Ask Sam letter

It’s okay to have feelings of jealousy about your best friend. It can make people feel very guilty when they do have negative feelings about people they care about, but it’s natural to have them and what can be important is how you deal with these feelings. It sounds like having arguments about it has been affecting you both, I’m wondering if you’ve ever thought about a way you both might be able to talk about how you feel without it turning into an argument. Sometimes even changing the way you put things, for example starting things by saying “I feel jealous” instead of saying “You make me feel jealous” can help change the focus of a conversation.

It can be very difficult to be able to see a future when you are feeling this way, at the same time though it can be good to try and think a little about how you would like things to be. Sometimes really trying to imagine it, not only how you’d feel, but what you’d be doing, what would be different around you, who would and wouldn’t be in your life and what you would be doing can really give you an idea of what you want to achieve. It can be good, as well, to think about things in both the short and the long term. In the short term thinking about ways of handling your feelings now and in the long term thinking about what you would like to change in order to start getting towards how you’d like things to be.

When you talked about feeling like cutting a lot but not doing it because of your best friend, it sounds like cutting has helped you to be able to deal with these feelings in the moments when things do feel too much. Self-harm can help people to express or even relieve difficult emotions that they sometimes wouldn’t know how to hold inside, at the same time though it’s important to remember that there are other ways that you can express how you feel. The Self Harm page in Explore has loads of different ideas for things you can do instead of self-harming, but it’s important as well that you take time to think about what works for you. Thinking about what self-harm makes you feel like can help to think about what other things you can do instead which might help as well.

Thinking about things in the long term and trying to change how you feel both about yourself and what’s going on around you can be incredibly daunting. It’s important to remember though that change does take time and that it’s not about changing things in massive steps, but thinking about the small steps you can take and what might help you to take them.

It might be really good if you took some time to think after reading this email and, whenever you feel ready, you come and talk to a ChildLine counsellor. They can talk to you about anything that might be happening and give you a space to talk openly without being judged or told what to do. You can contact them by email, online through the 1-2-1 chats or even by calling on 0800 1111 (it’s completely free and won’t show up on the phone bill).

Take care,

Sam