Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay 

Planning who to invite along to an afternoon tea on her birthday, my daughter felt rather crushed when one of her close friends insisted another particular person be invited or she wasn’t going to come. At first my daughter asked me whether we could invite this other person so, as I dug deeper and uncovered the reason, we had a little chat.

I explained that unless she took the risk that her friend might not come, she was going to feel worse on an ongoing basis that she had not spoken her truth and honoured herself. Her truth is that, while she likes this other person, she doesn’t want invite them into her close friendship circle.

Without another word, she picked up the phone, called her friend and told her that she would love to have her come along, but she would not be inviting the other person, it is her birthday and she gets to make that decision. Of course, her friend said she would come along after all.

This is one lesson I wish I had learned myself many decades ago. The fact was not lost on me that it was precisely those early social relationships where I would have started to embed my own way of relating to people outside that immediate family circle.

Instead I was largely codependent in my relationships and had poor personal boundaries, because I was hyper attuned to others’ feelings. I’d learned from the cradle that my best strategy was to anticipate how the people (who were responsible for me) were feeling and adjust my behaviour in order to avoid getting into trouble.

That meant often swallowing my disappointment that how I was feeling had not been considered and then I’d change who I was being in order to fit in. Nowhere was this more obvious than in my personal relationships.

I shared with my daughter how I’d fallen in love when I was younger (in the olden times), and was in a relationship with someone who had ultimately left and broken my heart. I used to idolize him; he was so completely unlike anyone I’d met before.

But, while I enjoyed many aspects of being with him, and was upset for many years after we parted, in truth there were ways in which I didn’t feel honoured. For example, I used to get ready to go out on a Saturday night and be waiting from around 7pm, then he wouldn’t show up until 9pm, and he never used to acknowledge how late it was or apologise for keeping me waiting for hours.

On the other hand, I never used to call him out on it. I remember once his sisters mentioned how awful it was of him to do that, they had noticed it, which made me feel somewhat seen, but I never challenged him on it. More fool me, as my mother would say.

Looking back now, I can see that I was so afraid of losing him, or being seen as less than cool, I never gave him the chance to see and love the true me. That is not to say that he would have, but in the end it didn’t matter anyway.

When we split up, I was devastated and wondered what it was about me I needed to change. I berated myself for being too needy. And I was, I thought I needed him to love and accept me to make me whole, when really I needed to know and love who I am.

Dealing with the things that are unsaid has been my Achilles heel in life. I’m a straight up kind of a person and, because I anticipate others’ feelings, I am usually on the front foot apologizing or explaining. So when I’m caught up in a situation where someone denies, deflects or disowns their behaviour it takes me more than a moment to change gear.

It took me a long time to recognise that pattern with my partner. If something would come up that triggered me, I’d criticize and he would deflect with another criticism and we would go down this rabbit hole of blame that became so out of proportion to the original trigger, we were caught in a spiral of old unhelpful belief patterns.

Thus my adult relationships of every kind have been this intricate and cumbersome tango that have incorporated my own emotional baggage along with that of my friends or partners. There was me simultaneously trying to figure out who I should be in order to be loved and accepted, and at the same time also balking at my own lack of integrity with myself.

Most people may either resonate with my experiences or the opposite extreme; of disconnecting and retreating into a bubble, where all that is real and all that matters is the individual experience. The degree of attunement in infanthood is reason for this, as I talked about in Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In .

But as I result, I don’t like to cause damage in my relationships; it feels very unsafe to me. And how to navigate things that trigger me has been one of the hardest patterns to break, moving away from the blame game and into more of an observation mode.

I should confess I am no wallflower. At every step of the way the part of me inside that recognised I was getting trampled upon and carrying too much baggage would protest and I’d lash out in some version of criticism and/or (mostly) restrained anger; with a lot of internal anger and resentment towards myself.

So it is with some relief I’m now at a point in my life that the advice I’ve given to my daughter is the advice I’ve been taking myself in recent years.

After figuring out who I am - what Shona Keachie actually likes and dislikes, needs and desires, and being in loving acceptance of that - the other challenge has been to risk my relationships with others in order to keep integrity with who I am. It has meant some relationships have fallen away, others have deepened, and new ones have appeared.

But the common thread is that I can present myself in relationships without having to wear a mask of some sort, shape shifting to suit the people around me. There is freedom in that, and so much less encumbering than wondering what is wrong with me and why I am not like these other people around me.

Do you know who you truly are? Do you love and accept yourself? Are you willing to risk your relationships more in order to be fully loved for who you are?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy My Needs versus Yours, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.