I have always had a hard time making friends. I have never really felt like I fit in, and as a child, I was forced to grow up and be an adult–which made things a bit difficult when it came to hanging out with other kids in the same age group. Even now, a month away from my 25th birthday, I can count my friends (that aren’t family, either by blood or marriage) on one hand. To be even more specific, they aren’t the super close friends I talk to every day–one of them I only talk to every few months, another I only am really “friends” with because our sons are friends, and the last one I talk to every few weeks or so. Why am I like this? Sure, it’s partly because of my childhood and my shyness, but another reason I’m like this is because of friendship wounds. Just like in a romantic relationship, when something happens that negatively affects you, you carry it with you into future relationships. It isn’t any different with friendships. Wounds from prior friendships can create an atmosphere where it is harder for us to make new friends, no matter how old we are.
Friendship, romantic, and familial relationship wounds can even intertwine in aspects of our life. I have found that one of my biggest insecurities with any relationship in my life is that people always leave me. This started as a child in familial aspects but then continued as I grew up and made and lost friends. At the end of my 7th-grade year, I moved from Oregon to Arizona and while my friends said that they would write to me constantly and that we would text each other all the time, we lost contact after a few months. Of course, I tried to reach out, but when they didn’t respond, I felt a gaping hole in my heart. Halfway through my freshman year, the same thing happened. I moved from Arizona to Tennessee and lost all but one of my friends. To this day, I still consider her my best friend, but we went from talking once a day to maybe once every three months if we’re lucky. When I moved, our lives (and our time zones) just became extremely different and it made it hard to keep in touch. We were both busy in high school and then experienced different life paths after graduation. I wish I could say it stopped there, but it didn’t. About five years ago, my life was in a much different place than it is now. I was working at a school where I was extremely close with my coworkers. We went to concerts together, we would buy lunch for each other without any expectations of reimbursement, and we genuinely enjoyed spending time with each other. Three and a half years ago, I left that job and I haven’t heard from any of them since, even though I did make an effort for a while.
Each of these situations hurt. Each one honestly hurt more than the last one did. Each one of these situations has influenced the way I make friends and the way I interact in my friendships. The idea of friendship wounds may seem juvenile, but it is anything other than that. Friendship wounds are incredibly real and can be incredibly raw. Just like any other trauma that we experience in our lives, these wounds linger if they aren’t addressed. If we do address them and face them head-on, we can find healing. They won’t ever fully go away (because nothing ever fully goes away) but we can learn from these wounds, grow into better versions of ourselves, and in turn, become a better friend for others.