Hi folks,

I have been thinking about the difference between friends and family.

People say, "You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family."

I think it's more complex than this, as our friends choose us as people they would like to know, and enjoy being with. So, in a sense we don't really get to choose our family or our friends. So friends are people who have actively wanted to be around us, which can't be bad.

I live in an odd way. I have no contact whatever with my birth family, on my mother's side or my father's side. I didn't do anything particularly to create this situation myself, it just came about gradually over a period of years. It became established in the families, starting with my father's side and spreading to my mother's side, that I was the 'moody and estranged one' and I was never visited by anyone in either family, I moved house a couple of times over the years and now I'm disconnected completely.

During the same period of years I have had a successful teaching career, and well loved by my students, maybe the most popular teacher in my part of the college. I was always being told that I was a caring and empathetic teacher, "One of the best".

I also have quite a number friends who like and admire me, openly telling me that I have a kind and caring nature, consulting me for advice on all sorts of things, telling me how important I am to them.

So, here are two pictures of me, one brought about by my father's abuse (still undisclosed to the wider family, and now he is dead anyway), and the other brought about by my getting far away from his baleful influence. It is truly like a rebirth in life, but it is hard to know that there are such very different perceptions of me in the world. I must have been VERY defensive during the abusive years, and I can see how that might have looked to extended family, as they saw my reaction but not the action that screwed me up.

Anyway I now have a happy wife and a lovely daughter, as some of you will know, and I put that success down to my 'safe distance' policy as well.

I am wondering what you folks think about the family/friendship thing . How easy or hard do you folks find it to let friends validate you when you have been systematically invalidated within a birth family? How do you start to let the good vibes come into you and displace the bad vibes?

Can good friendships fill the gap, and start making the changes? For me, I think the friendships didn't really convince me, I was so deeply scarred. It was my daughter that started to change my self image. I started to think, 'How can someone with such a happy daughter be so bad inside?' Well, the simple answer for me is that I'm not!

There is the point that my daughter loses out from my disconnection with birth family, and that hurts, but my wife has a good extended family with lost of girls in it, and my daughter also has loads of very close long term friends - in fact they all live together, so it's good vibes all round for her.
(We did manage to do the duty visits when my parents were alive - the old 'ultra polite' visits that many of us here know so well!)

But, my question is - what experiences have others here had on this issue? Can good friendships start the healing process?

Cheers, M