Sometimes when people say that they are telling you something you should know for your own good, maybe it really is for their own good. Maybe they tell you that you should change something about yourself for your own good when really its something that is for their own good, not yours? “Janey, you should quit talking so much and stop monopolizing the conversation”, when really they are the one who wants to monopolize the conversation and they want you to shut up and let them completely take over. Worse yet they can compliment you about something you are wearing or about a new hairstyle when obviously it doesn’t flatter you at all. Then your best friend can be your worst enemy. How do you tell the difference between one and the other?
Also less lethal but still misleading is a friend-enemy who may monopolize the choice of the next store to go to on “Black Friday” or acts like she is being the most helpful when you are deciding where to eat. It is always presented as the most logical choice but over time you or others don’t get to go where they might have planned to go. If you kept score, how many times did they get their choice while you or others did not get theirs? Maybe you had hoped to have Chinese and to top it off it might have even been your birthday and you didn’t get to have your choice for whatever reason your “friend” gave. Then if you begin to feel slightly angry over time, your friend will have a reason why you shouldn’t feel bad and it makes you look and feel like an oversensitive slob.
Could your friend be a little narcissistic and even insensitive? Not that you could say anything about them or to them. The only remedy often seems to be a little bit narcissistic or insensitive yourself. Often you spend too much time being codependent and meeting other people’s needs and may even have difficulty recognizing your own needs. “Let’s invite Judy (that’s you) to the party, I’m sure she’ll bring the food and even make the decorations.” Whoops, isn’t something going “wrong” there? Maybe the party wasn’t your idea and you had something else planned. But you get coopted!
I was pregnant with my second child and though I hoped for a girl as my first was a boy; but I didn’t know because we had no way of telling at that time. When I did have a girl, I was pleasantly surprised and had a smile on my face; but I didn’t realize until later that I wasn’t prepared for a girl (I had had two brothers (oops I almost misspelled them as “bothers”), but my good friend gifted me with an assortment of girl items which were greatly appreciated by me. However that night I went into a trance state (a form of hypnosis which I had earlier had used for help labor) and went through all the possible thoughts and ideas and scenarios that were connected with having my first girl child.
I guess I was not really prepared and my mind told me that. It was a significant event for me and went beyond the happiness of having a boy and now a girl (P.S.: The third child was also a girl and I was more prepared for her.). These sometimes negative thoughts were a form of preparation especially for me. I regretted losing a night’s sleep with a new baby; I realized I had mixed feelings and possibly without acknowledging them, they might have interfered more with my attachment to my new baby.
As a psychologist, I realized their value and acceptability of my mixed feelings in my forming my relationship with my baby girl. I don’t know if this could have affected positively or negatively my only experience of postnatal depression which I had with this birth. I don’t know for sure if it decreased my experience or increased it; but I feel that as a psychologist, my experience of working through some of these issues immediately after the birth helped and so did my gift from my good friend.
Relating my experience above is also a gift to a good friend of mine who is expecting a girl for the first time after creating a big brother for her too. As one who might possibly use this information, I am just suggesting to her what might happen and how I felt when this happened to me. I also had the encouragement of a friend who is and was at that time the mother of several girls and the support and the help of having had previous trances to help with labor. Was this my hypnotist’s post-hypnotic suggestion? It could have been as it was just like him to do something like that. I am wishing my friend who is going to give birth soon that everything goes well and I will be thinking of her.
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