T. T.
Did you see that Psychology Today article where the guy is talking about the rise of single men being lonely. He was talking about the day to day we're coming up on cuff and season. Yea, it is a lot to consider.
And a lot of men were not happy about it. They took it personally, and you know, a hit dog will holler.
Oh, that's taking me back to our Dialects and Accents episode.
Yes, yeah, apparently that article is talking about very specific people because they were very mad.
I think when we consider relationships, we're not just talking about romantic relationships, right. How you show up in all types of platonic familial relationships. All of those things are important to consider, and so we had to bring it straight to the lab.
I'm T T and I'm Zakiah and from Spotify.
This is Dope Labs.
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that makes it hardcore science, pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
And this week we're talking all about that healthy dose. Make sure you get the right prescription. Specifically, we're looking at attachment styles, attachment theory, how you make friends, how to handle conflict, all of it.
Let's get into the recitation.
What do we know?
TT?
Well, I think one thing that we know personally is that friendship is very special and also very important.
Yes, friendships can be these really deep intimate connections, and we talked about this many moons ago in LAP twenty six.
I feel like another thing that we know, especially at this big age, is that it's hard to make new friends, Like I don't know the last time I made a new friend. It's not as easy as it was when we were kids on the playground, you know what I mean.
Yes, or even in college. And I think because of that, we also know that losing a friendship can be really rough.
M hm Okay, So what do we want to know?
You know, I think we've seen a lot about relationships and how they've changed, especially over the pandemic. But we want to know why friendship is so important? Why is it important to us? Why do we have these big feelings around friendship?
I think I want to know more about the difference between friendship and romance, So a platonic friendship and non platonic and what are the differences, what are the strengths and weaknesses of either of them?
And I think the other thing I want to understand is how people are approaching friendships in different ways. And you know, I think we call those attachment styles. But I've seen it in relationships. But what does it mean in friendships?
That's a really good question, and so piggybacking off of that. When we know what our attachment styles are, Conflict is inevitable in any relationship. But how should we be handling conflict with our friends?
Yes, and if the conflict means the friendship passed to end, how do we make new friends? We know it's hard, but how do we jump over that hurdle and make some new No new friends?
No new friends? No new friends? No no, Now.
Let's jump into the dissection.
Our guest for today's lab is doctor m Rissa G. Franco.
My name is doctor Borissa G. Franco.
I am a professor, a speaker, psychologist, and author of the book Platonic, How the Science of Attachment can help You Make and Keep Friends.
Not only is doctor Franco a psychologist, but she's also a friendship expert. She's traveled the world studying the science behind friendship.
Now you may remember we've had doctor Franco on Dope Labs before we learned a lot from her in Lab twenty six, and she didn't have a book then, so we can't wait to get into the information that's in this text. Yes, we know how important friendship is for me and TT, but what does science tell us about friendship?
We know from the science set just like we need food, we need water, we need air, we need social connection to be functioning at our best, which is why research actually finds that the impact of loneliness is a kind to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. It's actually linked to how long you live, your level of connection even more so than you're die, and the amount.
That you exercise.
So if this doesn't underscore how important friendship is in combating loneliness, I don't know what will fifteen cigarettes a day, how many cigarettes are in a pack.
I also think friendship specifically plays a huge role in our identities. When we hang out with our friends, we learn different ways of being in the world, and we begin to incorporate that into who we are as people.
A lot of people put a lot of energy into dating or finding their life love partners, but doctor Franco is right, friendships are also really really important to our identities.
And doctor Franco says that people often pit romance and friendship against each other when they're actually a lot more connected than we might think.
Friendship is part of what having a healthy romantic relationship looks like. For example, there are studies that find that when you're going through conflict with your partner, you're gonna have dysregulated stress hormone release, but not if you have close friends. And so friendship in the ways that it stabilizes us and grounds us also primes us to experience healthier relationships and all other aspects of our lives.
Friendships feel like those before you could really swim. They would give you those little things to go on your arms to keep you from drowning. Uh huh, floaties when you jump into a sea of conflict. Friendship is like the floaties to be like, hey.
We have you bellied.
We're not gonna let you drown. Friends, that's perfect, and this friendship has been that for me. Baby.
Okay, we more than floaties. Now, we a whole scuba suit. We come with oxygen.
Okay, go down there if you want.
We've got even when you're down in the depths, you still got it, we ask doctor Franco to break down the difference between romantic and platonic relationships.
The origin of platonic comes from Plato the philosopher, and he talked about friendship at a time when it really wasn't seen on a hierarchy like it is today. And in fact, they talk about a philosopher in the book who has this quote around friendship being so beautiful because we don't need sex to keep us together. We're just
in it because of each other's characters. And even if we don't have this formal ceremonity to hold it together, we're still in this relationship and in that way, it's divine and its own right.
Yes, yes, yes, you know, I believe in the ability to go. I think if every day you get to wake up and choose like, yes, I still want to engage with this person, it must be real.
Ye, Okay.
In Doctor Franco's book, she has this thing that she calls a shovel friendship, and it's a person who is your friend that would literally bury the body should you show up. And I told her, Zakia is absolutely my shovel friend.
And that's the thing, right, Somebody that is willing to do that for you has to love you. Doctor Franko tells us that people compartmentalize platonic and romantic relationships too much, and that the same thing that makes romance successful also creates successful friendships. A.
Rout Ad and I go as far as to argue that actually romance is part of friendship, right, like those feelings like you're idealizing someone, you want to spend all your time with them, your territorial of them. People often feel that in friends, particularly with best friendships, and that's separate from sexual interest.
I love this point, and doctor Franco talks about this in her book with some very specific stories throughout history. One of our favorites that she shared was about President Abraham Lincoln and his close friend Joshua Speed. They were so close, these two men, they shared a bed, they were love letters to each other back then.
That was all considered normal.
Romance has actually been part of friendship, even more so than marriage throughout history, because we used to get married to people because we wanted to pull resources, we wanted to be affiliated with their family. It was a practical endeavor, and the sexes were considered so distinct, so the idea was you can't really connect with someone who's a different
gender as you. Where you find that deep romance, those people that really get you, those people you feel passionate about, is through your friends and so Abe and Joshua speed story and historians still argue over whether this was sexual, But I frame it in the larger context of the time that their interaction was normal. Friends would carve their names into trees, friends would even go on the honeymoons
of people that got married. Romance as being a part of friendship was all normal, and we've only stigmatized it more or seen it as separate from friendship within the past one hundred.
And fifty years.
Yeah, I told t T that I would be on her honeymoon before I realized it was going to be hiking. Then I was out.
Then no one came. Shoot, my goodness. Everybody bailed out. What happened? Whatving?
But I was at the wedding. Yes, you were one of my bridesmaids. You have to be there. It was no way I was doing it without you.
The stigmas be damned. I wasn't worried about those stigmas. Okay, no new day new age and I'm feeling good.
But we wanted to know more about like when all of this happened, When did that shift with friendship occur? And doctor Franco talks about how industrialization actually impacted our approach to friendship.
Before eighteen sixty seven, our sexual orientation it wasn't an identity. It was just forbidden to have sex with someone of the same sex. It wasn't forbidden to be gay, and all these sort of consolation of behaviors that we associate with being gay, like if you hold a friend's hand, you're not having sex with them, so that's not stigmatized. Or you write them a love letter, you're not having sex with them, so that wasn't stigmatized at the time. And then what started to happen is at that time,
industrialization was happening. People were moving into cities, things are more anonymous, There started to be more same gender relationships. There is a push for psychiatrists, specifically Sigmund Fred another guy named Richard Vonkraft Ebbing, where they sort of created
this theory around same sex love. They created almost this concept of sexual orientation as a larger identity because they wanted to say that it was a disorder, So they created this identity to then push this agenda of something went wrong in your childhood that made you attracted to be with someone of the same gender.
So what Freud was trying to do was intellectualize homophobia by saying that homosexuality was some sort of perversion, and that was to reinforce his and society's views of homosexuality.
So Freud was just a piece in the overall puzzle that.
Creates this society that is steeped in homophobia and affecting same sex platonic relationships.
And I think a lot of this has to do with the gendering of friendship. It was normal before for men to have friends and be you know, the homies, the same way we see besties always characterized as women in the media. That was the same thing we were
seeing with men. It wasn't until over time we saw friendship being characterized as feminine and femininity being tied to homosexuality, and homosexuality being seen as negative that men felt to perform heterosexuality, that they had to distance themselves from friendship which felt feminine to them, and it becomes stigmatized along with a lot of behaviors that were previously considered platonic.
Remember when we started saying, well, not we, But when folks started saying romance, romance when it was just two men that were friends, Yeah, what are we doing here?
The homophobia is just peaku.
All of these arguably romantic behaviors that were so normal to friendship because of homophobia really became a lot less normal. And even now, I think there's this concept in the research called homo hysteria, which is fear of being perceived as gay, and I think that phenomenon in particular really
affects straight men's ability to connect with each other. And there's a study that the more homophobic a man is, the less his friendships are because of the way we conflate any sort of intimacy, natural normal intimacy between men, we conflate it with sexual interest.
Uh.
We need to be talking about this because it's not just in the research.
I'm seeing it.
I'm seeing it playing out on Instagram and Twitter and the tiktoks daily daily.
Honey, If this is affecting your friendships, and we are saying friendships are a key part of your romantic relationships, it's also affecting your romantic relationships too.
Right, Because everything that you're supposed to be getting from your friends, you are trying to get from your romantic partner. With your romantic partner will ten times out of ten not.
Be able to fulfill.
So you really just out here in a relationship and still lonely.
Fifteen cigarettes a day. I think this brings us right back to what we were saying about friendship. This is just another type of relationship. And if you haven't practiced friendship with your platonic friends, you're supposed to automatically know how to do it in a relationship.
I don't think that's how that works, y'all. Not Alan overson out here.
You need you need to practice practice. Yes, we're talking about practice.
And so when we think about how do people show up in friendships right now, a lot of this is related to attachment theory and attachment styles, how people show up and how this affects their connection with others.
So the idea is who we are affects how we connect, and how we've connected affects who we are our personality, our trust of other people, our openness, our friendliness. That's fundamentally shaped by whether we've connected in the past or been heard in the past. That's really affected who we are.
In her book, Doctor Franco talks about six traits that make it more likely for you to connect with people their initiative, vulnerability, authenticity, productive, anger, affection, and generosity.
You would have these traits naturally if you didn't go through some previous baggage trauma, big t, small tea charmer. But if you didn't go through these wounds, you would all have these traits. We're all inherently pro social and social creatures.
That's right. Most primates that includes us are working together in a social order to benefit ourselves and others. Okay, And so how you're raised, your neighborhood, your economic factors, your education, all of that determines the types of connections that you make. Those early interactions kind of set that mold for how you engage as you move about the
cabin of life. And so if you're operating with one set of instructions and somebody else's operating with another, it can be hard to make healthy, strong connections with those folks, or even to form connections in the first place. We begin to learn how to attach to others as babies, and those experiences continue to inform our relationships as adults.
Attachment theory is basically telling us you have these early relationships with your parents. It created a template for how people will respond to you throughout life. And because social interaction is inherently very ambiguous, you don't know why someone's not responding to you. You don't know if someone's quiet because they hate you or because they're.
Tired or hungry.
This template tends to be what is reality for us. It tends to be what impacts our bodies, what impacts how we respond, what impacts how we behave in our friendships, more so than the truth, more so than whatever the reality actually is.
We've talked about the mind body connection before in previous labs like our lab called Good Anxiety with doctor Wendy Suzuki, in Mind over Matter with doctor Susanne O'Sullivan and Art Therapy with Professor Juliet King. And our relationships with other people can affect how we feel in our bodies, depending on whether we feel safe or not, and if we're fearful or anxious, our bodies might go into fight or flight with our friends, making it hard to make decisions or have a calm conversation.
So when we think about it, our life experiences yes create eight and cement what our attachment styles are going to be.
Oh absolutely, our brain begins to predict.
How our relationships should go, how we connect with other people, and it's all based on what we've seen before. So over time, your template of what happens in relationships becomes internalized as your attachment style, and this then predicts how we form attachment or connection in relationships with others.
Doctor Franco's book focuses on three attachment styles, anxious, avoidant, and secure. The first style is anxious attachment.
You think everybody is going to abandon you when it comes to relationships. You are clinging or you take things personally. You appreciate the ability to earn people's loves, so you enter in relationships with people that don't treat you right. You have trouble expressing your needs because again, you think people are going to abandon you, and you tend to develop friendships really quickly, but they can be very volatile and also end very quickly.
Look to your left and to your right, do you know someone like this or is it you right?
And that makes sense if you are nervous about things, you're trying to quickly get to the good part. And you don't want people to leave, so you're going to be constantly doing those things. That makes sense to me. Doctor Franco share some tips for folks with different attachment styles. Here's what she suggests. If you're anxiously attached.
For anxiously attached, one thing that would really help is to assume people like you. When you're anxiously attached, you have this implicit low self esteem and you think other people don't like you. So if it's ambiguous and you don't know, just assume that people like you.
The second is avoidant attachment.
You tend to not have that many friends, and if you do, they don't feel like they really know you. Feels like you're at a distance. You don't ask your friends for anything. You feel very easily burdened if they ask you for something. If there's a problem in friendship, you just sort of tend to cut it off. Your template is that people can't be trusted and if I go to them for help, they will not help me. So I have to be self sufficient and that affects
how avoidantly attached people interpret the world. For example, I say a study that shows that when someone does something nice for it, avoidantly attached people, they think that that person is doing it because they want something out of them, and that's the.
Reality that is in their body.
So when people do nice things for them, they're not even taking that in and they continue to go forth in the world like it's true that people can't be trusted even when people are showing them love all around them.
This has to do with how you have formed these templates for attachment in the past or in your early stages as a child.
That's right.
The next tip is one that works for both anxious and avoidant attachment styles, and it's to recognize moments of safety in your relationships.
When you are anxiously or avoidantly attached, you tune in so much to the negative because that's what your internal template is, and you don't notice when people are being loving towards you, or affirming you or supporting you. And so when your friend shows up for you, when your friend listens to you, when your friend reaches out to you, just to check in, pause and savor that in your body. What does that feel like for you internally?
Doctor Franco cites the work of doctor Rick Hansen, another psychologist, about internalizing moments of safety and how that can actually change your brain structure. For avoidantly attached people, doctor Franco suggests asking yourself if there's something that someone has done to suggest that they're untrustworthy, and if.
You cannot identify something that they've done, recognize that your assumption that you can't trust them is coming from your history rather than the realities of the situation, and ask yourself, how would I go about this relationship differently if I felt like I could trust that.
Person and experiment.
Experimenting is really important for changing our attachment styles, because attachment sells like an algorithm. If A, then B. If I'm vulnerable, people will reject me. If I reach out, people won't want to hear from me. And when we experiment and we do the thing that makes us scared and there's a different outcome, and we savor that outcome, we internalize that outcome, we feel the impact in our bodies. That's the work of changing our internal algorithm.
And so when doctor Franco mentions changing our internal algorithm, it's not changing our attachment style, but it's changing how we operate, how we move.
You know, knowing your attachment style is just knowing yourself a little bit better. I feel like I fall more in the avoidant attachment style, and with that knowledge, I can be a better friend to my really good friends because I can say I don't want my really good friends to feel like I don't want to be around them or like I don't value them. So now that I know this about myself and what my knee jerk reactions might be, I can do a little course correction
with the people I love. And that brings us to the third style of attachment, and it's called secure attachment.
And then you have securely attached people who are comfortable giving and receiving affection, who tend to initiate more friendships, have more enduring friendships, be better at working through conflict
in friendships, make their friends feel safer. And their biggest assumption is they assume people like them at all stages of friendship, and that helps them initiate new friendships, That helps them work through conflicted ways where it doesn't get into fight or flights, that helps them rekindle old friendships. They just have this sort of endless optimism and perspective taking where they're thinking about their friends' needs and their own and balancing the.
Two well that sounds nice.
Yes, I know someone just like this, the friendliest friend of all friends.
I'll let y'all guess.
You know TC. When I consider this, I don't think any one attachment style is better than the other.
Yeah, I think we're tempted to say, you know, secure attachment is the superior attachment.
You know, it's just how much course correction might you have to do for other people to understand what's going on you to get out of your own way, even right, because it doesn't change the interactions that we're all having. It's just how we're coding them as they come in, Like, what's my algorithm saying this interaction we're having means?
Right?
So like if someone with security attachment walked into a room full of people, they might say, oh, look at all these potential friends, or look at all of these friends that I'm about to have. And someone with avoiding or anxious attachment might walk into that same room and say, mmm, I'm not sure. But if you know those things about yourself, you might say, I'm walking into this room, I'm unsure of all these people. I don't trust them, but maybe
I'll open myself up. The first person that walks up to me and says hello, maybe i'll, you know, continue a conversation with them rather than run away like I would do. People can work towards being securely attached, but sometimes it's also a sign of privilege. That means that you have experienced a better childhood environment than a lot of other people. It's easier for you to regulate your emotions. Oprah has this really good book with Bruce Perry where
he talks about regulation as a privilege. It means that you haven't been through traumas and also maybe systemic traumas too, like you know, racism, sexism, hobophobia, all these things could also contribute.
And so if you are securely attached, what should you do.
In recognizing the privilege of your attachment. I think you, as the secure person can do things that other people might not be able to do, like be regulated in conflict, bring up conflict and issues with your friend and de escalating that conflict, keeping things really fair, being there for your friends when they are vulnerable, and making them feel validated and love. Like you have all of these superpowers, and the more that you use them, the more security
you're going to give to other people. You're going to heal a lot of people with the ways that you show up in the world.
What doctor Franklin is saying is so important. There have been plenty of times where this friendship has been healing for me.
You know, same, same, Absolutely.
It becomes a positive cycle, right because if you are affirmed and healed here, you know, it fuels you up and you can go out into the world and spread a little bit more love.
Absolutely, it's like pay it forward or like a ripple effect. Mm hm. They say hurt people, hurt people, but healed people heal people.
You're gonna start making bumper stickers.
I can't take credit for this stuff. I'm sure I heard it on TikTok. All right, let's take a break and when we come back, we'll get into how to address conflict with friends, how vulnerability can make our connections stronger, and how to make new friends.
We're back and next week we're talking all about the economy with doctor Vanessa Perry. She's going to help us understand inflation, the recession, the FED, the interest rate changes, all the things that you need to know to be able to navigate the murky waters of what is the US economy.
Okay, let's get back to the lab.
We've been talking to doctor Marissa Franco about the importance of friendship attachment theory and how our attachment styles affect our relationships, and.
We really wanted to learn more about conflict in friendships too. It's normalized to have fights with your significant other or someone that you're dating, but it can feel kind of awkward to have conflict with a friend. Sometimes it seems easier to just end the whole friendship.
That's usually my style.
I'm always just like, oh, you want to auga, I can't argue with you, ha ha ha.
Even if you don't want to argue, TT is gonna still take that route. Even if you don't argue.
If I even get a whiff of an argument, I'm like, I'm out.
That actually happened to me and you and.
We talked about it before. And if you haven't heard it, go back and listen to Lab twenty six, which is called what about your Friends.
Yes, I tried to stop being friends with Zekiah and she wouldn't let me, thankfully. Thankfully, Doctor Franco said this normal for all kinds of intimate relationships to have conflicts, and that includes friendships and In her book, she talks about how she learned to get over her fear of conflict in friendships.
I felt like, if there's a problem in friendship, it's my job to get over it. That's how I'm a good friend until I could it anymore.
And it's one of my best friends.
We got into an argument, little things like she got mad at me when we say django, but it started to accumulate and I'm like, Okay, I think it's my job to get over it, but I'm not.
And now I'm withdrawing.
So maybe this whole me trying to solve this problem on my own is it really working? And I came across the study that was like open and pass conflict contributes to more intimacy.
Guys, Like, what.
What conflict could benefit our friendships? It's not just conflict, it's how you do it. It's how you express your anger.
Doctor Franco says that authenticity is key when you're navigating conflict with your friends.
We hear the word a lot.
It's so hard to pin down and how I define it is who we are when we're not hijacked by our defense mechanisms. So when we're in fight or flight, we're hijacked by our defense mechanisms because those are protecting a deeper and more vulnerable feeling a fear of hurt. And when we're not hijacked by these defense mechanisms, instead of me telling you you suck in this way, you're an awful friend, I'm going to talk shit about you now to my other friends.
All of that is my.
Hurt being expressed in these inauthentic ways. And so if I can instead say, actually, I was just really hurt and I felt really disappointed and I felt kind of down right, I can stay with that level of vulnerability instead of using these defense mechanisms to make me less vulnerable but also to harden my friendships.
Authentic vulnerability is a lot harder to practice than it sounds, because what comes naturally to us is our defense mechanisms, and those kick in automatically.
We know that's happening because we become reactive. We feel like the way respond has to be urgent in the moment. Right now, it almost feels impulsive when we're communicating in that way that's not authentic. And so if we can get to that more authentic place, that's what the conflict that's healing. Looks like there's this psychoadalyst's Virginia Boulner, and she talks about flaccid safety versus dynamic safety. Flaccid safety, we just pretend the problems aren't happening, and we are
comforted by our game of pretend. Dynamic safety. We rupture, we repair. We know that when problems come up, we can repair, and we experience a deeper level of intimacy.
Yes, I love dynamic safety, we know, but no, it's important, like I wish everybody to have a friend in their friend group that is like that, because when you create spaces for your friends to feel like they can be vulnerable.
Doctor Franco's absolutely right. It deepens the friendship. It makes you feel more connected, it makes you feel heard, it makes you feel seen and in a world where nobody's looking and seeing anybody or listening to anyone, I hope you can feel like that.
With your close friends.
Yes, and you know, our bodies, even when you think about how we get strong when we exercise tears in the muscles, you know our body has systems for physical rupture and repair. And so it's really interesting and exciting to me because you know, I love all things about the body that we can do this emotionally as well.
Yes, So if we're looking to deepen a friendship, how do we actually work on being more vulnerable with our friends.
I used to very much see vulnerability as a burden to people. And my mom she never cried until her father died. That was the first time I saw her cry. So was it modeled for me?
You know?
I think as black women, there's historical reasons why we maybe don't feel as safe being volterable. And I thought everybody wanted to see me as perfect and polished, so I tried not to be votable.
That's very real, but also very hard.
Yeah, it's really tough for you know, women of color, people in marginalized communities to show that level of vulnerability. I think for black women specifically the whole, Like black women are super hard and super tough and they don't feel pain type of thing. It really prevents us from being able to experience these vulnerable moments because people don't expect it from us and don't give us the space to do it right.
Leave me out of the strong black woman trope. I have weak ankles and weak risks.
Part of being human is having to be vulnerable. I'm sorry to break it to you. I've had to break it to myself. It really hit home to me when I interviewed this expert on secrets, Michel Slepian. He had this study where he looked at who's really good at holding the weight of their secrets? Is there something inhering about them? Were they very self sufficient or independent? But he found that the people that were best at navigating the weight of their secrets had actually told someone their
secrets and that person received it positively. And I asked him, what is the number one thing you would suggest that we do with our secrets so they don't feel oppressive to us, And he said, tell someone, tell someone about your secrets. We become strong through sharing who we are with someone who loves and validates us, and we internalize that love and that regard into our hearts and to our core.
Recently, I had a friend ask me about therapy, and you know, if anybody's asked me, I'm like, hey, I am a strong proponent of therapy at time, thinking it's very good for you to have a place where you can talk and feel like you can share secrets. And the person was asking me about how to use a therapist. She's like, well, you have all these friends and she was like, well, are there things that you would tell your therapists that you wouldn't tell your friends?
And I was like, not really.
I feel like my friends are like, wily, I'll be dumping, I'll be fitting all that trash and you just come and scoopid and.
You put it in these little squares.
You are good to me. But I was saying, sometimes because there's so much romance or loving friendships, they won't tell you that your poop is thinking. They won't tell you that it's your roses really smell like boom boom boom boom, you know, and you might need somebody to do that, and they will accept your secrets. But that can be helpful to kind of build your ability to share with someone you're paying to keep your secrets.
Yeah, and doctor Franco said, it's okay to start slowly by scaffolding your vulnerability.
Who in your life feels the safest start with that. Maybe it's your therapist, I don't know, if it's your mom. Talk to them first, because if they make you feel safe when they share their reaction, what that's going to do is make it feel less vulnerable when you go to the second person, who's more.
Of a wild card.
According to research by doctor Anna Brook, there's something called the beautiful mess effect, which makes us assume that people will judge us more for being vulnerable while dismissing the positive outcome of being seen as authentic.
So remind yourself that if you think your vulnerability is going to lead to people taking advantage and there's no evidence of this, then you might be experiencing the beautiful mess effect. Remember that it doesn't have to be comfortable. You're doing this because it fulfills your larger values of taking care of yourself or connecting with people. It's get active love to yourself to be vulnerable.
That's a great point. Maybe understanding that vulnerability serves a larger purpose in deepening our relationships can help us challenge ourselves to lean into it even when it's uncomfortable.
Right.
And I think another great point is we talked about in the last episode with doctor Franco about dignifying friendships, Like if you give your friendship some dignity, being vulnerable will be part of dignifying that friendship. And something that's also important to keep in mind is your own boundaries. There's a big spectrum between healthy discomfort and feeling unsafe.
We talked about this a little bit in LAP seventy five. Can you change Someone's mind? When we're talking about conflicts around prejudice or other topics that have real effect on our lives, racism, homophobia, classism, all the other isms, there are cases where you won't be able to see eye to eye and stay in relationship with that person, and you may feel unsafe with that person and have to
end a friendship. And doctor Franco says that her identity as a black woman has affected how she navigates her friendships.
I often hear white people, privileged people saying, well, being mature means getting over it and still being friends, And maybe that's the right choice for some people. But I think that assumption that that's for everyone can really discount how unsettling it can feel to be friends with someone
who you feel doesn't humanize you as a person. I talk about in the book how I went through this experience where my friend, she's white, she called me a diversity higher, which she introduced me to all of her other friends and how it sounds like a single moment, but what I talk about in the book is that
it's not a passing moment. It's a cumulative moment that is a trigger because it reminds you of every moment someone has treated you like you're less intelligent throughout your entire life, because it reflects that you are living in a larger society that devalues your intelligence. And if you think about a paper cut that's been cut at in the same place for hundreds of years, it's going to be a very deep wound.
It's important that your friends that are other races or a different class see.
You as equal.
Absolutely, And I feel like we saw a lot of friendships relationships coming to a head during the Black Lives Matter movement COVID when folks were communicating pain and some of their friends, family members, loved ones, we're dismissing them, and so people were having to reckon with Wow, what do I do next?
Do I keep this person in my life?
Do I say no and draw a hard line and say, okay, well, this friendship is over, this relationship is over.
Those are decisions that you have to.
Make because when we're talking about certain issues, it's life or death. And if someone doesn't humanize you and champion your voice and hear you and see you, that ain't a friend. It don't sound like a friend to me, sounds like an enemy.
And what you're talking about tt doctor Franco talks about in her book and calls it adjusted mutuality. And the adjusted part is key because if you're just having a mutuality, then that's just one to one. Everybody's view is equal. But when you have friends that are from different groups, let's say one from a privileged group run from a disadvantage group, that one to one isn't holding to the
same weight. And so doctor Franco says that what we need is the more privileged person to do a little bit more work to understand the disadvantaged person's perspective, and that is adjusted mutuality.
And the truth is that we need this adjusted mutuality in our friendships to correct for a world in a society that is inherently non mutual, Like we're not becoming friends in a blink slate. We're becoming friends in a place where if you're from a disadvantage identity, you have to spend so much more time and energy understanding the perspective of privileged.
People, and we know that privilege and identity are complex. Some things are fixed, like race, where you were born, et cetera, while other circumstances might change over time, like class education. It's important to consider the complexity of someone's whole personhood in our relationships. Doctor Franco shares three steps for building friendships with people who may have different privileges in life experience than you. Those three steps are vet, vulnerability, and voice.
That is looking for people that do value your identity when you're choosing who to be friends with.
Vulnerability is bringing your full self to the friendship, just like we were talking about before, which means you don't, you know, break off little pieces of yourself and only show parts of yourself to your friend.
And then voice means when your friend screws up and says something hurtful, you gotta tell them. Often, if we don't have the conversation or the conflict because we're afraid the friendship's going to end, the friendship ends anyway because we withdraw because we're so RESTful and we're like, I don't want to be around this, so goodbye. And so if you actually want to continue on the friendship. You have to be able to say that was actually pretty hurtful to me, Like, what did you mean when.
You said that?
And I think that anybody who has friends, these are things that you know, the vulnerability and being your full self and the friendship are things that we can all continue to do because like, even if you've had a friend since you were five years old, you know that you've changed and that person has changed.
Your lives have changed a lot of different ways.
And so these are exercises that we have to continually do with all of the people that we care about. It's not just something that oh, we did it once and then we can forget about it. It's something that we have to put into practice and do consistently, especially when we care about folks.
You know, we started the top of this episode talking about that Psychology Today article, but that's not the only place that I've seen conversation about friendship and belonging. And you know, even coming out of the pandemic, we talked about loneliness and what people experienced and how many people are saying their friendships have changed.
Absolutely because they weren't able to meet up see each other in the ways that they used to prior to the pandemic when we were all having to stay at home.
Yeah, friendships definitely went through.
It, and once you kind of he and on it, it's hard to not see the thread of friendship running through so much of what's surround us. I was looking at Abbot Elementary and they were saying like it was an episode about work friends, whether they were real friends.
Or work friends.
You know, and you know me and you were out of college. Yeah, and so it becomes hard to maintain friendships and to build new ones, and to sometimes decide if you will keep the ones you have.
Right, Right, Because as we are moving through our lives, things change. Who we are changes, and so there's a lot of difficult decisions that we have to make. And sometimes it's not that you've outgrown a person, but you have changed so much that maybe your lives don't overlap anymore.
And I think.
Because we are in this society that is moving so fast and rewards productivity and not stopping to take a beat. Along with the changes that you're having, right, you're also processing every single thing that happens to you through your own lens. And I think we've talked about this in can you change someone's mind? When we talk to Dave McRaney,
you know, you're processing of what's happening to you. The same thing could be happening to somebody else and they may receive it completely differently.
Right.
Have you ever had moments where someone is telling the story and it involves you and they're imitating you, and you're like, I wasn't yelling.
They're like, yes, you were. You're like, no, I wasn't.
Let me tell you yes. And I was just talking about this last night, actually it was today, because I was saying that I have these shocks most of the time with you, when we are talking, you will imitate me, And I say, have you seen those things where it says you don't think you have an accent? There are things that I say or the way I think things come across when you play that tape back that's not how I intended it a lot of the time, and
I think about that a lot. One of my friends' moms who I'm always excited to talk to, she's so funny, she's so animated, and I'm always like, Hey, what's going on?
How are you?
And when she replies to me, she says, hello, how are you, because she said I talk like a robot and that I have no inflection. Oh no, that's how she receives the way I'm speaking to her like that. I'm not excited to talk to her, but I am.
So that just underscores the point that you and doctor Franco made. Who we are and how we grew up and the things that we've experienced through our lives will dictate how we receive information from our friends, from our family, from people that we work with, to people that you're
just walking by on the street. I was listening to the radio and they were talking about how there is a specific demographic, which is black men, that we're struggling at the workplace because they are less likely to make
eye contact with, you know, some of their superiors. And so they were saying that that was impacting their work relationships because I guess their superiors felt like they weren't trustworthy, that it seemed like they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing because they weren't making eye contact. But you got to think of the context of black men in America. Not too long ago, Emmett Till was killed for looking at a white woman in the eye or.
Speaking to her or something whatever happened.
And so you can imagine how incidences like that, and an innumerable amount of other incidences that are similar to that, would shift how black men interact with not only white women, but they're superiors at work and white men.
All this stuff is all jumbled up, and we're not stopping to take the time. These brains will have you lumping people's behaviors into all kinds of categories. This determines what we like, This determines what we don't like. This determines the the type of people we decide to pursue relationships with, the people we choose to trust. Like you said, it's all in there together. And so I think when you have the opportunity to reflect and say, hey, what's
my style? The only person's behavior you can control as your own baby, Okay. And so if you spend a little time saying, how do I move in the world, how do I perceive people's actions?
I think this can kind of help you.
And this may help you also see what might be missing or should be added or should be dialed back in some of your friendships. Absolutely, what I'm taking away is that you don't want dynamic safety.
My friend is tired of my dynamic safety. You guys, I'm not tired of nothing. I want to go on record and say that I'm not tired of nothing.
My friend, she understands me. She gets me. I do, and that's all I ask. All.
All right, it's time for one thing and my one thing for this week. And Knda Is the kid is one thing for this week too, But she has her own thing is doctor Marissa G.
Franco's book.
It's called Platonic How the Science of Attachment can help You Make and Keep Friends, And it is out right now. She gave us an advanced look at it, and let me tell you, I have a rainbow of highlights and tabs.
It's so good.
I think there's something for everyone to learn about themselves in this book and to help them be a better friend.
Yes, definitely, co sign on that.
What's your one thing this week? Zee?
My one thing along with this book has been this newsletter.
You know.
I love a newsletter that I've been reading by Carissa Potter, and it's called Bad at Keeping Secrets. Now we're gonna link both doctor Franco's book and this newsletter in the show notes. So that's Dope labspodcast dot com and you can just click on the show notes and it will take you there. This newsletter explores emotions, feelings, thoughts, and regulating your thoughts and I just loved it.
It's a substack newsletter.
So I read one post that was about regret and it was so good that I had to talk about regret. I think I came and talked to you about regret after that. I posted it on my Instagram. So good, but can't wait for people to check it out. That's it for Lab seventy eight. But guess what, we have.
A poem for you.
We want to know which attachment style do you identify with the most anxious, avoidant or secure? Let us know and knowing these things, does it make you think back on any interactions you've had. I want to hear drop the t in the DM. So, okay, call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought, or give us an idea for another lab you think we should do this semester. We really like hearing from you, and I did get
y'all's text. Okay, I'm getting to zero two five six seven seven zero two.
Eight, and don't forget there's so much more for you to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheat sheet for today's lab and additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus, you can sign up for our newsletter check it out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's guest expert, Doctor Marissa Franco.
Find her on Twitter at doctor Marissa G.
Franco, and you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast.
Tt is on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho.
And you can find Zakia at z said So.
Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Ohm Media Group. Our producers are Jenny Radlett Mass and Lydia Smith of WaveRunner Studios. Our associate producer is Caro Rolando. Editing and sound design by Rob Smerciak, with additional editing, mixing and sound design by Hannes Brown.
Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Ali zugi Era from Spotify Creative producer Miguel Contreras.
Special thanks to Shirley Ramos, Jess Borrison, Till krat Key, and Brian Marquis, Executive producers from Mega Own Media Group rs t T Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley