Sticky Friendships

Friendships can become sticky.

Human relationships produce both attractive and repulsive forces on each of its units. When attractive forces are most prominent, friendships can ensue, and people will be drawn to sharing time and energy within these friendships.

World forces are dynamic, however, and these attractions can eventually subside, or they can breed repulsion from within. If repulsion occurs, we often find that the new repulsion encounters resistance, and moving away from the other becomes difficult. A struggle then ensues, which induces pressure on both parties. This pressure can feel uncomfortable, and if allowed to persist, it can rip the parties apart, damaging one or another in the process, particularly emotionally. The friendship became sticky.

Such forced separations are common, and often result in hurt, bitterness, and resentment. Each one feels the ripped and hurt pieces in themselves, and attributes them only to the ex-friend. They are the cause of the damage, and they are to blame.

Yet often such rips are only brought about by a lack of awareness, a failure to perceive the pieces and the details of the process as it truly occurs. Simplistically, if we feel attraction or repulsion towards someone, we want to be allowed to move towards or away from them correspondingly, and sometimes we may even feel entitled to do so. But a personal relationship contains within it much more than what it appears to be on the surface: two bodies sharing time.

Humans are much more complex than just our physical bodies. We carry memories, knowledge, emotions, ideas, ideals, and habits, plus the social contracts of rights, possessions, and obligations. In addition, all of these components flow and interact with each other, resulting in maze-like webs of interdependencies, needs, and assumptions, making us systems vastly more complex than our visible bodies seem to be.

When people meet each other, our subcomponents or sub-bodies meet as well. Our physical bodies, our habits and possessions may be exposed, while the other components may be invisible, whether willingly or not. We may be aware of some of them, and not of others. Regardless, the sub-bodies meet and interact with each other as their nature dictates. If enough harmony and resonance between our sub-bodies arises, mutual attraction is induced. And if this attraction occurs between their emotional sub-bodies strongly enough, a friendship is born.

As time passes in a friendship, our emotions continue to mingle. Each meeting creates new connections, each shared moment weaves new threads in between. External factors wash onto each of them, and pull and sway them as the currents flow. And all throughout, these emotional threads adapt and seek to grow as their nature dictates. Subtle and fluid as they are, our emotional bodies grow, mingle, and meld into each other, like climbing plants or conjoining trees, finding support in one another. And of these shifting details, the friends are often unaware.

So when the (emotional) bodies are impelled to move away from each other, whether by themselves or by external currents, they find resistance. The deeper their friendship was, the stronger the ties, and a simple pulling apart can only succeed violently or fail to detach. The former hurts both parties, the latter remains in joint pain. Neither is a graceful solution.

Awareness of the complexity of these connections can help us ameloriate such a situation. By recognizing that we are complex beings, and realizing the many parts that we are made of, we can bring our awareness to these parts. We can seek to know the details of our make-up, and find the precise cause of a discomfort by looking within. This we do by paying attention to what we feel and how we interact with the other, seeking to deconstruct the friendship into its many threads. By feeling each of our threads, by understanding its relationship to the tangled whole, we can find the critical point of tension, and then choose how to treat it. This process is analogous to finding and unfastening each of the buttons on a jacket, just as the simple forced method is analogous to pulling on it until the buttons are ripped off the fabric. The former requires understanding, complex behavior, and does not damage the parties, while the latter does not require understanding nor complexity, and causes damage.

As it stands in humanity, the method of awareness seems to be seldom used, relative to the method of ripping. This is understandable. Knowledge and investigation of self is not a widespread habit, and though injunctions like "Know thyself" are common knowledge, they are considered archaic or impractical platitudes. The external world, with its flashes and glitters and enticing baits, lures people's attention to the utmost. And even when their human systems turn to look within in their natural rhythms, people find idle distractors to look away from this seemingly unexciting state. Food, drink, company, pleasure, and games all stir people's systems, and force their attention outward again.

And even when a person decides to look within, the task ahead is laborious. Most often a person has gathered a lifetime of emotions, all stored up in memories painful and thrilling. As a child's emotional body develops, it encounters myriads of emotions, each one of them new. Each naturally brings up physical expression, and at first they have no label. They are neither desired nor repudiated. He learns to desire or to repudiate them, according to how people around, often his parents, react to it. If they repudiate his energetic excitement, he learns to repudiate it himself. If they suppress his cries of sadness or her self-assertion, they learn to suppress it as well. If they encourage his obedience, he learns to encourage it as well. And all of these learned reactions the child accumulates within himself. Each new memory builds upon the collection, and he merely stores them together, fairly unaware that they continue to pile up, lacking any habits of "emotional cleanliness". Furthermore, initial rejective reactions of the people around them can be forceful, and can hurt the child's tender emotional tissue, associating such initial memories and emotions with hurt and pain.

As a result, an adult's emotional basement is most often an abandoned, filthy, cluttered, convoluted, tangled, slimy mess. A lifetime of mindless storage and neglect has left the emotional body to autonomously process these as best it can, and it somehow manages to produce a functioning emotional body. But because we do not clean it nor care for it, it is littered with traps, traumas, pain points, scars, festering wounds, and rickety structure, all of which render it weak, unreliable, and sometimes dangerous in its reactions.

This internal muddle left behind from forceful memories can make emotional introspection seem a herculean task. Where to begin? How do I tell this emotion apart from that other one? The slime of our shame disgusts us, the uncured wounds hurt us, and when the pain is strong enough, it can push our attention back outwards and seek a target to blame, trying to convince us that is the source, and that further introspection is unnecessary. Only our own willpower can help us resist this repulsion, and keep awareness steady on the painful target.

The whole task of emotional cleaning is one of finding, curing, discarding, and organization. We find each part by placing our awareness on it. We cure it by releasing and feeling whatever sensations it still holds, which often contains pain. Once exhausted of energy, we discard the unnecessary junk left behind. And for the memories and patterns that we find useful and wish to keep, we can bring in the power of the mind. It can analyze each item, gather and compile them, coalesce what makes sense, and leave behind a cleaner, compacted version of the whole. Such organization helps us feel our emotions more clearly, just as an index helps us quickly find our way through a large store of information, instead of wading through the whole and retrieving inconsistent or undesired behavior for our life.

Such is the task of emotional cleaning. It requires faith, attention, willingness, and patience. As relatively few have undergone this process, emotional introspection feels strongly uninviting to most, and when faced with discomfort in a friendship, most will end up applying further force until they rip themselves apart. If, however, we look within and find the precise pieces that resist the mutual forces (i.e. the buttons on our jacket), we can find a more graceful solution. We can unbolt the door to open it instead of smashing it down, so to speak. And if we find that keeping this friendship is not possible anymore for whatever reason - whether it conflicts with our core self or we do not find value in it anymore - we understand ourselves enough to know what must be done, and how best to do it. Our causes to separate from the friend are well known, we can communicate them clearly, and we need not resort to blameful behavior or violence that arises from fearful incomprehension. And then according to our understanding, we can proceed to unfasten, disentangle, or cleanly cut the relationship that is no longer desired. Then in the internal imbalance that inevitably ensues thereby, we will, via the same introspection, know how to understand it, and find balance within ourselves again.