A
female
age
41-50,
anonymous
writes:My colleague is a bit of a nightmare and I don't know how to handle her!Some background - 3 years ago, I asked for a divorce after many years of physical and emotional violence from my partner. I have an eating disorder, which flared up under the stress, and I went down to an anorexic BMI. I really struggled emotionally, but I pride myself on my professionalism so I kept things together at work and never so much as cried in public about it. I am now recovered, have a new partner, and am much happier!Since I lost the weight, my colleague at work has been crash dieting and exercising obsessively. She's lost stones and stones of weight, but it's coming not from a good place of control, but from a bad place of emotional instability. While she's never been anything close to an anorexic BMI I felt terrible that my eating disorder might have been the trigger for someone else's problems, so I opened up to her with my own experience, and managed to persuade her to seek help. However, though she has been seeing a counsellor, I don't believe it's helping. One reason is that she's lacking in self-awareness to a disturbing degree (she's the kind of person who will say 'I'm the most laid-back person in the world' through gritted teeth, while brandishing a pair of scissors at a colleague). She'll say one thing one day, and the opposite the next, without ever registering that there's any difference between the two positions - and this happens to such an extent that no-one knows they are talking to any more, or what this person believes. Her behaviour is really disturbed too. She's extremely promiscuous, almost always with men who are married or engaged, she's thrown a knife at her sister, and she lies almost compulsively at work. She is always crying because she's constantly on a massive victim trip, feeling that everything in her life is bad - even though a lot of the bad things are the direct consequences of choices she herself has made (for instance, loss of her best friend is due to the fact that she slept with her best friend's husband!!). A while ago, she was coming to my office and crying for two hours, non-stop. This began to affect my mood and my ability to do my job, so I eventually had to have a word with my boss about it to explain where my time was going. I wasn't breaking any confidence in doing so - she's so obviously troubled that the entire department had been told unofficially that there was a problem. But since then, she's been incredibly rude to me, and very short. She clearly sees it as a huge betrayal. Talking to her would do no good, because she's one person one moment, another the next.In all honesty, I am scared of this woman. I think some of her behaviour suggests anti-social personality disorder. While I feel sorry for her, I am not in a place to be able to deal with her behaviour. Am I cruel to want to keep her at a distance as far as possible?
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anorexic, at work, best friend, confidence, divorce, engaged, friend's husband, my boss, she lies, violent Reply to this Question
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Fancy yourself as an agony aunt? Add your answer to this question! A
female
reader, Honeypie  +, writes (10 February 2011):
 First off, no I think distance is what YOU need to do. In order to function and work.
Secondly, I don't think you should take responsibility for her problems, after all you didn't "make" her do it. She made a choice and stuck by it. You tried to help her by letting her in and by telling her to seek help. Obviously she might still be in some sort of denial phase and there isn't anything you can do about it.
As for her sex-life. Well, that is on her. If she wants to treat herself like that, again, HER problem. Now if she was a good friend maybe some advice, help would be useful, but this woman doesn't want help or advice. She was a huge Woe is Me Pitty Party.
It could be honestly that she is doing some kind of drugs (which might be why she had that rapid weightloss). It could be she ISN'T taking her medication. She sounds bi-polar or really mentally unstable.
Either way, I would distance myself from her.
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