Nina

I'm pretty much a beginner with self-actualization. Since last year I became fed up with living a life full of negativity and self-doubt. I’ve started to work on myself to make significant changes with the destructive and negative side of me. A couple of years ago, I became friends with a former co-worker of mine. She happens to suffer from severe depression, anxiety, self-hate and thrives off of attention even if it is negative attention. I’m the type of person who fully gives myself to someone who is in need of support and love. I am that person for her to come to if she needs someone to listen when she’s hurting. Lately I have been changing my tune with this friend of mine. Since I started on the path of self-actualization, with reading, meditation, diet, I have been encouraging her to do the same. I’ve suggested books, meditation, and just maintaining my positive energy when I’m around her. But, I feel drained when she comes to me with her problems, and when she asks for advice from me, she doesn’t seem to like my perspective and continues on with her rants about how she is not lovable or she’ll always be single. A lot of her issues center around dating and men. I’ve been finding it frustrating because now I am realizing she’s the type of person who thrives on drama, she’s an attention seeker, she can be quite vapid, and she lacks any tack or patience when it comes to listening to other people and their stories. Recently we got into a petty argument because she kept asking me why a group of random guys at a bar didn’t like her. I explained that I didn’t know, and it shouldn’t matter because you will never meet these men again. She became upset, so I explained to her that maybe one of the men had taken what she said or did the wrong way. I explained to her that she should try to become more aware of the energy she puts off and her body language. The truth was, I thought she needed to relax because all I could think was how angry she looked. She demanded that as a friend I should be straight up with her, so I pointed out that with one of the guys that we were speaking to, she had cut him off mid-sentence and talked about herself for a good 5 minutes, maybe he thought she was being rude. At that point she went into a tirade about how people hate her, she can never say or do anything right, and then she insisted that she never cut the guy off. I was completely shocked that she was going off on me because I voiced my perspective on a situation that she asked me about. I completely flipped out on her and told her I was done with her games and drama. At this point I don’t want to ever speak to her again, even though I left that situation mostly annoyed that I lost my cool, and not the least bit angry at her. I still love her but I can’t deal with her narrow, negative, superficial view when it comes to how she thinks people should interact with her and but doesn’t think about how she is truly interacting with the people around her. At this point I don’t think it’s good or healthy for me to continue this friendship, but I don’t want to ever abandon someone who I think needs some type of positive influence in their life. What should I do? At this point she’s very angry and defensive. It would be difficult speaking to her about her attitude or just even about the argument.

Oh, I understand what you're saying now. I didn't think of it that way, but what you pointed out could be true. I'll have to reflect on both your points. I also really do feel that it could be that through the work I've been doing, our vibrations or mindset is at two different levels that at this point. I no longer ride along her emotional train of “woe is me” or destructiveness. It was mentally and emotionally exhausting just trying to get her off that train. It wasn’t serving either one of us, because it was using up most of my energy that I should have been using on myself and she wasn’t absorbing anything that I was providing to her, so I stopped.

Yeah, I am leaning towards having a talk with her even though I do have my reservations about it. I don't want to label her or our relationship as toxic, because I don't internalize or run with the negative energy that she puts out. She's really only hurting herself. Everyone has their ups and downs, and right now she's at the bottom with the the stuff that she's going through. However, like Ayla and you mentioned, it doesn't seem like she wants to put in the work to improve herself. I'm definitely not going to beat myself up over her choices.

Wow, that sounds pretty rough. It's great that you were able to recognize what was happening and remove her completely from your life. I think that once you're able to really recognize someone's intentions in a relationship, it being good or bad, you can make a conscious decision to either stay or remove yourself from the situation.

Ayla, thank you for the advice. I did think about what if she was mirroring my behavior that night. I used to be the type of person who would get swept away in my negative thinking. But ever since I've been working on developing deeper sense of self-awareness, I was in a positive and happy space that night. When I'm not in a good space I just stay home. From the moment we met up, she was talking to me about how upset she was with 2 men she's currently dating. I could see that she wanted to stay with that emotion all night, and I just kept trying to steer the conversation to something positive. I've realized this is a constant pattern of behavior for her. But you're right, I need to think about what I should do before taking any action. Think about how this relationship is serving both of us. I'm a work in progress and she wants to stay where she currently is at, when it comes to self development.