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Key points
- Your past wounds can impact how you perceive challenges within your friendships.
- The most common wound involves feeling unworthy.
- If you have a wound involving not feeling like a priority, you may disrespect friends' boundaries.
- If you have a wound involving not feeling worthy, you may be inauthentic with friends.
To illuminate how our wounds can impede our friendships, I interviewed therapist Vienna Pharaon (behind the popular Instagram mindfulMFT), on her forthcoming book The Origins of You.
Tell me about the idea behind your new book, The Origins of You.
It is about looking back at the unresolved pain from our past and how that can run our lives today: creating or contributing to the unwanted patterns that we have in our adult lives.
The book is about five origin wounds and how we accrue them: worthiness, belonging, prioritization, safety, and trust. When we don't tend to the pain properly, those wounds get re-reactivated and reenacted in our adult relationships.
How can our wounds affect our friendships?
If you have a prioritization wound, for example, you might pressure a friend to do something that you want them to do, but really what you're trying to do is control your pain. If I can get you to do this with me, then I can create the illusion that I am important to you.
Or, for example, if you grew up in a family where being who you are was not accepted, a child may trade authenticity to maintain connection, love, presence. We often grow into adults who have been living inauthentically for a long time wondering: Who do I need to be in order to be liked by you? How do I need to present in order to fit in?
Are there any wounds that stick out when people are making new friends?
Worthiness. Am I good enough to be chosen? Am I valuable enough to be your friend? Will you like me enough? Am I Interesting enough, smart enough to be liked by you?
I created a free quiz, “What's your origin wound?” and the results were staggering. I have had over 20,000 people take the quiz and 80%+ identify with worthiness as a primary wound.
How is the felt experience different for someone who might have this wound and for someone who might not?
[How we’re affected by] communication or boundaries. If your worthiness is intact, and a friend says no, I can't make that plan, you're not dragged down by it. If your worthiness is not intact, and a friend says no (e.g., Hey, I'm too tired. I can't.), it’s personal. It becomes: Do you not care about me? Do you not love me?
The need to protect the self from pain becomes more important than honoring the other person's boundary. It's not because we don't care about the other person. It's just that when the wound is in the driver's seat, that's the thing that becomes the most important: protect myself at all costs.
I read Maslow's books on self-actualization. And he says if you lack a sense of self, you see other people as tools to fulfill your sense of self. And you don't see their full humanity. And that sounds like it relates to what you're talking about.
Do you recommend friends bring their wound up with their friends?
Absolutely. I think that this is an entry point for getting to understand each other's inner worlds—if these are intimate relationships, where we care about their experience as much as we care about our experience.
When you notice reactivity in your friendships, that’s an indicator that points us to something that's unresolved about our past relationships.
[The goal is] to get to a point where we can narrate some of that in these moments. Instead of just having the big reactions, you might say, "I feel disappointed right now because my prioritization wound feels pretty activated that you didn't come to my birthday party."
It moves away from a headspace (talking about the thing) and into the heart centered place of actually connecting on a much deeper level. That's a healthy, normal thing to do within friendship.
It’s like telling people how you need to be loved.
What strategies or tools would you use to try to work on those wounds?
Reflect on: What did I want as a child and not get? Notice where that craving comes up, present day in your friendships. I wanted my parents to listen to me or I wanted to feel important or I wanted to know that I could just be myself and still be accepted.
Notice what is on repeat. What you complain about the most is going to come back to a wound.
Making the unconscious conscious, it sounds like.
You say the goal of our relationships is true differentiation, the ability to hold on to yourself, while maintaining relationships. The goal isn't just to make new friends but to befriend people who are loving or respectful towards you. Can you talk more about that goal?
It's to hold on to you while also creating connection with others. You don't need to trade who you are to gain a friend. When wounds are in the driver's seat, they're constantly trying to convince us to trade [our self]. It means prioritizing staying true and authentic to who you are and moving away from any dynamic where you need to fake who you are.
You force the right people to miss you and the wrong people to choose you when you don’t show up authentically.
This article also appears on my friendship blog.
