"At the center of this bizarre reenactment is one driving assumption: “I am someone who deserves punishment. If I were better, this person wouldn’t reject me and treat me like toe cheese.” This belief makes it incredibly tough to confront the bad friend in question. Not only do you already know that you won’t be heard, but you also suspect that merely stating your needs or standing up for yourself makes you mean and hypocritical. Also: The bad friend is somehow always in the middle of a crisis of her own. So how dare you bring up your own crisis when her crisis is so much more dramatic and terrible than yours?
So you wait. For a long time. You accept that you need to be kept at arm’s length. As long as you’re going through something that requires her to hear a word about your feelings (even if they’re unrelated to her, even after her crisis passes), then you still have to be kept away. Plus, you really don’t deserve to be going through anything or to need anyone because, unlike her, you’re doing just fine, you have the tools you need, you don’t need any help from anyone else.
See how it works? When you have feelings, you’re exaggerating or being dramatic. When you need something, you’re just being petulant and needy. Your needs aren’t real to her, somehow. Even when you show up for her, that’s a liability, too. Because she doesn’t like to lean on people, and your intimacy and inside knowledge of her challenges make her anxious. You are a faucet that gets turned on and off. If you decide you want any control of your own, you’re treated like a faucet that isn’t working correctly...
Is she a shitty person? Probably not! Maybe you remind her of someone from her family and she needs to work something out with that person, through you. She has just as much of a right to her issues as you do to yours. Issues are just deep, passionate desires covered in shame, dripped in extra shame, boxed up in shame, and tied up in a big shame bow. But once someone treats your issues like a big pile of unnecessary garbage, it’s hard to treat theirs with care, too. Two people with issues and baggage and subconscious confusion and shame in the mix need a lot of generosity and goodwill between them not to feel like they’re perched in the middle of an enormous garbage dump."
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