Whatever our experience in our family of origin in terms of unconditional positive regard, all the way from very good to very bad, most if not all of us feel the need to go out into the world and seek more experiences in life and also hope to encounter unconditional positive regard in that unknown but inviting space. Even when we feel fearful to one degree or another, we also feel hopeful to one degree or another. Our intuition tells us that in the broader world we may well find greater opportunities to enhance our search for the self, to continue the becoming self in a new environment.
When I asked students who else influences us as we attempt to grow into a self, aside from parental figures, they always came up with any number of answers. The first often focused on relationships with friends. Many students and others have spoken about the vital importance of friends in their formative years. Many of my students told me that they stayed in high school primarily because of their friends. If their friends graduated before them for some reason, they often dropped out lacking any motivation to stay in the now deadly environment of high school.
Given friendship's central importance for the becoming self, and for many that came only slightly behind parental figures and families of origin, we discussed what we might have hoped from such friends, such relationships in terms of the becoming self. We looked for the possibilities of finding the qualities of unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance that we have found as central to the becoming self. When we looked hard, critically examined the idea of youthful friendships carefully, we found that the picture clouded a good deal. Our nostalgia for these friends became upset if not overturned by many of the realities we discussed.
Friendships in early years often had to do with doing what the friend wanted us to do. Even in preschool, lots of children seemed to make bargains out of their friendship, even make competitions out of friendship. The phrase, "I'll be your best friend if you do this or give that," still seemed to ring true even for younger students. The steadiness we want from regard seemed stunningly lacking for most. Many reported that they had no idea if yesterday's best friend would have become indifferent or even worse, a kind of enemy from one day to the next. If the best friend had wandered off to another best friend, whatever else was true, the abandoned friend felt the loss and felt the sting of being left out of the relationship now formed without her/him. Sometimes, another kind of bargain would get struck and friendships could re-form. The weakness in that friendship came because when friendship becomes commerce and negotiation for position, the friendship has very little relationship to any real sense of the developing or becoming self. These are the relationships of having, of possessing and discarding, not of being, of acceptance and continuity. Such childhood friendships can make the playground a field of competition, recrimination, "best friend," "worst friend," "I don't like you" minefield of emotional turmoil. Whatever lessons we learned in such fields, they taught us to watch what we do and say and to please others so they would like us. Hardly the becoming self when we learn to adopt poses and attitudes we might find at odds with how we feel.
The older these questions of friendship became, the more complex they seemed to become as well. By high school, friendships existed in complex ingroup and outgroup structures which most everyone called "clicks" (I tried to use the spelling "clique" any number of times, but almost always told I got it wrong).[50] Clicks had two essential functions. The click made its own group the ingroup, and it declared any other click or anyone else the outgroup. The click formed an entire set of positive features for the ingroup, itself, and at the same time the click constructed a complete set of negative prejudices for the other groups—everybody else. Such dominator labeling did nothing to assist most people in continuing the search for the self, to continue becoming self. Most students said that if they expressed any real individuality, they could find themselves on the outs, off into outgroup land—a cold, lonely, and exposed place. High schools, in this way, bred a very powerful lesson in "us and them," in the creation of a fully human ingroup as opposed to the Other, an alien and less than fully human outgroup or individual. This created tensions between the ingroup, us, against the Other, them, and it also created a quality of cohesion within the us, the ingroup.