The FIRST "Dear Saylor"...

If you need advice you can always send an email to saylorsays@yahoo.com and I will respond with some tips and ideas. I will NEVER post your question online without your permission first. Your emails are confidential!! If I think your question and my answer would be beneficial to other teens, I will ask you if I can post it here. You always have the right to say no and I would NEVER break your trust. Pinky promise!

So here goes, the very first Dear Saylor!

Dear Saylor,
So, yesterday my best friend said something awful about me behind my back. I thought best friends were for life. I thought they were the people you could trust with anything. There is stuff my BFF knows that I would sink into a hole and die if she told anyone.
I don't really want to confront her because if I piss her off she could tell my secrets.
How do I handle it or do I just let it go?


Signed,
Bff-less

Dear Bff-less,
OK There are two schools of thought here... "confrontation to show her how pissed off you are" and "confrontation to help her understand."

Friends are tough because society has told us that BFFs are like two peas in a pod...you are exactly alike, you can finish each other's thoughts, blah blah blah....

The truth of that matter is, whether you are talking BFFs or boyfriends, what attracts you to one another are the little nuances that make you different. You might not realize it but one of you is strong and one needs a shoulder, one of you is a bit more outgoing than the other. It's how the universe works.

That being said if you go with the first school of thought... SHOW HER HOW PISSED OFF YOU ARE... you very well may set her off and depending on her integrity, she may spread some of your 'baggage' out of her inability to admit what she did was wrong and hurtful.

But if you go the other ...HELP HER UNDERSTAND... route you are more likely to calmly plead your case, give her a chance to apologize and mean it and renew your allegiance to each other with the addendum to the original union... "come to me with something BEFORE going behind my back."

Now, you ask, how in the world can you do that when you are so pissed you could spit in her COACH bag without feeling bad?

WRITE, WRITE, WRITE!
Huh?
Yep, pretend you are writing to her and lay it all out there. It doesn't even have to make sense. You can jump from one thing to the next and make sense of it all later. Be pissed! Rant! Scream and cry while you are doing it.

THEN... and only when you are SURE you have gotten it all out... go back and read it, make sense of it and re-write it so that it reads the truth you want her to know.

BINGO - you have now gotten out all your angst, you have made sense of all your thoughts and feelings, you may have even realized some buried feelings you didn't even realize you had. But now when you approach her, your thoughts are arranged, you are less angry and more determined to straighten this out instead of breaking her nose.

Trust me!
This works.
It's the teenage version of a timeout!

Let me know how it goes!