On Making Friends

Today in therapy, we were congratulating me on the strides I've made in my cognitive therapy: developing my center and a sense of home in myself; becoming comfortable and content with the way my life is, even though I would rather it be less solitary; basically developing more of an internal locus of control rather than external.

Then I asked my therapist, "What next? Go back and do some trauma work?" She was curious why I felt I need trauma work rather than to continue with cognitive work. 

"Where in your life do you feel that past traumas are holding you back?"

That was a good question. We talked about that for a bit, then I came up with my problems with making connections: both friendship and romantic. Since I've lived in Houston, I've had two friendships go ballistic on me (and had to go to other friends to get reality checks to make sure I wasn't the crazy one in each situation), one dropped off the radar, and one has had very good reasons to be scarce. But in my past, I've watched as other people made workplace friendships that developed past the workplace and I saw people make love matches that eluded me. I've developed the expectation, I told my therapist, that either I won't make any connections or the ones I do make will end very badly. (I have one good friend I made via work and who has remained a good friend for over 25 years.) I feel I'm so poor at making friends I might as well start making them out of Sculpy.

There is good reason for me to think that traumas have affected my ability to make intimate and lasting connections. But it's also possible that my expectations, based as they are upon experience, have twisted my beliefs and self-talk about friendships and romantic relationships. So far, we are doing quite well with the cognitive stuff, so why not keep going on that, my therapist suggested. 

It's quite possible that the cognitive work will help me in this realm. While early traumas — childhood molestation, cruelty by schoolmates, and losing my father then my brother — have affected my abilities to connect, they and other experiences have affected my ability to think I'm able to connect. I think that I don't catch social cues, that I'm a social dunce. I think that I don't catch cues from men correctly, which is why they turn and run if I ask them out to lunch; I think also that I must give off weird cues to make them suddenly lose interest in a friendship with me. 

Also, these two women here in Houston who suddenly went crazy-weird on me are not the first friends to do that. They just went at it in a much more verbally violent fashion. Both of them accused me of thinking that everything was all about me and that I was 'childish'. Sorry, but if you don't get back to me for a year and a half, I tend to think that means you don't want to be friends. As for the other one, she yelled at me over the phone in the office where the people I had previously worked with could hear the things she was saying but not the barely anything I was able to say in return. Sorry, but my grandmother was dying so I had to be gone from work, you knew I was coming back, and yes, you did fire me by replacing me in a regular job with someone else; giving me the option to do some lower-paid freelance work sometimes is not the same. So what if you only needed two days off of work when your brother-in-law died: I was helping my mom with grandma and she meant a lot to me, so I stayed a few extra days to comfort my mom as well as myself.

I was confused by both of these women and their responses to me. I'll never know why they responded to me like they did, so I'm left wondering if it was something I did or said, or else how do I figure out if someone is batshit crazy before I get too involved with them? The lack of knowledge hinders me and feeds into my beliefs that I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to making friends. Thus the idea about little Sculpy friends.

When it comes to men, let's say that I've must have unconsciously chosen poorly so I wouldn't have a long-term relationship where they would die suddenly and cause me the kind of pain that losing my dad and my brother caused me. Because I have no other good ideas for why my relationships were almost uniformly bad choices for me. Even after I had dealt with my feelings regarding the molestation, I was still making these poor choices, until my late 30s when I had my last boyfriend. (I don't count the mini-connections made in online dating programs, connections that went nowhere and that confused me by resembling very little of what I wanted.)

My therapist thinks we have some good, juicy cognitive work ahead of us. I feel that I've made so much progress recently, progress like I've never seen in all my years of therapy, that I am willing to believe we can chew through these issues that no one has been able to help me with before. She is hopeful, which makes me feel hopeful. And after a session that began with us patting me on the back on how well I'm doing, how can I not believe that I can take on and handle the issue of making connections?

Of course, I have my online connections, which I appreciate more than I can articulate. But I credit all of you with your depth of heart and caring in these connections. All I do is talk: you read and comment, making me feel cared for and cherished. For this, I thank you. 

And I thank those of my other friends who occasionally read here and comment either publicly or privately. I've been successful at friendships a few times, and I value and cherish those friends.

So that's where I'm going next. I'm sure this direction will provide fodder for many blog posts, all of which I hope will be interesting and thought-provoking. (I'll provide pictures of any little clay friends I make.)

Ready for this next chapter? I am!