The Friendship Fix: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Losing, and Keeping Up with Your Friends - Softcover

Bonior Ph.D., Andrea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312607318 ISBN 13: 9780312607319

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2011

Synopsis

Had enough of that bridezilla? Feeling alone in a new city? Dealing with the trauma of the worst breakup ever―with someone you never even made out with?

We've heard the path to fulfillment has much to do with relationships. But while it's often thought that for young women, it's all about finding the right man, real women beg to differ: It's friendships that are at the heart of happiness. Unfortunately, they're also at the heart of drama, stress, and sometimes not-so-great escapades after that fifth martini. And, technology, from texting to Facebook, has made all friendships more complicated than ever.

At last comes The Friendship Fix, jam-packed with practical ways to improve your life by improving your circle. From dealing with friends-with-benefits to coworkers from the dark side, from feeling alone to being desperate to defriend a few dozen people, Andrea Bonior, Ph.D. helps you make the most of your friendships, whether they be old, new, online, or in person.

About this title

About the Author

Andrea Bonior, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and author of the popular weekly mental health column "Baggage Check" in the Washington Post Express. Her expertise has appeared in such places as CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and Good Housekeeping. In addition to maintaining a private psychotherapy practice, Andrea serves on the faculty of Georgetown University. She lives with her family in Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
FRIENDS
Who Needs ’Em?
 
There’s an old adage about friends doubling your joy and cutting your sorrow in half. Unless I’m forgetting a part about whiskey, the point of this proverb is to remind us that friends serve important roles in our lives—profound, meaningful purposes that go much further than telling us if our butts look fat—and that their mere presence can have a phenomenal impact on our experience of happiness and pain.
HOW FRIENDS IMPROVE OUR HEALTH: WHAT YOUR GRANDMOTHER (AND A BUNCH OF DUDES IN WHITE LAB COATS) DISCOVERED
In fact, friendships have a host of emotional effects on us. Clinical depression, a disorder whose prevalence is growing sharply and whose typical age of onset—like (sadly) the market for thongs—is getting younger and younger, appears more likely to target those who feel unsupported by quality friendships. Anxiety disorders, from the phobia that makes a person go screaming when in the presence of mayonnaise to the debilitating and uncontrollable panic attacks that can confine someone to his or her house, are also associated with a lack of adequate social support.
The connection is especially true for one of the most extreme anxiety syndromes: posttraumatic stress disorder. Research shows that after suffering a trauma, whether it be a natural disaster, loss of a loved one, personal injury, accident, or assault, people with a higher level of social support in the form of friend and family relationships are much less likely to develop PTSD. We’re not talking about friendships merely helping you whistle while you work: PTSD is a serious condition that, when left untreated, can lead to a lifetime of nightmares, terrors, an inability to engage in the normal daily routines of life, and not uncommonly, suicidal behavior.
Not only do solid relationships make us less likely to be afflicted with these and other psychological disorders, but they often make us more likely to recover from them quickly and smoothly if they do occur. Quality friendships can be both the apple and the antibiotic—a medley of prevention and cure.
Consider, also, the ways that friends themselves can encourage us to get proper health treatment. From the coworker who won’t stop harping about that strange mole on our arm to the buddy who suffered from depression but shared the experience of how he got better, friends who have our best interests at heart can often push us in the direction of health. Certainly, for instance, if a loved one goes to therapy and extols its virtues, that destigmatization can do much more than any magazine ad ever could.
Friendships also affect our physical health in a more intangible way. Experiencing emotional intimacy in the form of positive relationships can help boost our immune system to better fight and heal from infection. As anyone who’s tried to ignore a particularly bad itch most definitely knows, it can be virtually impossible to distinguish between mind and body. If that smells too much like patchouli for you, consider this: Social support has a significant effect on the prognosis of someone who has been diagnosed with HIV. We’re talking about actual life spans here, affected directly by whether or not someone feels they have friends they can count on. Research upholds similar results for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—and that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s pretty amazing, really: all these physical and mental phenomena, determined in part by the simple idea of what we visualize when we think of our friendships. It sounds too simple. Just how is it that these relationships can do this?
There are quite a few ways. As therapists know, there is much to be gained from sharing your emotional experience with another person. Doing so can provide meaning, insight, and a sense of perspective that simply can’t be gleaned from speaking into a mirror while wearing a disguise. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) People all over the world have learned that spilling their guts to another human being (even if, in the case of the Internet, that human being is pretending to be a twenty-five-year-old Catharine when he’s really a forty-seven-year-old Roger) can have a magical effect. Why else would it be that often our automatic response, for better or for worse, when someone is going through pain is to say, I know how you feel? Is it really a surprise that one of the most affirming phrases in the English language (other thanYour car’s engine is fine!) is I know what you mean? Similarly, one of the most prized attributes that a woman tends to list in a man (even if she ignores that list and goes instead for the beer pong champion) is that he is a sensitive listener.
Indeed, people often describe profound relief when finding someone who can really hear what they’re saying: it’s validation to its highest power. The sense of euphoria that comes from connecting with another person who truly “gets” your experience—whether that experience involves growing up one of fourteen children or wanting to gag when smelling cilantro—can change one’s life. People are prone to waxing poetic when they find it: it’s the Church of Emotional Intimacy. They once were lost, and now they’re found.
So many of our feelings can be made so much easier to manage, and perhaps more fun to experience, just by saying them aloud and letting them build a bridge between us and another person. Exposing our fears makes them much less frightening; affirming our triumphs makes them much more real; revealing our grief relieves us of carrying the burden completely alone. A compassionate and empathetic friend, much like a therapist, can give us and our emotions a foundation to cling to. It’s the reason that merely having someone listen can be such a powerful experience, even if that person was secretly paying more attention to the cheerleaders at the halftime show. All jokes about therapists’ fees aside, it is no shame that part of their ability to help lies in just being there, in the moment and attuned—those nods can be meaningful. A quality friend understands this and runs with it, knowing just how to validate their buddy’s emotional state—whether that state stems from a hard-won personal triumph or just a particularly arduous commute home.
But another way that our platonic relationships wield such power is much more quantitative: Friends help us shape our identity. For all the emotional intangibles, they can also serve (like that infernal and unyielding doctor’s scale) as a rather cold-blooded yardstick. Think of how often you view yourself—and even define your existence—through the “relativity perspective” of your friends, learning important clues about what you’ll eventually believe yourself to be. I feel shorter around my taller friends, more outgoing among my wallflower ones, and, unfortunately, more gargoyle-esque around the ones who look like sitcom stars. This mosaic of comparisons shapes our core beliefs and often our self-esteem, and can help us figure out exactly where we stand in the world.
Perhaps this is one aspect of why the loss of a friendship can be so complex in the pain that it brings. It’s not just that Sheila never returned our favorite cardigan. It’s that we feel less funny, or less popular, or less knowledgeable of the ins and outs of Lost trivia when she, who was the audience that made us feel that way, is no longer there. Many people don’t realize that the end of a meaningful friendship can literally signify the loss of a piece of their own identity. Such relationships can be the landscape background of our self-portraits; they provide the context of our traits, and when they disappear, those traits have no home. To paraphrase the old quandary, if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no friend around to say, That must’ve hurt! does it still make a sound?
Friends themselves—especially that loudmouth Sarah you’ve known since she got banned from the slumber-party circuit—also give us even more direct feedback. Their reactions teach us what they appreciate about us, and they also are all too willing to let us know what we do that drives them up the wall. All these pieces of information, whether we like them or not, give us an enormous amount of insight into ourselves. We know we can be anal because our roommates used to resent our chore wheels; we know we sometimes interrupt because we notice others rolling their eyes; we know we’re generous because we’ve heard our amigas extol the virtues of our cookie-gifting habit. It’s our friends who give us daily feedback about the characteristics that make us who we are, and it’s these assessments that stick with us when we define ourselves internally and externally. Life is full of constant pop quizzes about how we’re doing as people, and often our friends are the only ones doing the grading. (And you thought your econ professor held a lot of power!)
There’s also an incredibly profound and positive aspect of feeling that you’re not alone. Existential psychologists have long known that fear of being and dying alone is one of our most primal anxieties, and it drives a host of human endeavors. Much of the world’s greatest art, poetry, music, and storytelling (sorry, Tucker Max, you just missed the list) can be attributed on some level to our attempts to fight the angst of being by ourselves, literally and metaphorically. Human beings are born to connect with other people, and this need for affiliation is evident from our first infant clamors for a warm body to our later preference, confirmed for decades by social psychologists, for being in the presence of others when we are scared or anxious about something.
And the friendship gift, like the person who made too much fruitcake, just kee...

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0312607318
• ISBN 13: 9780312607319
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240