Low Self Esteem Friendship

This is the first of two posts about friendship. This one digs into some dynamics of the low self-esteem friendship. The second will cover the aspirational friendship.

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Why are you friends with the people that you are friends with?

Is it because they are the most inspiring and valuable people in your life?

Is it because you connect on a deep level, and have conversations that you find nowhere else?

Or is it simply because you’ve been friends with these people for years. And even though none of them inspire you, you would feel guilty if you didn’t make plans with them, or accept their invitations to do things.

Maybe you’ve moved to a new city at some point in your life and found your way into a group of friends who, while being fun, don’t actually live up to your values.

They talk about each other behind each others backs. They are cruel to each other. They don’t support change but resist it, by teasing you about your new haircut, new shoes, or new business idea.

Do you get caught up in power games?

Worrying about one person in the group more than others. Trying to be closer to the person who makes all the plans and seems to be the center of the group.

If you don’t actually like your friends, are they your friends?

Or are they just people you spend time with to avoid feeling lonely.

Friendship in an aspirational sense is about sharing values and mutual admiration. But often, a group of friends serves as a way for people to try and hide from sadness, loneliness, and inadequacy.

You would think, that since friends are the people, you ought to care the most about, that you would be more supportive and kind to your friends than you would to some random person you just met. But, it is often the other way around. People will be kind to a stranger, and harsh and demanding with a friend.

Why do people treat their friends so poorly?

Often because they are the people you compare yourself to the most. You have ended up in this social circle because it feels comfortable. You have struck a balance between being around people you feel better than, but who are “cool” enough that people outside your current social group will not judge you.

Since you are comparing yourself to your friends, success among them becomes threatening. You unconsciously chose those people as friends because you could compare yourself positively to them. You were able to think that you were smarter than someone, better looking than someone, more successful than someone. You had a reason why you could feel like you were better than everyone you knew.

But, when they start improving, you feel more and more threatened. You don’t want your fat friend to get skinny because you took comfort in being better looking than that person. You don’t want your poor friend to get a good job because you took comfort in being more successful than that person.

Who you are exists in comparison to the people around you, so you want those landmarks to be suitably low so that you can feel high in comparison.

When you don’t have self-esteem your friends aren’t people that you love and admire. Instead, they are often people that you resent, and sometimes even hate. Your best friends are people who provide you comfort, not because they are kind or caring, but because you can look at them and avoid feeling inadequate.

This is what low self-esteem friendship is like, and it doesn’t really look like friendship at all.

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In part two I’ll dig into what friendship ought to be about.