Making and keeping friends can be like crossing a minefield with a defective mine detector that works only some of the time and we have no idea of whether or not it is working. We may think that we are taking a safe path, only to trip a mine. A relationship blows up in our face.
When I befriend someone, I often find myself thinking about how they are faring in life. I guess that it is one of my character traits to take an interest in the lives of those whom I have befriended and to feel care and concern for them and for their well-being. I guess that I picked up this trait from my grandmother and my mother. It is the kind of motherliness that they showed toward me when I was child and later in life.
This character trait may trigger annoyance in someone if they are very independent and are not accustomed to this quality in anyone who has befriended them. They may not see it the way that I do, and they may mistake it for something else, for example, intrusiveness. They may feel like I am trying to invade their space and to pry into things which are not my concern. The different way we see this trait can lead to misunderstandings and tensions in our relationship.
This difference, however, is not insurmountable. It is something that two individuals can resolve if they talk with each other, identify their boundaries for each other—what are the “precede cautiously” areas and the “no-go" areas at the particular stage in their relationship. It is something that they can jointly work upon for a smoother relationship.
I am much better at expressing my positive feelings at this stage in my life than I was when I was younger. My family was not very demonstrative when I was a child. We did not openly show affection toward each other. This is not to say that we did not feel affection for each other. We did not display it. We did not say things like “I love you” or give each other hugs. We tended to be guarded with our feelings, cautious and reserved.
My greater openness with my positive feelings can be disconcerting to someone who is not accustomed to that degree of openness and who shies away from emotional closeness. I can at times be overly exuberant in expressing what I feel.
What practitioner of Transactional Analysis (TA) call the Child ego state may give voice to what I may be holding him back from saying, “Wow!! I like you a lot!!” This, I imagine, can be unsettling to someone who is taken by surprise by what I said and is not sure how they themselves feel toward me. They may not know how to respond.
When we were kids on the playground, we responded in one of three ways to such an expression of liking. We responded. “I like you too.” “Well, I don’t like you!” And walked off. Or we stood there dumbfounded for a moment and then ran away without saying anything, leaving the other kid in a state of confusion, thinking to themselves, “Does … like me?”
An ego state may be defined as “a way in which we think, feel and behave, making up our personality at a given time.”
According to Steve Rigler on the Counseling Tutor website—
"The Child ego state is not when we are acting childish, or what others perceive as childish behaviour. It is how we behaved, thought and felt, replayed out as we did as a child."
"These adaptive behaviours can be immediate and act as a survival instinct within us, putting obstacles in the way of our own growth."
"These are archaic memories that we are unable to remember on a conscious level, but lie within our unconscious."
Rigler goes on to point to his readers’ attention:
"The Child is divided into Adapted Child and Free Child."
"Adapting to the demands of my parents or parental figures, behaving, thinking and feeling in ways that were imprinted on us as a child, I am said to be in Adapted Child."
"Without parental pressures or demands, and acting as we wanted to without influence, like simply playing or making a sandcastle and losing ourselves in our own world, we are said to be in Free Child."
When I became a social worker, I studied Transactional Analysis, doing extensive reading, and attending TA workshops, and used TA in my work. It has become an integral part of the way that I see the world.
It is a helpful way of better understanding other people and ourselves and why we do the things that we do.
Kids, when they find a new playmate or make a new friend, also want to know more about them. It is a normal part of friendship.
The same thing is true when we become adults. We want to know more about those whom we have befriended.
One of the ways that we may convey our desire to know more about them is to tell them more about ourselves. There is a danger here in that we may discourage them in talking about themselves. They may mistakenly conclude that we are only interested in talking about ourselves. We are not interested in learning more about them.
When we were kids, our parents may have had a rule, “We do not talk about what goes on in our family with strangers. It is none of their business.” When we become adults, we may apply the same rule to ourselves.
Beyond a certain point we are uncomfortable with talking about ourselves. We are not sure that we can trust whomever we are talking with. Out of their desire to know us better, they may be asking too many questions than may be comfortable for us. We think to ourselves, “Can I really trust ….?” We may become suspicious of their motives. If in their excitement to get to know us better, they throw caution to the wind, our suspicions of them may be reinforced. This too can lead to misunderstandings and tensions in our relationship.
We may be open at the beginning of a relationship, only to become more reticent as time passes. We do not reveal our thoughts or our feelings readily. This may cause confusion in whoever has befriended us. They may not how to respond to our reserve, our slowness to make known our thoughts and emotions. One way they may respond is to talk more, hoping that we may respond in kind. This, however, is not likely to produce the results that they desire, but they may persist, hoping that they may experience a breakthrough. The more they talk, however, the more we may back away from them.
When we find ourselves in these kinds of situations in a relationship, the advice that Jesus gives us is different from the advice that we might receive from popular psychology. Jesus has mandated that his followers love other people—those who Jesus has identified as our neighbors, those who are antagonistic and ill-disposed toward us, those who are our brothers and sisters in the faith. Whatever may happen, we are to keep loving them. Jesus does not give us any other options. We are to maintain friendly relations with them.
I will offer one caveat. Jesus does not expect us to stay in a relationship in which we are being physically and emotionally abused or sexually abused and exploited. This is also clear from his teaching.
For our own mental health, however, we should not hold onto anger and resentment toward the individual with whom we were involved in such a relationship. We need to work through these bitter feelings. They can do us as much harm as the physical and emotional abuse and the sexual abuse and exploitation.
Out of his immeasurable love for us God shows us grace—his good will and favor toward us. This grace is not tied to anything that we do or even who we are. It is pure gift. One kind of grace which we may sometime hear of is healing grace. It is the power of God’s presence working in us to overcome misunderstandings, to ease tensions in our relationships, to repair broken relationships, to set things to right, to restore love and goodwill between those who have become estranged from each other.
God also gives us the Holy Spirit, God himself dwelling in us, to encourage and guide us. The Holy Spirit will help us to avoid making unwise decisions in the heat of strong emotion; impulsive, reckless decisions; decisions that are an act of defiance and rebellion, but which are not in our best interest; decisions that are motived by a desire to show someone that they are wrong or to hurt them; decisions that we will come later regret, even though at the time we may angrily dismiss that possibility.
Jesus came teaching love, not to set an unattainable goal that is impossible for us to reach, but to point us in the direction that God would have us go with the help of his grace. God is nudging us to take our first hesitant step in that direction. Once we take that step and begin the journey, we will discover that God is with us, urging us on, and enabling us to walk as Jesus walked, to walk in love, receiving not only God’s healing but also being instruments of his healing, instruments of his love.
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