A Difficult Relationship

Julie has a difficult relationship with a girl in her mainstream school. Of course the situation has improved since Julie largely dropped out of school, but she does visit the school once or twice each week, and on each visit there is a high chance of her running into Chrissie. There will be whole long months in which the two girls are studiously neutral, or even quite friendly in their relations. But there will always be a catastrophic break at some point, and a huge outpouring of venom and distress. Through email and Facebook, it inevitably spills over into home life. The impact on Julie is devastating - she is tipped into a state of hysterical terror at the thought of "what Chrissie might do to her" - a terror that is completely irrational.

There is no other person with whom Julie has ever had such a difficult relationship - her friendships in the main have been sunny and supportive. This single relationship, extending back into the distant past of primary school, has a unique complexity. Was Chrissie the girl who bullied Julie in primary school? Julie once told me that she was, but later was more ambiguous about it. For a while it seemed unlikely anyway: for a few months in their third year of secondary school, the girls appeared to suddenly become the firmest of friends. They had been thrown together in the early stages of Julie's illness, when Julie had started to withdraw from classroom life, and was being accommodated in the school support unit. This unit, a sort of mini-school within the much larger school, houses a flotsam and jetsam of pupils seeking refuge - typically no more than ten or twelve children, of all ages and abilities. Amongst the permanent residents of this "village" school was Chrissie, the only other girl of Julie's age, and of course an old friend - or should that have been enemy?

Whatever their history, the girls seemed to form a strong bond. They met up outside school; staff at the support unit, who had struggled to get through to Chrissie, encouraged the friendship. It looked as if this unexpected friendship with Chrissie was a definite positive in a period of Julie's life that otherwise was beginning to spiral downwards into depression. It was a bonus that it seemed to give as much back to Chrissie, who was in some undefinable way, herself very vulnerable.  Bearing in mind the hints that there had been bullying in the past, I even wondered if Julie found it cathartic to become friends with Chrissie now that they had grown up.

Yet at the same time, it was obviously not like Julie's other friendships. Driving the two of them to the cinema, or on a shopping trip, I was struck by how little conversation they made in the back of the car - so unlike the usual chatter and raucous laughter I was used to with other girls. Julie admitted that Chrissie forced her to meet up even when she was beginning to feel less and less like going out.  Chrissie was desperate for Julie to sleep over at her house, and I could see how tired Julie was of trying to explain that she was just too unwell. It was tempting to see all this as Chrissie's attempts to rouse her friend out of the clutches of depression. I suppose I wanted to believe that. I was puzzled though why this seemed to fall to Chrissie, and not Julie's normal friends. Had they really all deserted her once she dropped out of mainstream school life? Or was Chrissie uniquely perceptive?

It turned sour as soon as Julie became very seriously ill. The first time she had to break a prior arrangement with Chrissie - because she was being admitted to hospital - Chrissie was furious. The enforced separation did not improve the relationship in any way. On one of Julie's brief visits to school from hospital, Chrissie declared that she could no longer be friends with her - a declaration that plunged Julie into hysteria, something which at the time baffled me. I could not, for the life of me, understand why it mattered so much to Julie, stuck in a CAMHS inpatient unit, struggling with her demons, whether or not Chrissie was friends with her. But then, fourteen year old girls do lay great store by friendship, I thought, shaking my head in disbelief.

Over the year that followed, the hospital made heroic attempts to settle Julie back into mainstream school - which effectively meant back into the very small world of the support unit. How much of their work was undone by the constant presence of Chrissie there we may never know. To my shame, it took months before I began to take Julie's stories of whispering campaigns and hate mail seriously. I couldn't believe that in such a supportive atmosphere, and with so many adults in attendance, Julie could be at any risk of bullying.  Once I realised what was going on, I tried to alert the outreach workers from the hospital - they were responsible for settling Julie into school - but they refused to have anything to do with it: it was the school's business, they said. For what seemed the longest time, the school staff at the support unit refused to take it seriously - they knew Chrissie very well, and felt protective of her. She was vulnerable, they said (though surely not as vulnerable as Julie, seriously ill in hospital, I thought). They told me that Julie seemed to give as good as she got - it was just a clash of personalities, they said. Julie's very ill state told against her: no one was prepared to believe her side of the story, that as soon as staff left the room, she was bullied by Chrissie. Poor Julie, goaded by Chrissie's taunts, often lashed out angrily just in time for a teacher to see what looked like an unprovoked attack on Chrissie. It was months before a member of staff finally witnessed a sustained verbal attack on Julie. Julie herself did not help things by repeatedly lapsing back into the phoney friendship with Chrissie, which confused the adults, and weakened her claims.

Looking back now from a longer perspective, it is clear that Julie is far too unwell to sustain a real friendship with someone like Chrissie. I have never felt any animosity towards Chrissie - she is a genuinely very vulnerable kid, who I hope will find her own way in the world eventually and thrive. She is unlikely to understand the impact she has on Julie. Having few friends of her own, she wants to bind Julie to her by hoops of steel. When Julie lets her down - by being ill - Chrissie is just not able to understand the defection. Angry and bitter, she unleashes her weapons on Julie. It is bad luck that these weapons hit their target with such deadly accuracy. Either the long difficult years of whatever went on between them in primary school honed the weapons, or Chrissie has a genius for exploiting a weakness. It is bad luck for Julie, but also bad luck for Chrissie because by destroying Julie she destroys the friendship she yearned for. The most common and haunting phrase in their exchanges comes from Chrissie, "If you were a real friend you would..."

Before her illness, and during it, I am glad to say that Julie has made many good and strong friendships with all sorts of people - including both girls and boys of her own age, and also with adults. Most of these relationships seem genuinely supportive, both of her, and of the other person. When not immobilised by illness, she is often affectionate and funny, and is concerned if friends are in trouble or feeling down. What the story of Chrissie illustrates to me is how easy it is, especially if you are young, and fragile, to get sucked into an unhealthy relationship that does neither side much good. Chrissie still exerts a strange fascination over Julie, as perhaps failed relationships always do. Back in February I caught Julie arranging to go shopping with Chrissie, and here we are in May and there has just been another vicious argument via email, reducing Julie to hysterical sobbing. It doesn't matter how clearly I spell out to Julie what she should do - ignore all emails from Chrissie and bin them, and drop her as a friend on Facebook - I can see Julie just can't quite give up. There is always the glimmer of hope that with this one last message, she will finally get through to Chrissie and make her see that she is a good friend to her. That boundless childish hope that if you can make them understand you, they will stop hurting you.

I am torn between intervening - adding Chrissie's email address to the spam filter and screening phone calls - and carrying on trying to support Julie in standing up to her. In a few weeks Chrissie should be leaving school for good, and I hope that with no opportunity to meet there will be less trouble.  Julie should find it easier to settle back into her old school once she has gone. Maybe only time will tell how much damage this destructive relationship has done.