Friends?
At my middle school lunch table, if you had on some funny-looking shoes, high waters, a bad haircut, were too quiet, laughed too hard at someone’s joke, or said the wrong thing, that was your ass. You’d become the target of the jokes and antagonizing laughs that made you feel like the whole world was laughing at you. When these jokes came from a “friend” it was beyond confusing. My perception of their betrayal felt like a system malfunction and inside, I had a myriad of thoughts like Why are you suddenly turning on me and embarrassing me in front of your friends? Don’t let these people see you’re offended. So you don’t really mess with me like that. You better not let me find anything you’re ashamed about because I will be bringing it up the next time you want to be Mr. Def Comedy Jam”, etc. And these are thoughts I had towards people I considered friends.
To survive in that environment, I adapted to it. I expected to be in a constant state of uncertainty about when I would be the target of these jokes. I learned to limit my trust in friends, I learned to avoid showing how I really felt so I wouldn’t become the laughing stock or receive a stigmatizing label like “emotional”. I learned to expect people to be cool in one-to-one situations but switch up in a group. I learned some emotions were unacceptable to express, like sadness, embarrassment, and worry, while others weren’t, including anger, apathy, and some happiness, but not too much happiness. I learned to keep my guard up and keep jokes in the chamber in case one of these people I considered a friend tried to embarrass me. I lived in a constant state of angst amongst “friends” because of trust issues and I masked that angst with stoicism or reciprocity of the same treatment that had me on edge.
I was socialized to make fun of people who showed emotion. My friends and I bonded over provoking people, like Cam’ron did with Bill O’Reilly: “You maad. You maaad.” We learned to antagonize people by doing things like laughing relentlessly at jokes, whether they were funny or not, to see how the target of the joke would react (e.g., 0:26 seconds into Jay-Z’s "Bring It On"). Back then, there wasn’t any “Tell them how their actions impacted you” and this was the culture I grew up in. Fortunately, this would change.
Through oral history, the late great Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis taught me that The Dozens was a coping mechanism/game enslaved Black boys played to build the mental fortitude to avoid reacting when enslavers violated their beloved sisters or mothers. Reacting could lead to death. The dozens would be played, with boys going back and forth with a dozen jokes about each other’s mothers, sisters and so on to see who had the mental fortitude to avoid losing composure, breaking-down or overreacting. If a participant in the dozens overreacted or broke down, they would lose the game. Presenting ourselves as unbothered and non-emotional was a protective means of survival. Even with that history, and appreciation for some good jokes, I wish the line not to cross amongst friends was respected more. In therapy, we seek to identify patterns that helped us survive in the past but may be counterproductive in the present day.
Collectively, many of us look at each other skeptically based on histories of poor-quality friendships. Some aspects of this friendship culture were anti-love. If you showed someone too much love, someone would discourage it by telling you, “You’re on his dick.” From that, we learned to restrain our appreciation for each other. The music we listen to drills messages in our minds of our brothers being our enemies, being violent towards them, taking each other’s romantic partners, "no new friends", etc.. We’re continuously indoctrinated with messages that it is unacceptable to feel emotions, let alone express them. In many of our favorite movies, terrible “friendships” are depicted: Juice, Paid in Full… In my favorite movie, White Men Can’t Jump, it took being hustled, romantic partners negotiating for their partners, a grand prize of $25,000 and more just to be frenemies. Around people we don’t know, tension looms because of this indoctrination and plenty of us remain on guard around each other. Historically, America has socialized us to be scared of black men with propaganda (e.g. findings of news overrepresenting black crimes in news, an inundation of Black men being depicted as wild but docile, violent, sex-crazed, criminous people with superhuman strength (caricatures Brutes and Bucks, etc.) (References Birth of A Nation). Despite familiarity with these stereotypes for what they are, many of us have internalized them and look at each other with skepticism and distrust.
The impact of many of our friendships is that they are festering and deteriorating other relationships.
Growing up, it was normal to hear someone break a peaceful silence to suddenly tell their friend, “you ugly”. That can start to deteriorate your relationship with yourself, for example, having a lack of confidence from questioning whether you’re actually ugly. One time, I got jumped and my friends' joking about it could have easily led me to not seeking support out of fear of being made fun of again. I remember being in high school and friends of a good friend causing a raucous about a girl he liked “hitting it and quitting it”. Through these guys basically announcing the news to the school for everyone to join in on the laughter, I learned my friend lost his virginity to this girl and she left him afterwards. I was in utter disbelief, thinking “These are your friends?!”. I hadn’t experienced heartbreak yet, but I could imagine how hurt he was and I definitely knew the heart is too delicate to play with. I could not make sense of these guys broadcasting that information and howling all over school about it, especially when he was visibly embarrassed. I could be facetious and say these experiences are how are villains are made. The truth is, these experiences are usually at the heart of insecurity, trust issues, cognitive distortions like projecting and more. Encounters like the ones previously mentioned may appear to be minor issues in relationships, initially, but like small cracks in a boat, they will eventually lead to sinking if they're neglected.
It's easy to simplify some of this behavior to “Boys being boys” but just recently I saw grown, professional men, of what they claimed to be a close friend group, cackling at one of their friends while revealing his girlfriend cheated on him. Mind you, this is on social media for the world to see. This behavior has become part of masculine culture. On the other hand, I recently witnessed see young, Black boys in my neighborhood speaking to each other about mutual interests such as homework, entertainment, and interpersonal issues with schoolmates, in a collaborative, non-mocking manner. So, the issue of men's troublesome behavior towards each other shouldn’t be simplified to "boys being boys". Responsibility lies with us, the men who have been victims of and continue to perpetuate a culture of toxic friendship.
Fortunately, I’ve come a long way from tension in my friendships and feeling jokes were at the heart of those relationships. My understanding of friendship has been enriched by seeing all that friendships have potential to be including safety, dates where we bond over un/common interests, offering and receiving support and just being present with each other. I’m more comfortable expressing emotions to others and I’ve periodically been reinvigorated by what I consider to be fulfilling friendships.
“…while vulnerability may give people the power to hurt us more deeply, it also gives people the power to love more deeply” - Marisa G. Franco
Today, when I hear someone downplay someone else for emoting (e.g. “you mad you mad”) I consider that they are probably victims of environments like the ones I grew up in, where their feelings were not acknowledged and they too, were probably shunned for expressing a range of emotions. I assume the person lacks support and they probably learned that behavior from people who were not accustomed to adequately attending to their emotions. And no matter what, somewhere in that person, there will always be a craving to be cared for, despite their actions suggesting otherwise.
How Can Therapy Help?
Therapy can help you:
Reflect
Therapy helps you recognize traits and habits that once protected you but may no longer serve you or your relationships today. Therapy can also provide space to explore the impact your socialization on your past/current relationships.
Challenge your socialization on friendship
Challenge beliefs you may have been indoctrinated with. See if that indoctrination aligns with your personal values and your concepts of what a friendship should be (e.g. Friends should already know how to treat you, friendships shouldn’t take any effort, friends are too emotional). Therapy helps you assess these beliefs and decide which ones truly align with your values and your vision of healthy, supportive friendships.
Heal Old Wounds
Therapy helps you revisit and tend to those experiences safely and graciously, enabling you to move beyond wounds and making room for healing.
Builder Stronger Relationship Skills
Increase your conflict resolution skills, emotional awareness, comfort with vulnerability, communication skills, boundaries, etc. towards the relationships you want.
Embrace Emotion and Vulnerability
Establish a solid foundations for building stronger relationships and inner-peace.
Validate your experience
Sometimes, just saying what you’ve been holding in can lift a weight you didn’t realize you were still carrying. Being seen and heard in therapy can ease shame and open the door to self-acceptance.
Exposure to Blind Spots
Therapy also helps you see the patterns and defenses that may be getting in your way such as like invulnerability, jealousy, remaining silent what really matters and avoidance. Awareness gives you the power to make new choices that lead to better relationships.
Therapy provides a safe space to explore dissatisfaction with relationships and how you may unconsciously contribute to them (e.g. invulnerability, cognitive distortions, defense mechanisms).
Our friendships have the potential to be great beyond the best friendships most of us have experienced. Stereotypically, men process information more logically than emotionally. If we continue to process information this way and confront each other when offenses are committed from a place of love, support and safety, our relationships will be richer than they’ve ever been. And where we’ve been called out for doing more shoulder-to-shoulder activities (e.g. watching sports) than face-to-face (e.g. having lunch together), we can use that information to face each other and deepen our relationships by asking questions like “How are you really doing?” and focusing on internal experiencing like emotions, opposed to external happenings exclusively, like observations. For some of us, finding new friends may be a quick solution for problems with old friends. When you inevitably encounter old problems in new relationships, will you put in the effort to work through the problem? Will you give that person the opportunity to show up for you the way you want them to? Our relationships have great potential to be everything we want them to be and more, despite a socialization that led many of us to becoming unfamiliar with high-quality friendships. I encourage you to be your best self in relationships so we can normalize being the high-quality friend that you wish for when you need one.