Are you stuck in movie logic?

This advice sounds good on paper (or on Substack) but in reality any given verbal confrontation is a roll of the dice. I have tried what she's advocating many times over the years and on quite a few occasions the result was I was shut down and hard by the interlocutor. Other times, the interlocutor paid lip service to the point I brought up but slid right back into old/unhelpful patterns after we discussed it. Sometimes it created a much larger conflict than what had been brewing, and not one that ultimately got us to a better place (one time it almost caused a physical fight!). Often I regretted opening up the issue in the first place.

My lesson is: Sure, don't be totally non-communicative about your issues but pick your entries as well as you can and be willing to guess that some are not worth it. And also know you'll often be wrong in your guesses. You can't really win this game.

I can also say from personal experience this verbal confrontation like the author is suggesting can make innocuous situations devolve quickly. There was one guy in a friend group I had who I felt like I couldn't really connect with. He always seemed very awkward and only willing to engage in surface-level conversations with me compared to everybody else. I tried to (gently) ask him about it, basically like the author would suggest doing, and it turns out he did not feel like he was being awkward, surface-level, or failing to connect at all. He thought we had a real genuine, deep friendship. What I said really hurt him and there was a lot of hard feelings on his end. Needless to say we did not go back to being friends after that, and I ruined what could have been a good friendship if I had taken the time to reflect that maybe my interpretation of awkwardness or lack of connection was coming from me and not experienced by him.

It can really hurt relationships to bring up things like this if it isn't experienced by the other person, it might be all in your head.