Sunday, 31 March 2019 / Published in Status

The Email

When I called RJ, my oldest, dearest friend of 40 years and asked him not to contact me or my family anymore he didn’t have even one question. RJ, the one who has “always loved me the most,” and my “family” who live with him, was too scared to meet with me when I later asked him to see me. This was the last direct communication between us.

04/12/2019 Update in Italics

After years of selling courses, including communication courses emphasizing “attention, intention, confrontation,” he chickened out and scrambled for a reason he could live with: a talk he had with my sons. We had no previous conversation about what had happened when Dennis and our sons visited RJ and the “family” at one of his Smith River, California homes and I stayed home to work. Here is the email he sent me:

Why did he only speak to my children about it? My husband was passed out drunk at the time. RJ and the group had been drinking all night in the garden. Later my husband told me he thought something had happened, but was unsure what.

So. Dennis told me he wasn’t passed out, just very drunk. He also said he talked to RJ the night before and after. Dennis said he just agreed with what ever RJ said because he didn’t want to deal with it. I get it, and it is that “Oh RJs being RJ” brush off coupled with wanting to hang out with all your closes friends and now become the center of his attention

While he called it a concerned talk, everyone who knows RJ knows it was a drunken monologue with public shaming thrown in for good measure. I am all too familiar with this kind of evening. Although my boys were young they were never stupid and took RJ as they should: a drunken old asshole. They’d seen this happen to more than one other person at RJ’s dinner table. These folks describe it well here and here.

But why did he grasp at this experience as the reason that I ended the friendship? Another community member I talked to likely told him how upset I was that he had done his drunk pontification act on my children. The person is, and has always been, a top notch triangulator and she did not let me down here.

This is the rest of our final email exchange:

Then I heard nothing else from RJ or the community, only the lawyers. It still shocks me when I read this exchange. This guy, who even told my children that he loves me more than anyone else loves me won’t meet with me. Should I believe this is what I deserve by the one who loves me best?

Through a lot of therapy I have come to understand that people who actually care for you want to know how you are, even if you are not doing good. They will not let you walk out, throw you out, or “push” you away, ask you to act happy when you are not “turned on,” or are feeling depressed, or are doubting your path. Anger is not a dirty word, it is your body telling you to set a boundary and be careful because what is going on feels wrong. Most importantly, it is not an enlightened state of mind to exclude emotions, people or information, and it is definitely not a loving one.