Dear Naia:

I am responding to your posts on this page:

It is my understanding that you are genuinely a kind person and you don’t want to hurt others. This is admirable. Your kindness is evident in your communication with me and with other members on this thread.

You wrote about another long term friend: “she’s the sweetest person I know.. she is shy, introverted, not assertive”- if everyone you meet in life was these things, you will have no problems. Problem is that some people are aggressive and you will need to assert yourself so to protect yourself, either end interactions/ relationships or confront those people otherwise.

Your other friend is at times aggressive and you have been afraid of her hurting you, so you wanted to end the friendship but was too afraid to confront her so you took an indirect way to sort of confront her, that is.. to confront her without confronting her (“I wanted to force an end to the friendship without confronting her”)

You wrote: “I feel angry, resentful although I don’t want to feel that way about anyone”- it is impossible to not feel anger at others because we are born to feel anger, it is one of the natural emotions of animals. Its biological goal is to motivate an animal to fight when it has to, so to protect its life, its territory, its offspring. Your anger has a reason and it should be there.

When we feel anger at a person, we can’t be “genuinely happy” for that person. We want to hurt them, this is natural. Not that we should proceed to hurt the person, but we feel that we want to, that it will please us. This is what revenge is about, feeling pleasure over another person’s displeasure/ hurt. Can you imagine, Naia, the most “saintly” person feeling this way? But it is so, all humans do. It is just that not all humans proceed to act on this desire.

You placed a quote: “if you consistently experience unhealthy emotions that influence your actions..”- but there is no such thing as “unhealthy emotions”. We misunderstand our emotions. Some of our emotions feel good and some feel bad, but they are not good or bad. They are all natural and meant to motivate us to act in such a way so that we survive and function well in life. We need to understand our emotions correctly, not to reject them!

What to do when angry? Look for the valid message in our anger and choose what to do about it. In case of your aggressive friend/ roommate, the right thing to do is to end your relationship with her and plan on no longer living together.

(The post you copy pasted for me, I read it before. I didn’t understand that you meant this one).

Your friend/roommate “herself said she would have ‘no scruples destroying lives of whoever hurts her'”- if I heard that, I would ask what she meant by “hurts her”- what hurt is she referring to. If she meant that if a person is trying to kill her she would have no scruples doing what has to be done so to protect herself, then I understand and agree with her sentiment. But if she means otherwise, this statement would be enough to end my relationship with the person making this statement.

“Last year, she spread rumors about a girl in her class that were absolutely untrue just because she didn’t like her”- yes, I would not be her friend. But why did you write about her before (in the post you copied and pasted): “I trust her completely”?

You don’t trust her. You are afraid she will hurt you. This means you don’t trust her.

“she became more and more of a bad mouth being judgmental about everyone’s appearance and choices in life.. she had a bunch of classmate just like her, with whom she could gossip”- better stay away from her and her friends.

Clearly you need to end the friendship and living together arrangement with her. It is not good for you to be “waking on eggshells”.

In summary: it is natural and healthy for you to feel anger, it is okay to assert yourself against aggressive people and end contact with them. It is impossible to live a functional life if our aim is to never cause hurt or displeasure in another person. We have to be fair with people, to not mistreat them, but to protect yourself is not to mistreat another, even if it displeases them that you protect yourself. See to it that you are fair in the way you assert yourself, but do assert yourself. It will be scary to do so, but start small and practice. Over time you will build confidence in your ability, confidence and courage and it will get easier.

anita