The special friend more often than not occurs in romantic endeavors but can occur in friendships as well. This person is the pinnacle of the egoic dream, the One, a person who promises to fulfill our desires first and then our needs. They capitalize on the ego's tumescent yearning for separation and isolation. They offer a fortress where everything we could ever want exists—everything, of course, other than freedom. The promise of the special friend is that we can have everything we want provided we are willing to live as a hostage.
The special friend in an OM is the equivalent to the "in love" spot in the pocket behind the one o'clock spot. This spot can feel so good that we want to forego all others. Once stroked, it can hijack and occupy our attention. We must engage with the special friend, and the in love spot, very rarely, because of their highly concentrated potency. Just a drop can activate a craving that will have us living for more, experiencing radically diminishing returns yet unable to turn our attention away from it. Everything else looks pale in comparison to interacting with this friend.
What we don't realize is that no one person and no one spot are meant to deliver that kind of potency for very long. In fact, they can't. While they are set on reducing our world to focus only on them—starting with a mass expenditure of seductive attention—they cannot keep it up and so they begin to conserve energy, becoming withholding and difficult. They only "activate" when we threaten to remove our attention. We are hooked. We continue to ingest on the most addictive reinforcement schedule, performing more and more for one very rare "hit."
The special friend lacks the power of optionality. Lacking the facility of attention to focus on multiple things simultaneously, they send all their power into one place that becomes hyper-powered while other aspects wither. They mistake enmeshment for intimacy and in fact, eschew true intimacy. True intimacy is welcoming, being with, and releasing all things. A person with hyper-powered attention sees that as threatening and regards their way as "higher."
They will keep taking hostages, never knowing why the connection always dies—why they always find themselves living in a dead relationship or why the other person always leaves, with the life sucked out of them because the special friend demanded more from them than they could ever offer. They are seeking a kind of security that does not exist.
The specific challenge of this friend is that they will make us their god. The difference between this friend and the comfort friend is that the comfort friend will flatter, but with no power behind the flattery. The special friend has the power to keep us pumped up. We truly feel like we are the only one who matters in the entire world, that we are the secret place where they reveal what they otherwise would conceal.
We feel like we are privy to something the rest of the world isn't. This particular sensation is a favorite intoxicant of the tumescent mind and the special friend is beyond a supplier; they are a dealer. In exchange, we agree to be an extension of their avoidance of the rest of the world by being (at first, a willing) hostage as they agree to use their abundant power to bolster our ego.
This works until they run out of power. They have become familiar with our insecurities and use them to keep us in the hostage position. More often than not, they play upon our inability to please them. When we first started out, the ability to please was intoxicating. Everything we did delighted them. Now, they are ungratifiable. But because of the reinforcement schedule, we try harder than ever. We become a hamster on a wheel.
The only way out is to get out. Our mind will tell us there is no place better, continually comparing everything else—including the present interior feeling—to that first hit. We start by drawing back into ourselves, back into the central circle where there is optionality, and use that to pull ourselves into any other world.
If we stay with it, the attention that has been gripped around the special friend will suddenly begin to open again, like an internal unfolding. It is important to immediately direct attention into other sources because we will want to go back to the known. It is helpful to seek sources that will catalyze growth and require us to extend ourselves.
When we no longer agree to be our special friend's hostage, they are forced back into the world. Once we are plugged into other sources, we can begin to interact with the special friend, provided it is in our range and they agree to plug into other sources as well. Be aware they may not take us up on it; they may simply take another hostage. However, if we operate with great love and care, we can slowly begin to introduce them to other people and other worlds, so they see a more gratifying form of connection. The potency of their attention can be distributed in such a way that they receive feedback from multiple locations and people. They no longer live in all-or-nothing relationships, but develop the gradients that bring freedom.
Both of us finding this optionality is the highest realization of this type of friendship. From here, we become friends among friends. We each have earned our status as special not by being willing to feed each other's hunger for separation and avoidance, but because in our willingness to forego hyper-powered focus, we contribute to true liberation. We do the work that does not provide the big "hit" but gives us the continuous power of true self-esteem, something no one else can give us.