Well, I’ve written about friendship on here before, and why it’s really hard to build when you have PTSD. So, I’m going to start by re-sharing some quotes from myself. I’m linking to the original entries, as well, but these are excerpts.
From “This Could be the End” (Posted October 6, 2023)
https://apostateturtle.com/?p=1224
“They don’t need to know you have trauma”/”Just don’t tell them” (Posted April 30, 2025) https://apostateturtle.com/?p=1765
In the first photo, I was referencing the fact that you’re only supposed to bond with natural supports, but you’re only supposed to reveal significant things about yourself to your therapist, and that’s unrealistic. I still use the fine-aged-cheese analogy. Very few people get it, but “If you know, you know,” as they say.
The thing with building friendships, is that it’s extremely hard to do when you’re desperate. Stepping away from cheese, imagine that you’re about to starve, and all you have are apple seeds. So, you have to plant a zillion seeds, but conditions are tough and you know that there’s like <1% chance that any individual seed will ultimately grow into a tree bearing fruit. In fact, you have no actual guarantee that any of them will reach maturity. But you still have to tend to each of your seedlings regularly. Well, trying to build friends when you have no friends is like that, except with a million more stipulations. You see, if any of the plants find out that you’re desperate, they will get spooked. So you have to tend to them regularly, but not too regularly, lest they get suspicious. And if they find out that you don’t currently have any mature trees, then it’s a lot for them to imagine that they’ll be your only tree when/if they reach maturity, and they might decide to go transplant themselves elsewhere.
This is what it’s like to get kicked out of a cult. I have to go to extreme lengths to try to think of things that I can share about myself honestly without letting on that I have trauma. Basically, I can only talk about my turtle and cat. Everything else is either trauma, or just totally unrelatable. So then I try to develop hobbies so I can have something to talk about with potential friends, but that takes money, and it’s hard to make money when you’re barely hanging on to mental health, which is a common problem when you’re totally alone in life. Now, the normal thing is that people have a family of origin, then are placed in public school. So they have people who exist in their lives. People move or whatever, but it’s not normal to have to try to make friends starting from zero. I’ve been working on this for over a decade now, and I have a few people who are important to me, but I do keep them at a bit of a distance because I don’t want to be too much. Add to the mix, I’ve also spent years of my life distancing from people a lot because I believed that I was toxic.
But, I just wish that therapists could understand why their advice never works. Say I go to board game night, hoping that maybe in five years somebody there will be my friend. But I have to stick to superficial talk about board games for the first several board game nights (which are usually once a month) before slowly progressing and being able to share about my life. That would work fine if I already had friends. But building friendship looks totally different when you don’t have pre-existing friendships. It’s not possible to just “act casual” when you’re dying inside. Normal people can casually go to board game night and appear interested in board games, because they actually are interested in board games. They’re not secretly praying desperately for a miracle and the person before them becomes a friend. They can act casual because it actually is casual to them. If nobody there ends up being a lifelong friend, that is fine. If you have absolutely no tribe, you cannot follow the standard ways of making friends. It’s not that I don’t intellectually understand that you’re supposed to play it cool.
Honestly, I actually would argue that it’s disingenuous to try to follow standard friendship-building protocol under these circumstances. If you’re dying inside and crying yourself to sleep every night because you’re so alone, but you play it off like you’re pretty okay, then at some point your potential friend will find this out. Otherwise, you’re not actually friends with that person. You might be friendly acquaintances. But if something is a huge deal, then your friend will at least be aware. You don’t have to talk about it all the time. But if the greatest source of pain in your life (or at least in the top 3) is that you’re alone, but you intentionally withold that information, and furthermore you actually go out of your way to pretend that the exact opposite is true and you’re fine and not desperate at all… is that a real friendship? Or is that an interpersonal relationship based on lies?
So, I mean, I don’t have the solution. Most of my friends are people I met on the complex-trauma ward, and my closest relationship by far is with my cat. I just wish that we could acknowledge this as a societal issue, and therapists could stop telling us to just fake it until we make it. Even if they wanted to say, “We have absolutely no idea how to make friends in your situation,” that would free us up to try to figure it out on our own. As opposed to the current most-common strategy, which is to shame us if they think we overshared with a potential friend when we were supposed to pretend we were normal. Like, their method might work for them because they don’t know what it’s like to be truly and completely alone. I just wish they could know that not everyone has the luxury of being able to make friends in the standard way. Once you have a few friends, then sure. I think I’m actually nearing that point. But I’m definitely disillusioned with the establishment for championing this idea that you can build community starting from zero and after severe complex trauma in the exact same way that you’d build community if you’d moved to a new city. Nobody seems to really know the answer, but I can definitely say, building friendship after trauma requires a lot more creativity and experimentation, and probably more authenticity as well. Oh yeah, and you do have to accept that a lot of people will probably think you’re crazy before you find a kindred spirit who also was looking for a serious and authentic friendship.