Is it wrong to ‘cycle’ friends quickly?
Table of Contents
· Cycling friends — A problem?
· Your Injured self vs Healed self
· Cutting out friends — A psychological breakdown
· Step 1: Awareness
· Step 2: Understand
· Step 3: Communicate
· Afterword
Cycling friends — A problem?
“Yeah, I think I would be completely fine if I never saw this person again in my life.” I said, late one night as I was sitting in the couch.
I was talking to my roommate. We were talking about friendships, and I was debating if I should continue to put effort into a friendship with a specific friend.
“Dude, I don’t know. I know you think this way, but it’s not black and white right? Aren’t there levels to friendships? For me, the bottom is ‘nice to have around’ friends, and at the top are ‘ride or die’ friends. Like, people you can’t live without,” he said.
I thought about this. I agreed with him but it’s just not how I see the world. I cycle friends very quickly. They either are my friends, or they are not. I’ve always wondered if this was a problem. I had a therapy session recently that clarified this. It is a problem. A much bigger one than I thought.
Your Injured self vs Healed self
Before we continue, I need to define these terms. These are terms I’ve learned recently, and they have been incredibly useful in identifying this problem (but how to you fix it? Geez, always focused on the solution and outcome aren’t we. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that later. Spoiler alert: it’s not easy — but when is it ever?)
Injured self:
This is the part of you that gets activated (another commonly used word here is ‘triggered’) by someone else. It causes you to jump back into that younger part of you — the one that’s probably scared, a lot younger, and traumatized (a softer word is ‘injured’ — hence the term injured self).
Healed self:
The adult version of you, the one that you’ve been working on. The one that understands what it’s like to be compassionate towards himself and towards others. The one that has all these tools to regulate emotions and understands what’s happening to his body. This is the person you want to try to stay in when someone activates you.
Similar to negative emotions, the goal is to not try and get rid of the injured self. The goal is to collaborate (how can we both work together to solve this?), not command (shut the fuck up and just do this). The goal is to understand why the injured self has shown up and figure out what to do with it. Let’s break it down with an example — or more specifically MY example.
Cutting out friends — A psychological breakdown
Let’s play out a typical scenario I go through. I meet a new person. We vibe. We become friends. We hang out more often and like each other’s company. Inevitably, something happens that hurts me. Either she starts to show up consistently late to our meetups, or he gets busy with his new girlfriend and can’t hang out as much with me anymore, or some other thing. Bottom line: it affects me. I take that personally and think that this person no longer cares about me. So I stop investing time and energy into that friendship and move on.
Ok, this is problematic for several reasons. The first major one is that it prevents me from creating long lasting friendships. If friends are dropped on the first mistake, then all my “friendships” end there. It’s a very cut throat model to friendships. It’s worked in the past because when we’re kids, we don’t really need much. When we’re in school, were busy with school. When you get out of school and into the adult world, you start caring more about this stuff.
The second problem is this keeps me stuck. I’m constantly jumping from one friendship to the next, until something happens and then woosh, what we spent so long creating disappears. It sucks.
So how do we fix this? Let me walk you through this using the example above.
Step 1: Awareness
The first step to any problem is realizing it exists. My therapist says awareness is 90% of the solution. I think it’s more like 70–80%. Re-read my example above. Can you catch when I switch from my healed self to my injured self? I’ll give you a minute.
.
.
.
Ok time’s up. If you guessed “I take that personally and think that this person no longer cares about me.” then ding ding ding, you are correct. So the first step here is going throughout life recognizing what thoughts belong to your injured self (”I don’t need this person in my life anymore because they hurt me”) vs healed self (”This person probably still values me as a friend, they’re just busy with their own life right now.”)
I also found it really helpful to understand WHY this happens (so you can solve the ROOT CAUSE, not just the symptom). Like, where did my injured self come from? The answer is childhood (bruh I swear this is always the answer to this type of shit).
In my previous article, I talked about feeling unloved and how, growing up, I was raised in an environment where love was given to me inconsistently (at least that was my perception). In that article I also mentioned that I started to ignore my brother (give him the silent treatment) because he consistently blamed me for things and got me into trouble. I learned from a young age that the only way to protect myself from someone who hurts me is to ignore them, stop talking to them, and basically cut them out of my life. Hmm, does that sound familiar or what? Hello injured self. You learned how to do this as a way to protect yourself from your dad’s punishments as a kid. That made sense back then but doesn’t make sense now. So how do I reprogram this?
Step 2: Understand
The answer is to understand the emotions that come up (that ‘trigger’ or ‘activate’ the injured self).
Note: from my experience so far, this becomes exponentially harder if the emotion is overwhelming. For example, if someone does something that you take REALLY personally, and makes you REALLY mad. In that moment I’m tempted to just say fuck this, I’m gonna be mad, I hate this person, I don’t need them, and I’m gonna stop talking to them.
Hard to “understand” when you just say “fuck it” right?
So there needs to be another step before this (in addition to awareness): slow everything down. Breathe. Get into your body. Notice where you feel the anger. Are there other emotions? Sadness? Ask why it’s there. Why has it shown up today? Why does this person make you so mad?
Let’s apply:
Recently I had a situation where I felt really shitty and reached out to a friend for support. He didn’t respond to me, and that hurt me. I felt like he didn’t care about me. I got mad. I expected him to respond right away. I wasn’t able to slow time down in this situation. When he did get back to me, he said he was busy training (gym), and said he was open to call. I expected him to call me instead of me reaching back out to him asking for a call. I felt even more angry and refused to talk to him, even though I knew I needed someone to call.
Let’s understand what happened here.
- I wanted to talk to someone, but got angry because I felt like he abandoned me. Let’s slow this down — did he really abandon me (injured self) or was he just busy and living his life, and didn’t see my message? (healed self).
- I expected him to call me and because he didn’t, I associated that with him not caring about me (injured self). But how can I expect someone to call me if I didn’t directly ask for it, which I didn’t? (healed self)
- I got angry and refused to talk to him (injured self, sound familiar?), even though I knew that I needed to talk to someone — I basically “punished” or robbed myself of the opportunity to do this (healed self).
Knowing my story, it makes sense why my injured self showed up. It was just trying to protect me using what it learned in the past with the situation with my brother. But reality is different (i.e. the “healed self” parts). Ok so we’ve identified and understood why I was activated, and can separate reality (healed self) from how I felt (injured self). Now what? I now have to tell this person all of this. How?
Step 3: Communicate
I am not gonna lie, I do not have much experience in this area (yet). This is basically “hey bro just communicate your needs to your friends” but that’s a lot easier said than done — at least for me. I find it very hard to do so. I’m worried what people will think. I’m worried people will stop caring about me because I’m asking for too much. I’m worried people will leave.
So I’ll do my best to outline what I think is the correct approach here, pulling from my limited experience doing this.
In a nutshell, you need to talk to your friend. You need to have a difficult conversation. Yes, this is going to be hard (otherwise it wouldn’t be called a difficult conversation). You need to be willing to be vulnerable, and let them know where you’re coming from. If you don’t feel comfortable saying something, or are unsure of what to do, communicate this. For example:
- “Hey I don’t really know where to go from here. I don’t know what to do.”
- “I’m not really comfortable communicating how I feel because I think you will take it the wrong way.”
- “I feel uncomfortable expressing my needs.”
There doesn’t need to be a conclusion, or a clear, well, thought out plan (speaking to my younger self here, the dude that always overthinks and plans everything out in advance). Communication, especially when it comes to your feelings and being vulnerable, is messy. It’s like both of you are naked, with your hands behind your backs. You might think the other person is holding a knife, when when reality they just want to give you a hug (weird analogy but you get the idea).
Here are something things I said in my convo (using the example above):
- “Hey man I feel angry that you didn’t call me right away — I expected you to but I also realize that wasn’t reasonable since I never told you want I wanted”
- “Whenever I reach out for help, and someone asks me to call them back, it makes me feel like they don’t want to talk to me. I feel like I need to put in MORE effort to tell you to call me, and I don’t have the energy for that when I’m feeling shitty. So can you just call me instead (whenever I reach out)?”
Afterword
I’m still navigating all this myself and still trying to figure this out. If I learn anything, expect it to be edited into here or to appear in another article. Relationships are messy, complicated, and a whole lotta fun aren’t they?
Thank you for reading. Out of all the things you could’ve spent your time on today, you chose to spend it on this article. Your attention means the world to me.
Til next time 👋
— Andy
