Tips for autistic friend asserting himself

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Hi,
I have a good friend who I spent the weekend with for a party and he told me that he is getting ready to cut ties with a fake and toxic "friend" who he has known since high school. He is also mildly autistic as well. He told me that
1. This friend is very pretentious and competitive verses what my friend has
2. He never appreciates my friend and criticizes him for everything
3. Friendship is one-sided. He only contacts him whenever he wants or needs something. If my friend needs something, his "friend" is too "busy."
4. He is extremely controlling and wants to run my friend's life and especially job-wise.

He said that he doesn't know how to stand up for himself and would like to. I sent him a few things on toxic friends and ways he can be assertive.

If your friend has not stood up for himself much at all before, I would suggest not cutting ties without first asserting his own needs and then seeing if anything changes. Given how hard it is for many of us to make friends in the first place, I think it's not a good idea to throw away a friendship without first trying to salvage it if possible. Moreover, when the shoe is on the other foot, we need our friends to be assertive with us, rather than just dropping us like a hot potato without explanation. Personally, I think abrupt cutoffs are appropriate only in extreme circumstances (e.g. threats of violence, major betrayals).

I don't know enough about the situation to know for sure whether the following is a good idea, but here are my suggestions offhand:

1) I would suggest that your friend start by composing a letter to his friend. The first draft should just contain at least three concrete examples of each of the four points you outlined above.

2) Your friend should then review the draft and re-write it in line with the principles of How to be Assertive Without Being Aggressive. Among other things, the letter should also mention any positive things that your friend values about the friendship.

3) Before emailing the letter, your friend should first, discreetly, make sure there is nothing else going on in his friend's life at the moment that is especially stressful. The letter not the sort of thing his friend should be receiving the night before an exam, for example. To avoid tipping his friend off (thus causing undue stress) in case something important [i]is[i] going on at the moment, it might be best to ask a member of his friend's family, or perhaps a roommate, instead of asking his friend directly, and ask the family member or roommate to keep the question confidential, at least temporarily, until the other important matter is done with.

4) Once your friend is assured that the timing is reasonably okay, your friend should first briefly let his friend know, in a general way, that he needs to discuss some important matters pertaining to their friendship. Only after his friend responds to that initial notification should your friend then send the full email.

5) Your friend should expect his friend to react with angry denials at first. However, if indeed the friendship is salvageable, his friend will eventually calm down and be willing to negotiate some changes.

6) Any changes will likely take time. Your friend will likely need to remind his friend repeatedly about some things, but should not give up as long as his friend is at least making a sincere effort.

Mona,

Actually, he lots of other people in his life at the moment that he does things with and has noticed a big difference between the way we treat him versus his friend who he has known since high school. He also met a whole group of them at a church that he goes to. It sounds like he just basically uses my friend and always boasts about how better he is than my friend. He also told me that he seems very controlling and wants my friend to beg him for a job at a sales company. However, my friend's skills do not lie in sales, he's talented in IT and has lots of skills sets in those areas. It sounds like he gets mad at my friend for not doing things the way of this "Friend." Finally, he constantly gives him a lot of destructive criticism.

I'm glad to hear that your friend has plenty of other, better friends. Still I think it would be best if your friend could try to assert himself first, and see if any positive changes result, rather than just abruptly slam the door on the friend in question. If nothing else, it would seem that your friend could benefit from some practice asserting his needs.

He used to struggle with finding friends to do things with and only had a few of them in which three turned out to be pretty low-quality friends that weren't nice to him. So he used to depend on these low-quality friends because they paid attention to him. My friend is 44 and said he has known him since high school. He told me that he has been using him since then by treating my friend poorly.

Our other friend cannot stand him and feels that this guy is extremely pretentious and competitive in showing off all the things he can do because he can afford them and especially on social media