How did you cope? Did you ever cope in the first place?
It could be a relative, significant other, best friend or whatever. The personality change could’ve been caused by brain injury, illness, traumatic experience, finding/losing religion, drugs, or something completely unexplainable.
Example of changes: loss of intellect, loss of emotional stability, a very laid back person changing into a very controlling person or the reverse, a very free-spirited person changing into a very conservative one or the reverse, a very kind person changing into a very mean person, etc. etc.
The only person I can think of is an aunt. And I don’t think her personality changed so much as intensified. When she found religion things got a little crazier, but I think they were headed that way anyway. So over the course of maybe 4 decades she went from nice but a little high strung to really weird. I understand that now she’s a hoarder. One can’t even move through her very large house because of all the comic book clippings.
Not someone I was personally close to, but my younger brother’s best friend, who I’ll call Fred. Fifteen years ago he was a really cool guy, a very nice, law-abiding citizen. He married his girlfriend that he’d been with since they were like 14, and they had a couple of kids.
About ten years ago, Fred started dealing drugs. Now he’s all about the “bling” and all that shit, flaunting his money; he dumped the wife in favor of the hot woman of the week; he’s been in prison a couple of times… he’s a totally different person. My brother hardly speaks to him anymore.
I had a best friend in high school who got way into pot- clever and funny became boring and lazy and then weird and then needing to borrow money and then owing money to sketchy people. There was a kind of desperate air about him all the time. I cut him out until he cleaned up.
Seriously- it was just pot but his life become effin’ Trainspotting.
My mom has undergone a significant personality change, mostly due to her increased drinking. In high school, she was pretty with it. College, she was still fun, but we noticed she was drinking more. Now, 12 years after I graduated college, she’s a passive-aggressive soul sucker who makes everything about her. Sometimes she’ll start drinking gin at 10 a.m. It makes her alternate between saying really mean things designed to wound and getting sloppy touchy-feely, trying to hug us and kiss us and tell us how much she loves us. I’ve told her several times that I’m concerned and have asked that she moderate when she’s around my children, going so far as to ask, “Do you really want your grandchildren to remember you that way?” She’s cried about it, said she has a problem, etc., but from the way she’s doing it, you’d think she was acting it out on a stage. She delights in affecting this sad-but-brave appearance. “I’m devastated, but I’ll soldier on.” After a recently demonstration of selfishness and attention seeking, I’m particularly disgusted.
On a more positive note, my sister used to be completely rabid bitch when we were in high school together. It was bad enough that, in retrospect, she probably needed therapy and medication. We lost an entire set of dishes one summer and she used to beat me up frequently. But when she went to college, she mellowed a lot, stopped caring about her “image” and now we’re very, very close.
My late wife, during the six months prior to her death from Parkinson’s. After six years I’m still not up to discussing the details, but if you’re interested you can do a search for threads I started in late 2003/early 2004.
My best friend’s husband was a workaholic but a great provider. He and I didn’t always see eye to eye, but he was always active, out working, and full of vitality.
Almost 2 years ago he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Now he just sits in his easy chair in his t-shirt and boxers, never speaking or doing anything. It’s not just that he’s been ill - he has no spark left in him at all - he’s just a soulless corpse who occasionally shuffles past me when I go to visit her.
I want to go in and shake him and make him get it together for his wife and small son - because he’s just given up. But he’s not my husband - he’s hers. I think of that scene in Regarding Henry when the PT gives Henry eggs he doesn’t like to force him to speak. Since Ed doesn’t really care for me, I want to go in and make him mad enough at me to want to come at me and hit me - just to see some passion back in him.
Yes. I was barely a teen myself at the time so I didn’t realize that’s what was happening, but I remember a childhood where my mom wasn’t batshit insane. That all changed at one moment when I was fourteen.
About a year ago, I reunited with my best friend from high school. She used to be normal, funny, fun to hang out with, and cool. Now, 20 (some) years later, she is extremely religious, judgmental, hateful, and mean. And she says that I, as an atheist, am not able to have any morals or values and so she can’t have anything to do with me, unless it’s to email me and exhort me to get saved before it’s too late. :rolleyes: I really wish I’d never re-met her and then I could still at least have my good memories of her left intact.
Anyone had guilt from avoiding these particular people? I would like to hear more input from those who witnessed personality changes that resulted from illness or injury.
I would assume that one would feel more guilty from not wanting to associate with a person, who has had these changes as a result from something completely out of their control…opposed to something like drugs.
But the posts about drugs are eye-opening nevertheless. :eek:
When I was in junior high my best friend had a close friend that he’d known his whole life. This kid was a bad seed. By the time he was 15 he’d been arrested something like 10 times. He used drugs (most of us did, but not like him), he stole, he ran away from home multiple times, he was into beating people up, he was in constant trouble in school – when he was there. He mostly skipped or was suspended. I knew him all the way through high school.
He just found me through Facebook a couple of months ago. He’s been to divinity school, he’s an ordained minister, he works with the deaf, he’s married, and recently he became a father.
I had a good friend in high school. He was a good student, active on varsity school teams (football and basketball), an excellent golfer, popular with the ladies. A generally happy type who teachers liked having in their classes.
Then he got into drugs. Suddenly, everything became about the good shit he scored, and the next party. Many classes were skipped, and grades suffered. Sports held no interest for him any longer; this formerly active student athlete spent less time on the field and the court, and more time just sitting around. It was during this time that he once mused that the girls at school had the cleanest hair anywhere, as they were always planning to wash it when he asked them out.
He lost many old friends too, me among them. No guilt on my part; I simply had no interest in drugs, or in just sitting around ingesting drugs.
Recently, I ran across him online. He’s now a successful businessman, married with kids, and once again playing an excellent game of golf. Nice to see he came through it all, but apparently it took some doing.
I’ve been good friends with more than one person who was intelligent, bookish, creative, a little nerdy, and made me feel comfortable and at ease only to have them decide at some point that they were making too large a sacrifice of social capital and it was time to become shallow and obsessed with looks and being friends with the ‘right’ people. It really sucks and I never really have figured out a way to deal with it. I have been completely stunned at the vast difference between how people behave when talking to me vs talking to ‘cooler’ people, and how people will reform their entire personalities just to fit in.
I have always been very close to my grandmother, she’s my grandpa’s second wife therefore she is the same age as my Mom and has always played a maternal role in my life. She has fibromyalgia. It was starting to affect her physically when I was in my teens, but I don’t think anyone but me realized how seriously ill she was. We went through a long period of separation (my Mom forbade her to see me for about a year) and when I joined up with her again, she was a different person.
She used to be on top of things, able to juggle forty things at once, always taking care of her children and children’s children and didn’t have a mean bone in her body. While she has physically deteriorated to the point that she cannot work, in my mind it is her psychological changes which are the most tragic. She can’t remember things, cannot concentrate, is extremely unreliable, and clings to stubbornly irrational thoughts and behaviors and refuses to back down. The house is an absolute dump bordering on hoarding-level issues. She also has apparently started beating my grandfather. He’s been in the hospital at least once from injuries she’s inflicted. She would never have done this before that disease took over her brain.
They choose not to deal with it. That’s the general status quo in my family, though: ‘‘Let’s ignore this and pretend it’s normal and maybe it will go away.’’ Never does. I accepted a long time ago I can’t force them to do the right thing. I can only make the best choices for myself.
I do feel guilty for keeping my distance more than I used to. I have had people ask me how she’s doing and when I comment that it’s been a while since we’ve touched base, they seem surprised. ‘‘I thought you guys were really close.’’
Well, we were. And are. I mean, I love my grandma. But there’s only so much drama one person can take. In a way I’ve already grieved the loss of her and moved on.
Related thread from 8 months ago. In the OP I related the tale of a friend of mine who went from a pretty extreme atheistic liberal to a very extreme fundamentalist right winger.
Last year I helped my mother and my mother-in-law die. Both of them underwent significant changes in personality during the process - one for the positive and the other for the negative.
Most of my life’s work has been working with people who are in major life transitions so the textbook stuff comes pretty naturally but the emotional work is always a challenge. I cope with a strong and generous support system and a faith in natural process. In these cases the hospice people were an invaluable plus.
It’s been important to put my own physical and emotional health first, to say “No” without guilt and to recognize when it’s time to retrench and that frees me to help as I am able and willing. In my experience it’s an ongoing process of learning from trial and error.
After he explained to me that the “nice” personality he’d showed all those months was not really him - guys act differently when they are courting, he said. Now he could be himself.
What happened? Well things fell apart from that high point.
Am I bitter? Why would you even think such a thing?
an seanchai
My friend Gerald, from elementary to high school, got heavily into drugs while in college and spent four years as an utter waste and terror to everyone who knew him.
The good news is that he miraculously got his life back on track and successfully made amends to a lot of people, including his parents.
The bad news is that he got murdered not longer after this. It wasn’t even drug-related; some guy who felt Gerald had cut him off on the freeway followed him to work and killed him.
I’m glad you seem to know how to take care of yourself, too.