Are You With The Right People?

You do not know very well what is happening but you feel bad a lot of the time? Do your friends contact you less than before to meet and worry less about how you are doing? This may be the time to ask yourself if you are surrounding yourself with the right people.

If the answer is negative and you often find yourself in situations such as almost always being the one who takes the step to initiate a contact, the one who first takes the initiative to call or send that WhatsApp message to propose a plan, it is You may need to ask yourself what kind of people you interact with.

Due to situations like these, it would not be unusual for you to feel nervous, tense and to justify the situation by thinking that your friends have a lot to do to focus on you.

Sometimes we don’t even realize it or maybe we don’t want to see that those we used to call friends now seem to treat us like acquaintances.

That can be difficult to assimilate, but if they lower our expectations more or less constantly – if they tell us that they will call us and they do not do it, if they tell us animatedly that we have to meet again but they do not take the step, etc.- It would be a good idea to stop for a moment to see if we are receiving what we deserve.

The feeling of guilt

Sometimes we blame ourselves, becoming responsible for what does not depend on us. In the case of the friends we mentioned at the beginning, we can feel guilty for not meeting our friends, while justifying their attitude.

This self-imposed responsibility can blind us to the true reality. Perhaps they are the ones who are not contributing enough to the relationship, and therefore are not worrying about taking care of it.

Based on the ideas of Helena Béjar, it is important to know how to distinguish between positive and negative guilt :

• The first helps us to recognize that we have done something wrong or that we have made a mistake; it is what we could better define as “responsibility”.
• However, negative guilt can be a truly disabling burden that often prevents us from seeing a solution.

The problem of guilt is that it tends to make us fall, almost always repeatedly, into the same mistakes without being able to solve too much.

We call our friends, we propose plans, we make an effort to keep in touch … But, with all this, the logical thing would be to think that there will be someone who almost always loses, and that someone is us.

The right people make us feel good

If when we return home after staying with our partner or our friends we feel tired and down, or if we have begun to suffer, for no apparent reason, symptoms of anxiety, it may be that we are not surrounding ourselves with the right people.

One technique to cope with these situations recommended by Dr. Marisa Navarro is to repeat the mantra “ this relationship does not feel good to me ”. In this way, we can force ourselves to be a little more aware of what is happening, ceasing to blame ourselves for what is happening and thus being able to make a decision that is favorable to us.

One way to deal with this situation in order to get away from it and its negativity is assertiveness. María Luisa Navarro Pereira, in her article Appropriate interpersonal relationships through assertive communication and behavior, collects the perspectives of various authors on certain behaviors that are not assertive.

In this line, there are two very important that we mention below:

• Passive behavior : makes us feel victims of circumstances and tends to promote low self-esteem. This behavior is full of fear of rejection or losing the people we care about because they get angry with us. What we can do to change this is to respect what we feel and express it. What they feel is probably their responsibility, but it shouldn’t be scary to say phrases like “this is hurting me” or “I don’t like this” to someone.

• Doubting yourself : the thoughts of the type “I have exaggerated” or “surely I see problems where there are none” generate guilt. If something takes away our energy or does not make us feel good, we would do well to analyze the situation from a less biased perspective; Going to a professional can allow us to see what is not entirely clear to us or that we cannot identify.

Review the scale of values

Another piece of information that we can assess to see if we are with the right people would be obtained by  reviewing our scale of values ​​from time to time.

To do this, it is important to choose between six and eight of those values ​​that are important to us and define them : How do we see friendship? What does it mean and what should it include? These types of questions can help us a lot when evaluating the relationships we maintain.

Once we have reviewed our scale of values, we can apply it to our friends or our partner. We may not match in some values, it is normal. But, if you do not agree on any of the chosen values, then we could conclude that we are not with the right people. This can be hard and difficult to accept, so going to a professional can be of great help.

This will offer us the necessary tools to work on our personal skills, increase our self-esteem and can help us to see that, sometimes, we have to let go of those who no longer want or do not deserve to have a hole in our life.

Finally, to emphasize that the end of a relationship does not erase the experiences lived. In some way, we have been taught that friendship or true love is forever, when it doesn’t have to be.

There are great relationships that end, leaving us with a series of wonderful moments, to make way for new ones, which will too. So if you find that you may not be with the right people, it may be time to say goodbye to them.