Ellie used to wonder why she always felt drained after spending time with her friends. Then she noticed that they were constantly complaining about their jobs or their partners without ever taking steps to change. Or else they would select an unsuspecting victim and sink their teeth into them. They didn’t want to hear about Ellie, 35 – the changes she was making in her life, the new business she had started. And they certainly didn’t want to hear that it was going well, she says. “You almost felt like you couldn’t fit in with them unless you were moaning about something.”

Maybe you have one of these characters in your life: an old school friend, perhaps, who consistently leaves you feeling worse than before you met up with them. In psychological shorthand, they are known as “emotional vampires”, for their ability to suck the pleasure from a social interaction – and your energy along with it. But what are the signs that you are in one’s clutches, or that you have become one yourself? And how can we best handle such relationships?

“There are some people who have an excessive need for attention and validation,” says Suzy Reading, a psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society. They are often overwhelmingly negative, or display a victim mentality, refusing to believe that anything that happens to them is their fault.

“A lot of times, they don’t actually want solutions or advice – they just want to offload,” says Reading. And while they might be intently focused on themselves, “there’s not a great deal of self-awareness”.

It’s not just their own patterns of behaviour that these individuals are oblivious to: emotional vampires are defined by their inability to empathise, leading them to vent their frustrations without thinking how it might affect or be received by the other person.

Carla Manly, a clinical psychologist based in California, says such behaviour reflects a lack of emotional intelligence. “When somebody is an empathic human being, even if they have a high need, when they reach out for support, they will be aware of your emotional state first.” They might ask you if now is a good time to talk, or pick up on cues that suggest it isn’t. Emotional vampires pay no such mind, says Manly. “They are only caring for their own appetite, their own needs.”

The key point is that the behaviour is consistent, even chronic, says Manly. There are many reasons a friend might temporarily be more demanding, or less present, such as after a breakup or a period of poor mental health. But in functional friendships, there is an underlying sense of give and take. “We want somebody to be invested as we are invested; a mutual reciprocity. It’s not always 50-50, but overall there is a sense of balance.”

An emotional vampire will resist that equilibrium, betraying a fundamental egocentrism. Any attempts to change the subject can be met with one-upmanship, dismissiveness or even hostility. “If you do then challenge them on it, they’re so resistant that you might end up getting attacked,” says Reading.

But to characterise one person as the predatory bloodsucker and the other as their hapless victim can be reductive. After all, vampires can’t prey on just anyone: you have to invite them in. “If someone has managed to get into this position of being completely domineering, then obviously we’ve allowed it to some extent, or possibly enabled it,” says Jenny van Hooff, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Even with the best of intentions, it can be all too easy to get sucked into the dynamic. Beth, 38, befriended a friend of a friend, wishing to support her through her first pregnancy. The younger woman struggled with her family and was not in contact with the father of her child and Beth thought she could help. But every time they spoke, Beth felt depleted, depressed and helpless. “I started to realise that I’d repeat the same things over and over again and she would never follow the suggestions, nor listen to me.”

When the woman started volunteering information about her childhood traumas, Beth felt that a line had been crossed. “It wasn’t about the trauma per se, but the fact that she would ‘vomit’ information without really listening,” she says. “The next time she called, I told her I only had 15 minutes, and the time after that, I made up an excuse so that we wouldn’t speak.”

Reading says it is especially common for women to work to maintain ties they find unrewarding and even actively unpleasant, often having been conditioned to keep the peace and prioritise others’ needs above their own. “Effectively, women are raised to believe that you’re either selfish or selfless.”

She often sees adult women struggling to protect themselves against their overbearing mothers: a “particularly painful dynamic” that was probably established in childhood. Emotional vampires might also enter into our lives in the form of co-workers or co-parents, Reading says – making it harder to create distance.

Schoolfriends are another common culprit, as people naturally grow apart over time, but feel reluctant to cut longstanding ties. “Just because there’s a legacy to this friendship, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a right to choose what shape it takes,” says Reading. It’s possible to maintain the relationship and still take steps to protect ourselves.

She suggests considering how much you can give to this individual and tailoring the interaction to bring out the best in them. “If you’ve got someone in your social circle that’s really overdramatic, loves chaos and wants to be the centre of attention, maybe don’t go out for coffee with several friends, because it will become that person’s show,” says Reading.

Instead, you could go for a walk together, one on one; nature might help to “diffuse that wall of noise”, she suggests. “Or, even better: go and see a film together … Think laterally about how you can enjoy time and space together in a way that feels healthy for you.”

Managing our own expectations can also help make those difficult relationships more sustainable, says Manly. Accepting that one particular friend is not inclined to give a listening ear can alleviate your disappointment or anguish when they speak only of themselves.

Cutting old friends loose can backfire, she says. “There’s something really precious about those relationships, because they carry the energy of ‘I knew you when’ and ‘You knew me when’ … The minute you part from the relationship, you fracture something in that sense of continuity.” But by recognising the value of those shared experiences and memories, the relationship can become a lot easier to maintain, Manly says – despite all the ways in which you might have grown apart.

“We don’t necessarily need to completely cut off the relationship,” she says. “We simply energetically and emotionally create greater distance. And to tell you the truth, when it comes to the emotional vampire, because they are more egocentric, they may not notice it.” Both experts agree that emotional vampires tend to move on when one energy source cuts off the supply. If this seems callous, consider the costs of maintaining the relationship as it is, says Reading. “At the end of the day, it’s also OK to protect your peace.”

It can also pay to be more upfront and give a friend a gentle heads-up about how their behaviour is affecting you. It may be an uncomfortable conversation – but it can be productive. For Troy, 32, confronting how he and his friend of a decade had drifted apart was helpful in changing their course. They had met at university, during a period of change in their lives, but in the subsequent years Troy’s friend had got hung up on a messy breakup. For many years, Troy says, they were stuck in a pattern of him being her shoulder to cry on. “Our friendship shifted from a place of feeling mutual to a point where our conversations were always about her and her relationship and how it was affecting her,” he says. “The gravitational pull was always towards the dark things she was going through.” Troy tried to respond with compassion, not only hearing his friend out, but trying different ways to help her move on.

“I’d always leave our conversations feeling really down – and also that nothing I was doing was helping,” he says. “There was a period where we even had a moratorium on talking about him, because I was not interested in having the same conversation we’d been having for the past five or six years.”

Eventually, Troy began to withdraw, volunteering less about himself and investing less in the friendship. Matters came to a head when his friend said she felt something had changed between them. They ended up having an argument. “It was a very hard conversation and things were said that were not easy for either of us to hear,” says Troy. But it also released the tensions that had been building on both sides.

“The fight actually acted as a reset button and we sort of made commitments in terms of how we wanted to be better friends to each other,” he says. When they met again a few weeks later, it felt “much more even – there was a sense that we’d gotten past it”. Being prepared to have those difficult conversations with people who matter to us can be productive, not only for our relationships, but for our sense of who we are within them, Reading says. Particularly in the case of family or close friends: “One of the functions of those relationships is to smooth off each other’s rough edges.”

One of Reading’s clients recently told an old friend, who had complained about feeling lonely, how she might be inadvertently pushing people away. The friend took it on, says Reading. “So let’s not write people off. It’s about making that distinction between a nice person, who doesn’t ruffle feathers, and being a kind person, who is allowing others to learn and grow.”

Manly is more circumspect about emotional vampires’ ability to change. “If they are doing even a modicum of self-work, they may be able to hear you, but in most cases they’re not – that’s why they have those patterns.” For any feedback to be received in good faith, “there has to be a desire to change”. There are also often unforeseen costs to “speaking one’s truth”, Manly adds. “It may not get you anywhere and in fact it may create rupture.”

Troy says he persevered with his friend because of their shared history and his faith in the real bond underpinning it. When he found himself feeling similarly drained by a looser friendship, he had felt more able to walk away. “She would always complain about being single, how busy work was, about not having any friends,” Troy says. “I became increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that she thought we were best friends, when for me she was someone I saw out of obligation every four months.” These experiences, he says, have taught him “to be more intentional with my friendships and who I devote time to – but also to be more transparent and clear when problems are arising and I can feel that balance shifting in a significant way”.

The challenges of vampire friendships may feel particularly heightened and unexpected because the nuclear family has become less dominant as the organising structure of our society. Platonic bonds have been rightly recognised as important and enriching, but the popular description of friends as “the family you choose” can set up unrealistic expectations – and belie the frequent difficulty of navigating them, says Van Hooff. “When you look at research, people maintain friendships that they really do not enjoy.”

It’s perhaps in response to the uncritical celebration of friendship as always equal, effortless and enriching that the concept of “emotional vampires” has taken flight, Van Hooff suggests. “The rules of friendships are really opaque and difficult to work out and some people are more skilled at navigating them than others.”

The next time you find yourself in a never-ending interview with an emotional vampire, you might look for ways to defang the monster, and even to understand them, before resorting to banishment. But for those starting to feel apprehensive about looking into the mirror, Reading is reassuring. “For anyone thinking: ‘God, am I an energy vampire?’ I think the fact that you’re asking that question would suggest you’re not.”

All case study names have been changed