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A friend told me she didn’t want to be friends anymore. I accepted this as truth — this is what she said she wanted and I honored it.

A month later I contacted her out of the blue because I was thinking about her. I sent a simple message saying “I’ve been thinking about you and hope you’re well. No need to get back to me — just wanted to send some good thoughts your way.” I was even unsure about sending this message because I didn’t want to dishonor her.

She responded very quickly with “I’m SO glad you contacted me. When I said I didn’t want to be friends I just wanted to see if you’d fight for our friendship.”

Hence, she was manipulating me to see if I would react a certain way. She was hurt and wanted to feel that I truly loved her.

Another friend recently backed away from me. When I had an opportunity I asked him why?

He said he backed away from me because he wanted to see if I would quit on him and leave the friendship myself.

He said, “If you quit on me because I am behaving a certain way, it will be on your shoulders and I don’t need to accept responsibility for quitting myself because you did first.”

He wanted the decision to leave to be on me so he could walk away scot-free.

I appreciated his honesty about this and I recognized it as manipulation by someone who was hurting.

A mentor said many unkind things to me in the name of personal development. I was striving to be better in certain areas of my life and I didn’t understand why the feedback had to be so harsh.

Although I didn’t understand completely, I knew for a fact that she was hurting — and we know what hurt people do.

She later said that she would say things to me that she was actually feeling about herself. So when she said I wasn’t being authentic she was actually thinking that she wasn’t being authentic. This was interesting because in my experience as a coach I have learned that this a typical coaching phenomenon — we tell others what we really want to say to ourselves.

Often coaches listen back to their coaching calls to hear what they said to their clients because they are projecting what they feel about themselves onto the client.

This is very typical of people in general — we can only see in someone else what we have in us. When we say something to another person it’s good to check and see if we are really just projecting what we feel about ourselves. When we point the finger at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at ourselves.

An acquaintance was acting strange and very wishy-washy with me, often sulking in a passive-aggressive manner.

I asked him about it (in several different ways to elicit an honest response). He finally admitted that he wanted attention — he wanted to see if I would reach out to him when he didn’t make much of an effort. He felt if I reached out to him, it would make him feel worthy.

Again, this is typical behavior from people who are hurting. They want to feel better so they will wait until their ego is gratified — that feeling of the ego being filled up enables them to feel positive about themselves.

I had a friend who would never contact me first. She always waited for me to contact her (she also did this with men and other friends in her life).

After a few years of friendship, she finally told me that it made her feel wanted and loved when people contacted her first.

She was so set on feeling good about herself through other people reaching out that she didn’t reach out to anyone first.

She was hurting inside and dealing with insecurity about who she was as a worthy human being. Her way of filling up was to wait for others to reach out to her. It served her for a long time so she did it. She still hadn’t been able to break the cycle with me even after a decade of friendship.