Excuse me....are you my friend?

A comment that my family often makes about my childhood is that I could put with a ridiculous amount of maltreatment from my peers without taking any apparent offense.  My sister recalls a time that she saw a boy kicking me repeatedly in the hallway at school and I just did not respond in any way.  When she asked me what was going on I shrugged her off saying, "Oh nothing.  He’s my friend.   He's just messing around."  She didn't accept that explanation because he was kicking me so hard but being two years younger than me she didn't know what to do.  I don't remember that incident but I do recall a similar situation.  When I was about ten years old I went out into the neighborhood where my grandparents lived and saw a couple of boys that I had played with the summer before.  They were under a tree with five or six other kids that I didn't know at all and I just walked up to them.  I don't remember exactly what happened next except that they all started making fun of me.  Then they proceeded in turns, one or two at a time, to beat me up.  At the first blow to my face my vision went blank.  I didn't know what I should do.  I couldn't run and I couldn't fight.  I remember trying to get them to stop by saying something like, "Okay...okay... that's enough."  This went on for several minutes and I had no idea how to extract myself from the situation. 

Luckily my older sisters happened by, rescued me, and took me back to my grandparents’ house.  As they doctored my bloody nose and cleaned me up, one of my sisters asked why I wasn't fighting back.  I replied: "Because they are my friends."  She was puzzled.  She went to great lengths to explain to me that if kids are beating you up they are NOT your friends.  I didn't get it.  Not only could I not read between the lines, I couldn't even read the lines.  I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t understand that something had gone horribly wrong in that situation though.  It was a traumatic experience for me to approach some kids with the intention of finding someone to hang out with on a summer day and end up being beaten for no apparent reason.  I just felt like there had been some kind of mistake that I didn’t understand.  I didn’t have hard feelings toward those other boys.  I just didn’t know why it had happened or what I had done wrong.   

I have found that, even as an older adult, I have trouble with the concept of friendship.  As a part of the initial process that my psychotherapist used to help me understand how I might be a little different than a more "neuro-typical" person, she asked me to tell her who my friends were.  I listed my closest friends first and then went on to comment on the people that I had lost touch with when they or I had moved on to another job or to live in another town.  In a very gentle way she began to explain to me that there was something wrong with my list.  She said something like: "Those people are not who I'm asking about. You're calling your wife your best friend.  She is a friend in a way but that's different.  If you were having trouble dealing with your wife, who would you be able to talk to about that?  That person would be a friend.  In the same way, your son is not really your friend, your daughter is not your friend, and your son-in-law is not your friend.  These people care about you because you are a part of their family but they can't really be your friends." 

I assured her that I did understand what she was saying and that my family was just sort of my "inner circle" of friends but I had other friends.  For example, in the past I had always considered whoever I worked with at the time as being my friends.  I explained that since I had worked from home for the last nine years I had lost touch with them.  I still had friends during those years though among the people at my wife's school.  We went to their parties and to their weddings and they came to our daughter's wedding.  I described some of them and, one by one, she said: "No…that sounds like your wife's friend....no that's your wife's co-worker...no that's your wife’s friends’ husband."   I felt a little uneasy because I could see where this was going.  We finally got to the point when she said, "I want you to think of it like this: Other than your family, who have you known for a long time that you could call if you needed a really big favor or if you had a problem and you just needed to talk?"  "I don't have anyone like that" I said, losing my composure in the process.  That's when I had to admit to her what I had known when we began that exercise.  I didn't really have any friends and I didn't really know why.