Well I think that what he means is that you dont need to work on .... anything
You can be yourself here and people will say thing to you directly and not be sneaky. Here someone can tell you to fuck off and eat a dick . So if someone is mad at you they will say so and not be sneaky about it.
And the comfort and safety in that is that our friendships are sincere and not forced.
He may not have said anything but I have issues confronting others irl and I believe that trying to approach a somewhat combative attitude could be helpfull on this area and I could learn a few things from it without getting as wounded as I would if it happened irl.
Is it an assertive attitude you are hoping to approach rather than a combative one? An assertive attitude means you confront someone calmly and with respect rather than with raised voices, clenched fists, and threats.
For example, the other day I was in a movie theater with my husband and daughter. The lights had been dimmed and the funny commercial for silencing cell phones and no texting had already played although the movie had not started yet when someone right in front of us started obviously texting on his cell phone. The reason for not texting is that the glow of the screen is distracting to the other people who are trying to watch the movie.
A non-confrontational response would have been to say nothing and hope that the person stopped texting when the movie started. A more combative response would have been to tell the person to stop texting or else I would go get a manager to throw him and his cell phone out of the theater. What I did was to ask the person if he was going to be finished texting by the time the movie started and he finished the text he was working on and put his cell phone away.
I used the confrontational approach once in a movie.
It was a 10 p.m. or so show of Batman. A man and small boy came in and sat about 3 seats away in the row behind me. The boy began to say he was afraid and the man kept telling the boy to shut up. I turned back to them and said, "Take it outside." (Real nice and smart huh?) He said "Make me." So I went to the concession stand and said someone was talking in the theater and was distracting the audience (an exaggeration). I went back to my seat.
About 2 or 3 minutes later an employee came and talked quietly with the man and left. About 5 minutes after that a sheriff's deputy came and asked the man to come with him. The man began shouting and resisting. The man and the deputy got into a scuffle and the man began screaming to his kid to "Call the police. Call the police." Anyway the deputy got the man out of the show and an employee took the boy. I can only surmise that the man was drunk and the employee noticed when she talked to him.
I realize I was being confrontational about the whole thing, but I believe I did something good for the boy and the man.
