this whole thing of loyalty to old friends who are negative influences is something I struggle with.

as well as how to manage negative influences from family, and calibrating appropriate involvement

like...there seems to be a different ruleset for...

1) immediate family - parents, siblings, children
2) outer circle of family
3) old friends

and then the ruleset being different for someone who is emotionally robust vs someone in a state of instability

like the ruleset for Tom would be different than for myself lets say, especially when I was in my twenties, very unhappy and trying to figure things out

Maybe there are no "negative" social influences, any more than there are "negative" exam questions (the ones you answer incorrectly).

I would say that there are too many factors to develop a general list of how to handle situations in these categories. Handle them as you feel best at the time is my advice.

Sometimes I find myself thinking: ".... M'okay. What might be the least horrid result that can be brought about here?"

That sounds just terrible. Yickch!~

Montana

care must be taken for great precision regarding imprecision.

Observing our expectations of others and ourselves, our personal behavior, our demandes is an opportunity to learn about our ego, fear, and etc. In a demanding time all of that is not easy. I would look for a pattern of events, i.e. actions could be different, but a main theme would be the same. As soon as you could see a repeating theme, it could be your answer to all your question, because you could stop reacting the same way to that, and the endless chain could be brocken.

. . .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis, and back again.
. . .
It follows from this that the scale across which we seek similarity need not be chronological. Consider the following incidents in the life of Stalin between 1929 and 1940, arranged not by dates but in terms of ascending horror. Start with the parrot he kept in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The dictator had the habit of pacing up and down for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. He immediately reached into the cage with his pipe and crushed the parrot's head. A very micro-level event, you might well say, so what?

But then you learn that Stalin, while on vacation in the Crimea, was once kept awake by a barking dog. It turned out to be a seeing-eye dog that belonged to a blind peasant. The dog wound up being shot, and the peasant wound up in the Gulag. And then you learn that Stalin drove his independently minded second wife, who tried to talk back to him, into committing suicide. And that he arranged for Trotsky, who also talked back, to be assassinated halfway around the world. And that he arranged as well the deaths of as many of Trotsky's associates that he could reach, as well as the deaths of hundred of thousands of other people who never had anything to do with Trotsky. And that when his own people began to talk back by resisting the collectivization of agriculture, he allowed some fourteen million of them to die from the resulting starvation, exile, or imprisonment.

Again, there's self-similarity across scale, except that the scale this time is a body count. It's a fractal geometry of terror. Stalin's character extended across time and space, to be sure, but what's most striking about it is its extension across scale: the fact that his behavior seemed much the same in large matters, small matters, and most of those that lay in between.

ased on his personality could we say, that looking at a paranoid schizophrenic is right way to find out about human behavior?