Friendships Are For Everyone, But What Do You Do When Low Self-Esteem Gets in the Way?
I’m not here to talk about how friendships are necessary for well-being because research has shown that having good friends improves both physical and mental health, whether you’re going through tough times or not (we all have a need for belonging and connection; support and mutual understanding, to know that we are valued and to feel like we are worth something even socially). In fact, according to Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, the key to a long and fulfilling life is meaningful social connection aka satisfying relationships. And according to Dr. William Glasser— the founder of choice theory and reality therapy— all long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems, and what most human beings want in their Quality World are better relationships and a more satisfying life (Glasser defined “Quality World” as “…a special place in your mind, where you store the mental pictures or representations of everything you want. The people, places, things, values and beliefs that are important to you reside there”). Bam.
That being said, if friendships are important, it’s disappointing that the act of building them can be quite a feat for some of us, who…haven’t been mentally set up to feel rewarded by back-and-forth interactions; who haven’t been socialized to feel that the core of who we are is likable & acceptable by others; who just can’t picture/ see ourselves loving and being loved; and…who haven’t learned to trust our senses and what they’re telling us about what we need from others (the comfort of their presence) and what others can benefit from us too.
The point is that social interactions can on-the-whole come off as pointless if we give in to our (attachment/ developmental) traumas and its side effects such as social anxiety and low self-esteem, because instead of enthusiastically initiating outings and taking an interest in the opinions, preferences, dreams of others, some of us unconsciously and strongly hold on to the belief that we are different from others in a way that we’ll never be worthy of intimate, one-on-one connection, so much so that we practically lack faith in the possibility of self and other within the context of a stable, dependable relationship.
In such minds, we don’t deserve the latter; responsiveness feels off and is seen as something so foreign…that we can’t help but look out for threats such as impending shaming, criticism, and rejection because they are familiar; we assume the worst in others, that they might be out to get us or worse that they like having us around just so they can feel great (accomplished, pretty, kind) about themselves; we constantly question why they choose to remain friends with us and sometimes impulsively push them away with our insecurity, our genuine suspicion & our determined anger that is in truth directed towards people from the past who have left us feeling alone, unwanted, different, hungry for an object, and overwhelmingly insufficient in a way that makes us bad and unredeemable which makes us feel all the more lonely.
But don’t be fooled into thinking that friendships aren’t made for those of us described above. In fact, friendships can make an even bigger difference, have a bigger positive impact, on those of us with a history of trauma such as bullying, emotional abuse, and neglect. The only thing, or should I say barrier, to maintaining this oft-unspoken-of elixir for self-esteem and well-being that starts with the letter F, is our own sense of insecurity; a sense of danger (that we feel deeply within our bodies, not just minds) that suffocatingly follows those of us described above everywhere we go, threatening to threaten our egos to the max once for all in the case that someone truly makes all our nightmares come true by bringing out our demons…and amidst this unique kind of heartbreak (of a loss of a stable self), all we end up caring about, really, is keeping our already vulnerable self (or ego) intact, as broken as it already feels. Such is the human need for preserving oneself.
So we isolate. We convince ourselves we’re not capable nor lovable, like what the people from our past communicated to us (because they still live on in our heads). We take questionable statements from unreliable narrators/ resources as if they were facts about us and what the future holds for us…
And amidst this, utterly consumed by our suffering—all forms of our suffering firing at us at point-blank range— we struggle to see others; their own separate self along with their emotions and struggles and what they need from us, making us come off as not the best companions either, which then confirms our own beliefs about our own social worth and the meaning of life, or lack thereof.
Obviously, doing without social connections is therefore the easier option for those of us described above, making friends being perhaps not just a little hard but a tall order (although this can only be observed empathetically and by a mind trained to read such behavioral patterns); but when we forego friendships, we deny ourselves of the elixir that has been proven by theorists and researchers to heal our attachment traumas and make us heal psychologically, with which we’d enjoy life and live it to its fullest…or in the words of psychoanalysts and those who study object relations, by denying ourselves friendship, we keep ourselves hungry and frustrated.
