The Healing Power of Friendships
Friendship is vastly underrated when it comes to a person’s mental health. What do I mean by this? When we think of mental health, physical health, and even overall happiness, friendship is not often the immediate go-to. It’s on the list somewhere, but not at the top. I want to make the argument that friendship is central to these health pursuits and I want to talk specifically, as a therapist, about the ways that friendships can heal us.
There was a recent longitudinal Harvard study that examined health and happiness across the life-span, and the researchers went into this study with various theories about what the most important factor would be. Some thought it might be cholesterol levels, while others thought it would be physical activity. Researchers followed 268 adults across their entire adult lifespan (they started in 1968). What they found was that the most consistent predictor of happiness, health and contentment in life was the presence of strong personal connections with others. Rich friendships are key to our happiness.
Often, when we are depressed, anxious, unhappy, or in pursuit of meaning, we don’t immediately turn to connection with others. We think perhaps we need medication for our symptoms. Maybe we need to exercise more. Maybe we need to turn deep within and find some sense of purpose that tells us what job or vocation to pursue. Or maybe we turn to self-help books, meditation, or other cognitive strategies to deal with our sadness or stress. Most of these ways of thinking are very individualistic. Instead, I want to move up the priority of thinking relationally.
How many people know your inner world, including your vulnerabilities? In turn, how connected are you to the inner worlds of your own friends? Strong personal friendships are defined by mutual vulnerability, mutual sharing of joys, and mutual curiosity about each other’s lives. It may be that, as you hear that, all the barriers to friendship come to mind. Maybe for you, there is a fear of that kind of connection. Perhaps you struggle with trusting others, or perhaps you fear rejection. Or maybe, the possibility of being open and vulnerable with others is something that was never modeled for you – it’s foreign ground.
As we explore our hang ups with being vulnerable, we’re also getting closer to the territory of why I think friendships are key to mental health. We know how we’re wired as human beings, – we get a neurochemical boost that benefits us, simply from being connected to others . But there is also an important way in which I believe that friendships heal us.
As a therapist, I think psychodynamically, which is a technical way of saying that I think in terms of the impact of our relationships. Put simply, when we have difficulty trusting others, or being vulnerable, it is often because of our early relational experiences. If those early experiences made it difficult to be vulnerable with or to trust others, then we will experience anxiety or depression (or both), depending on how those feelings are organized internally. We will feel lonely and isolated, or anxious that some aspect of our experience is shameful or unacceptable to others. Deep inside, we’ll wonder if something is wrong with us.
The work of building strong friendships can involve finding new experiences of connection that rewire our internal pre-conceptions of others. What do I mean by this? If you learned at an early age to fear or expect disinterest or even experienced shaming when you were emotionally open or vulnerable, then as an adult you likely go into relationships with that pre-conception of how others will treat you. However, the healing work of good friendships (not all friendships are safe ones), means that if you choose to be open and vulnerable with others, and they remain interested, and don’t shame you, then the possibility for re-wiring, for healing those early experiences, emerges. You learn that it is possible to be open with and thus connected to others.
As this happens, you reap both the straightforward mental, physical and emotional benefits of friendship. And in turn, you reap the double reward of healing those pre-existing barriers to friendship that kept you isolated, struggling with self worth, or anxious about aspects of your experience that you had learned to keep hidden. You move further from isolation and fear of rejection into the possibility of rich connection with others. The shame you felt about those aspects of your experience begins to heal as you realize that you don’t have to feel embarrassed about your human uniqueness or vulnerabilities.
I’ll say it again – friendship is vastly underrated. I believe that rich connections with others are the heart of what it means to live a healthy, happy and contented life. I hope my writing inspires you to inventory your life with particular attention to the quality of the connections you have with others. For some readers, this will mean examining the quality of your current relationships and asking what you can do to invest in them more deeply. For others, perhaps you’ll be realizing that maybe you need to be finding ways to pursue new or healthier friendships. Wherever you are on this journey, whether it is learning to be more open with the friends you have, or whether it means seeking out and building new friendships, know that this reflection will be time well spent.