Seeing a friend this week – anxiety-inducing social interaction

Hi,
One of the christmas social plans I’ve committed to is playing on my mind. It’s a friend christmas with a specific group.
And one of the people is someone I had a challenging interaction with back in august. I submitted an ask a coach on it at the time, but essentially they messaged to say they were upset that I hadn’t checked in about the racist riots in summer. I had been on a family holiday for 3 weeks, literally not checking news – and dealing with some big things that came up with family on the trip – when it happened. And when I got back, literally the day, found out my mum had had a secret operation so had to process this and also go home to help.
Essentially a week after getting home to this, I got that message from them. And it wasn’t the message itself that upset me – I’d rather they communicated this – but it was their reaction to my response. I apologised and said that I’d not been checking the news and had been overwhelmed with some family things since getting home (they know family is a big trigger for me, since a recent period of estrangement). And there response was: ‘do you hear how it sounds when you say you’ve been overwhelmed’? Then went on to talk about poc don’t have the luxury of that with everything else going on.
While I completely understood their sentiment – and am aware of my own privaleges as a white person – I found this very invalidating, given that I was in a pretty extreme stress response of my own at the time. But I didn’t feel like they wanted to hear any of that.
Since I replied and apologised further, we haven’t spoken directly on message, and I saw them once in that time. I have felt hurt and unable to communicate with them safely. This isn’t the frist time I’ve upset them untentionally and I have a lot of fear of being ‘cancelled’ by them (which does trigger fears around being rejected and silent treatment from parents). The fact that they haven’t messaged me either suggests there is a mutual feeling of the friendship not benefitting either of us right now.
I’ve made my peace with this, as it’s been a long time coming – and this was the last straw for me- but I still value the group we share. This event at xmas used to be something I looked forward to so much, but now I’m dreading it.
I know that I could make up an excuse and not go (I will be on my period so feel it’s the worst time for this encounter). But I worry if I don’t this will fester even longer. And that my classic rejection response is to push the other person away!
Do you have any tips on knowing the best action to take with this?
Many thanks

 

 

Answer:

I notice an underlying belief. Explore what you think about it. But it sounds like your brain thinks friends should never have disagreements. What if that’s not true at all? Some of the most powerful opportunities we have as humans is to mess up and then make up. To forgive and be forgiven. To love people exactly as they are. To repair after an argument.

Why do you think you push people away? Do you want to continue doing that? Make a choice about going to the Christmas event. Then make a choice about who you want to be in this relationship. Be kind to yourself.