Hi I'm Anna Runkle also known as the crappy childhood fairy and today I'm
going to talk to you about something that doesn't always come naturally to
people who experience early trauma and that's how to have better friendships.
Now if you grew up with a crappy childhood, you may struggle a little bit
to have good close relationships with people. A lot of times the trauma in
childhood makes attachment just kind of funky and weird and fraught for us and
if we didn't learn how to do this at home necessarily it's something we can
learn. So I have some tips to show you how to have better friendships by
basically being a better friend. Here's my first tip, pick the right people for
friends because you know how it is with us, we get attracted to troubled people.
So if you're like me, you have a kind of history of allying with maybe the most
troubled person 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.
We talk about this a lot in my dating and relationships course because this
broken picker problem is really common for people with childhood PTSD. It's true
with romantic relationships and it's true with friendships. Now I know hanging
out with good healthy people is easier said than done when you had a crappy
childhood. Sometimes if we have childhood PTSD going on we can be overreactive, we
can be kind of blame-y or a little too angry or not quite understand the rules
of how to be a good friend or get really withdrawn from people and run away from
the whole thing. And in the end that can kind of turn into a whole trail of
relationships that didn't quite work out and that's why the whole crappy
childhood thing can be so painful but you can work on these things it's really
kind of logistical. Keep in mind research shows that the 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 you're going to meet and one of the
first things that you can do to have a great relationship with a friend
is just to pick a good person and then work overtime to be a good friend to
them. When you want to hang out with somebody I would suggest if it's at all
awkward invite them to do something with you, especially for women sometimes we
get together just to talk and that's really good with somebody you're already
close with but if you're just getting to know somebody it's good to get together
and do something, some activity and one of my favorite examples is bowling, if
you go to a movie with somebody you can't talk and if you go to a restaurant
you have to talk but if you go bowling or something like that you can kind of
talk and do something and if things get a little weird you can just take a
little breather by focusing on the activity for a while and then come back
to talking, so doing things helps. Alright the next thing is about being a good
listener. Now everybody knows but try this okay?
When you get together with your friend spend 30 minutes just doing an
experiment only listen and respond to what they're saying about themselves
don't talk about yourself at all. Now I'm not saying do this forever but just as
an experiment and as a practice, just listen to the other person and reflect
on what they're saying and give them feedback. But don't talk about yourself,
this is so common I do it all the time too where somebody says something and you
go "Oh me too that happens to me" or "Oh I have a story about that," but just for
exercise spend 30 minutes listening. My husband and I went to a party once and
just for an exercise we did the whole party never talking about ourselves and
it was funny we were so popular, we got invited by two other couples to have
dinner sometime and that normally wouldn't happen and they didn't even
notice that anything was going on with us, they actually never asked anything
about us which was interesting. So it didn't actually come to any dinners but,
it was really a lesson to me; people really need to be listened to.
Now 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
to do about headaches they're not really telling you about the
headache. Unless people specifically ask for advice it's just so much better to
listen and kind of hear what is the content of what 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 oh why
was it hard? And that leads to better listening. Similar to that, when you give
them a compliment. I mean people like compliments and you don't want to do it
too much 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,"
that's not a clean compliment, you're sort of putting them on the spot to
say something about your blouse. A clean compliment is you go "You know that shirt
you're wearing just looks great it's really a great color for you," and that's it,
you just make it clean a nice clean compliment. People really like that and
they need encouragement and they like it when their accomplishments or the good
things about them are noticed and that's just a good friend thing to do is to
notice and encourage what's good. Here's another good listening thing, when your
friend has told you about a big thing they're expecting, maybe they have an
award they're gonna get over the weekend or they tell you about something that
was hard they had knee surgery and it was really
painful, a good friend follows up on that maybe calls them a few days later and
says well "How did the award ceremony go?" Or "How's your knee doing today?" If you
think about it the 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
and not just in the moment in the conversation but over time and that's
what a good friend is, 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.
Another thing is be a believer in your friend.
Everybody has self-doubt and when we become friends with people we'll begin
to reveal what our doubt is. So you might say "Well I'm thinking about changing
jobs but I'm not sure that I'm smart enough for that job." So you know what a
good friend is? It's somebody who sees your very best potential and believes in
you and can express that to you, so be a believer in your friend.
I think a lot of people we tend to think 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 actually doing something right and that there's even the potential for
them to do something even better. 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 grieved, when they've lost a loved one. I know that
when there was a period of my life where I had a lot of tragedy, I really found
out who my friends were and some people who I thought were good
friends they were just like gone and other people who I hadn't yet been very
close to, they really showed up for me and they came and visited me in the
hospital and they sat with me when I was the most depressed and they encouraged
me and took me for walks. 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 stuff, the weddings, the parties, the celebrations, but you
also want to show up for the hard stuff. A good friend shows up for the good and
the bad. And you never want to talk behind their back, I'm just gonna say
this, you don't really want to talk or say anything bad about anybody 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 gonna know, just on the off
chance that the energy reaches them you don't want to talk about your friends
behind their back. Have their back, protect their identity, protect who they
are, and protect their hearts. And finally, stay in touch with them. This is one of
the great afflictions of our times is that we think, well I said hello on
Facebook and I saw a picture of their kids there but if you're not talking to
people face-to-face or at least on the phone, it's really hard to sustain a
close friendship. Facebook doesn't count, even texting doesn't count, so whenever
you can, see people face-to-face and 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
email and if you can't send an email, okay send a text and if you can't do
that okay fine, talk to them on Facebook. So these are the 10 things that you can
do to be a great friend and to make closer friendships in your life.