Collection 3: "With Friends Like These..." by Dorothy Rowe

We might find it hard to give friends objective advice, unrelated to the person we want them to be.

We can be reluctant to allow each other to change, sometimes falling out in a way that is painful for all involved.

When these ideas are shown by events to be reasonably accurate, that is, our ideas are validated, we feel secure in ourselves, but when they are proved wrong, we feel that we are falling apart.

On the other hand, when we say, “I’m shattered,” or “I’m losing my grip,” we might not be using cliches to describe a bad day but talking about something quite terrifying that we are experiencing: our sense of who we are is being challenged.

We are constantly assessing how safe our sense of being a person is.

Our positive emotions are interpretations to do with safety, while the multitude of negative emotions define the particular kind of danger and its degree.

All she had to do was to endure a period of uncertainty until she could construct ideas that better reflected her situation.

The degree of risk we perceive from our friends relates directly to the degree of self-confidence we feel.

Feeling self-confident, we can rejoice in our friend’s success at a new job; feeling inferior, we see danger and try to defend ourselves with: “It’s not fair.”

We create a mental image of our friends, and we want to keep them within the bounds of that image. Our need to do this can override our ability to see our friends in the way they see themselves.

We create a mental image of our friends, and we want to keep them within the bounds of that image. Our need to do this can override our ability to see our friends in the way they see themselves.

Falling out with a friend shows us that our image of them, from which we derive our predictions about that friend, is wrong; and if that is the case, our sense of being a person is threatened.