You don’t know very well what is going on but you feel bad a lot of the time? Do your friends contact you less than before to stay and care less about how you feel? Perhaps this is the time for you to wonder if you are surrounding yourself with the right people.
If the answer is negative and you often find yourself in situations like being almost always the one who takes the step to initiate a contact, the one who first takes the initiative to call or send that WhatsApp message to propose a plan, is You probably have to ask yourself what kind of people you interact with.
For situations such as those described above, it would not be unusual for you to feel nervous, tense and justify the situation thinking that your friendships have a lot to do to focus on you.
Sometimes, we don’t realize it or maybe we don’t want to see that those we called friends now seem to treat us as mere acquaintances.
That can be difficult to assimilate, but if they tear down our expectations more or less constantly – if they tell us they will call us and they don’t if they cheerfully mention us that we have to stay again but they don’t give up, etc.- It would be a good idea to stop for a moment to see if we are receiving what we deserve.
Sometimes, we self-incriminate ourselves, becoming responsible for what does not depend on us. In the case of the friends we mentioned at the beginning, we can feel guilty for not being with our friends, while justifying their attitude.
This self-imposition of responsibility can make us blind to the true reality. Perhaps they are the ones who are not contributing enough to the relationship and therefore are not worrying about caring for it.
Starting from the ideas of Helena Béjar, it is important to know how to distinguish between positive and negative guilt :
- The first helps us recognize that we have done something wrong or that we have made a mistake; This is what we could best define as “responsibility.”
- However, negative guilt can be a certainly disabling burden that often prevents us from seeing a solution.
The problem of guilt is that it tends to make us fall, almost always repeatedly, on the same mistakes without being able to solve too much .
We call our friends, we propose plans, we strive to maintain contact … But, with all this, it would be logical to think that there will be someone who almost always loses, and that someone is us.
The right people make us feel good
If when we return home after staying with our partner or our friends we feel tired and decayed, or if we have begun to suffer, for no apparent reason, symptoms of anxiety , we may not be surrounding ourselves with suitable people .
One technique to cope with these situations that Dr. Marisa Navarro recommends is to repeat the mantra ” this relationship doesn’t suit me “ . In this way, we can force ourselves to be a little more aware of what is happening, ceasing to self-incriminate ourselves for what is happening and thus being able to make a decision that is favorable to us.
One way to deal with this situation to be able to get away from it and its negativism is assertiveness . María Luisa Navarro Pereira, in her article Appropriate interpersonal relationships through assertive communication and behavior, reflects the perspectives of various authors on certain behaviors that are not assertive.
In this line, there are two very important ones mentioned below:
- Passive behavior : it makes us feel victims of the circumstances and tends to favor low self-esteem. This behavior is full of fear of rejection or losing the people we care about because they get mad at us. What we can do to change this is to respect what we feel and express it. Whatever they feel is probably their responsibility , but it shouldn’t be scary to tell someone phrases like “this is hurting me” or “I don’t like this.”
- Doubting oneself : thoughts of the type “I have exaggerated” or “I’m sure I see problems where there are none” generate guilt. If something detracts us from energy or does not make us feel good, we would do well to analyze the situation from a less biased perspective; Going to a professional can allow us to see what is not entirely clear to us or that we fail to identify.