HealthyGamerGG - Can Long Distance Friendships Work?

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Dr. K dives into long distance friendships discussing guilt, one way relationships, communication, and more, Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, like, we need to go kill Baron or the dragon or whatever, right? Like, we need to do this, we need to do this, we need to do this. Whereas, like, being an effective communicator, especially in a Mova, I found it's way, way better to ask questions instead of telling people what to do. Hello. Hi. Hello, friend. How are you? I'm doing all right.

How are you? I'm doing well today. Can you tell me what you go by? I go by a boss. Okay. Welcome, a boss. This is kind of crazy. Yeah.

Yeah, I've been watching your content for a long time, and it's helped a lot with learning how to listen to people and how to talk to people and notice my own emotions. So this is kind of crazy. I'm very happy that it's been helpful to you. So how are your friendships? How's life going in the world of your friends and things like that? So for me, I'm kind of keeping a lot of long-distance friendships

where we mostly talk on Discord. My main group of friends, we went to high school together, and then after college, we all moved to all kinds of different states. And so to me, this problem has shown itself more recently. So I've been going through a breakup, and that's been a hard time. And whenever I bring it up to them, they're very supportive of me, which is great and reassuring for me. but I feel almost guilty bringing it up a lot because we don't have a particularly formal or regular way for talking through our emotions or talking through our days.

Usually we get on Discord, play league, talk about league or Yu-Gi-o or whatever it is that we're playing. And so I think, I imagine that I wouldn't feel as guilty going to them with my, my if I'm going through a hard time like oh I'm thinking about her again if they were also if we were all communally talking about our feelings and how we're how we're doing I'm assuming that this is largely like a guy thing I imagine a lot of guys go through this and a lot of guy friendships where you don't really talk about how you feel or tough times and things like that so I was wondering how to introduce more regular ways of talking outside of games. Absolutely. So let me just make sure I understand your situation. I'm really glad you're calling in today, Abbas, because I think that

this is something that a lot of people do struggle with. So if I heard you correctly, you had a group of IRL friends in high school or college, and after college, I believe you went your separate ways. And you all have continued to stay in touch over the internet and Discord. Is that correct? Yep. And most of the time, the nature of your social interaction is like gaming related. So y'all will hop on, you all will play league, Yu-Gi-O, whatever. Is that also correct?

Yep. And you're going through a breakup. You're kind of leaning on them for support. it sounds like they're actually supportive, but I'm hearing that you feel guilty because it almost sounds kind of one way. It's sort of like, you know, when they are hanging out with you,

they're not asking for your emotional support. You're not supporting them through a breakup. You know, they're kind of logging on to have fun. And when you're kind of logging on and you reach out for support, like it's kind of one way in terms of how the support goes. Yeah. I've been trying to kind of load balance

as weird as that sounds, you know, one time I'll go through a hard time, I'll text one friend, and then I'll keep a rotation of friends of, you know, four or five people to talk to you, so that way it's not like an everyday thing or an every week thing for the same person. So what are you trying to accomplish by load balancing? I'm trying to not to not overbear one person with all of my, For me, I'm going through a sad time, right? So I don't want to have the same person feel like they have to support me. Okay.

And I feel like it would be easier for the group altogether if it's multiple people supporting each other. Okay. So, all right. So let's understand this problem. So you feel guilty, right? Yeah. And the reason that you feel guilty is because there's one way of support. like one way. It's a one-way road.

Yeah. And since it's one-way, what you're sort of doing is you don't want too much traffic down that road. So what you're kind of doing is creating five different one-way streets with five different friends so that you're kind of balancing the load of them supporting you. Yes. And then you're also kind of noticing that maybe it's a masculine thing, maybe it isn't. But definitely in your case and in your particular group, you're using. struggle to sort of understand how to like broach the topic of like how do we talk more about things that are not gaming right exactly and so unrelated yeah it helped for me to turn on my camera just like eye contact wise or uh it's your choice so i'm not going to stream you um i turn on

my camera on discord so that you don't see the stream delay yeah i just it feels weird i have a personal hard time talking with people if like they don't have their cameras on. You're welcome to turn it on. I can, I can, and then I'll move things over. I just don't want to leak you accidentally. That's all good. Okay. So I just can't.

Yeah. So, oh man, this is so much nicer. Right. Yeah. We should think about next time, you know, if people are comfortable showing their face, then everyone can enjoy. Because you're such a, seeing your face makes me feel so much more connected to you. Yeah, it feels so much easier than just talking to my Discord AVI's Cloudy and Smokeball, you know, just a random.

Yeah, so I want to ask you a boss, what did you just do just now by sort of asking if you wanted me to, if I wanted you to turn on your camera? What did you just do there? It's great. I wanted to make eye contact, so I asked you if that was cool with you. Okay. that's pretty cool right so i somehow don't have a hard time asking strangers

for favors and questions yeah do you have a hard time asking your friends for favors oh yeah how do you understand that um uh uh so in in high school i noticed this a lot where uh

i was in i started joining theater things in high school and it's a lot harder to perform in front of friends than it is in front of strangers. It's a lot harder to ask. Like if a stranger sees me drop a book and they pick it up for me, I'm like, all right, thanks, move on. But if my friend

does it, I feel like, oh my God, I do this every time. Or if I feel sad and I reach out to them, I'm like, oh, man, I'm being sad again. I feel like it's too much. I'm noticing that you have a problem owing your friends things. Balance with your friendship sounds very important to you.

Yeah. I view it more as me being guilty. I feel guilty a lot. What are you guilty of? Oh, so many things. I'm guilty of not doing a good job at work. I'm guilty of not reaching out to friends first. A lot of times they'll reach out to me.

I'm guilty of asking people for things and then, like, a lot of times I'll call people, be like, hey, do you remember that show you watched? Do you recommend it? Okay, cool. Bye. And that's it. So you're just, you're getting something from them, but you're not giving anything in return. Yeah, that's the impression I get. They haven't said that to me, but that is, I don't know, I'm trying not to do that anymore. Okay. Have you ever asked? No. I just recognize from one person, one friend has been like, hey, wait, hold on. How are you doing? I haven't seen you in six months. What's going on? And that's only happened once. But yeah, I feel guilty about a lot of things. I see that. So let's kind of talk through this in a couple of different ways. So the first is that it does seem like you're a little bit prone to feeling guilty. And I'm sort of noticing almost this

pattern where if you've got a relationship, this didn't quite resonate with you, but this is sort of what I heard, and I'm sure there's more nuance to it, but that like, this one-way traffic thing seems to bother you a lot. So if your friend picks up a book for you, in a sense, it almost seems like, I mean, everyone drops books. But I imagine you would feel more comfortable if they helped you out with something, if you were able to help them out with something. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then also it's kind of like with this whole thing about,

oh, hey, is that show good? Like, thanks a lot. Kay, thanks, bye. You know, so you're getting something from them and you're not giving anything in return. And so I think there are a couple of things that we can sort of give you kind of very concrete kind of suggestions for you to sort of think about

and see what you feel comfortable with, about how to change the dynamic of your friend group. But I think a lot of this comes down to something kind of simple, which is that I'm noticing that a lot of your guilt or a lot of your mistakes are actually not signaled to you by your friends. No. They're actually like from here.

Yes. Right? What do you think about that? I think it's overall a mechanism that serves me well to. treat people well and to um i think where i got it from was i had a family friend who for context i'm a muslim so he would say that at the day of judgment you know god essentially presents you a book of all the things you've done and you have to review it um and the guy mentioned how people who keep a journal of the things they've done in this life even before the day of judgment their process is

quicker. I don't know why I thought there would be a good idea to do, but I started doing it mentally. Like, this is how I did well. This is what I could have done better. Yeah. And so I start keeping track of all the things I do and all the mistakes I make and all the things I need to improve on. Do you think you were doing that before your friend shared that with you? I might have, but this was probably eight years ago. So it's hard for me to remember that far back. Okay. So, So, Abbas, I'm going to share some thoughts with you, but let's start by kind of organizing. So I think there's like two or three different layers to this. Yeah, I got off track, my bet.

No, no, no. It's good. I mean, that's how humans work, right? So human beings are complex. And your answer or solution isn't going to be simple. Did you just make another mistake? Did we just add something to the book? Yes, because like even with therapy, I go in and I plan out the story of like, this is how my week went.

this is all the things I want to cover. And then my therapist is like, let's talk about that when I'm only five minutes into the story. And then I leave the session thinking, oh, man, I forgot all these things to talk about. I didn't do all this. And yeah. Yeah. So you perceived yourself as making a mistake now. Something has been written in the book of judgment.

Yes. Oh, Abbas is supposed to talk about his friendships. And here he is talking about his guilt and his spirituality in the way that his mind works. Oh, no. Yeah. Right? So do you think you made a mistake there? I didn't follow through with my intention. So yeah. Yeah. So look at my face. Do I think you made a mistake? No. I don't think so, but it weighs on me anyway.

Ways on you anyway. What weighs on you? That I didn't follow through with my intent, that I deviated from the prompt. Okay. So I personally found it useful that you shared that stuff. What do you think about that? I feel concerned because if I'm already deviating this far in, then if I keep talking, I'll keep giving more context, and then I'll deviate even further. And then it's like, how do I explain 22 years of my thought processes?

I'm 22 years of my thought processes in half an hour. I can't. And then it's like, ah, it becomes too much. Okay. So you believe you made a mistake. Yes. I don't believe you made a mistake. That's nice.

Right. So we're agreeing to disagree there. Yeah. I see that. So now here's my concern is like you're talking about, relationship, right? Like a relationship with your friends. And right now,

so I'm, let's say I try to reassure you and I say, bro, it's really not a problem. I'll explain why in a second. But you have, you play wall, right? So like, you have reassurance resistance. So like, as I try to reassure you,

like, you're resistant to that. So 90% of that reassurance, you block, you know, because you've got to, you tank it up. And what does that mean for you and your friends? and your guilt? I play league like it's a single player game,

and I think it applies here as well. Beautiful. How? I learned if I want to climb in league. I was watching L.S., who's a big coach, and he says, it doesn't matter what your other teammates do. You can only fix what you've done. And I think, oh, okay, yeah.

I, you know, I didn't look at the mini map. That's on me. My bad. And so even though there's a lot of information to take and there's a lot of different routes and everybody is going to make mistakes, it's my fault. And so even if my teammate carries, if I had a bad game, I had a bad game. Even if they brought it through and we still won and we had a fun, whatever. But I still didn't look at the mini map. I still didn't track everything.

I didn't do everything I could. Yeah, so I've heard this a lot. So this may be a little sneak preview. So I've been doing a secret experiment outside of creating content. And I play more Dota than League. And I know this sounds kind of weird, but everyone sort of says if you want to climb in a multiplayer game, just play it like a single player game. Like you can't rely on your teammates.

You can't, you know, it's just a single player game. There just happen to be like bots, treat people like bots. And that's the best way to climb. So I know this sounds kind of weird, but I think that that's absolutely. idiotic because it's a multiplayer game. So I did this experiment and hopefully we'll make a YouTube video about it at some work. It's a lot of work where I have, I had two accounts and I calibrated. So this is Dota.

So I don't know if this works out perfectly in league, but I calibrated on both accounts, just me, like playing on both accounts simultaneously. And the only difference is in one account, I, communicated with my team, and in the other account, I just muted everyone and didn't talk at all. And the MMR difference between the two, I don't know how this translates into league, maybe someone in chat can help us out, is about 1,000 MMR, which is like pretty big. Like, it's huge. And I know it sounds kind of weird, but like in a multiplayer game, when you actually communicate

effectively, and I think the reason that people say don't communicate in multiplayer games is because we don't actually work on communication the way that we do on like last hitting or rotating or clicking buttons or things like that communication is a skill yeah absolutely and the reason that people say mute people is because we don't know how to communicate with our team effectively yeah this is somewhat related but like i realize um i learned over the course of the last relationship that you know if i'm listening i can't do anything else i have to like focus 100% and i've had to work on communication, exactly like everything else, where, like, you taught in one of your videos, if you want to listen to somebody, repeat back what they said. And so that was something I had

to build, like, all the other skills. Yeah. So, so I think if we kind of come back to your interpersonal relationships, I'm noticing that, like, I mean, you said it beautifully, that you're, you play it the same way you play league, which is like, like a single player game. Like, you don't, so, so here's what we're going to do. So here's how I'm kind of understanding your situation. So on The one level, there's some stuff that is actually a single player kind of quest. So your propensity towards guilt, your kind of spiritual perspective, which kind of, I can't tell if that, I want to say you're sort of misinterpreting something there in terms of the religion of Islam, but I'm not an expert in Islam and you're the Muslim. So like, if that's, you know, I'm not either. So, so, but, you know, something tells me that sometimes what happens is we have religious or spiritual traditions that intersect with particular.

vulnerabilities in our psychology. And then what happens is instead of like recognizing this is a problem within me that I'm prone to guilt, and instead of like working on that in sort of a healthy way, sometimes what happens is religion will come in and say, no, no, no, you're not prone to guilt. That's not a problem you should fix. That's part of the religion. You need to be guiltier. And it'll kind of reinforce it.

And in my experience, like, sometimes that can be unhealthy. I'm not saying that religion is bad. I think it's, you know, there are vulnerabilities in our psychology that can be exacerbated by all kinds of external influences, whether they be friends, family, religion, philosophy, like, you know, people can sort of get into nihilism and stuff like that in a very unhealthy way. So that's just kind of the personal piece. And then I want to talk a little about the interpersonal piece. So very concretely, if we kind of go back to the core issue, it's that you just play league with your friends. and you're kind of leaning on them for emotional support. So this is where I would really encourage, like, communication.

So I know it sounds kind of weird, but I'd start with a simple question, like, hey, I've been going through a breakup recently. I really appreciate your support. What's it like for you when I ask, you know, when we like talk about this instead of talking about league? That's scary. What's scary about it? It's trying to try. tread ground in a totally, like, the grass isn't cut.

It's all tall grass. Trying to figure out how to navigate a new avenue for the relationships in my life. And so that's scary because I don't know how receptive they'll be to that. Maybe they'll just want to play league. Maybe they just, you know, they had a long day at work. They talked about it with somebody else. And so they just want to chill. Yeah.

but like yeah it's unknown it's an unknown absolutely right and so you talked earlier about how maybe this is a dynamic with men and i think that generally like culturally like we're not my experience growing up as a man i can't really say if it's exclusively for men maybe women do this too maybe trans people do it who knows right we can't really comment on them but i know that generally speaking we just we just play games and we don't really talk about stuff much you know yeah yeah i've had to bring emotion wheels with my friends of like yeah they say i'm feeling bad and i say okay what do you mean pull up an emotion wheel please and we'll go through it and they'll they'll say oh i'm feeling guilty anxious yeah so i mean do you think you're helping them in that moment i hope so that was

one time success rate so far okay so so that's also the kind of thing where i think you should ask for feedback in that situation be like hey was it kind of weird that i like brought up this a motion wheel? Or was that, you know, just like talk to them because I think the issue here is that you're not, you're kind of operating alone and you're not getting any feedback. And you've got to be careful because there's that reassurance resistance where even if they say, oh, no, it's totally fine, a boss. It doesn't bother me at all.

Like, you've got to be a little bit careful about your reaction to when you ask a question, you really have to listen and try to accept what they say, whether it's good or bad. And even if they say, hey, it's a pain in the ass. I just want to play league. how would that make you feel? I get it. Right? So that's like pretty cool

because even if you're cutting the tall grass and there's a gigantic snake underneath, now you know what their boundary is and you're not going to burden them anymore. So like communication is really important. The other thing that I'd recommend, and this is also, this is going to be even scarier, is that you actually tell your friends like,

hey, do you all have time for like a call to talk about stuff that isn't league? I think that'd be cool. It's a lot easier to do that in person. because, you know, you wrap up a YouTube video or whatever and you just chill, but online, like... So, I mean, if you've got a group chat or whatever, like I would actually orchestrate that conversation

and almost take something of a leadership role where I would share with your friend group, hey, here's what I've... Here's been my experience. I went through a breakup recently. I've leaned on y'all for support. One thing that I noticed is that it feels kind of one way to me because... I don't know if it's just because y'all haven't gone through a breakup

or, you know, what's going on here. But I just wanted to let you know that I'm, like, I've really appreciated y'all being there for me and it means a lot to me. And my door is always open if anyone needs support. And also, I'm kind of curious, like, how do you all feel about talking, like getting together and talking about stuff or, like, you know, that isn't league? And just communicate with your team. You know, you're not saying.

and this is where people kind of screw up with communication, is that oftentimes they think that, like, communication means telling your teammates what to do. Hey, like, we need to go kill Barron or the dragon or whatever, right? Like, we need to do this. We need to do this. Whereas, like, being an effective communicator, especially in a MoBA, I found it's way, way better to ask questions instead of telling people what to do. So, like, you can ask people like, hey, do you want me to ward on the top side of the map

or the bottom side of the map? Like, where do you want to play as a carry? Yeah. And then like the neat thing, the reason that you gain 500 MMR from that move is that if you ward somewhere and your carry is playing on the opposite side and they get killed instead of raging at them. If you ask them ahead of time, hey, where do you want me to ward? They like subconsciously, they're going to go play around your vision. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And then they won't feed. It's like bizarre. But if you tell him, hey, dumbass, go play around the vision. You're on the wrong side of the map. They're just going to rage at you. they're going to int down mid. So, like, this is where,

I know it sounds kind of weird, but maybe video games are a good analogy for real life. And what I really encourage is that you just have a conversation with your friends and be like, hey, I really appreciate what you all have done. I'm kind of curious, like,

if anyone is, like, have y'all gone through anything, you know, that I can help you with? You can even, like, open the door in that session or just kind of talk to them about, is this okay? Is this not okay? And the one thing you've got to be kind of careful about is your reassurance resistance.

Because this may be the kind of kind of thing where if they say like, oh, no, it's totally fine. Or maybe they'll say something wild, which is, no, like, I actually like, it's so nice to hear that you appreciated. It makes me feel like I did something useful with my day instead of just playing league to be able to help a friend of mine. Now, I don't know if they're going to be able to tap into that quite yet. I don't know about that one. Yeah. We're all still in the, man, that's crazy phase. So, yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so, I mean, I think the key thing, though, is that, you know, have a conversation with them. Like, you can solicit feedback from both individuals and even get together as a group because, like, this is what needs to happen, right?

Someone needs to take the lead and change the dynamic of your communication and open the door for a conversation that is not just video games. How does that sound to you? It sounds like it's exactly what I'm looking for. I'm now, I now need to think and reflect on how to do that more pragmatically. Like, once we get in the call, I imagine scheduling will be fine. Once we get in the call, how do we start talking about our day? I guess I just have to have questions lined up. Like, how's worked been the past month?

Yeah, so I'm going to give you some pragmatic tips. This is great. We're not going to leave you hanging here, Abbas. So I would schedule a call, right? And I would tell people like, hey, I wanted to, if I were in your shoes, you don't have to duplicate this precisely. But I would say, you know, hey, I was just hoping to hop on a call with everybody for like maybe half an hour. And I wanted to talk a little bit about communication. A couple of things.

I noticed that most of the time when we talk, we talk about games. As you all know, I've been going through a breakup recently. And I found a lot of like really awesome support from y'all. So first of all, I wanted to thank everyone. The other question that I kind of had is that as y'all have been supporting me, I sort of feel like that's a little bit lopsided. And that I want to just tell people that I'm here to support y'all. And I was just curious about having a conversation about whether we want to like intentionally talk about things going on in our lives that are not gaming. That's why I'd like to meet.

And to just basically figure out if people are on board for this kind of thing. Are you interested? Yeah. And then you can go to like, I wouldn't come in with like, hey, what's going on in your life? Like, hey, like, are you dating? Like, you know, don't come in with a set of questions because you got to get people on board. They've got to like queue up first, right? You got to accept the party invite and then you have to sign up for the queue.

You don't want to just like queue up and then like they're in a game and they're like, hey, we didn't sign up for this. Does that make sense? So I think frame setting here is very important. Yeah. And I liked how you framed it as thank you for the support. Because personally, six months ago, you know, I would have said, sorry, I'm such a, sorry I've been so down or sorry I've been relying so heavily on y'all.

So, yeah. Yeah, what's the difference there? Beautiful. I got this from a day nine video where he talked about showing the flipping apologies for appreciation. So instead of saying, sorry, I'm rambling, thank you for listening. sorry I've been so sad. Thanks for your patience type of thing. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's been helping a lot. Yeah, so that's going to help with your guilt, right? Because it's like there's a lot of good subtlety there. One is the acknowledgement that it's okay to be struggling. And that that's not something you need to apologize for. And then you can express gratitude. So I think you can give that a shot. Just be mentally prepared that this is often, like sometimes it's a lot for people.

And they don't really know how to respond. So if it doesn't work out, you know, come back to Discord, talk to us, talk to the community about it, or maybe post on subreddit or whatever, whether it goes well or doesn't go well, like, you know, give us an update because we'd love to hear. And for other people who are listening as well, if you want to, like, deepen your relationship with your friends, this is kind of exactly how you do it, especially because there's a, there's like, I don't know how to say this, there's like an unwritten set of rules. and no one knows how to like broach, like no one knows how to like enter the unexplored territory of like talking about feelings. What kind of get on, you know, help each other out with here and there and things like that. But like this is like you just have a conversation about it. And ask people if you're worried, if you're feeling guilty, don't sit with that guilt on your own.

Ask people, hey, what's it like? Is it okay that I do this? Like I'd love to help you out. You know, I'm always available to talk. I kind of feel like I owe you. you know and and you know people will say oh like if they say that like what if you say that a boss what are your friends going to say uh i don't know i kind of just want to do this for me because like for me i love uh my friends get together we play yu geo once a week i love that well honestly

my favorite parts are the half hour as we're building up and we just catch up and we just talk like oh yeah i went to this food place i saw this move like that to me is my favorite part of the night when we just talk to each other um yeah and so i hope they're receptive to it and if they're not i don't know there's like eight friends in the group so chances are at least some of them absolutely right yeah so and in terms of the guilt and the spirituality and stuff like that i think that's maybe a topic for a different day does that sound okay that's that's a different day for sure uh that's something I got to talk with with my parents and you know figuring that out yeah awesome so um any kind of would you like to kind of summarize takeaways like yeah what's the situation that you're in and

and what do you think you should do about it like what sits well so my current situation I guess as a recap would be I have a group of friends and we're long distance so we don't see each other in person very much When we talk online over Discord, it's usually about games and through games exclusively. And I want to try to bridge the gap of having a more personal, interpersonal relationship. And so to do that, some ways would be framing why I want to do it, saying, like, I appreciate how you guys have been supporting me in tough times. And I either open the door or my purpose. plan would be the schedule like, hey, Saturday night, can we hang out and just talk? And seeing how they respond to that and also, at least for my personal situation, if I feel

guilt, recognizing why, and asking the person more directly, and seeing how they feel about it, maybe they don't see the same thing I do at all. So, what else? Oh, I think having face cams helps a lot. It's a lot harder to keep track of conversations. Yeah, absolutely. So great tips. So just to clarify a couple things.

So I think asking your individual friends, how they receive and perceive your leaning on them for support, like whether it's okay or it's too much or too little, signaling to them that your door is open if they ever need that. right because sometimes it's like hard to because like I can imagine that they're in a situation where they're feeling guilty too I don't want to burden a boss with my problems but you're you're totally fine with it and so everyone's like I don't want to burden my friend with my problems I don't want to burden my friend with my problems so you're all just sitting there in a single like you're in

party queue but everyone's playing the single player game yeah right and then you don't you know I'm not going to rotate to their lane they're not going to rotate to my lane and then y'all are just going to lose. Whereas like, we just need rotations both ways. And that's how you win a game, right? And so sort of signaling to people that you appreciate what they've done for you, how is it for them, and that you'd love to support them if they ever need it. Appreciate what they do.

See how it is for them and see what we can do to build on that. Yeah, 100%. Okay. And then just watch out for your reassurance resistance. I will work on that. Yeah. Just notice it. Notice like, oh, like this person is,

telling me something and I'm not able to take it in. That's where you're going to start with that. That's definitely a problem. Yeah. Assurance, resistance. Yeah. I'm going to keep these noted. All right. Cool. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Abbas. Take care. You too. Bye.