Unrequited friendships or low self-esteem?

[Rowen13]

How do I know if a friendship is worth it? I told my online friend that I really loved and cared for him as a friend. He told me he liked and cared for me.

After knowing him and sharing my darkest moments and secrets, it hurts that the emotional/energy level is not reciprocated.

I know I have an anxious attachment style and my last girl friend never loved me back either. He knows about this and I have explained how much it hurts and how I worry that the same friendship dynamic is repeating.

l'm tired of always being the one that cares more? Should I try to care less or just cut ties with my friend and move on? I'm aware I can't control his feelings but I find because I am going through a difficult time in my life already..it's really affecting my self esteem and mental health.

He says he wants the friendship but I wonder if it's better to just cut ties and work on my anxious attachment style. So I can find a friend that I don't continually chase and the emotional investment is more equal.

He use to reply and text all the time and now everything I say seems to irritate him and he never initiates contact. I try to get him to see the friendship is already over but he always repeats that he is fighting to keep me in his life.

I know in every relationship that someone always feels more but after everything we have shared and the level of trust I put in to letting him see the "real" me...it just hurts that I know deep down that I am disposable to him and all the time spent and conversations meant nothing.

Opening your heart and being vulnerable and feeling undervalued just hurts. 

I know I am the only one keeping the "friendship" alive because, that's not a friendship at all.

[Eagle Ray]

Hi again Rowen13,

 What I’ve found is the healthiest friendships usually happen when both parties have developed a sense of themselves and their own centre/groundedness. So they are not reliant on the other person’s responses for their sense of worth or value. The friendship still involves care and respect, but there isn’t a need for constant validation or definite types of responses from the other. Validation is still important, but when we have established more of a centre within ourselves we are not constantly seeking it from others.

In friendships in the past I was usually the person other people clung to and this was a repetition of having a mother who clung to me to get her emotional needs met. I thought it was my job to meet the other person’s needs while remaining invisible to myself. I would be very focussed on making sure they were emotionally ok. I’ve since learned this is co-dependent and that I was attracting people who were clinging to me in a dependent way. I was feeding this pattern by constantly responding to their needs and interests.

In the case of your friend, it sounds a bit confusing because on the one hand he is saying he is fighting to keep you in his life but you also feel he is not responding to you and you feel undervalued. Do you think he is just trying to find a good boundary in the friendship at the moment where he’d like to still be friends but is feeling a bit like there is stress in the attachment? Do you think letting go of needing validation from him may actually open the way for a healthier balance? Sometimes when we let go of trying to control a situation, that’s when the situation starts to work out.

On the other hand, perhaps you have different levels of need for emotional sharing, and while you have shared a lot about yourself perhaps this is not his style of communicating? People can be quite different in what they feel comfortable sharing. It may not mean that he cares less about you, but he doesn’t have the same style of relating through sharing a lot of feelings and emotions. 

It may not be a case of cutting him out of your life as a friend, but perhaps realising that he may not feel able to respond to you in the way you would like. You may still be able to share certain things as friends but maybe not in the way you feel invested in it at present. It can help to have a few people in your life as each relationship brings a different dynamic and is enriching in its own way.

I have just a very few friends now and I have left all co-dependent patterns behind. The friends I have now are kind, gentle people where there is an ease in the connection. In all cases we know we are fully responsible for our own lives but still get benefit from having one another to talk to and share with. For example, one of my friends had a recent health diagnosis and reached out via email because she felt the need to chat. So we’ve been chatting back and forth and I’ve been as supportive as I can be. But both her and I know it’s her thing to work through just as I have my things to work through. But we can still give each other moral and emotional support.

So I think the answer is finding your own centre and then relationships with others will feel less anxious and precarious. As you become more at ease within yourself, relationships with others feel more at ease. It can take a bit of time to break old patterns but it’s incredibly liberating when it happens. You realise you have so much agency to find your own peace and happiness while also having healthy relationships with others that are kind and supportive.

I hope that makes some sort of sense? 🤔 I think we have to become a genuinely good friend to ourselves which really helps our friendships in the outer world. It also becomes much easier then to detect which relationships with others are healthy for us and which may not be so healthy, and orient ourselves to the former.

Kind wishes,

ER

[Eagle Ray]

P.S. I just thought I’d add that the vulnerability you feel around attachment is really normal given the history you’ve described on your other thread, so please don’t feel bad about it in any way. It’s where working with a good psychologist/counsellor can be helpful who has a good understanding of attachment issues. If we have complex childhood trauma we are often still desperately finding ways to feel safe and those impulses can drive our attachment behaviour. My pattern was, if I can help and support others they might not hurt me and therefore I might be safe in the world. Sometimes it’s a case of identifying what your particular pattern is trying to do in order to change the pattern. I realised my pattern was bringing me less safety, not creating it, and I had to come back to myself and actually really see myself for the first time. I’ve had to learn to nurture myself and be the healthy parent for myself that I didn’t get growing up, and that is where I’ve started to really clearly see and know healthy attachment.

All the best,

ER