I reconnected with my friend after a long time where we hadn’t seen each other. For the first time in my life I was beginning to process what I had been through in my life and at that moment I needed a true friend. I had reached my breaking point. I thought she would understand me because she was a little older. I had dealt with death, betrayal, losing family, being left for another woman by the man I loved, but I tried to keep a strong face. But I thought I could be honest with her about how I felt. She would interrupt me mid sentence to tell me that I just needed to be grateful or try journaling. Not gonna lie her advice did help eventually, but I wasn’t at that stage yet I was still hurting and I felt like she wanted me to just shut up and act happy so that I wouldn’t rub any of my “negativity” onto her. Eventually we just started drinking and partying a lot but never having real conversations anymore. The positive conversations were more reciprocated, but I felt like that’s ALL I could be around her was positive. I felt that if I wasn’t happy she wasn’t interested. And at that time, I wasn’t happy. Whenever I opened up she would make me feel like I was just dramatic or like other people had it worse. I started to feel mixed feelings being around her and she took my change in attitude as jealousy. Eventually I convinced myself that she was just trying to help and that maybe I should take her advice and being more stoic and reserved with my emotions. We ended up drifting apart again because of life but I felt worse after being around her. What ended up feeling like a slap in the face is that afterwards she started to make posts saying she wanted more “meaningful” friendships and that she was tired of just having people to drink and party with. I felt like she just slapped a label on me as the drinking/partying/negative friend and it turned me away from wanting to be vulnerable with people
How do you overcome the feeling of being invalidated by people you trusted?
