Coping by avoidance

Today a friend of mine told me that she would avoid all those discussions with me which would cause me to hurt from inside, meaning,reporting those incidents or episodes where she feels I have had an unfair deal and she would not have had the power to stop it happening. It set me thinking: is that the method I would employ to deal with my hurts ... Not talking about it? Was it not her way of coping with her hurt which stemmed from her feeling of being helpless in mending the situation? I would not like to be protected from hurts by well-meaning friends building a wall of protection, consciously not allowing me to be privy to any information which would cause hurt. I would rather have the brickbats and develop my resilience against them. Agreed, the process may be extremely painful, it may appear to some as being masochistic! But that is what life is all about I feel, growing from pain, either dulling yourself to it, or desensitizing yourself to it, or evolving a stronger person from it. How else do you explain evolution? I also feel certain amount of artificiality would creep into the relationship if we start this process of information filtration, simply because we doubt the person's ability or emotional quotient to deal with the information. I do not subscribe to the fact that what you do not know, does not hurt you. Facts have a strange way of getting to you, and I have found this happening once too many times in my life ! I'd rather have them from my friends, than them reaching me from the bulletin board! But again, these friends feel discomfort for being the bearer of unpleasant tidings, and so would like to avoid the topic altogether. I understand where they are coming from, and somewhere they may even hold themselves responsible for the pain they are causing me. Well, it would look like how in the olden times, some kings would behead the messenger who would bring bad news to court! That surely is not the case right? The bearer of badness not responsible for them... MOHANA NARAYANAN