The challenges of making and keeping friends

Gabriel M
Jul 27
6 min read

Why kids need a safe home base

My mentor Amanda Curtin often says, “Kids need a safe home base.” For kids making relationships, such as friendships, they need support and guidance to help with those new experiences. That natural process is full of discovery, mistakes, vulnerability, and learning.

However, when you are not getting loved at home, it may feel like your only chance of getting loved is with friends or teachers, and those relationships can feel overwhelmingly high stakes – like we must be perfect or else lose our only connections to warmth, approval, or love.

The intensity of early connections

Making and keeping friends was extremely difficult for me as a young child. I only ever had one friend at a time, and that relationship could be strained because of my overreliance on that person. These relationships could be intense, and I could feel incredibly vulnerable to losing them.

I would feel enormous fear when a beloved friend would leave, or when I would have to leave them. But I also recalled seeing my friends get tired of me – while they liked me, I might have at times been very intense and needy. I tried to hide this, but the truth is that I was needy – needy for somebody to cherish me.

Looking back it’s possible to see how difficult it was for me, as a child, to have healthy friendships, when there was no emotional safety in the home I was growing up in.

I didn’t experience acceptance at home, I didn’t experience a lot of warmth either, I desperately yearned for closeness and to be adored, and that simply did not occur. So, when I did find a friend outside of the home, I would try to get a lot out of that relationship. I couldn’t help it.

But there was a lot I didn’t know, and it cost me in those early friendships. Eventually I learned to overcome many of the challenges I faced in making friends, but I continued to struggle with intimacy for a long, long time.

How childhood relational trauma shows up in adult friendships

Trusting friends, and trusting that we can know what the proper boundaries of friendship are, can be very challenging. Our present day difficulties around making and maintaining friendships might look like any of these:

Fear of reaching out: Struggling to reach out because of a belief that people don’t want to hear from you.
Feeling like a burden: Reluctance to share problems with friends because you feel like a burden.
Unexplained endings: Finding friendships fall apart, but having no idea why.
Grief over natural drifting: Struggling with how people change, and sometimes become unrelatable to us. This is a kind of loss in friendship, where we may grow in one direction, and they in another. If we never got help around grief and loss, we may struggle a great deal to process the loss of friendships like this.
Imposter syndrome in social circles: Feeling as if you’re waiting for the other person to notice that you’re not good enough for them, or that you’re a bad person who has somehow fooled them for the time being. There may be a fear that they will find out about some aspect of your past that they won’t like.
Fear of exposed identities: Fear that if friends from different circles or parts of your life talk they will compare what they know about you and decide that you can’t be trusted and maybe even put you through a shaming confrontation, or ghost you.
Vulnerability hangovers: When you do share, feeling like you’ve overshared and then experiencing shame.
Difficulty expanding your circle: Struggling to make new friends. This may mean that we feel very much beholden to our established relationships, because we’re not sure how to spread out our energy and get our needs met in different places.
Comparison and envy: Comparing oneself to other people who are friends with each other in an easygoing, trusting way, and not understanding how they do that.
Fear of conflict and disagreement: Not feeling safe to disagree with friends, or to tell them when they’ve hurt you – there can be a belief that they will abandon you if you try to have a difficult conversation with them, or that they will attack you and you’ll discover you were wrong for feeling hurt to begin with.
Inability to internalize affection: Enjoying the company of friends, but struggling to feel their love, and perhaps struggling to believe that they’ll be there for you if you really need them.
Performance pressure: Fear that if you’re not in the right mood for them, they’ll dislike your company and distance themselves from you or outright reject you.

Unpacking the root cause

These difficulties in friendship stem from a home environment that was emotionally unsafe, and unhealthy around relationships of all kinds. As kids, we may have had to figure friendship, and all kinds of relationships out by ourselves, without help, and without a safe, loving home base to heal, recharge, and reflect in.

It’s important to honor our efforts as kids to figure friendship out as best we could, in spite of this, and the chances are that we did pretty well under the circumstances, and became someone far different from our parents.

It’s also important however to begin to look at what we did need as kids, that we didn’t get, because this can open the way to grieving our losses and begin finally unlearning some of the toxic messages we received and taking the chance to do things differently.

What children actually need to develop healthy friendships

To build secure social connections, children require specific foundations that dysfunctional homes rarely provide:

A safe home base to go back to: A place where they are loved and accepted unconditionally. This allows them to make mistakes with others outside of the home, and risk not being liked. They can do this because they know they have somewhere to come back to where their acceptance is not in question.
Modeling from parents around conflict: We internalize the relationship between our parents as our basic template for all relationships.
Practical help and boundary guidance: This has more to do with how parents interact with us, rather than with each other. If they show us that they have boundaries, and help us to understand how to respect them, and if they are observant of our boundaries, then we know how to maintain emotional safety with other people.
Boundaried physical play: Children need physical play with a parent that is rough and rambunctious, where the roughness is determined by what the child wants, but is moderated by the adult if it gets too destructive. Kids might want to be thrown up in the air, spun around, or wrestle. Children need to test physical boundaries to understand what hurts others and to integrate their aggression as an expressive and creative impulse. When they learn safe ways to express this, it becomes a vitalizing part of their emotional development.
Empathy and care for hurt feelings: When parents interact with us in a way that shows genuine care for our feelings, we know that we can sustain knocks and we have a place to get the care we need to recover. It also teaches us how to be there for others.

If we were parentified (had to take care of these needs for our parents), we are likely to lead with these behaviors as a means to get relationships and may find ourselves only able to connect with those who need us in this way. We can come away from a dysfunctional family with very painful beliefs around what friendship is, what is expected of us in it, and what we can expect from others. What might be important to remember, is that the right people, when you find them, will be nurturing and fun, and not a chore to be around.

Tracing present patterns back to the past

A lifetime of adult struggles around relationships of various kinds can leave us exhausted and cynical about the possibilities of finding better, and we may even feel like we let ourselves down. This is the importance of being able to trace our beliefs around relationships back to our families of origin, so that we can see how much of what we feel about the present is informed by unresolved hurt from the past.

We all deserve this chance to separate what we are capable of having in our lives, from the worldview our parents' behavior imposed upon us. When we can give ourselves that chance, we may find relationships that feel more like home to us, which is what every human needs, and what we always deserved.