Healthy friendships are loving, supportive, respectful, and honest. We enjoy spending time with each other. Oftentimes, when we are discouraged, it is a friend who comes along and makes us laugh or gives us reassurance and hope.

A true friend will not sabotage your dreams or be happy about your struggles. Healthy people do not tolerate a friend who continually makes them feel worse with critical remarks and ridicule.

Yet, that very behavior is not only tolerated, but too often accepted, when it comes from our own inner voice. Barbs of criticism are mistakenly identified as “humility”, or even, appallingly, “the conviction of the Lord”. Continue reading →