Post Estrangement: Thoughts about Friendship

Danial Laport quote: 

"On our dark days, our exhausted days we may think that no one is celebrating us…but there is someone thanking you for something or showing you how good you are."

I think I have had way too few of these kinds of friends or relationships in my life. I came to realize this when the darkness of shadow entered my life in the form of a traumatic rejection. That was when I learned what a shallow support system I really had.

Looking back I see that my life has been filled with people eager and willing to tell me all the ways I have let them down, who have gleefully pointed out my failures and my faults, who have compared me to others and found me lacking. And I accepted this because I believed they were reflecting the truth at me. I had come to believe I deserved their disparagement. Most of them disappeared from my life the day the shadow entered my life and I never heard from them again. I fought for my recovery with less than a handful of friends who stood by me. And some of those remaining friends I lost when I started to become stronger. Some I lost when I started to say no to any abusive put downs. Some I lost when I enforced my newly learned boundaries. And some I lost when they became envious of me for going after my dreams.

As I got better, as healing transformed me and I started to recognize that maybe I did have worth. I also was given the gift of some incredible new friendships. Friendships that lifted me up, that saw through my grief and into my heart filled with kindness and a longing to be loved. They celebrated my moments of progress, they supported me thought the darker days, they encouraged me to continue my healing path because I was worthy of being healed.

Finally, over time, I think I have come to realize that I deserve a better class of friends. I have created a different definition of what a friend is and in the process I have brought those kinds of people into my life.

It took me a while, but I now recognize who those friends are, and they are in the most unlikely places and showed up at the most unlikely times. I think of them as my angels of survival. Without their presence I might not be here today. I did not hear their messages as clearly when my mind was clouded with negative and critical self-images. However, I did feel their healing balm. Now I feel the warmth of their loving acceptance and that sustains me through my darker days. 

I have also created a definition of what friends don’t do and now recognize those would be friends are not really friends but rather people looking for someone else to bolster their ego. I have found a name for them; my emotional vampires. They are the people that I know that I need to be very careful around for they envy my happiness and they feed off of my despair. They are the ones that claim the loudest that they love me and then stab me in the back with actions that prove otherwise.

Their words on one day may say “come here I care” and then on other days their words and their actions trigger my “you have just been emotionally attacked” warning button and I feel pushed away.

They are not to be trusted because they are inconsistent and that inconsistency is based on the unease they feel when they feel that their expectations are not being met by me. They have come to see me as the solution to their self-esteem problem regardless of what the cost may be to me. In effect they are saying it is easier to coerce my help feeding their ego needs than to find a way to heal themselves.

I keep my emotional vampires at a self-respectful distance. I wear my thickest emotional armour when I am near them so that I don’t get deluded into letting my guard down.

I still sometimes have a dark day, days when I am emotionally exhausted, days when I think I am on this journey of healing all alone, and then out of the blue one of my angels, says the most incredible thing, or lets me know how I have touched their hearts, or thanks me for something that I did or said that touched or helped them. And I feel uplifted for they helped me to see the goodness in myself that sometimes my inner critic fails to recognize, especially on a dark day.

Thank you to all the friends that I think of as the angels in my life.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 10 – 10

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