My friend’s negative self-talk is straining our relationship. What can I do? | Leading questions

A close friend of mine is suffering with crippling self-doubt and it’s starting to take a strain on our relationship. We’ve been friends for eight years. She is such a bright, bubbly and charismatic person who has an infectious ability to make people laugh and feel welcome; but she also has a really low opinion of herself and, as her friend, I am the one who always gets the brunt of her negative self-talk. After every social event she will message me to ask if I think she has annoyed someone, or that she spoke too much, or that she embarrassed herself. In private conversations she is constantly putting herself down, calling herself fat, apologising for nothing and generally claiming she’s not good enough.

I love her and constantly reassure her that her thoughts have no grounding but, after years of this, I am tired. I’m starting to enjoy our time together less and less, as I never know what mood she will be in or what she will say about herself. I would hate to hear anyone else speak about her in the way she does. I especially hate it when she says these things about herself.

I really want her to seek counselling; I am reaching my limit and my constant reassuring is achieving nothing. I don’t want to make her feel worse, and outright say I feel this way, but my subtle pushes aren’t working either. I desperately want my friend to see herself the way the rest of the world does, it’s painful to me that she doesn’t. What can I do?

Eleanor says: There’s something so strange about seeking reassurance when we’re not going to respond to it. We ask whether we messed up at the party, vocalise the hypothesis that we’re rotten and embarrassing, clearly partly hoping that we’ll get howled down. “No! You’re wonderful!” calls the chorus. But having got the reassurance, the self-doubting mind doesn’t do anything with it; the doubt isn’t really vanquished, the awful views about ourselves don’t go away.

You know everything I just said from weary experience, but it might be worth making it explicit: deep self-doubt isn’t normal doubt. It didn’t arrive with much evidence, and it won’t be healed with it either. Those moments where a self-doubter voices their fears and another person gives reassurance are not at all like regular persuasion, because no amount of evidence works. They’re more like a ritual where we all know our lines, and for some reason some moments make the self-doubter need to go through the ritual. Their opening move of saying something awful about themselves out loud can be like a director saying, “places, please”.

As the assurer, it’s tempting to think your job is providing ever more evidence that these thoughts are wrong; to say every wonderful thing about your friend that she never says to herself. That might be right – a lot of us learn we’re lovable because someone proves it by loving us. Similarly, you might help assuage her self-doubt by modelling how someone else – you – can be certain of her value.

But if, after years of reassurance, the self-doubt remains, you might wonder whether instead of helping the cycle of self-doubt, you’re somehow unwittingly contributing to it. If your friend is unable to use your evidence about how others see her, you won’t fix that by giving her more. Pouring in more petrol doesn’t fix a leaking fuel tank.

So why does a self-doubter ask what other people think, if they’re determined to disagree? Why involve others, over and over again, in such profoundly self-critical fears?

One nice answer is that it makes us less lonely in those feelings. A less nice answer is that it externalises discomfort: it takes an exchange that’s happening inside us – “I messed that up”/“no you didn’t” – and locates it between us and someone else, so we don’t have to tolerate it sitting within ourselves.

I don’t know why your friend needs to perform the ritual. Only her and a therapist will. But your esteem for her glows even through your letter. If evidence was going to help, you might think it would have helped by now.

The next time she initiates it, could you perhaps engage with the fact that she has these thoughts, rather than argue with their content? “It sounds really hard to feel that way”, not, “That’s not true”. “That sounds like a really frightening idea,” not “I’m sure they didn’t think that about you”.

That way you don’t get pulled into discussion about her value, which you know will dead-end no matter what you say. You focus on her experience of having these thoughts, instead of even dignifying them as live hypotheses to refute.

You can turn yourself into the Sisyphus of affirmations trying to fight someone else’s self-doubt. But self-doubt isn’t regular doubt, and regular evidence doesn’t work. Instead of seeking ever-better ways to give reassurance, perhaps your strategy could be resisting the cycle.

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