Every person’s experience is their own. Another person’s scale of pain does not lighten or decrease ours. Perspective can shift our experience of it when we are ready, but what we feel is what we feel. And your feelings are important because you are!

So glad you stopped by. I visited your blog earlier this evening. I like your honesty and candor.

Ain’t that the truth! I remember telling a therapist about my adolescence and feeling embarrassed because it all just seemed like the same old crap. I told him “I wish I could tell you about how I got raped by my uncle in the barn,” since then I’d have a traumatic experience that would be respected. What the therapist said then floored me: he said “maybe you didn’t have an experience like that, but you were abused, and you were traumatized. Don’t you realize that?” I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t realized that at all.

Maybe you shouldn’t have told this friend. I don’t know how trustworthy she is with keeping confidence, but that’s something I know you will be able to deal with no matter what happens.

I’m not certain if I understand why she’s in shock. Is it because she can’t believe what she just heard or is it because like you last year, she is on the receiving end? I’m thinking it’s because she’s just having a hard time dealing with this new information, but I just wanted to be sure.

Part of being good friends is to support one another and lend an ear and a shoulder in time of need.

This doesn’t have to be another repeat of relational aggression. As your friend, she doesn’t really have to do anything except to be your friend. She doesn’t need to pick up your banner or make things right for you or tell others. She doesn’t even have to change her relationship with this woman.

What she can do now, because she’s been informed, is just be more aware of whatever dynamics are occurring between this woman and herself. That way she reduces the chances of being blindsided.

But she doesn’t have to “take sides”. In that way, she doesn’t have to get involved. Being someone to talk to is part of being a friend, so if you didn’t ask her to take any kind of action against this woman, then you really haven’t gotten her involved.

Do you see what I mean?

Make sure you make this clear to her, so she doesn’t feel out of loyalty she’s expected to do something for you or whatever.

If both of you can be clear in your boundaries, then you can be friends to one another without going to war for one another. If more people did this, there would be *much less* relational aggression. It’s hard to do relational aggression without collaborators, which isn’t synonymous with being a good friend.

It will be okay. Don’t feel guilty, dpsling. It’s human nature to want to be heard and understood, and at least, acknowledged. What happened to you last year happened.

You made it through that. You will make it through this.

Demian,
~DreamSinger