The Case of the Befuddled Sad Sop

Consistently, the best part of New York Magazine’s Ask Polly columns are the letters. In yesterday’s column a woman who calls herself Befuddled Sad Sop explains what happened when she tried to apply a piece of advice that she gleaned from the therapy culture.

BSS has a friend who has been alienating their mutual friends by behaving badly while drunk. BSS learned that she should overcome her tendency to bottle up her emotions. And that openness and honesty makes for a good friend. While her friends are taking their distance from the bad drunk, BSS decided that she needed to explain it in person, to her face.

Allow BSS to lay out what she did:

I am someone who struggles at expressing my emotions and tends to avoid addressing conflicts. For years, my mouth would clamp shut when it came to feelings. But I’ve crawled out of that, and lately I’ve made friends with people who are enthusiastic about talking about emotions and relationships….

I confronted a friend, and it did not go well. I tried to tell my friend that her recent behavior while drunk was raising some eyebrows — that various people had mentioned this to me. This is something I’d want to know if I were in my friend’s position. Mutual friends have been backing away from this friend, and even though I think my friend is great, I can also see why some people might take offense at her harsh personality. My friend sometimes worries about being disliked but never connects the dots.

I put off talking to my friend about the drunken incident, but then I received a pretty passive-aggressive message about it from her, so I asked to talk. After we talked, my friend sent inflammatory texts to all of those involved. I was accused of using this as a platform to vent my own hurt. And roll out that dramarama … the detailed agony is extensive and still ongoing. Immediate lesson learned? As nice as “true mirrors” sound, maybe not everyone is ready for them.

I felt I was doing the right thing with someone I was very close to. I still feel this incident needed to be addressed, but I also feel my lesson here is that I should have kept my mouth shut and distanced myself from this friend, taking a clue from others around me. The end result of this has been exponentially more cataclysmic than keeping my mouth shut.

To give Polly her due, she understands that BSS has made a mistake. The outcome gives it away. Yet, Polly goes on an extended rant about herself that we could certainly have lived without. She seems to want to show BSS that she herself, in her Pollyness, is just as bad a human being as anyone else… even if she would not have told a friend to her face that everyone thinks she’s an ugly drunk. Polly seems to want to understand why BSS did what she did. She wants BSS to face her own issues, even though that is not what this is about.

Yet, there’s no mystery here. BSS did it because she applied a principle she learned from the therapy culture, via someone named Rebecca Solnit:

BSS wrote:

Rebecca Solnit recently articulated a valuable lesson that I’ve had to learn: “The opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.”

Obviously, Solnit’s advice is nuanced. Reflecting someone back to them, helping them to see how they look to others, is a difficult and tricky enterprise. Because you have to do it without saying it, without making them feel attacked. Yet, when BSS told her friend what everyone was saying, said friend felt immediately attacked and… counterattacked.

Polly continues to suggest that, however badly BSS behaved, she, Polly still likes her, because she is just like Polly herself. With my apologies for Polly’s vulgar vocabulary:

And I love a bitch. I love a cunty complainer who’ll have a drink and complain with me. I’ve always hated the word cunt, but I love it lately, because who fucking cares anymore? But I also want to clean it up. Say “cunt,” clean it up, say “cunt,” clean it up. I’m like a fireman who’s also an arsonist. I feel more confident and grateful than ever, but I’m also such a dick and I need some twisted friends in my life who get it, ALL of it.

Of course, Polly recommends that BSS head off to a therapist to discover how friendships work. To me this would encourage her to withdraw from her social circle to deal with her inchoate emotions. She has alienated more than one friend and would do better to repair some of her friendships… before it’s too late.

In truth, BSS draws the correct conclusion: she should have done as her other friends had done and distanced herself from someone whose behavior has embarrassed the group. One understands the impulse to help, but the drunken friend did not ask for the help. Perhaps the friend knows how badly she behaves and even knows how harsh her personality is. If she thinks that she is the life of the party, the fact that her friends are drifting away and that she is no longer invited to parties will tell her that she is not seeing things very clearly. Or perhaps it will not. Perhaps she needs to attend AA meetings.

So, BSS draws the correct conclusion, the conclusion that is accompanied by remorse for having made a mistake. Polly knows that it’s a mistake but she lards it over with an intemperate rant, one that we are supposed to excuse because she was writing on her 47^th birthday.

Go figure.