Invisible
when someone's behavior here confuses you, I find it's most helpful to click on their username anywhere it is underlined on the board. This will take you to their profile, where you can click on the line that says,
Show the last posts of this person.
This will bring up everything they have posted under their username, over the entire history of their account.
if you start at the beginning, which may be the last page depending on the order in which you have posts displayed on your screen, you can see how they started out here, what they said when they first got here, how people responded to them, how they responded back, etc. It gives a very in depth picture of how we have all expressed ourselves, changed, grown.
You may learn some interesting facts about other people here too, at the same time, by tracing their interactions with the person whose posts you are reading.
Now, if someone cancelled their account and then came back later [I did this], you will only get the posts from their new account. Even so, this may give you a sense of what the person is like over time, and that's important - and you can do a search on their username to get the posts from their previous account if they didn't change their name when they came back [I didn't].
I really recommend doing this whenever anyone's behavior confuses you. It will usually help you to see if what they are doing is typical of them, whether they do it to everyone or just a few people and what kind of people they do 'it' to, whether they have grown and faced anything that they might need to face or seem to be 'running a show' here [projecting an image to an audience] and not in recovery at all. Seeing these things is valuable for maintaining perspective and proper compassion [which is totally different from enabling!], while avoiding being 'fooled'... as much as possible, anyway.
I find that misuse of PMs isn't uncommon here - people may send truly strange ones, or they may behave very reasonably in PMs to you, and then tell the most incredible lies about you and your PMs on the board. No surprise. This is a recovery forum, afer all. Everyone here has been injured. Not everyone here will be at the same stage of healing, and because honesty can be very painful, not everyone here will be honest, all the time, either, sometimes not even to themselves.
Simplest solution? Block PMs from people you mistrust. Or if you're fed up enough, block PMs from everybody. You can do that in your profile by clicking on your own username wherever it's underlined.
And I do hope you will stay. You can learn a lot and grow a lot here. I know there are lots and lots of people who just read the posts here - you can learn and grow just doing that, even.
all the best...
