I recently made a new friend. She is a wonderful woman in many ways: friendly and outgoing and cheerful and funny and great to be around. But as our acquaintance lengthens, she is gradually filling me in on her past, and I’m starting to wonder.
You see, she has gone through what sounds like an unending series of awfully damaging events, both physically and emotionally damaging, I mean. And while in some of them she is clearly a ‘random victim,’ in most of the cases it seems to me that she is either setting herself up for bad results by voluntarily doing things reasonable adults would avoid OR the damage is flatout self-inflicted through incredible clumsiness and carelessness.
(BTW, this woman, let’s call her Accident Prone, is about 28 now, and very attractive. Which maybe shouldn’t matter, but in truth what constitutes ‘reasonable behavior’ is sometimes different between being, say, an ordinary looking 50 year old guy and a 20 year old beautiful girl.)
Examples, just one of each type though I could give you at least a half dozen more of each:
Of the blameless victim type: She moved into an apartment that was formerly occupied by a friend of a man who turned out to be a serial rapist, and subsequently drew his attention. (Of course, even there…Am I the only one who gets locks changed when she moves into a new place? And she didn’t even do that after the first time she found this stranger-to-her guy had let himself into her apartment.)
Of the setting herself up: She and another friend decide on impulse to drive to Mexico for a night of drinking and ‘having fun.’ At some point during the journey it occurs to them it would be funny to handcuff themselves together and claim to be escaped fugitives. The situation ends up with assaults and a drunken brawl in a bar, and arrest. Naturally they had managed to lose their purses in the course of this, and so they spend several days in a not very pleasant jail while things got straightened out.
Of damaging herself: She dropped a glass while cooking dinner. From then on it was a comedy of slapstick, with cutting of fingers, falls onto broken glass and accidentally sitting on some collected pieces and finally somehow slicing her arm open to the bone on a piece that was somehow wedged into the side of a cabinet. She was sitting around in a pool of blood laughing at her own silliness when her date arrived, and he had to rush her to an emergency room.
Now, I started to disbelieve her. Maybe these things had not happened at all, or that maybe she was wildly exaggerating just to amuse other people with the stories. But I talked with a couple of other woman about it – the one who had introduced me to Ashley, and another unrelated woman, and between them they can vouch for many of the incidents being true. Either they were there while these things unfolded, or helped clean up the mess, or knew the other people involved in these incidents, etc.
Assuming this all happened, then, is she just the unlucky flipside to the guy who wins the lottery and buys a rummage sale coat with a pocket full of jewelry and so on? Or…
Is it probable that she is (on some level) deliberately getting herself hurt? She relates these horrible stories cheerfully, introduces the subjects herself, and does in fact gather a lot of sympathy and admiration for her pluckiness and grit and courage in having survived so well. Well, who could fail to admire a woman who has risen above not just multiple injuries that required hospitalization, but three separate rapes and a kidnapping by an enraged ex-lover in such a bracing way? She gets lots of ‘stroking’ and is the center of attention and so forth – could that possibly be enough to make her willing to suffer this abuse to get ot?
Would this be some some form of “Munchausen Disease”?
And, if so, what should I do as her friend? Discourage her from telling the stories and wallowing in it? (Without the ‘reward’, maybe she’d stop hurting herself.) Encourage her to seek counseling?