Girl Groups…how Do You Make It Work!

It isn’t so much that NOBODY will help you. It’s trying to tell you that unless you have a person it will be somebody, not the right person. Don’t drill into the messenger or how the message is worded. Lots of us are well meaning but we don’t know how to convey it. Look into what the message is saying. If you want your person to be there for you, you need to find your person. It doesn’t have to be the one person all the time. Even the narc friend has helped once upon a time. We’ve moved on. Now we will have other people to cohabit this planet with. There are a million people around us. There is bound to be one or two that aren’t there just to take advantage.
I felt like a lot of it was also my mind telling me things. Even if someone is taking some advantage, as long as I get something out of it, I’m keeping the friend. My narc friend taught me to have boundaries. Even now, I have trouble with it but it’s getting better. Sometimes bad relationships teach us more than good ones. Now with boundaries, I can enjoy some people who probably still take some advantage but then I am not 100% either. As long as the relationship is not hurting me, I’m all for it.
Don’t go through life looking at what people say and do with a microscope. Past is past. What people say now have nothing to do with past hurt. Let go.
What is the point about thinking about your past every week and feeling very sad about the same things on an ongoing basis. The people who victimized you want this. They have conditioned you to victimize yourself years after they did it. You should consider therapy and help outside of the internet. Letting go means not torturing yourself about all this over and over. See for other posters we read yet another post from you, give the same platitude and then we move on with our lives. You are going to have to put in work to truly move on. The best revenge is actually moving on.

Which is why the suggestion of you texting first. You take control of the communicating for the first few instances. You decide what to say and say it via text so you are not on the spot.

Even now, I bump into the old friend and am tongue tied. Later I keep wondering why I told her all that! It’s a learning process but I’ve found others out there who don’t do what the old friend did and am happy to be friends with them and speak my mind without having to think and frame answers.

Regarding the relatives, you’ve already won the battle. Nobody will say it but when someone is the black sheep and they get the better spouse, that’s 75% of the victory and probably why you kept getting it from these people. It’s two decades past all those things. Make beautiful memories with the spouse. The happier you are the more the others will poke. That’s a sign that you are doing well. Sometimes setting boundaries means not saying a thing but doing things that will make you happy. That’s something that a) you can control b) nobody can take away c) that sometimes does more than what words can accomplish.
So Hakuna Matata. Btw, it’s winter. If you are not working out, do so daily. You can run from most of your self made troubles I’ve realized. Literally. That one activity has saved me from my own head. So get some workouts in.

 

It’s an admirable quality to be able to articulate and keep threads going where you want it to go. Have you thought about being a project manager? I can never be balanced like this and take discussions into where I want to take them. You are really good at it.

 

It’s surreal. People offer so many suggestions and share their experiences of how they did it. You say thank you and mention you'll try the steps, but then you come back and ask the exact same question in a different way, including the ever-present 'I/ no one is perfect,' 'I must be doing something wrong,' 'I end up with the wrong people,' and 'easy in India, hard in America.'

I am not here to troll you, Anika, but really, you keep asking the same thing again and again. It’s fine to do so, maybe it is just a vent or thinking aloud, but it feels like you’re stuck in a loop, expecting different results without making any changes.