Things I want my kids to know

I split a bill with a group of friends recently and on my way home I was worrying.

I was worrying about whether it was really fair, because it all happened quickly and on reflection, I worried that perhaps I had ended up underpaying and they had ended up overpaying, and what if they now thought I was selfish or mean. What if they were angry with me. And, lurking behind all of those worries, the real fear:

What if they never want to speak to me again and I end up on my own?

I have known these people for twenty years. They have seen me at my very best and at my very worst and they are still my closest friends. That didn’t stop me worrying.

When we get anxious about social things, often the real fear behind all the different worries that come up is exactly this: what if I get rejected and end up on my own?

For me, it is helpful to understand this as a primal fear, a fear that is in-built because we are mammals and we need a place in the group. It’s why we don’t turn up to work in our pyjamas and why we don’t tend to say all the thoughts in our head out loud: we have an in-built need to try to avoid rejection.

I get these little moments of anxiety quite frequently and when I do, it tends to be helpful for me to react to these moments of anxiety with a bit of kindness and understanding, but that doesn’t necessarily help me to stop worrying. However, in this instance, I did have one extra thing to draw upon that really did help.

The bank of goodwill

Part of understanding why I might get these moments of anxiety more than someone else might is this: there is a part of me that is afraid that it will only take one thing to bring a friendship toppling down. One mistake, one careless word. It makes sense that my mind might be afraid of this, because there was a time when I really did experience friendships as fragile (early school days). However, it is helpful for me to remind myself in the present day that this isn’t really how good friendships work.

In most secure and healthy relationships, we build up a bank of goodwill. Every time you are kind to someone, you are making a deposit in that bank. If you say something thoughtless or careless, you might be making a withdrawal, but it will be a small one and won’t clear out the bank. If you are generally fair or even generous, it is likely that a friend will not stop thinking of you that way just because of one small interaction where they came off a little worse. When I think of it the other way around, do my friends sometimes do or say things that aren’t perfect? Here and there, yes. Is that enough to end the friendship or change the way I see them? Of course not.

Don’t get me wrong, of course it is possible for you to do something so horrendously bad that the bank is emptied completely, and it is possible that if the other person isn’t in a particularly reasonable place themselves, they might decide to cut you off because of one small thing. However, that is a different kettle of fish and generally speaking, in secure relationships with people who are in a reasonable place, the bank of goodwill exists.

So, if you find yourself getting anxious about little errors or mistakes even in strong relationships, it can be helpful to remember the bank of goodwill. Yes, I might annoy my friends sometimes. Yes, I might be thoughtless or careless sometimes. But generally speaking, even when I do make an error, that won’t bring the whole thing down.

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Thanks for reading. Until next week,

Ted

P.S. My daughter tried to put some money in her piggy bank the other day and couldn't fit any more in, so there are a few coins overflowing from it. That was a nice image for me to use when I was thinking about this! You could take a coin away and that piggy bank will still be packed to the brim.