People With Almost No Real Friends Usually Can't Quit These 3 Hard-To-Break Patterns
Andrey K | Unsplash If finding real friendships always feels hard for you, it's probably because you're stuck in one of these hard-to-break patterns.
Research from 2025 found that repetitive behavior patterns actually become embedded in how we define ourselves, which makes these patterns super hard to change. In the last decade of coaching clients full-time, these are some of the most consistent things that I have seen that hold you back from finding real friends. While each person doesn’t necessarily experience all three of these, everyone will inevitably bump into at least one of these on their journey.
People with almost no real friends usually can't quit these 3 hard-to-break patterns:
Pattern 1: Avoiding vulnerability and emotional depth at all costs
The first and most significant hurdle for a lot of people is the fear of truly diving into their repressed emotional pain. Everyone experiences hardship in their lives. Someone who has had terrible things happen to them is more the rule than the exception.
Regardless of whether you label it as pain, trauma, hard knocks, or any other name, you’ve been through things in your life that you wouldn’t wish on others, and there will be some inevitable pain attached to those experiences.
When you actively try to hide or suppress uncomfortable feelings and thoughts, they actually become more frequent and way more intense than if you'd just let yourself feel them. Researchers have concluded that it's like the psychological version of trying not to think about a pink elephant, except the stakes are your mental health, and the harder you push those feelings down, the louder they get.
Here’s a quick example of this in action:
Several years ago, I worked with a woman who had an absolutely beautiful, deeply feeling heart. She also had more than a decade of fairly traumatic emotional and physical abuse behind her that she was unwilling to face.
We did several sessions together, and every time we started to veer towards broaching her childhood trauma, she would sidestep the issue and want to talk about something else. At a certain point, I had to call out this pattern directly.
During our third session together, I told her, “Whenever we get close to diving into your childhood pain, you find a way to sidestep the conversation. I want you to know that I am completely unattached to whether you face this trauma with me or not, but regardless of who it comes out with, it must come out eventually. Until then, it will own you and have power over you.”
She replied, “I want to discuss it, but I’m afraid that if I talk about it, then I’ll feel all of the sadness and anger that I’ve run away from for so long, and it will overtake me. That I will be pulled down into a deep well of emotion and never escape it.”
I told her that I understood her fears and that I promised that that wouldn’t be the case. Because, in fact, the only way to guarantee that her emotions would stick around forever was by deploying the exact strategy that she currently was: avoidance and denial. This strategy is all too common in the world of growth work.
We fear that if we allow ourselves to feel our pain, it will either 1) never end, or 2) that it will overtake us and we will lose control. No emotion lasts forever. You can feel sadness and anger and grief, and eventually, they pass on. They wash over you, and they leave.
If you are looking to keep moving forward in your healing journey instead of holding yourself back from personal growth, you must learn to love and accept your emotions as they arise. Until you do, they will hold you hostage and diminish your light in the world.
Pattern 2: Stay stuck in a victim mentality
Polina Zimmerman / Pexels
Another common hurdle that people struggle to overcome is moving from a place of blaming others for their lives to taking responsibility for their lives. No one gets through life unscathed. And while it is 0 percent your fault that these things happen to you, it is 100 percent your responsibility to deal with the aftermath of what your situation has given to you.
People with a victim mentality have an external locus of control, which basically means they genuinely believe their life is run by outside forces instead of their own choices. Scientific American published research showing this isn't just a bad attitude, but actually how these people perceive reality. They argue that they truly can't see how their own actions contribute to what happens to them because, in their mind, everything is controlled by other people, luck, or circumstances beyond their control.
I had one client a few years ago who blamed all of his life’s shortcomings on the fact that his father had been largely absent during his childhood. Having emotionally unavailable parents is a hindrance, no doubt. So is having one of your best friends die. So is being raped. So is being bullied for years. So are a lot of things that happen to people, every day, around the world.
At a certain point in our working relationship, I had to tell him that the pain that he felt on account of his dad not being around was real, but the fact that he was still blaming his father for all of his life’s shortcomings more than thirty years later wasn’t helping him.
When we blame other people for aspects of our lives, we shrug off the tough work of taking responsibility for ourselves. I’ll say that again: If you’re blaming others, you’re avoiding responsibility in your life.
Take back your power by forgiving the people you have felt victimized by, and get on with your life. No one is coming to save you. At a certain point in your journey, you have to pick yourself up by your socks and tell yourself, “How my life goes is up to me. I’m going to become a bigger person now, and stop copping out by blaming other people for my life’s circumstances.”
Pattern 3: Believing everyone will eventually abandon them
Ultimately, we suffer in life to the degree that we are run by our stories and beliefs about the world. And the bigger the belief is, the more power it will have over you. The Attachment Project published research on the abandonment schema and explained that it's basically this tragic pattern where people try so hard to prevent someone from leaving that they end up acting clingy, jealous, or controlling. Ironically, those exact behaviors are what push people away and end the relationship, which then just proves to them that their original belief was right all along, keeping the cycle going.
Take these two people, for example: Adam and John. Adam believes that the world isn’t a safe place, that everyone is in it for themselves, that women can’t be trusted, that it’s hard to make money, that life is ultimately meaningless and filled with suffering, and that everyone that he loves is going to abandon him.
John believes that the world is an inherently safe and loving place, that everyone is fundamentally good and has each other’s backs, that money flows easily and effortlessly when you are in alignment with offering your highest gifts to the world, and that meaning is something to be self-constructed, and that love and intimacy are things to be cultivated with anyone who you feel called to invest in.
Adam’s worldview is fear-based, reluctant, scarce, and contracted. John’s worldview is love-based, trusting, empowered, and expansive. Based on these two sets of global beliefs, who do you think will have an easier time in life? The one who believes that life is an unsafe, scary struggle, or the one who trusts in people, love, and a deeper sense of meaning?
At a certain point in your journey, after feeling your feelings and taking a higher degree of responsibility for yourself, it is a necessary step to look into and dissect what stories you carry about yourself and the world around you. Until you understand what lens you see the world through, you will project unnecessary lies onto everyone and everything around you.
Once you understand what stories your core wounds are projecting onto the world around you, you will then be in a position to comb out the metaphorical knots in your psyche and see the world as it actually is, as opposed to seeing it as your pain has convinced you it is. Transcending the noise of your mind!
A lot of growth work comes down to seeing how your mind projects noisy, convincing demons onto the world around you, and systematically distinguishing your stories from reality. The sooner you do the work of deconstructing these imagined monsters, the sooner you can start living your life from a healthy, loving, empowered state and give your gifts freely and without fear.
If you have found your way to this article, I want you to know that I fundamentally believe in your ability to transition away from your pain and your stories. Lean into them with an honest, willing desire, and you will transcend your mind’s nonsense in no time.
Jordan Gray is a five-time Amazon best-selling author, public speaker, and relationship coach with more than a decade of practice. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Women's Health, and The Good Men Project, among countless others.
