I feel very protective of my close friends.
I forget this is true until one of them tells me a story of some awful thing someone else has done to them. And I don’t even have to think about it. I want to tell them how amazing they are and how much they don’t deserve that kind of behavior, and I want to listen to them vent if they think that will make them feel better, and I want to validate the hell out of them.
And I’m angry on their behalf. Much angrier than I would be if the same thing happened to me. And none of the weird delayed reaction anger either. I’m pretty much angry right away. Angry and sometimes indignant.
One time a close friend of mine called me up on the phone with this story of some really bizarre and inappropriate behavior of a mutual acquaintance of ours. And I realized this mutual acquaintance could, no doubt, use his access to me to make things even worse for my friend. And I knew the mutual acquaintance would have no qualms in doing so.
I decided then and there to let that mutual acquaintance go. It was one of the easiest interpersonal decisions ever. If there had been inappropriate behavior directed towards myself, I would have agonized over it, and wondered if I was being reasonable, and wondered if I needed to give some more benefits of the doubt, and worried about possible repercussions and burned bridges, and worried about what people would think, and wondered if it was somehow all my fault. But because it was about my friend, doing the right thing was easy. To this day, I think about the boundary I set with satisfaction and zero doubt.
This, then, is what it means to become your own best friend. It can be a powerful thought experiment. It is advocating for yourself the way you would advocate for your actual best friends. It is wanting for yourself the kind of respect and appropriateness you would want for your actual best friends. It is stopping and telling yourself the story of what’s going on right now as if the story was happening to your best friend instead of to you, and then noticing the difference in reaction and allowing that to guide you accordingly.
And it is also about learning to see and appreciate yourself the way your best friends see and appreciate you. I think my best friends are fabulous. I am blown away on a regular basis by all their good qualities, and I feel so lucky to know them and have them in my life. I love hearing about what they’re doing, their successes and their failures, their joys and their sorrows. I want them to be happy, of course, but when they are having a hard time, I see how courageous they are. I see how hard they’re trying. I see the risks they are taking. I see how deeply they feel and care. And I admire them so hard.
To be my own best friend, I need to admire myself that hard. To be my own best friend, I need to be blown away by my strengths, not only be bogged down by considering my weaknesses. To be my own best friend, I need to remember that my hard times don’t automatically reflect poorly on me.
To be my own best friend, I need to embrace the idea of being as protective of myself as I am of the other people I love.
One of my amazing besties!
The Practical Free Spirit 
Amen to treating ourselves just as well as our “besties”. So true! And I am definitely going to try your thought experiment with regards to this. • That being said, a flag goes up for me when I hear people talk about going all out for their best buddies, because that’s what best buddies do – that somehow going beyond what is normally okay is good when it’s your best friend. I think of that pop song that talks about “standing up for you even though I know your wrong”. This is total BS – especially if going all out for our buddies is via anger. Case in point, when I broke it off with the woman I was hoping to marry, one of her best friends took it upon herself to reach out to me (and others) to tell me how much of a horrible person I was. This when I was totally heart-broken and depressed. What a great friend she was right? Getting angry on her best friend’s part? In truth, her comments were poison to me when I was already sick and needing support. We both still loved each other, and needed to heal. So I want to stand firm for not breaking norms and standards for best friends – whether that best friend is ourselves or another – “because that is best friends do”. There is an endless pool of love that we can dive deeper and deeper into when times are hard and/or we want to be there for someone. We don’t need to break good practices – like kindness to all – for our best buds. Best friends or not, the consequences of our actions still remain the same. Love begets love, hate begets hate, and truth is still truth.