Stop Rewarding Inappropriate Behavior In his book How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People, the psychologist Albert J. Bernstein discusses how providing tons of mental-health support to demanding friends can create a self-defeating feedback loop. If you’re always there to help your friends feel better when they’re down, you may accidentally train them to rely on you in order to feel better. Instead of using their own resources and problem-solving abilities to address their problems, they may begin to feel that they need you to fix things for them. “The things that make people feel better
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