Dear Seaturtle:

This is what you wrote yesterday about P: “she is so negative, and she talks just so much, doesn’t allow a moment of silence. She cuts me off, I can hardly get a story out… She doesn’t listen when I talk she just waits to talk, and my patience is falling away. In trying to be a good friend I have spent time with her and just allowed her to vent“.

Today, you wrote in regard to my suggestion to disinvite P to the weekend celebration of your birthday: “This is what I want to do, but I am afraid of losing P as a friend if I do that, that I would be being a bad friend, wouldn’t I be?”-

– if you don’t disinvite her and suffer her presence during your birthday weekend (enduring her negative, on and on venting, etc.)), then you’d be a bad friend to you, wouldn’t you?

And you’d be losing you, wouldn’t you?

To be a true self (not a false self) means being a good friend to you, to not lose you.

You wrote that you plan to talk with P: “I have a feeling she will get defensive and if she does, and cannot see her negative behavior and commit to working on it, then I will attempt to disinvite her. It would be easier if I could have a conversation with her and she could remove herself from the trip”– you are afraid of being your true, assertive self, so you are hoping that she (P) will make the right choice for you. Your false self is scared to be proactive, it prefers to be reactive (to leave it up to P).

To be one’s authentic/ true self means to be assertive and kind, not one or the other.

anita