, have really made me feel quite unwell. I guess I just wanted to offload -- my family have heard it all many times now and I guess I just wanted to talk it over with some other autistic people...it's so hard having an invisible disability; if my disability was more obvious then she'd never have called it a 'sob story'. I will not let this spoil my time at uni -- I'm there to study, I've made some lovely friends who are all looking out for me and I've worked so hard for years to be in the mental/emotional position to be able to go to uni, I'm not going to let someone else's cruelty ruin it -- but it's going to take some time getting over this one...the words are sticking in me like glass; I keep thinking I wish she'd just punched me or something, because at least a bruise would heal! That 'sticks and stones' rhyme is such rubbish...words are so much more painful than anything physical and their wounds never really heal!

Thanks for listening. Slight smile

Parents
  • What comes across to me is the strength you have shown in this situation. You stood up for yourself, maintained boundaries, refused to be a pushover and acted assertively. Situations like this are desperately painful for autistic people - we feel things really intensely and agonise over what has happened. These negative experiences also remind us of painful stuff that has happened to us before. It is so upsetting to get caught up in this kind of destructive negativity all over again. 

    It is wonderful that you can rely on your other flat mates to be real and honest and supportive. As others have said, and you said yourself, E clearly has lots of problems so being in close proximity to her is going to be challenging. The best thing is to have as little to do with her as possible and to focus all your energy on the degree you love and building more positive friendships. As us older ones know all too well there are toxic people everywhere you go in life. Once you learn to recognise them and take evasive action life gets easier, though it is always challenging. 

    Be proud of yourself for being so strong, remind yourself that your mum and your true friends are standing beside you, and get as much as you possibly can out of the experience of being a student. Looking at things from the perspective of an older person I am sure these will be some of the best days of your life. Have fun and work hard. Time will fly by! 

Reply
  • What comes across to me is the strength you have shown in this situation. You stood up for yourself, maintained boundaries, refused to be a pushover and acted assertively. Situations like this are desperately painful for autistic people - we feel things really intensely and agonise over what has happened. These negative experiences also remind us of painful stuff that has happened to us before. It is so upsetting to get caught up in this kind of destructive negativity all over again. 

    It is wonderful that you can rely on your other flat mates to be real and honest and supportive. As others have said, and you said yourself, E clearly has lots of problems so being in close proximity to her is going to be challenging. The best thing is to have as little to do with her as possible and to focus all your energy on the degree you love and building more positive friendships. As us older ones know all too well there are toxic people everywhere you go in life. Once you learn to recognise them and take evasive action life gets easier, though it is always challenging. 

    Be proud of yourself for being so strong, remind yourself that your mum and your true friends are standing beside you, and get as much as you possibly can out of the experience of being a student. Looking at things from the perspective of an older person I am sure these will be some of the best days of your life. Have fun and work hard. Time will fly by! 

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