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    Unfuck Your Friendships: Using Science to Make and Maintain the Most Important Relationships of Your Life
    Unfuck Your Friendships: Using Science to Make and Maintain the Most Important Relationships of Your Life
    Unfuck Your Friendships: Using Science to Make and Maintain the Most Important Relationships of Your Life
    Ebook178 pages2 hours

    Unfuck Your Friendships: Using Science to Make and Maintain the Most Important Relationships of Your Life

    By Faith G. Harper

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Friendship deserves more credit in a society obsessed with romantic and sexual relationships. In reality, friendship is the key to our mental and physical health, happiness, and social cohesion. Dr. Faith Harper, therapist and bestselling author of Unfuck Your Intimacy and Unfuck Your Boundaries applies brain science and her clinical and personal experience to help understand this vital type of relationship, offering insight into how to choose and make friends, sustaining and strengthening your friendships, friend group dynamics, friend breakups, setting excellent friendship boundaries, handling conflict, and managing all the different kinds of relationships we encounter in our lives. Includes a series of original advice columns honing in on the details that make our friendships work. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMicrocosm Publishing
    Release dateOct 12, 2021
    ISBN9781648410109
    Unfuck Your Friendships: Using Science to Make and Maintain the Most Important Relationships of Your Life
    Author

    Faith G. Harper

    Faith Harper ACN is a bad-ass, funny lady with a PhD. She's a licensed professional counsellor, board supervisor, certified sexologist, and applied clinical nutritionist with a private practice and consulting/training business in San Antonio, Texas. She has been an adjunct professor and a TEDx presenter, and proudly identifies as a woman of colour and uppity intersectional feminist. She is the author of several highly popular “five-minute therapy” zines on subjects such as anxiety, depression, and grief.

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      Book preview

      Unfuck Your Friendships - Faith G. Harper

      9781621063117.jpg

      Unfuck YOur Friendships

      Using Science to Make and Maintain the Most Important Relationships of Your Life

      © 2021 Faith G Harper, PhD, LPC-S, ACS, ACN

      © This edition Microcosm Publishing 2021

      First edition - 5,000 copies - September 23, 2021

      eBook ISBN 9781648410109

      This is Microcosm #442

      Edited by Elly Blue

      For a catalog, write or visit:

      Microcosm Publishing

      2752 N Williams Ave.

      Portland, OR 97227

      https://microcosm.pub/Friendships

      Did you know that you can buy our books directly from us at sliding scale rates? Support a small, independent publisher and pay less than Amazon’s price at www.Microcosm.Pub

      Microcosm Publishing is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years.

      Global labor conditions are bad, and our roots in industrial Cleveland in the 70s and 80s made us appreciate the need to treat workers right. Therefore, our books are MADE IN THE USA.

      Contents

      Introduction •

      What is friendship? •

      Why We Need Friendships •

      Friendships Are Relationships •

      How Loneliness Fucks Us Up •

      What Makes a Friendship Healthy •

      Types of Friendship •

      Acquaintance-People •

      Chosen Family •

      making friends •

      We Have a Limited Amount of Physical Time and Mental Energy •

      We Tend to Feel Like Crap About Ourselves •

      Finding Friends •

      unfuck your friendships •

      Attention and Attunement •

      Friendships Need Boundaries Too •

      Communicating Effectively •

      Defriending •

      Do You Really Need to Break Up? •

      How to Break Up •

      Grieving an Ended Friendship •

      Auntie Faith Answers Your Questions •

      Citations •

      Introduction

      Of all the things that are incredibly important to our emotional and physical health, the one we don’t talk about nearly enough is friendship.

      We don’t have control over our biological family and there isn’t shit we can do about that. I mean, I did issue a formal complaint to the universe about it, but haven’t gotten a response so far.

      So until Alpha Centauri A gets back to me, we’re gonna do the next best thing . . . choose the other people in our lives. The ones who nourish us, love us, see us for who we are, and encourage us to grow and achieve. And even though we can choose these people in ways that we can’t choose to ignore our homophobic tia at family dinner, it isn’t actually an easy task. Whether it be making friends, navigating the things that make friendships complicated, or just being a better friend, it’s complex and weird and exhausting to go out and collect a group of humans to call your own.

      When people ask me what kind of therapist I am, the short answer is trauma therapist. It’s kind of a record-scratch answer, but it is also the most accurate lens for all of the work that I do. It gets its octopus tentacles into so many aspects of our lives, including our friendships. No matter what brings a client in to see me, friend dynamics end up being part of the conversation at some point. And as a research nerd, I also know that we aren’t just born with the tools to get it right. I want to give you those tools.

      I’m going to talk about all the core stuff, like what friendship actually is, how to make friends, how to be a better friend, and friendship breakups. I’m gonna weigh in on the ancient question (ok, couple decades old question) of whether or not the internet is good for friendship. I’m also going to talk about more complex situations. The stuff that people are trying to unravel on the regular that more general information doesn’t necessarily solve.I decided to tackle those advice-column style, since I got my start as a columnist in a no-longer-existent magazine and I miss it.

      You’ll also find that since friendships are, you know, another type of relationship, all this info will apply in some way to your family dynamics and romantic partnerships, even if it doesn’t solve the problem of your homophobic tia directly.

      Friendship isn’t nearly the easy and intuitive process and concept that instagram makes it out to be. If so, we would all be so great at meeting people, collecting up the ones that we totally want to hang out with, and keeping them close for the rest of our lives. Eating cookies? Totally easy. Finding good friends and being a good friend? Definitely way harder. So let’s talk about it.

      what is friendship?

      Okay, this may seem kind of dumb and obvious on the surface, but this is actually a really valid question. The easiest definition is: an affectionate relationship based on a strong, voluntary interpersonal bond. That is, someone who we are not stuck with by blood or legal means—which is to say, not our family¹—that we pick out of the crowd and say Ooooh, this one! I wanna go do shit with this weirdo!

      In his book Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship, Daniel J. Hruschka points out that across time and cultures, friendships being voluntary connections between people is actually pretty unusual. Friendships have always been considered to be integral to our survival and happiness, so cultural rituals have always been created around the process. In some cultures, your parents picked your friends for you (big shudder) and big friendship ceremonies took place, similar to a wedding formalizing a romantic partner relationship.

      Nowadays we have choice (thank fuck, double big shudder on the idea of my parents picking my friends) but there are still structures in place that tend to define/limit our friendship choices. Researchers have tried to formalize models of studying friendship and finally came up with one in the 1990s that we still use to this day. This model looks at two main categories of factors:

      • Individual factors (our own personality traits, beliefs, values, approachability, social skills etc)

      • Environmental factors (who is physically around us by nature of where we live, where we go, what we do).

      Essentially, we are far more likely to become friend-persons with people who are pretty similar to us and are already in our regular environment. I met my best friend in grad school . . . he wasn’t a fellow student, but close enough, he was actually my stats professor. We are both parents, political progressives, and have a super snarky sense of humor. The other people I would consider to be close friends are also people I have met through other friends, at places I’ve worked, or through organizations I volunteer with. And there is a super common theme of us all being snarky and incorrigible progressives who love books, tacos, and chisme.

      But that still begs the question. If there are so many differences across cultures in how friendships are created and maintained, how can we even define the term effectively? My comment above about how friends are the people we pick out of a crowd and say I wanna do shit with this weirdo! may be a decent working definition for my culture, but not for everyone’s. So how do we even know it’s friendship? Dr. Hruschka found three themes in all types of friendships (arranged or created) that we can use to frame our understanding of what friending actually is:

      • Positive (and mutual!) feelings of goodwill

      • Unconditional assistance and aid when in need

      • Gift-giving that is fun and frivolous rather than aid/need based. Like a baby yoda funko pop toy, not help with a car repair.

      Dr. Hruschka was most interested in the idea of unconditional aid. It seems counterintuitive to evolutionary survival in many ways (more on that later when we discuss the barriers to making friends) but once someone is inside the bubble with us, it is a very steady construct. No matter past associations or the person’s ability to provide future payback, it’s something that we really do. If someone is our person, we love them. And we take care of them without tallying it as a zero-sum game.

      Why We Need Friendships

      We’re wired for social connection. A connection to others, specifically others who get us, is a huge part of how we regulate our own emotional states and feel safe in the world. This is why you can be, say, admitted to the hospital and have a parade of doctors and nurses and techs and the like in and out of your room and still feel very, very alone and scared. No one is seeing and connecting to your emotional needs. When someone sees and accepts and loves our authentic self, we feel safer.

      It also, interestingly enough, makes us bolder and braver. The idea that being attached to other people will make us codependent is utter bullshittery. The opposite is true. When we talk about attachment issues it is generally in relation to our relationships with the people who raised us and the people we end up with as our romantic partners. But (central theme of the book right here), attachment issues appear in any kind of interpersonal relationships we have. Relation means a connection between. And attachment is the nature of how those connections are formed and maintained. So all the flotsam and jetsam of our lives past and present (any old junk, tapes, mental health issues,

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