Help Interacting with a Friend with Anger Issues while Keeping Myself Well
Hello, everyone! I'm 20F, I'm attending a college with some close friends and am currently attending summer classes on campus while they're all back home.
I've decided to take this time to reflect on the friendships I've made and how I could improve from here on out. I should note, I'm Autistic and so are the vast majority of my friends.
This one friend I have, I'll call him Jay, 22M, He is perhaps the second-closest to me out of our friend-group. Like me, he came from a severely abusive family where he essentially had no one and we just went in different directions when it comes to coping mechanisms.
I had a parent who I was incredibly close to but made multiple attempts on my life as a kid, so it resulted in my brain shaping into a rather compartmentalizing, dissociative, and perhaps a passive way of coping. Just being friendly and helpful. I'm not one to be very assertive or confrontational as I'd like to be, but I won't stay friends with people just for the sake of keeping the peace anymore. However, I've been known to tolerate a bit too much in the past.
This brings me to Jay, who I became friends with last semester. We have a lot in common and he's someone with a very strong sense of right and wrong, a lot of integrity, smart, hilarious, responsible, many great great things that I admire about him. And I do believe he cares about me, absolutely. He trusts me a lot and has done a lot of things that I can't recall most of my friends in the past ever doing.
However, he clashes a lot with others during tense or annoying situations. He has outright said he knows its an issue and has described himself as a "very angry person." He is easily irritable, defensive, and has a lot of unprocessed anger. We worked on a team together during class and he would snap both at me and other teammates. He worked incredibly hard and the grievances were somewhat understandable, but no one appreciated being spoken to that way and neither did I.
I know there are a lot of factors at play I speak to him about sometimes and just check in if he's okay. He's AFAB so he takes a lot of testosterone shots that effects his mood and just has a hell of a lot going on at home and his housing situation.
But all of that being said, yes, it sucks. He won't call me names or anything, he's never done anything like that. The incidents with our team, he did apologize for, but there are incidents with me he hasn't really apologized for and we didn't really reconcile, honestly. I just sort of moved on and let it slide because it was nearing finals and our schedules were so packed we didn't have time to talk about it.
Really mild stuff on its own, but it builds up. A lot of them are just him getting over-the-top angry at me because I didn't hear him. He's done the same thing with some of my friends. Such as me walking towards a changing room in a store when we go out together and then when I jingle the knob not hearing him tell me that someone entered because I was already walking over, he just threw his arms up and yelled at me. Something similar happened just a few moments later and honestly it was overwhelming enough I almost cried. Same thing happened when our team was meeting and I didn't hear him in class because I got a call from my pharmacy.
Not only can we really not have healthy debates at all regarding things such as American History without him completely, stubbornly shutting me down and firmly stated that his view on it was correct, but I've also felt a bit disrespected by it. He won't hear me out and kind of squint at me like I'm being stupid. If we had talked just a little further about it, I would've been elaborate on what I meant, what my sources were, but we just can't talk about anything like that if he doesn't agree with it right away. Truthfully, it felt disappointing.
A lot of times when someone will say, I don't remember saying something to you, he'll jump to, oh they're lying to my face. He's done this multiple times and it's really messed with a lot of his relationships.
There were way more significant incidents that I just didn't experience personally, the way he talks about people sometimes is in this grey area between (I understand why you're upset) and (that's really harsh language to use here.) Such as describing someone as brain-dead or worthless, although in the contexts I understand why, I just wouldn't use that language.
Genuinely, I like him, I enjoy my time with him on his good days, but the unexpected back and forth puts me in a bad state sometimes and reminds me of bad memories. I see where he's trying to improve but I want to check in and see whether I'm in the state to support both him and myself.
I probably won't keep this post up long, but I just want honest feedback about how I should consider moving forward. Thank you!