Dear Maria:

“Should I break up with a friend?”- yes, you should end this friendship today. Having read your post it is an easy question to answer.

Let’s say you are too detached from people and should invest more in friends (“I’m questioning myself about how I’ve been dealing with people during my social life and if it’s right for me to be so detached. If I should invest more..”)- what is clear to me is that you should be detached from this particular woman and no longer invest anything at all in her.

It is about being selective: attach and invest in people who are good for you to interact with, not  in people who are bad for you.

It is a good thing that you had your school, work and career as your first priority so far and therefore you invested a lot in these things. The woman this thread is about, your friend from high school, “it was really nice”, and this friendship should remain there, in the past, when it was really nice.

The problem with her is that she is aggressive: you mentioned being caught in the crossfire between her and your ex boyfriend, you mentioned her arguing with you (“She would argue that I was a puppet of my ex…”She demands a lot of attention.. she gets angry if I don’t answer her texts… she criticizes me a lot… lashing me out saying I had no right to be upset”-

-after all of her aggression, you question yourself and  feel that you are “a sh*** friend indeed… guilty.. a terrible person”. This is what aggression does, it defeats us and deflates us, weakens us, harms us.

Her choices in life, such as hooking up with random people, having sex with them, and later continuing to make bad choices- make her an unqualified authority figure in your life, that is, her input to you about what an inadequate friend you are, that input is invalid considering who is giving it.

But even if her own choices in life were great, still, her aggressive treatment of you is enough to indeed “break up with (this) friend”!

anita