Friendship
Welcome to Takeout Therapy. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety specialist private practice therapist, and total mental health geek. Stick with me for the next few minutes, and I'll teach you what you need to know to have emotionally healthier and more peaceful way of life. I promise a little free mental health education can't hurt. We should have had it much earlier, but It's never too late to learn.
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Let's dig in. Well, hello there friend. Here we are for another take out therapy lesson. Do you notice how I always start the episode with, well, hello there friend? You know, I love to I love that.
I love the expression of friend. It means hello there you. You're just like me. Hello there, one of me. Hello there, fellow earthling.
Right? It doesn't mean like we're friends Well, I mean, of course, we're friends unless you're my client and then you're not my friend because I'm not supposed to be friends with my clients. Although I love my clients, and I totally wish we could get together and just have a nice cup of tea. Anywho? Hello, friend?
Today's episode is all about friendship because isn't friendship vague? Oh my gosh. Friendship is like this undefined relationship without really a set structure. So sometimes, doesn't friendship get confusing and uncomfortable? Or honestly, it's just gotta end.
If you are interested in digging into the subject of friendship, if you're like me, and friends have come and they've gone and it's hard to figure out what's wet sometimes. This episode will help us both. But first, I wanna invite you to my mindfulness mini boot camp. What I've done is I created a fabulous little handout for you that you can download right onto your computer or your phone, whatever. And it has like these lists of things that you can do for yourself to calm your overactive mind.
Your overactive nervous system to calm your freaking life down friend. I have created a handout for you. So all you have to do is just head to my website at takeouttherapy dot com where you can get access to my cute little mindfulness mini boot camp guide. Yep. For free.
You're welcome. I am such a nerd. I know. Anyways, I wanna talk about friendship today. Go ahead and get a nice drink of cold water.
Are you drinking water? Drink a lot of water. It's very good for you. It's good for everything from the very very very very inside of you. To the all the way outside view.
Water. Water is our friend. Friendship is so fuzzy. I was, like, kinda thinking about it the other day. I well, I have friends.
Did you know You know, everybody wants friends. Everybody needs people in their life, you know, that they don't live with. That they can have as part of the contour of our everyday existence. Right? But Again, it's just such a weird relationship.
Like, the norms of friendship Do you know what the norms are? Like, what are the normal parameters and friendship? Because I don't sometimes you meet people and they're like, oh my god. You're my best friend. I wanna text you every day.
Let's, you know, hang out all the time. Like, I've totally had these friends. I love these people. I love this kind of relationship. It's like hot and fast.
And it's like you can't get enough of each other and you never get sick of each other. It's super super fun. And then you have other friends where it's like you meet somebody and they're freaking awesome and you're like, I you know, I'm gonna see this person when I see them or I'll see them at my book group or whatever. Right? Like friendships they kind of have a context to them.
Like, we meet people in a certain way and then we have a relationship with them. And then, like, there are quote unquote friend. Oh oh, and sometimes we're younger. We sleep with our friends, which really makes things fuzzy. Boy, do I miss those days?
Just kidding. There's just good things about getting older, friend. Anyways, friendship is so fuzzy because it gets confusing. Because we don't know what the expectations are For one thing, like, what's your role? What's my role?
Am I the planner? Are you the planner? You should see me and my older sister. We are great friends, but we play all these funny roles together. Like, she always plans everything.
And even if I kinda wanna plan something, I just don't because she's better at it and she's my big sister and I'm like, whatever. This is my role. Right? There are we have like these funny little Yeah. Just roles that we slip into in friendship.
We have expectations. Like, how much time we're gonna spend with somebody or how often we wanna see them or what what kind of relationship are you in trying to create? We have ideas about activities that we'd like to do together and ways that we would like to communicate communication in friendship is fascinating. Actually, I'll tell you, it is a fascinating subject. To be a therapist and to listen to people talk about their different kinds of communication in their friendships.
We're so funny. You know, we wanna have relationships and they're really important to us, but we don't wanna be too close, but we don't wanna get too vulnerable. Now don't be getting too up in my business. Right? I know.
So all this fuzziness Just leads to conflict. Do we do conflict in friendship like hello? Most of us literally refused to do conflict in our primary relationship. In our families, you think we're gonna be doing friendship conflict? I don't think so.
So that is one thing that I do see in my life and in my work. Is we do not want to do any conflict in friendship. But what happens, but we don't do conflict right, is that we don't work things out. We just annoy the crap out of each other after a while. And then we try to figure out, like, okay.
How do I get rid of this person? Because if we can't do conflict, we can't work through annoyances and just sticky situations and, like, you know, humanness. And so then it's, like, the relationship kind of fizzles out. Sometimes that's true or we're just like whatever, I don't care about that. I'm not I don't I'm not holding on to it.
Or or we hold on to it, and then there's just always a bunch of drama. Do you guys have friends? I have friends. Yes. I promise.
I have friends. But as I've gotten older, I have less friends because I've kind of figured out what I need from friendship and what I and I'm willing to kind of ask for it. And also, I love to be in relationships with people who ask for what they need in the relationship too. And I don't really like drama. I used to I used to like it.
I grew up in chaos. I love me some drama just like the next person, but I just got to the point in my life where I was like, nah, I don't really wanna do this anymore. And so we all have a little bit of this. Don't we? Because friendship is fuzzy.
So the question then becomes what the heck do we do about friendship to what do we owe our friends? Like, what do we owe people for this exchange of relationship? And, like, what's the healthiest way to do friendship in general? Off we go then, Let's talk about what an adult friendship to look like. It's interesting.
It's like The first thing you have to do is meet your people. Not people. Your people. Oh, that is so difficult. I should do an episode on that.
I will jot it down right now. Meet how to meet your people. Meet your people because that is so tricky. So you gotta meet your people. Meaning, like, you gotta find people that share your not all, not all of.
But definitely within relationship values, your values about relationships. Right? Like, I have things that are really important to me in relationships period game over. Transparency would be one of them. I don't need to be in everybody's business, but like don't be lying to me.
You know what I'm saying? Transparency, like being a grown up and say, here's what's up. I can tell you this. That's just one of my relationship values. So fighting your people means like just clawing in to the people that you do share.
Like relationship values with that you share kind of what are the priorities. Right? Like, Where does a relationship fall within the priority of one's life? It's always super helpful. When the people that you hang out with kind of share the general same idea, and I'll get into that in a minute.
And then also, like, finding your people, the people that do the things that you love to do. If you don't know what you love to do, my friend. Go out there in the world and find some things to do and see if you love them. Because I promise you If you love them, you will find some friends there. You'll find your people.
Okay. Which is hard in adulthood. I love that meetup dot com. I think that's pretty neat. You guys tell me what you think of it.
And also tell me some other ideas about how do you find people to be in relationships with? We did a whole thing this month in my workshop was all about relationships. So if you have any, like, inkling of needing to kind of just, like, dig into how you are in relationships, what you need in relationships, what kind of relationships are you in and how's that looking? Come join club. We're talking about this stuff there.
So you gotta meet your people. That's the first thing. And then in adult friendship, we definitely want to set the terms. And people are always like, what the what? Set the terms.
Yeah. Set the terms, friend. Like, we need to discuss our expectations of this relationship. Like, we need to discuss how much time we have to get to the relationship. And, like, yeah, how much contact do we want to have?
Like, how often do we wanna have contact and also, like, what's the best way to contact each other? Am I a taxi texter? Or, you know, do I need you to send me a dance performance? Based on your feelings. Right?
There are a lot of people in there, everything in between. So, like, what activities are we gonna do? What I don't know. Just, like, we have to find out, like, what somebody's looking for from the relationship and just like, have a conversation about it? It's not like we have to sit down and have a meeting and I have a checklist and what are your terms?
No. To, like, go in a hike, dude, and spend some time with your new friend and say, hey, I like you. And this is what I'm looking for. And I wanted to let you know in case you're looking for that too. And if you're not, like, I totally get it, because here's the other thing is, like, friendship is it's not optional, but doesn't it feel kind of optional?
Right? Like, we can throughout life put more or less attention into our friendships. And so at certain times in my life, like, I don't have any attention from my friendships. I got shit going on, ma'am. Perhaps you can relate.
And at other times, like, I'm totally down for daily texting. I love getting together a couple times a week. I had this girlfriend when I was in my twenties. She lived across the street. Oh my gosh.
We spent so much time just sitting on each other's couches, reading magazines. It was pure heaven. I used to have sleepovers with this whole other group of friends I had, like, I have had so many friendships, but like, you realize what you start to want and need. And it's okay to have those conversations when those things change. So set the terms and set the terms again and again and again.
That's a mature adult relationship. And then the other thing is like have you gotta have boundaries. We, you and me, we have to have boundaries. So it's like, show up. If you wanna be in relationship and you say you wanna be in the relationship, then go ahead and show on up and then do what you say you're gonna do.
Also, what ruins relationships is when people don't actually mind their own business. And I'm not I hate this expression because I always think about my mom saying that to me this very unkind like, I love business. That's not what I mean. I mean, we're always trying to figure out what other people are up to. Right?
And so avoid that. Don't make assumptions or what I call drama. Right? Because anytime I made assumptions, and I've created this whole situation for myself, a drama situation, So just like have boundaries around that. I've learned to do that.
I've learned to have boundaries around making assumptions about what I think people are up to. I'm like, oh, she probably thinks no no no girlfriend. You do not know what she probably thinks. That is my boundary making. That's how I do it for myself.
It's really important to show up as your authentic self in relationships because when you start setting the terms and, like, having boundaries, you have to do it as your authentic self. If you don't have boundaries because you think it might hurt some of these feelings, they're probably not a good fit for you. Or actually, you ought to just set the boundaries and see what happens. Because they might not they might totally respect your boundaries and they might like be like, oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having good boundaries and showing me what that looks like.
I can have boundaries too. So the other crucial crucial thing about friendship is we have to have good communication just like we have to have in our lives, in our other relationships, in our families, with our kids, or our pets, or our partners. We have to be direct. And can I give a shout out for being self aware? If we let go of our assumptions of other people, we can sort of like see ourselves a little bit better in our friendship.
And raise our own awareness about, like, what is our own deal? Not what is our deal. Like, what is my deal? Right? Because that's the only thing you can do anything about anyways.
So we have to kind of be self aware like, lose the assumptions, lose the judgment. We are not here to judge our friends. Like, they're having their own experience. Oh, I got friends. I have friends people and they have really interesting different Lias and I do.
Of course, I have opinions about that. As they have opinions about my life, but It's just not my business. And so I don't and they don't either and I appreciate it so much and we're close. And we connect on a whole different level. Rather than the content of our lives, we kind of connect on this deeper level.
That's what I'm looking for from relationships. So I do really try to work on avoiding making assumptions and losing my judgment and just being self aware of what I need. And the other thing that I have become so willing to do that I highly recommend is I'm willing to do conflict in friendship. Because I've learned as a therapist and as a person as a woman. We have difficulty.
Woman to woman relationships are still difficult and we're working on it. Ladies, we got this. We're gonna figure it out. I have learned that conflict is super important. We need to be able to be respectful of each other and embrace each other's capacity to have a little conflict.
And just kind of talk about these funny little moments that happen between us and have it be okay. Have it be okay to ask for what we need in relationships to set boundaries. Right? Let's get better at friendship. And I hope today's episode has has helped you feel like you got your feet under you a little bit better.
I do. I have some ideas about some places where I need to make some shifts in my own behavior within my friendships because I also think It's just great to look at oneself and what you got going on because, you know, that's the other thing about friendship. It's like kind of by choice. Right? People come and go.
It's so appropriate that's the case and also really sad sometimes too, but it is a fact of life. And so find your people. For the you you are right now, and then you'll get to like be yourself in your relationships. That's what I want. It's what I'm going for and it's what I want for you.
Okay. I'll see you soon friend. Talk to you next time. I'm so glad you joined me today, and I hope it was helpful. Always make sure to get the appropriate level of help for your unique situation.
Check out the resources at takeout therapy dot com, and hopefully you can find something there. As always, thanks so much for showing up and doing your work. Which in a way changes the level of emotional development in your community, in your town, maybe even in the world, yeah, it's kind of a big deal. This podcast is intended as education and prevention. Not medical or mental health treatment.
See you next time.
