Approaching friendship from a place of security

being secure makes you less lonely

Much of my previous thinking on friendship (see this post, and this one) came from a place of insecurity. It was starting from a place of: what I have is not enough, and I need more of something. It came from a place of: I cannot tolerate the possibility of not having close friends.

And underlying that is the following belief: the world is a dangerous place, and having good friends around makes it less dangerous. Notice two things: (1) on some literal level, this is of course true; (2) when this is your overriding view of what friendship is for (making life less dangerous), your friendships will tend to suffer for it. In my case it resulted in me always feeling like I need people around to make sure I’m doing okay and am free of danger. In particular there was (still often is) a lack of trust in my own judgement; I need other people around to double check my judgement for me. Specific ways this manifests:

• Whenever I made a big life decision I felt a need (notice – not a desire, but a sense of need) to sanity-check that decision with other people. Anytime I have an intense emotional experience (say, something makes me super anxious), I feel a need to discuss that experience with someone (a coach, therapist, mentor, friend), in order to make sure “things are okay and I’m not falling off the deep end.”

• Whenever I wanted to post something online I would feel a need to have someone else read it first, to make sure I’m not saying anything “too crazy” or something that I might plausibly regret in the future.

I thought of friendship (and more broadly, the people in my life) as a crutch to help me make sure I make the right decisions and avoided danger. (“Danger” here includes all kinds of things, from small things like social embarrassment to big things like injury and death.)

Now, for the past two months or so I’ve been working on addressing the underlying insecurity, lack of self-trust, and feeling of danger itself.¹ Several interesting things have resulted:

• What I previously called “loneliness”, I now realize, was actually the insecurity. I felt like I could not trust myself to avoid danger, and so I always felt like I was deprived of something. Only if I felt like I was around someone deeply trustworthy (who also had, at this moment, the bandwidth to look out for me), did I feel like things were finally “okay.” Whereas now, I largely feel like things are fine regardless of who is around, and regardless of whether I am receiving affirmative feedback that I’m on the right track. When something bad or unexpected happens, I feel less of a need to immediately reach out and talk to someone about it to get reassurance.

• Connecting with people in general has become easier. Because my sense of self is not constantly under threat, I can be comfortable around a wider range of people. Do I need to know that someone is deeply trustworthy and will always be there no matter what in order to feel like I can relax around them? Clearly not.

• I feel less of a need to message friends with every little struggle. I feel less of a need to maintain connections with everyone to be sure that the friendship still exists.

The vision I’ve set out for myself is – can you trust yourself to take care of your problems as needed, and also to reach out for help to the extent that it’s needed too? I’ve found that by virtue of this increased security I also find it easier to reach out when I actually feel like I need help. In the past I would often just “struggle in silence” and secretly hope for my friends to check in on me, and then develop resentment when they didn’t. I was continually reinforcing this self-story of “I have so much difficulty with basic things and no one understands.” (If this seems like it applies to you, I strongly recommend reading about the Enneagram type 4 personality, specifically chapter 6 of this book.) Now that narrative is largely gone—life is a rollercoaster for everyone and you are perfectly capable of getting the help you need (and always have been).

Once this danger-oriented mindset around friendships is dissolved, you go back to viewing friendships in the frame of fun and enjoying the wild ride of life together. What was particularly striking about this process for me was recognizing that the thing I had originally pinned as the “core problem”—the lack of consistent yearslong close friendships—was not the most immediate cause of my unhappiness. I still think that long-term friendship and stable community are important, and I’m sure more of it would make me happier, but I no longer feel like something fundamental is missing from my life as it is. When you treat friendship—or anything else, really—as a crutch for an underlying insecurity you are doomed to be unsatisfied. No number of crutches will get you back to walking again.

1. The TLDR of how this happened is that I began to recognize there is no hard boundary between “dangerous situations” and “nondangerous situations”, that existence inherently involves risk of pain and death, and that this has been the case all along and I’ve managed it just fine up to now; there are no guarantees of anything and that is actually fine. I hope to expand on this more later. (h/t Chris for helping with this.)