I know when you are hiding something!
—Your mom
Whether we realize it or not, our friends and family have shaped who we are today. We are to a large extent the product of interactions with friends and family members, even those we may no longer be in touch with.
Our family and early friendships play a vital role in teaching us life skills throughout our key developmental changes, acting as a training ground for how we behave in all other relationships we build. They define our priorities when choosing new relationships, determining whether these relationships will nurture us or not. They provide a network for us to engage with others. Undoubtedly, some of our friends are “friends of friends” or “friends of the family,” keeping us in a close tribe of like-minded people.
Though we may possess, enjoy and even cherish some strong bonds with our friends and family, there can be an equally powerful dark side to these relationships. The people who know us best often have the most power over us, and seem to have particular power over our emotional well-being: the power to lead us astray and into trouble, to abuse us at times and even to betray us, whether by design or unknowingly. At the same time they are most likely to stick with us through thick and thin, even when we might be the ones abusing our power over them.
We are powerful in a group with our friends and family, often more powerful than as individuals. Even though at times they can make us feel angry, sad, small, insignificant, powerless, isolated and lonely—whether by ganging up on us over a particular issue, or by posting images all over social media of the great time they are having at just the moment when we are at our lowest—friends and family are undeniably our life-support system. They are as important as the oxygen around us: They can behave in ways that breathe new life into our day, take our breath away with surprise or stifle the atmosphere in a room. Regardless of gender, identification and the bonds they keep outside of our relationship with them, they matter deeply because they know us so well, and we know them. They are more practiced than most at reading the positions we are in and understanding our responses and behaviors around them, most likely because essentially they are most like us. We share with our family elements of genetic makeup and history, and with our closest friends we share and witness some of our most formative and important life experiences. Friends and family often give us a reality check when we stray from the shared ideas, values and beliefs of this most important social group. So they’ll call us out when they believe we are lying to ourselves as much as to the group.
It is no wonder we feel it is so easy to read our friends and family like a book when it comes to decoding their nonverbal behavior with us or with others outside our inner circle. And it is no wonder we find it so confusing when it turns out we read it all completely wrong. We need these connections. We are hardwired to depend on them for our very survival, and so the pressure we may unwittingly impose upon ourselves, or have imposed on us by others, also perhaps unwittingly, to keep these relationships intact can often result in our skewing interpretations of the signals we are getting from those closest to us, leaving us drowning in a sea of confusion.
Let’s look at some characteristic body language and the assumptions we make during encounters within these relationships to uncover the truth and lies that affect how well we survive and thrive therein.