Early Adversity, Attachment, and Friendship

If you’ve ever felt like some friendships take more energy than you have, or that you struggle with how to belong, you might also have wondered: Is this just my personality or is there something else going on?

I’ve spent a lot of time asking that question about myself, others, and even other animals. One of the gorilla families I’ve studied for a few years now includes a female that always seems to be on the outside looking in. Recently, I spoke with evolutionary anthropologist Joan Silk about baboons, early adversity, and social bonds. Her answers, combined with work from the long‑running Amboseli Baboon Research Project in Kenya, suggest that the story of how we connect starts much earlier than we think, and some of it comes down to our biology.

What is a “bad start” for a baboon?

Young yellow baboon

Source: Thomas Fuhrmann, CC BY-SA 4.0

Many of us experience difficult early life experiences, and baboons are no different. Some are born during a drought or when food is hard to come by, or they may have a mother who isn’t well connected. Others may experience more significant events, like losing their mother while they’re still young. In the Amboseli population, researchers have followed hundreds of baboons from birth to death for decades and have been able to keep track of the specific events each baboon has experienced and see how that shapes them over time.

This long‑term research has revealed a finding that hits close to home for many people. When females accumulate several of these early hits, their adult lives are dramatically shorter. In one long‑term study, female baboons that experienced three or more sources of early adversity died roughly ten years earlier than females with one or no adverse events. So what is driving this reduced lifespan?

The same females who had the toughest early lives tended to be more socially isolated as adults. We know from research on humans and parrots that social isolation is registered at the molecular level (shorter telomeres). For female baboons, social isolation means they are less integrated into social activities like grooming, resting together, and mutual support that characterize baboon life, especially among females. I can’t help thinking about Buzinza, the mountain gorilla female who spends most of her day with her adult son and the second‑in‑command silverback on the fringes of the main group.

Silk and her colleagues have also shown that early adversity is linked to weaker social bonds and other changes in social behavior. For example, in baboons, quiet grunts serve as important signals of friendly intention. It’s a baboon way of saying, “I’m going to be nice now,” especially after conflict or when approaching another female’s infant. Females who experienced more hardship early on were less likely to use these grunts and less effective at building strong, stable relationships. In other words, the very animals who might need friendships the most are, on average, less equipped to cultivate and maintain them. The biology seems to follow suit. When a female baboon loses someone she is close to, say her mother or a sister, the stress hormone cortisol spikes for her. That suggests that she is experiencing a deep sense of loss, not just a change in group composition.

When I was younger, I thought I had a best friend. Then, almost overnight, she became friends with others and I was dropped unceremoniously. For a long time after that, I didn’t like my closest friends knowing each other. I preferred to be the center with separate spokes, rather than part of a tightly interconnected social network. I wasn’t trying to orchestrate anything; it just felt safer if everyone I cared about wasn’t in the same room at once. Over time I have gotten better, but still…

Many people who have experienced bullying, repeated exclusion, or unstable caregiving histories report some version of this. For example, it can be common to withdraw under stress rather than reaching out. There might even be a feeling that friendships are draining. From the outside, it can look like shyness, introversion, or “just not being that social.” Of course, not all withdrawal or discomfort is rooted in a childhood marked by difficulty. Some individuals are more naturally introverted or socially cautious; others are more gregarious and novelty‑seeking. Personality plays a role. Even so, the baboon data suggest that early adversity can shape how social engagement develops.

In humans, studies on childhood adversity and adult health tell a similar story. People who experience more early stress (for example, loss, instability, neglect, or violence) are at higher risk for physical and mental health problems later in life, including difficulties with attachment and trust. The question is not whether they “care” about others; it’s whether closeness feels safe enough and sustainable enough to invest in.

When friendship feels costly

One phrase that came up in my conversation with Joan Silk is that friendship can feel “energetically expensive.” Think about what real friendship asks of us over time. We devote time to initiating and responding, accept some asymmetry or lack of reciprocity (temporarily) when the other person is struggling, figure out misunderstandings, mismatched expectations, conflict, and the logistics of adult life. For someone with a relatively smooth early history and a nervous system that expects people to be mostly harmless, that may feel easier.

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For someone whose early life was marked by instability, rejection, or unreliable caregiving, every step of that process carries an extra tax:

• Is this worth it?
• Will they stay?
• What happens if we argue?

These questions can also plague other parts of life, not just friendships, but also our work relationships.

What this means for therapy and everyday life

So what do we do about this, practically speaking?

If you’re a clinician working with someone who struggles to form or maintain friendships, it may be helpful to consider the biology as well as the psychology.

• Withdrawal is often about protection. For many people, especially those with a history of bullying, exclusion, or chaotic caregiving, pulling back from others is a way to manage feelings of being overwhelmed or overstimulated, not a sign that they don’t care.
• Friendship difficulties may involve friendship signals. In baboons, early adversity is linked to less use of “I come in peace” signals like grunting and to weaker social bonds. In humans, the analogs might be fewer positive bids, or difficulty sending or reading small, friendly signals—tone of voice, a quick check‑in, a softening gesture.
• Mismatch matters. Some clients do better with fewer, deeper connections; others need bigger, looser networks. Helping people find environments that fit their temperament can sometimes be more effective than urging them to “be more social” as a general strategy.
• Repair is a teachable skill. Many of us never learned how to deal with conflict well. Borrowing from baboons, one can explicitly practice low‑intensity “I want to reconnect” signals and other small gestures of reconciliation even while feelings are still mixed.

For individuals, a few key ideas can also be useful:

• If friendships feel draining, that doesn’t mean you’re “bad at socializing.” It may mean your nervous system is overwhelmed.
• Not wanting all your friends to know each other or preferring one‑on‑one time to group hangouts, can be a reasonable adaptation, but it’s worth asking whether it still serves you now.
• You can experiment with sending slightly more “grunts”, or in human terms, brief, low‑stakes bids for connection, without immediately jumping into full vulnerability.

One of my favorite lines from the Amboseli researchers is a question they now ask of their own data: “Can friendship rescue you?” In baboons, the answer appears to be “sometimes.” Early adversity still carries a cost, but individuals with stronger social ties in adulthood often do better than similarly unlucky peers who remain isolated. Social relationships don’t erase hard beginnings, but they can buffer you from some of the more negative outcomes.

Here’s what to remember. The quality of our relationships predicts not only mental health but also physical health and longevity. Yet those very relationships can be hardest to form when our early experiences have taught us to be cautious. There may be understandable reasons why trust and connection feel harder for some of us, but here is the optimistic piece: We are still capable of learning that some people are safe enough to grunt toward.

If you want to check out the conversation with Joan Silk, you can listen here.