I have a friend right now who is going through some stuff. It’s very familiar stuff to me, so I saw it coming in her case, but was helpless to prevent it because it was already in process before I knew it even existed as a possibility.

 

My friend is a giver. She is a rescuer.

 

I used to be, and have been three times before. Only once did it work out well, and that was with the friend who is now going through similar stuff that I did with the two who came before her.

 

Which is why I was deeply hesitant to rescue her ten years ago, because when it doesn’t work out, suddenly the rescuer becomes the “bad guy” in the situation from the perspective of the rescuee, and they usually bitch about it far and wide to mutual friends who never hear your side of the story because frankly, it’s exhausting and because rescuers aren’t gossips and aren’t looking to demonize the person they tried to help. So the rescuer remains silent while the “offended” rescuee/opportunist pontificates far and wide about the “unfair about face” that their “former friend” (rescuer) took in pushing them from their cozy nest.

 

Briefly, I’ll revisit the two disastrous rescues I undertook. I won’t describe what my friend is going through now, but I have no doubt the result will be the same, because the person she rescued has the same tendencies that my two did: narcissistic personality disorder.

 

In the first case, I met someone during the time I was at Ralph Helfer’s Wild Animal Affection Training Center, where I met my first serval cat.

 

PAT#1

 

Pat (it’s very strange, but in both cases of rescuee failure, the first name of the rescuee was Pat!) and I were assigned to “tame” Sneakers (the serval), which was a daunting task of (in our case) simply sitting with him in his small enclosure for hours until he stopped hissing and spitting and decided we were trustworthy and kind. This was after he had been ham-handedly ordered about by other handlers before we came along. Sneakers fell asleep in  my arms on the day we were to show our training adeptness and receive a pass or fail. When Ralph Helfer observed Sneakers sleeping soundly in my arms as we lay on the ground together, he smiled, gave us a thumbs up, and proclaimed, “Pass!  Good job!”

 

Sneakers and me. That’s Pat’s boot that Sneakers’ chin is resting on.

During the course of weeks that Pat and I spent together at the Wild Animal Affection Training compound, I got to know her story. She told me she was in with the wrong crowd in her town, “everyone” there was engaged in the drug culture, and she wished she had some place to go where she could get a clean break, clear her head,  and start again.

 

So, I offered her that opportunity. When I moved back to the Pacific Northwest, Pat came along. She quickly found a job working at a mink farm, so I was letting her use my vehicle to get to and from work.

 

Right up until I found out she was still using and driving my car while stoned.

 

She very quickly found the stoners here in western Washington and fell right back into the wrong crowd.

 

So, I booted her out.  Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!  It’s called tough love.

 

I simply wouldn’t allow unhealthy, counterproductive codependency to establish itself in my home. And of course I became the bad guy. (I know drug addiction is not a character flaw and that it often takes many times before someone can break the habit, but I wasn’t interested in becoming a halfway house for recovering/relapsing drug addicts. I’m not trained in it, and it’s well above anything that should be expected of a friend.)

 

PAT#2

 

In the second instance, I invited a friend (again named Pat) who had divorced her husband and was looking for a fresh start. We met at a StarTrek convention at which DeForest Kelley was a special guest, and we hit it off like two long lost siblings.  She was a real firecracker at conventions: vivacious, and funny. I figured she would hit the ground running if she just had a few months to land a job in the LA area and get her feet under her, so she moved across the country and joined me as a co-renter in Encino.

 

I covered all her costs for the first several months until she landed a spot at a temp agency. When I then suggested that it was time for her to start contributing to the rent and cleaning the house, she looked at me, aghast, but she complied, grudgingly.

 

We co-rented for four years. She was offered a permanent job several times at the place where she was temping, and they said they would train her and help her develop additional skills so she could advance in the company, but she didn’t love working there – she wanted a job in the entertainment industry like I had – so she kept declining and staying stuck.

 

When I suggested that she apply at entertainment companies if that’s where she wanted to be, she asked if I would apply to them for her. She was (still is) a gifted cartoonist/illustrator, so I told her, “No, that isn’t how it works. You need to go in yourself with a portfolio of your work and meet the HR folks at Disney, Hanna Barbera, etc.” She wouldn’t do that. And she continued to spend her money not on a security deposit for a move to her own place, but on VHS tapes so she could veg when she wasn’t working.

 

That got very old, very fast. I realized that she was perfectly comfortable parked right square in the middle of my personal life, which was never my plan when I invited her out. That’s the short version, and it’s enough to give you a sense of my developing frustration with a woman who was seven years my senior who had no intention of ever moving out.  So — in a compassionate and very carefully worded letter — I gave her a six-month notice so she would start saving the money needed for a security deposit and rent in some other place.

 

It became a tense six months.  She sulked for a while, and she talked with mutual friends in the DeForest Kelley club about how badly she was being treated.  (Admittedly, I did retreat from interacting with her as readily/eagerly as I always had before so she would experience viscerally that I was dead serious about the deadline and expecting to see a change in her improvident spending habits.) Fine. I didn’t care. I didn’t try to explain my side. But I did notice that none of our mutual friends offered to take her in, so I figured they had her number, anyway, and what value was there in bashing someone I still cared deeply about (and for) but who wouldn’t fly the coop to set me free so I could live alone again (my preferred way of living).

 

So, in both of those cases, I became the “failed friend,” the person who wouldn’t allow their dysfunction to hobble my life.

 

I’m a great rescuer, but the rescuee has to realize that once I’ve gotten them out of the water and into the boat, they need to start paddling like hell to get where they need to go so they are no longer dependent on a rescuer to live.

 

RECSUE#3 WAS A ROARING SUCCESS, THANKFULLY!

 

Ten years ago I risked my reputation once again to rescue the friend who now finds herself in a situation similar to the ones I faced above.

 

I was scared to death to offer her a place on my couch and in my life because of how unhappily my rescues had ended before, but after spending an entire weekend with her, I realized we were siblings at heart. We had nearly everything in common — a passionate love for animals (particularly cats and goats), similar sensibilities, and we got along a lot better than I ever have with my blood-and-bone siblings. We could finish each other’s sentences and thoughts. When we disagreed (and we did, vociferously at times) our frustration would erupt into a furious spat and then we’d cry, hug and apologize, and our friendship would become even deeper and stronger because we could disagree and still adore each other.

 

But from the moment she landed on my futon, she was working on finding a solution that would get her OUT as soon as she possibly could. I assured her there was no hurry, but she thinks like I do and did when I was couch-surfing at Sue Keenans, De’s fan club president during my first 15 months in Hollywood: she figured she was “imposing” and needed to find her own way in the world as soon as she could. She was so consumed by that ethic that she moved out just eight months later and into a caregiving situation that took advantage of her six ways from Sunday and  paid her pitifully (L&I-liability-wise, had she informed them) for seven-days-a-week caregiving.

 

That’s when I knew I hadn’t made a mistake. We shared a rock-solid mutual sense of responsibility for orchestrating our own lives.

 

Now, she’s about to put someone out who has taken egregious advantage of her for a year. She learned this lesson a lot faster than I learned mine, but it’s a hard lesson. It causes the rescuer to feel somehow as if they have failed, when the failure lies squarely on the rescuee. In her case, it is particularly egregious. Her rescuee quickly became an opportunstic freeloader in addition to being  psychologically abusive (caustic, critical, and infantile), extremely Trump-like in viewpoint and behavior.

 

It sucks.

 

This shouldn’t happen to good people

 

But it does, because good people want to help.

 

Good people deserve better. It’s just a shame that we don’t have perfect “rescuee pickers” because unfortunately, opportunistic takers recognize compassionate caregivers from a mile away and they know how to make themselves appear legitimately needy enough to receive an invitation. And it’s all downhill from there.

 

Good for my friend that she is standing up for herself and demanding that the people in her life treat her with the respect she deserves or get the hell out.