Dear Eric: Recently, I was trying to figure out how two friends of mine, James and Jon, had decided to stop talking to me and not continue our friendship. It wasn’t based on anything that happened between any of us. But then, upon thinking about what we all had in common, there was our mutual friend Paulo.

And then I realized what must have happened was when Paulo and I were having problems in our friendship, he probably complained to them about me. James and Jon didn’t just drop our friendship out of the blue on their own, but it was heavily influenced by Paulo repeatedly complaining about me, specifically.

What I’m wondering is how do I address this with Paulo to make him realize that he was a big influence and somehow steered them away from me permanently. This is problematic because

See Full Page