All About You — Day 7: Peers (Allies & Enemies)

[For “Day 6: Sibling Rivalries,” click here.]

ALL ABOUT YOU — DAY 7:

PEERS: ALLIES AND ENEMIES

After our parents and siblings, the next biggest social influence on our lives, for most of us, were our peers.

Our peers can be our best allies, our worst enemies, or anything in between. However, we have all been shaped by them—for better or worse.

They say if you want to know a person’s true character, take a good look at his or her closest friends.

For this next exercise, let’s examine your childhood friends (and enemies). Answer the questions below in writing, taking at least 15 minutes to do so. Then, when you’re done, take a look at my answers and my analysis, if you like. Finally, the bulk and remainder of this post consists of the fascinating results of studies about the powerful influence of close relationships, whether best friends, lovers, or spouses.

A. QUESTIONS FOR YOU

1. How did you make your very first friends? (Did you pick them? Did they pick you? Did your parents pick them? Did you like them? If not, why did you keep them?)

2. Were there others you wished were your friends? (If yes, did you try to be their friends? If not, why not? If you could go back, would you try? If not, why not?)

3. How did your friends help you? Hurt you?

4. How do you think you helped your friends? Hurt them?

5. Imagine that you could go back in time and meet yourself at age 5 and had only one hour to talk to your younger self about friends and friendships. What advice would you give and how would you convince your younger self to take it? (How about at 15 years? 25 years? 35 years? What advice would you give yourself 10 years from now about your current friends, and will you follow that advice now?)

B. MY ANSWERS AND ANALYSES

1. How did you make your very first friends? Etc.

I didn’t start picking my own friends till I suddenly found out the hard way how important it is to have a lot of good friends after my horrible 8th grade. I don’t recall much about my friends in South Korea. We moved around a lot, even back then. So, I imagine I had to switch friends frequently back there as well.

Once in the U.S., I was quite shy about making friends due to the language barrier. Whoever happened to come up to me and wanted to be my friend was good enough for me. I never reached out to anyone. I never rejected anyone. I just thought that’s how everyone made and kept friends. I probably came to adopt this view because of the fact that we moved around so much. Usually, the new kid gets either welcomed or ignored by the then-existing kids in the new school. My evident shyness or awkwardness was probably the reason why the most popular kids typically left me alone and the shyer kids approached me to join their cliques.

My parents rarely interfered with my “choice” of friends. Dad was indifferent to, or disliked, pretty much all of them. Mom always fawned on everyone else’s kids but her own—including all of my and my sisters’ friends. I think it was of paramount importance to her to be liked by everyone except her own immediate family.

I actually liked my earliest friends a lot. They always seemed full of great new ideas and were happy to try to answer my questions about all the mysterious American culture issues and customs. I never took a leadership role with my friends till after my 8th grade (again, that treacherous 8th grade!) because I was still operating under the presumption that I didn’t know enough to offer anything too exciting. I usually followed my friends’ lead about what to do, who to find attractive in the opposite sex, and pretty much anything. It was comfortable to just go along with whatever they suggested. They weren’t tyrannical about it. It was nice to finally not be responsible for anything more than my schoolwork, outside of my own home.

2. Were there others you wished were your friends? Etc.

Not until that dreaded 8th grade, which I wrote about in “How to Be an Extrovert.”

3. How did your friends help you? Hurt you?

My earliest friends gave me the only outlet I had to be myself. They didn’t judge me. They enjoyed teaching me many things. The more I appreciated their lessons, the more they were willing to teach me. Most of all, I learned by watching how they conducted themselves in a variety of stressful situations. I watched them get taunted by bullies and take it. Other times, I watched them stand and fight back, especially if they were defending their younger siblings. I learned from them the difference between good-natured teasing and mean-spirited name-calling. They were my very first heroes. We were not the most popular ones, but we weren’t the social outcasts, either. That came later for me—you guessed it!—in my 8th grade.

Even the few social outcast friends that I managed to make in my lonely 8th grade year, I could honestly say, helped me. They so sadly and painfully explained to me how much they’d like to be able to help me in my predicament of having been singled out as our school’s emotional (and sometimes physical) punching bag, but that they just couldn’t risk bringing that kind of hatred and anger onto themselves. I could see that they were right. Would I have stood up for them? Hell, yes! But, I knew I had to change what I expected from even my closest friends in the future. After all, I was used to standing up for people weaker than me being beaten by people stronger than me because that happened almost every week in my own house when my mom took a “beating stick” (called a “mung-daeng-ee” in Korean) to my sisters—or tried to while I intervened to weather most of the blows myself. But, I knew I couldn’t expect others to do this for me when they had no similar experiences to prepare them for that kind of heroics. I knew I had to make my own army of friends, and so I did. But, there’s the rub. That’s when I began to make the kind of friends who, in many ways, ultimately “harmed” me the most. I’ll explain.

Becoming “popular” protected me from ever being picked on again at school or in my neighborhood for as long as we lived there. But, as my extreme nature sometimes has me doing, I took things too far. After a full year on full-tilt friendly, extroverted behavior, everyone expected me to keep acting that way. Happy all the time. Cheerful. Excited. Energetic. Meanwhile my family life was getting much worse. I just didn’t know how to get off the extroverted merry-go-round.

Being popular meant being cool. Being cool—at least at that school and in that neighborhood—meant not caring too much about your grades or your future. I began cutting classes—a lot!—when previously I had a perfect attendance record all through junior high school. Honestly, I didn’t even know we could stay home if we were sick; and, anyway, school was my sanctuary from home, so I dared not miss a single day of it! But, when my new cool friends got me started on cutting classes, well, I had never known such peace, joy, or freedom as hanging out at the malls, restaurants, or parks for a few hours till it was time to catch the school bus back home! Some of my coolest friends were also starting to get heavily involved in sex, alcohol, drugs, and crime. Lucky for me, my closest friend had a great head on her shoulders and kept me away from all that. Again, I just followed her lead.

By the time my family moved again (to get my sisters away from their growing interest in gangs and petty crimes), I was so sick of being an extrovert while my family life reached new lows involving early morning calls to the police that I completely reverted to my shy, awkward loner ways for my final 1 1/2 years of high school in yet another new city—being careful, of course, not to piss off anyone who could sic the entire school on me all over again. I was socially exhausted.

I entered a deep depression that lasted until I finally began college. It was my highest hope that the petty cliquish ways of junior high schools and high schools was finally behind me. Worst of all, I was shocked to find that in my quest to become and stay popular for my own physical safety, I had somehow sabotaged my own future. I was told by my new high school counselor that my grades were probably not good enough to get into UCLA, my first choice university. I regret that I believed her and never completed the application for UCLA. Instead, I started at CSULA and promised myself I’d transfer to UCLA as soon as I could, which I did.

What happened to my friends from all my former schools (3 elementary schools; 2 junior high schools; and 2 high schools)? I tried to stay in touch with each of them after each move. Phone calls, letters, and finally driving to their homes as soon as I could. But, it never lasted for long. I learned to accept that friends are cherished traveling companions who must all eventually go their separate ways. The best we can do is to have a great time and appreciate them while we’re still together.

4. How do you think you helped your friends? Hurt them?

When I was very young, I would think that my friends appreciated my undoubting loyalty and willingness to go along with all of their suggestions. Again, this was merely an extension of how I was raised by my parents to treat my whole family. My needs and desires took a backseat to everyone else’s until at least my high school years. Did that ultimately prove helpful to my early friends or harmful to them? I don’t know. My family always moved us away before I could find out.

Then, when we stayed in the same city long enough to have longer friendships, I finally learned what it was like to end them for other reasons. I always tried to do right by my friends—often extending myself way beyond the call of duty or what the average person would consider reasonable to expect from friends. I often gave more of myself than I got. But, if a friend kept taking advantage of my trusting, generous, and forgiving nature for too long, I eventually—and sometimes quite suddenly—broke off all ties with them. I don’t believe in phony friendships. When the trust and good feelings are gone, there’s nothing that can bring them back. Those feelings die a natural death after enough abuse and neglect. Over time, I learned to recognize new Human Cuckoos, as I call them in my ebook Cuckoo in Your Nest!, much more quickly. As soon as I see a person’s true colors, I don’t waste any time. There’s no point in it. And, like magic, I became a happy person!

I hurt the Human Cuckoos who were once my friends; but, hopefully, I helped them, too. I hurt them when I succumbed to their manipulative tactics and continued to do exactly as they wanted because, as a result of my acquiescence and codependency, I participated in keeping them “helpless.” Then, when I stopped letting them use me in that way, I hope that I helped them realize that not everyone is willing to be their Human Host Bird, plundering their own nest of limited time, energy, and resources to satisfy their insatiable Human Cuckoo’s needs. Sure, there’s always going to be another sucker out there, but hopefully not one as gullible and generous as I once was. I really think I take the cake in that contest!

5. Imagine that you could go back in time and meet yourself at age 5 and had only one hour to talk to your younger self about friends and friendships. Etc.

Let me start with the caveat that I used some mild profanity in this exercise because that’s how I imagined I would actually speak to myself in these hypothetical scenarios. Ordinarily I try to avoid using profanity on this blog. But, here it made the entire exercise more realistic, and, thus, effective for me.

Also, the advice I would give to myself would almost certainly not be the same advice I would give to anyone else—unless that person also happened to be in the exact same circumstances that I had been in, including having my particular personality traits, which I believe responds best to a slightly more “tough love” type of advice delivery. What may sound too harsh/drastic to some—yet too mild/weak to others—would have been the Goldilocks’ “just right” formula for me.

a. Going Back to Me at Age 5

To myself at age 5, I’d simply say: “Let your sisters be your sisters. Don’t try to make them your friends. And, don’t try to be their parents, either. Let them find their own way. Or else they will grow up to hate you for it. Trust me big time on that! Just take care of yourself. And, don’t believe anything your parents say about friends or friendships, either. They really don’t know much that they can teach you. They are your parents, so you have to listen to them unless they make you do something dangerous. But they don’t own your mind or your body. Only you own these things. Learn 50% of what you need from good books. The rest from trying and failing. Make a lot of mistakes. You learn twice as fast—and the lessons really stick with you—that way. Stay away from negative people as much as you can, and always find the most positive people in any group to make friends with. And, never, ever give up!” Then, I’d answer questions and clarify these main points.

b. Going Back to Me at Age 15

To Age 15, assuming I didn’t have any previous visits with my younger self, I’d say: “Having friends is great but don’t let them lead you away from your ultimate goal of freedom. There is a future of total freedom for you—freedom from your family without guilt, freedom from financial worries, freedom to help whomever you choose! But, you gotta straighten up your act right now! You taught yourself how to make friends. That’s great! Now you need to learn how to make all the right friends. People who can inspire you, teach you, or help you to achieve your goals. And, you’ll help them, too. This is called ‘networking.’ Read about it. In fact, read a lot of everything: newspapers, magazines, and biographies. Watch the news, especially the business reports. (And, I just have to slip this in: You can be good at math if you just stop thinking you suck at it.) There is no celebrity too famous to stay out of your reach. Study anyone you want to make your friend. Copy the lives of your heroes. Think of ways you can start a friendship with them—without stalking them, of course. Write to them and let them know what your dreams are and why you admire them, or provide some other reason for writing to them. You’ll think of something. Out of 100 letters, if you make one good friend, all that effort was worth it. And, if you don’t, write 1,000! Just when you feel like giving up, don’t! That’s exactly when all your work is about to pay off. Never give up!”

c. Going Back to Me at Age 25

To Age 25, (again, assuming I hadn’t time traveled to myself before) I’d say: “I know you’re going through some major relationship growing pains right now. I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first? Okay, somehow I knew you were going to say that. The bad news is it’s going to get a whole heck of a lot worse before it gets better unless—and here’s the good news—you can change all that because I’m here to tell you exactly how to do it. Are you ready to hear how?

“Because it doesn’t look like you’re ready. It looks like you still don’t even believe I’m you. Who else could I be? I know I’ve gained a few pounds, my face is a little droopy, not to mention a few other parts of my body. By the way, you look incredible! Look, we can do the whole “show and tell” thing after I tell you what I came here to tell you. Ask me a test question. Something that only you know you know. If I can remember, I’ll tell you. Think of the most personal thing you never shared with anyone … or even wrote about in any of your diaries! Go ahead: Test me!” … “Okay, now do you believe me?! Trust me: You’ve got way bigger problems than that for the next 15 years if you don’t listen to me now. I only have an hour to try to convince you to change that, so please pay attention. You wanna take notes or something? I’m about to drop golf ball-sized pearls of wisdom here!

“Ready? Respect yourself. Your mind. Your body. Especially your body. Mom and Dad treated you as if you—your mind and your body—are not important or worthy of careful treatment or protection. Now you need to know that you are important—every part of you! And you need to believe this truth with the combined forces of all your heart and mind and to be very careful of everything you let into your mind and your body from now on, or else you’ll end up … regretting it.

“Guard yourself against the temptation to do things just to finally fit in. It’s great that you stayed away from smoking, drinking, and drugs for so long! Don’t blow it down the road just to get along better with others—not your bosses, not your coworkers, not your friends, and not even your sisters—especially not your sisters. Follow your own path as you always have up to now. Stay independent in thoughts and actions. Don’t fall for that “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” bullshit! Most of all, stay away from bad men. How will you know? You’ll know. They’re the ones you’ll initially love/hate. Guess what? You’ll always love/hate them. Each one will be worse than the last because you’ll have grown progressively weaker in your belief in yourself with each grueling, soul-zapping relationship. And, with your rapidly shrinking ego, you’ll grow ever more vulnerable to an increasingly downward spiral that will lead to … a suicide attempt that completey catches you off guard because you thought you were long over all your suicidal tendencies. So, save yourself from all of that by promising yourself now to forge your own path even if you must travel it alone. But, I promise you, you won’t be alone forever. Wait for the right one. You might be 40, 50, 60 years old when you finally meet him, but it’ll be worth it.”

d. Going Back to Me at Age 35

To Age 35, I’d say: “I’ve come to warn you that your life is about to come to the perfect storm of bad family, friends, lovers, and work relationships that will result in you suddenly surprising yourself with a compelling desire to quickly end it all in a real serious attempt at suicide. No need to let that happen now. We can change that future if you will pay heed to what I have to say next. In a couple of years, things will quickly spin out of control if you let yourself get embroiled again with your family drama. Don’t do it. Keep a safe distance from them no matter what! Just as important, get the hell away from your alcoholic man. He’s nothing but trouble for you for many, many years to come if you can’t break away from him as soon as possible. Get single and stay single till a nice, quiet man gently wins your heart. Those are the two most important things. The third thing is your career. Law is just not for you. Pursue your love of writing/teaching/coaching instead. Combine those loves with the growing power of the internet by starting your own web log or blog. Trust your instincts. You only need one good friend: Yourself. The internet is your next best friend and your future. Be extremely careful in trusting all else.”

e. Age 52 Coming Back to Me Today

If the future me—the me from 2018—came back to give me advice about my current friends, I think she’d tell me: “Trust your instincts even more. You’ve come a long way in paring your life down to the essentials, but you still strive blindly for those illusive “best friends” that all the idealistic books, movies, and songs rave about. They just don’t exist. Or, they’re so rare that it’s not worth wasting your time trying to make them happen. Like your True Love, it’ll happen when you finally stop believing in it. Instead, there’s a whole world waiting for you to help them with your work. Live for them. Focus on them. At the right time, your great friendships will finally happen—naturally. But, they are the icing on the cake of your life purpose. Always be your own best friend.” Hmm. I’m going to take this advice.

RESULTS OF EXPERT STUDIES

From Abnormal Psychology: Core Concepts by James N. Butcher, Susan Mineka, and Jill M. Hooley (2008), the following excerpts are relevant to the issues of peers, including lovers and spouses, and their amazingly powerful influence on the ultimate course our lives take as well as on our mental, emotional, and physical health.

A. BULLYING

Although most children profess attitudes against bullying, when bullying actually occurs, most students do nothing to intervene or support the victim (and as many as 20 to 30 percent actually encourage the bully; Salmivalli & Voeten, 2004). A small percentage (approximately 20 percent) however, do take the side of the victim and may even help defend him or her.

B. DELINQUENCY

Delinquency tends to be an experience often shared by cultural group (O’Donnell, 2004). In a classic study, Haney and Gold (1973) found that about two-thirds of delinquent acts were committed in association with one or two other people, and most of the remainder involved three or four others. Usually the offender and the companion or companions were of the same sex. Interestingly, girls were more likely than boys to have a constant friend or companion in delinquency.

C. STRESS

Considerable evidence suggests that positive social and family relationships can moderate the effects of stress on a person (Ozer et al., 2004). Conversely, the lack of external supports, either personal or material, can make a given stressor more potent and weaken a person’s capacity to cope with it.

A nationwide survey of stressful life events in mainland China found that problems with interpersonal relationships were the most commonly reported stressors in daily life (Zheng & Lin, 1994).

A divorce or the death of a mate evokes more stress if people are left feeling alone and unloved than if they are surrounded by people they care about and feel close to, Siegel and Kuykendall (1990), for example, found that widowed men who attended church or temple experienced less depression than those who did not. This study also found that men who had lost a spouse were more often depressed than women who had done so. The reasons for this finding remain unclear, although others have found similar results (e.g., Stroebe & Stroebe, 1983). It could be that women had a closer network of friends from the outset, which may have reduced their vulnerability to depression (Kershner, Cohen & Coyne, 1998).

D. DEPRESSION

A significant proportion of marital distress have at least one partner with clinical depression, and there is a high correlation between marital dissatisfaction and depression for both women and men (e.g., Beach & Jones, 2002; Whisman, Uebelacker & Weintsock, 2004). In addition, marital distress spells a poor prognosis for a depressed spouse whose symptoms have remitted. That is, a person whose depression clears up is likely to relapse if he or she has an unsatisfying marriage (Butzlaff & Hooley, 1998; Hooley & Teasdale, 1989).

Marital distress and depression may co-occur because the depressed partner’s behavior triggers negative affect in the spouse. Depressed individuals may also be so preoccupied with themselves that they are not very sensitive or responsive to the needs of their spouses. A recent review by Beach and Jones (2002) adapted Hammen’s (1991) stress-generation model of depression to help explain the two-way relationship between marital discord and depression (i.e., marital distress can lead to depression, and depression can lead to marital distress). As noted earlier, a significant amount of the stress that depressed individuals experience is somehow at least partially generated by their own behaviors, but this stress in turn also serves to exacerbate depressive symptoms.

E. ALCOHOL ABUSE

Adults with less intimate and supportive relationships tend to show greater drinking following sadness or hostility than those with close peers with more positive relationships (Hussong et al., 2001). Excessive drinking often begins during crisis periods in marriage or other intimate personal relationships, particularly crises that lead to hurt and self-devaluation. The marital relationship may actually serve to maintain the pattern of excessive drinking. [See Case Study below.] Marital partners may behave toward each other in ways that promote or enable a spouse’s excessive drinking. For example, a husband who lives with an alcoholic wife is often unaware of the fact that, gradually and inevitably, many of the decisions he makes every day are based on the expectation that his wife will be drinking. These expectations, in turn, may make the drinking behavior more likely. Eventually an entire marriage may center on the drinking of an alcoholic spouse.

[T]he husband or wife may also begin to drink excessively. Thus one important concern in many treatment programs today involves identifying the personality or lifestyle factors in a relationship that tend to foster the drinking in the alcohol-abusing person. Of course, such relationships are not restricted to marital partners but may also occur in those involved in love affairs or close friendships.

Excessive use of alcohol is one of the most frequent causes of divorce in the United States (Perreira & Sloan, 2001) and is often a hidden factor in the two most common causes—financial and sexual problems. The deterioration in alcoholics’ interpersonal relationships, of course, further augments the stress and disorganization in their lives. The breakdown of marital relationships can be a highly stressful situation for many people. The stress of divorce and the often erratic adjustment period that follows can lead to increased substance abuse.

Family relationship problems have also been found to be central to the development of alcoholism. In a classic longitudinal study of possible etiologic factors in alcohol abuse, Valliant, Gale and Milofsky (1982) described six family relationship factors that were significantly associated with the development of alcoholism in the individuals they studied. The mot important family variables that were considered to predispose the individual to substance abuse problems were the presence of an alcoholic father, acute marital conflicts, lax maternal supervision and inconsistent discipline, many moves during the family’s early years, lack of “attachment” to the father, and lack of family cohesiveness.

Case Study: The Drunken Wife and Mother

Evelyn C., a 36-year-old homemaker and mother of two school-age children (from a previous marriage), began to drink to excess especially following intense disagreements with her husband, John, a manager of a retail business. Over the past several months, she began drinking during the day when her children were at school and on two occasions was inebriated when they came home. On one recent occasion, Evelyn failed to pick up her older daughter after an after-school event. Her daughter called John’s cell phone (he was out of town on a business trip), and he had an assistant pick her up. When they arrived home, Evelyn (apparently unaware of the problem she had caused) created a scene and was verbally abusive toward the assistant. Her out-of-control drinking increased when her husband of 3 years began staying out all night. These emotionally charged encounters resulted in John’s physically abusing her one morning when he came back home after a night away. John moved out of the house and filed for divorce.

F. CORONARY HEART DISEASE

Studies point to the strong link between social factors and the development of CHD [coronary heart disease]. For example, monkeys housed alone have four times more atherosclerosis (fatty deposits in blood vessels that eventually create a blockade) than monkeys housed in social groups (Shively, Clarkson & Kaplan, 1989). Similarly, people who have a relatively small social network or who consider themselves to have little emotional support are more likely to develop CHD over time (see Rozanski et al., 1999, for a review).

For people who already have CHD, there is a similar association. In one study among people who had already suffered a heart attack, those who reported that they had low levels of emotional support were almost three times more likely to experience another cardiac event (Berkman, Leo-Summers & Horwitz, 1992). And, in another study, death in CHD patients was three times more likely over the next 5 years if they were unmarried or had no one that they could confide in (Williams et al., 1992). Echoing these findings, Coyne and his colleagues (2001) have shown that the quality of the marital relationship predicts 4-year survival rates in patents with congestive heart failure.

TO BE CONTINUED …

This is going to be an adventurous journey into our past, present, and future lives. None of us can be prepared for what we might find along the way. So, just sit back and enjoy the ride! Also, I hope at least some of you brave souls will share your answers, insights, and revelations in the comments below for everyone’s benefit!

When you’re done, collect your answers and keep them in a safe place. I recommend a diary. It makes a precious gift to someone you love, especially you!

[For “Day 8: Class, Culture & Income,” click here.]

[For entire “All About You!” series, click here.]

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[For “300 Friendship Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Love and Marriage Quotes,” click here.]

[For all posts about different QUOTES, click here.]

[For “10 Reasons to Keep a Diary,” click here.]

[For “20 Questions for Your Diary,” click here.]

[For “Requests for Cuckoo in Your Nest!,” click here.]

[For “How to Be an Extrovert,” click here.]

[For “My 10 Commandments,” click here.]

[For “Fan Your Inner Flame Till It Burns Bright,” click here.]

[For “Change Your Mindset to Change Your Life,” click here.]

[For more “Easy Steps to Success with People,” click here.]