The Skills That Make Friendships Last

What is the number one thing that you can do to make your life happy? [sighs] I'll cut to the chase. It's having a few good friends. But almost none of us who grew up with trauma feels like we're good at that. Friendship skills, though, can be learned. Here's how. Research shows that people you hang out with have a bigger effect on how your life goes than just about anything else. They influence the choices you make. They influence the standards you set for yourself. They influence the other people that you're going to meet in the future. But the weird thing is people hardly talk about this. We talk about romance and how to date, but did anyone ever teach you how to have friends? No. It's assumed that we'll just pick it up by osmosis or from our families. If this is something your parents didn't model for you or they couldn't model for you because they were really limited or damaged in this area too, you are so not alone. Especially for people who grew up with trauma, learning to have friends and be a friend is so tricky. Maybe you struggle to have friends or you have friends but the relationship stays on the shallow end and you don't get close or you get close but then your trauma symptoms can get the better of you and something happens to trigger you and the whole thing blows up. Big argument, little argument that you can't really recover from or the friendship just crumbles. Has this happened to you? I'm guessing it's happened a number of times. If you grew up with abuse and neglect, there's a high probability that having friends is a part of life that gets hard for you sometimes. And this is a big reason why unhealed trauma can be so devastating to your life over time. You end up isolated. You don't have those people who love you and get you and who are there for you when you need them. And this is really important. Not having that is a big setback. And I'm sure that it's robbed you in some ways of the life that you deserve. But the good news is this can change and you can heal and the path of your life can start getting better right now if you can develop some friendship skills and learn to form friendships with good people. Now this is something I had to really work on in my life. My trauma symptoms kind of got worse over time in my early adulthood and so good friends that I had were pulling away and I didn't know what was wrong. Now I know, now we all know it's complex PTSD and it has a common pattern of symptoms that once you know what they are, even if you haven't totally healed them yet, it can clarify what may have been going on and going wrong in your friendships and what part of these problems is something you can change. So, here's what I learned. First, it's so important that you pick the right people for friends because if you're like a lot of people with childhood PTSD, you find that troubled people have this funny allure for you. What is it about them? It's a mystery. They feel so charmingly comfortable, so unthreatening, so much like home. And maybe you have a history of buddying up with the most troubled kid in the class or somebody who turns out to have a drug problem or people who are really not available to be good friends. So the first thing is to start identifying who would be the good healthy people for you to hang out with. Now we talk about this a lot in my dating and relationships course and in my connection course because this broken picker problem is really common for people with childhood PTSD. But the way you choose friends can be just as rickety. Now, the key to get clear with yourself is to actually write down what characteristics are absolutely essential for you. So, let's say it's that people are kind, right? They're honest. They reciprocate your interest in friendship. You don't have to know these people yet, but you're defining what the right people are like, how you will recognize them. And then you also spell out what characteristics you cannot have in friends. And this might be characteristics where you had a blind spot before. And you know, it brings your life down. So, I used to have a blind spot for people who had serious drug addictions. First, I wouldn't see it, and then I would see it, but I'd be too afraid of loneliness to say anything or stop hanging out with them. And I had no business hanging out with serious addicts. I was never into drugs myself, but that's what I grew up with and that's where I felt at home. And so I'd use kind of fuzzy reasoning to rationalize staying friends with serious addictions. And it would introduce all kinds of trouble into my life. Drama, shame, people stealing my stuff. I know, right? It didn't fit with the other parts of my life where I was fairly functional. And I had to make a decision that I could not have that in my life

anymore. Not with the blind spot that I personally have and the way I couldn't seem to keep boundaries at the time. So you write down what your lines are. What characteristics are a big no way for people that you let into your life. Okay? So that helps keep certain people out. And as you may be fearing, it's true that setting boundaries about who can be in your life could introduce a period of loneliness. You end some friendships and the new people haven't arrived yet. You haven't found them yet. Now, I know finding good, healthy people is easier said than done. When you had a crappy childhood, sometimes trauma symptoms show up that make things harder for that, too. Maybe you get emotionally intense and fall apart. Friends might stand by you at first, but part of falling apart is it makes a person very inwardly focused. And in the long run, this can push friends away, too. Or worse, maybe your stress comes out as a tendency to criticize and blame your friends when you're feeling overwhelmed. So, there's conflict. You're hurting feelings. They don't want to deal with that, so they pull away. Or maybe you're the one who pulls away. So, these are common trauma-driven dynamics and reactions to ordinary stress that can happen in a friendship. And even if you're able to keep your feelings under control enough to not ruin everything in a big explosion, that kind of self-control can really limit the depth of a relationship. It can limit how much fun the friendship can be if you're just holding yourself together tightly all the time. There's not the deep connection and trust between you and your friend that would be needed for a friendship to last. And so over time, being too controlled will cause a friendship to fade, too. And it's a sad and h hard part of trauma healing that this part can be so hard to change. But you can change these dynamics by working on yourself. So one of the first things you can do to have great relationships is just pick good people and then work over time to be a good friend. When you want to hang out with somebody, I would suggest if it's at all awkward, invite them to do something with you. So not just random hanging out, but an activity. With good friends, it's normal to get together without a plan or without an activity. And that's really good with somebody you're already close with, where there's no need to have a plan. But if you're just getting to know somebody, doing some activity can kind of take the focus off the interpersonal dynamic so much. You know, a little is good, but a lot can be overwhelming. Now, one of my favorite examples, I always say this, bowling, right? The bowling alley near me closed during the pandemic. I hate that. If you go to a movie with somebody, right, you can't talk. If you go to a restaurant, you have to talk the whole time. But if you go bowling, you can kind of talk, bowl, talk, bowl. And if things get weird or you need a breather, you can just really focus on the bowling for a little while and then come back to the conversation. So doing things helps. The next thing is about being a good listener. Now, everybody knows this, but try this, okay? When you get together with your friend, spend 30 minutes just doing an experiment. Only listen to them. Don't talk about yourself and instead focus on listening and responding to what they're saying about themselves. Now, I'm not saying do this forever, but just as an experiment and as practice, just listen to the other person and reflect on what they're saying and give them feedback. Now, it may feel really uncomfortable to not talk about yourself at all, right? Um [clears throat] because what's normal what people do often is you say hey this thing happened to me and it's normal for somebody else to say oh that happens to you me too one time you know and then you tell a story about how it happened to you so it's natural to relate information about yourself when someone tells you something about themselves that's a way many of us think that we're being a good friend and sometimes it is but when it goes too far it can make the other person feel interrupted and deflated about something they were trying to be heard about. So, it's good to really, you know, [clears throat] hear what someone's trying to say, to really hear it. So, when they tell you about something that happened, you can go, "Wow, what was that like for you? " And then what happened, right? And uh, well, that wow, that's weird. You you listen to what they're saying and respond to what they're saying. Don't relate it to yourself. That's how you can get closer to a person. 30 minutes. Just try not talking about yourself, okay? It will teach you a lot. So, this one time my husband and I went to a party where we didn't really know people and we were kind of anxious about the party because we both would prefer to be at a party where we know somebody. So, just as a strategy to make the evening fun, we decided to do the experiment. And we made a rule for the whole evening, just a secret rule. We didn't tell anybody we were doing it for the whole party. We only listened and talked about what other people were saying. We never ever talked about ourselves. And it was funny. We were so popular. We got invited by two other couples to have dinner sometimes. And honestly, that

rarely happens, you know, when we meet people. They didn't know anything about us. And here's the funny thing, they never asked a single thing about us, right? See, they weren't great listeners either. And it didn't feel great to never be asked, but it really like raised my awareness about, wow, you know, that is not what's going on in a conversation with a lot of people. Some are really great at it. So anyway, we never actually ended up having dinner with anybody, but it was a really good lesson for me that you can just listen and you can actually learn a lot about people. It reminds me um when I used to I used to have this work that involved a lot of travel and a bunch of us would travel to other cities and do a consulting job and then travel somewhere else. And a lot of times people got together and had wine at dinner. And at a certain phase of my life, I decided I just didn't want to drink alcohol anymore. And for like 8 years I didn't drink any alcohol. And um it was so interesting because when you sit together and you don't drink alcohol with people who are just having some wine with dinner like they get very open about stuff and um and I was just very a aware of myself and it was a little bit of a contact high to be around people who were having a glass or two of wine. So I felt relaxed. I felt like myself, but I wasn't accidentally self-disclosing a bunch of stuff, which is what especially back at that time of my life was likely to have happened. And the other thing I liked about it is that like if I would go to the ladies room at 10:00 at night and go to the mirror to wash my hands, I'd look in the mirror and my face was still fresh. It wasn't all like red with running mascara. It was a nice little thing. So, you know, not drinking wine and doing a really good job of listening is a way to really show up with other people with all your faculties. And I'm not saying you have to be so perfect all the time that you're just with your faculties all the time. Sometimes you get to relax. But I am saying if you struggle to make friends, anything you can do to heighten your awareness of what the dynamic is and just pay attention to what your natural inclinations are, what's hard for you, what other people are like. Like I was really surprised. I thought that these other people at the party were people that we had to impress. But the fact that they never asked about us and talked about themselves, you know, uh I don't know. It just wasn't that impressive. It was okay, you know, it just wasn't that impressive, though. So, I learned a lot of people are not good listeners, but just about everyone is hungry to be listened to. So, here's another thing to keep in mind, and it's another form of good listening, is don't give unsolicited advice. If somebody says, "Oh, I had a hard day yesterday. I had a headache all day. " You don't have to jump in and tell them what you do about a headache and go, "Oh, you know what you have to do? " They're not really telling you about the headache, unless people specifically ask for advice. Hey, what would you do if you had a headache? It's, you know, it's just better to listen and hear what it is they really wanted you to hear, which is that they had a hard day. It was so hard. They had a headache the whole time. And then you can say, "Wow, that sounds like a hard day. what did you do? [sighs and gasps] That's how a friend listens. So, similar to that, you can give them affirmation. a word of praise recognizing something good about them, a compliment. People like to be appreciated more than you might think. And obviously, you shouldn't do it too much. It, you know, at a certain point it becomes manipulative of other people and that's not good. But when you can give a sincere compliment, make it a clean compliment. Don't say, "Oh gosh, your blouse is so pretty. Mine is so ugly though, but I love yours. That's not a clean compliment. That's kind of like loaded, right? You're putting them on the spot to say something about your blouse. No, yours is very nice. A clean compliment is when you go, you know, that shirt you're wearing just looks great. It's a really good color for you. That's it. And you just make it clean. Nice clean compliment. And people like it. And it boosts their spirits. They need encouragement. And they like it when their accomplishments and the good things about them are noticed. That's just a good friend thing to do is to notice and encourage what is good in another person. Now, here's [clears throat] another good listening thing. When your friend has told you about a big thing they're expecting, maybe they're giving a speech at an event next week or they're they have a final or they tell you about something that was hard, like they recently had shoulder surgery. A good friend follows up on that, maybe calls them a few days later and says, "Hey, I was just checking in. How'd the speech go? " or "How's your shoulder doing today? If you think about it, people who do that for you, those are the people who you end up closest with. That's like showing up for people and actually paying attention. Not just in the moment in the conversation, but over time. That's what a good friend is. Who, you know, it's not just small talk. It's it's connection. It's a durable connection between you. If you want to have a friend, you've got to be a friend. And if you want to have a good friend, you've got to be a good friend. Now, another thing is to be a believer in your friend. Everybody has

self-doubt. And when we become friends with people, we'll begin to reveal what those doubts are. And they might be something like, well, you know, I'm thinking about changing jobs, but I think I might be kidding myself that anyone would ever hire me. So, you know what a good friend is? It's someone who sees your very best potential and believes in you and can express that to you and remind you of your strengths and why you are employable and supports you in finding ways to make that happen. [clears throat] That's how to be a believer and your friend. I think a lot of people we tend to think that if we don't put somebody down then we're not causing any harm. But actually people need to have a witness that they're doing something right and that there's potential for them to do something even better. — [clears throat] — So good friends can believe in the best possible outcome and always encourage a friend toward that next step. A good friend also shows up for the hard stuff. And that means picking people up from the airport, visiting them in the hospital, helping them move their furniture, and sitting with them when they're grieving when they've lost a loved one. I know that when there was a period in my life where I had a lot of tragedy, I really found out who my friends were. A lot of people who I thought were good friends, they disappeared. They didn't help. They didn't even call or they said, "Let me know if there's anything I can do. " Or, "I don't know what to say. " You don't even know what you need when you're in that state. So, a when people say, you know, if there's anything I can do, you'll notice nothing really follows up. And that's kind of baked into that comment of like, "Let me know if there's anything I can do. " There are special people who know how to ask if you need help. They know what to say. They suggest a thing or two. They say, "Would it help if I picked up some groceries on my way over? " and would it be okay if I wash these dishes right now? It was the people who did that for me, who took the time to come see me in the hospital, even though it was far away and so boring and creepy and hard to park. And they are the people who made a huge difference in my life right when I was the most depressed. And they encouraged me and took me for walks around the corridors. In the long run, those are the people who became the lifelong friends. It's a beautiful thing to do for other people. So, you want to show up for the good times, the weddings, the parties, the celebrations, but you also want to show up for the hard stuff. And a good friend shows up for the good and the bad. You never want to talk behind your friend's back. That's important. I'm just going to say this. You don't really want to say anything bad about anyone who's not present, but especially your friends. Don't ever talk about them behind their back. I mean, even if you know for a fact they're never going to know just on the off chance that the energy reaches them. You know, our nervous systems are connected and we can feel these things in each other. You know, if somebody says, "No, I'm not mad. " You can feel when they're mad, right? We're connected. The people we love especially, you know, can feel that. So, you don't want to talk about your friends behind their back. Have their back. Protect their identity. Protect who they are. Protect their hearts. And finally, stay in touch with them. This is one of the terrible things about contemporary times is that we think, well, I said hello on Instagram and I texted happy birthday or I stuck it on Facebook. But if you're not talking to people face to face or at least on the telephone, it's really hard to sustain a close friendship. Messaging on social media, it's not nothing, but for those purposes, it just doesn't count. So whenever you can go see people face to face. If you can't see them face to face, talk on the phone or video chat. If you can't talk on the phone, send an email. And if you can't send an email, send a text. And if you can't do that, okay, fine. Talk to them on social media. If I do all those things for people, they don't do it for me. Then go back to the beginning of the video where I said the first thing is how you choose people. It's all about how you choose your friends. So these are some of the ways that you can be a better friend. If you want my free PDF listing these friendship skills, click the link in the top line of the description section below this video. And right below that, you'll find a link to my book, Reeregulated, where I'll show you how being able to connect with people is a core aspect of healing from early trauma. I'll show you how to do it. Don't forget to write your review on Amazon. That would be doing me a favor. Thanks, and I'll see you very soon. If you grow up with childhood trauma, you might have ended up with a tendency to overshare and then you might regret it or feel shame or actually put your safety in jeopardy. Hey.