Wednesday this week. I had a difficult conversation with a friend. I told him that I was seriously worried about the state of his mental health and advised him to seek therapy. His response wasn't what I was expecting - the classic denial, anger, reverse attack. Instead, he came out with a bizarre string of irrelevancies that had little or nothing to do with what we'd just been talking about. If he was trying to reassure me as to his mental state, he was doing a very poor job of it.
He doesn't seem depressed or anxious, but I can see a pattern of self-sabotaging behavior in his life which has recently worsened. It was this, together with some weird or inappropriate things he had said or done the last few times we met, that prompted my concerns. I suspect this is all caused by unacknowledged childhood trauma. I recently learned that he had had a troubled childhood, being abandoned by his father at the age of around 7 or 8, was in a children's home for a time and later did a spell in reform school (juvie). I thought that he might be ready to open up to me a bit more about these things, but it seems I misjudged him.
I guess one of the hardest lessons to learn in life is that you can't save people who don't want to be saved.
Reverend Muhammadovsky 