Figuring Out Your Tribe

Figuring Out Your Tribe

Feeling Unheard by Friends

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There is a particular kind of lonely that happens in the middle of a good conversation.

You are sitting across from someone you love. Someone who has known you for years, who would drive across the state if you called at midnight. You bring up the thing that has been sitting on your chest. She listens. She says something kind. And then you drive home feeling emptier than when you arrived.
I did this for years with one of my oldest friends. The subject was my relationship with someone very dear to me, a relationship that has always had some hard edges in it, and I brought it to her again and again, the way you keep pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts.

She always listened. And then she would say some version of the same two things. Try not to let it get to you. And, eventually, I don't know what to tell you.

For a long time, I heard that as dismissive. I would leave those conversations feeling like I had spent something and gotten nothing back, and I would quietly wonder whether the friendship had run its course.

It had not. I was just handing the wrong thing to the right person.

Nothing was wrong with her
Here is what I finally understood. My friend had never had a relationship like that in her life. Hers were easy, close, and uncomplicated. She was not brushing me off when she said she did not know what to tell me. She was telling me the truth. She had nothing to reach for. Every story I brought her had to be measured against people who had never once made her feel that way, and it simply would not fit.

She was not a bad friend. She was not even a bad listener. She was the wrong address for that particular piece of mail.

Another friend, meanwhile, was living almost exactly what I was living. Same kinds of moments, same aftermath, same bewilderment. With her, the conversation went somewhere entirely different. I did not have to build the background or defend the feeling. She would say girl, I completely understand, and mean it, and then we would sit there together trying to work out why people we love behave the way they do.

It went past talking. We started backing each other up in real time. If one of us was heading into a gathering where it was likely to go badly, the other would come along, absorb some of the attention, and give whichever of us needed it a reason to step out of the room for twenty minutes. Having her there also took the sting out of it. Nothing was going to shock her, so there was nothing to be embarrassed about.
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And here is the part that took me longest to see. That same friend, the one who understood all of that better than anyone, had very little to offer when I brought her a problem with my business. Not because she did not care. She had simply never run one. My other friend had. She has built and run her own practice for years, and when I go to her with a business problem, she gives me exactly the kind of grounded, practical feedback I could not get anywhere else.

Nobody got dropped. I did not have a hard conversation or draw a boundary or write anyone out of my life. I just started bringing different things to different people.


The better question
Most of us evaluate our support systems by asking, "Are these good people?"

It is a fair question. It is just not the only one, and when it is the only one, we end up feeling unsupported by people who genuinely love us.

The question I have come to ask is this: how does this person add to the quality of my life, and do I want to add to the quality of theirs?

Notice that it runs both directions. This is not an exercise in sorting people by usefulness. It is an honest look at what actually passes between you, in both directions, and it usually leads to a second question that is a good deal more specific. What is it, exactly, that we give each other?

That is where the relief is. It stops you from holding one person to a standard no single human being can meet, and it stops you from mistaking a mismatch for a failure.

A few things become clear once you start looking this way.

People belong to more than one area of your life. Support is not one-dimensional, and neither are your people. The friend who cannot help you with one thing may be the only person who can help you with another.

The type of support matters as much as the subject. Some people are sounding boards. Some open doors. Some show up and quietly take a task off your plate without asking a single question, which is sometimes exactly right. And some just get it, without needing the backstory.

Access and counsel are different things. This one is worth sitting with. I have a friend who is generous with her time, her money, and her attention in a way most people simply are not. She also runs a business, and she would be the first to tell you that the business side of it does not come naturally to her. So I do not take her my strategy questions. But over the years of building that business, she has met everyone. Accountants, bookkeepers, attorneys, and other people who have started something from nothing. When I need to find the right person to consult with, she is the first call I make. Her value is the door she opens, not the advice she gives, and knowing that difference is exactly what makes her such a good tribe member rather than a disappointing one.

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The Replenish Test
Here is the exercise. It takes about ten minutes and a piece of paper.

Think of the last three or four times you brought something heavy to someone. For each one, write down three things.

1. Who you went to.
2. What you brought them. Be specific. Not "the situation at home" but "wanting someone to tell me I was not imagining it."
3. How you felt afterward. One word: replenished, neutral, or drained.

Then ask the only question that matters here: is this person the right one to go to for the thing I keep going to them for?

Feeling drained does not mean you are disloyal or unappreciative. It usually means there's a mismatch. And once you can see the mismatch, you can fix it without losing anybody.

What you will probably find
Most people come out of this with a bigger tribe than they went in with. Not because they made new friends in the last ten minutes, but because they had been measuring one person against every possible need and coming up short. When you spread the need out, you discover you have more coverage than you thought.

Some people realize someone has been in their tribe all along and they never counted her. The neighbor. The cousin you only text on birthdays. The woman from your old job who always answers.

And sometimes you find a real gap. There is nobody on your list for a whole category of your life. That is worth knowing. It is information, not a verdict on you or on the people who love you.

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 ​When the gap is not a friend's job
This part is important, so I want to say it plainly. 
Some needs were never going to be met by a friend, no matter how good she is. A spiritual gap will not be filled by someone who does not do that. Grief that has settled into your body is not going to be resolved over coffee. If what you need is clinical, a friend cannot give it to you, and asking her to will strain something that was healthy.

That is where a therapist, a support group, a class, a coach, or a practitioner belongs. Those are not what you turn to when your people fail you. They are tools in their own right, the same as rest, movement, and prayer. Choosing one is a form of self-care, not an admission that something has gone wrong.

Your tribe is not one person who has to be everything. It is a collection of people who are each genuinely good at something, plus the professionals and practices that cover what people were never meant to carry.

You probably have more of it than you think.

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​This kind of inventory is one of the practices I write about in Abundantly You: A Toolkit for Authentic Self-Care. If you want help mapping your own support system and figuring out where the real gaps are, that is exactly the work I do with clients one-on-one. Click here to learn more.