Relationships
Boundaries | Social Satisfaction | Create Positive Experiences
You deserve loving, safe, and supportive relationships. We need relationships because it’s in our relationships where we can fully develop our “self".” We need connection because we help one another be resilient to life’s challenges, we comfort one another, and we create positive life experiences together. The challenge is knowing and accepting how you want and don’t want different types of relationships and developing skills and tools to make relationships less scary and more safe and enjoyable.
#4 Boundaries: Build Your House
Boundaries. Name sucks, concept totally normal and healthy. Boundaries are about improving relationships AND keeping you safe. Someone once described it as building a house and choosing who gets access to which rooms and how. And vice versa- that others have a house too, and you need to think about (or maybe even ask them) which rooms you have access to and how.
Boundaries will TRANSFORM your relationships. It won’t happen overnight. But it will happen. Some of the transformation happens in the dynamic of your relationship and some of the transformation is in your internal world. Boundaries will require you to develop new skills, especially communication skills, and it will take time. But the ability to apply boundaries in your life is something you’ll need to know how to do forever.
#5 Social Satisfaction
One must achieve social satisfaction. Social satisfaction is not the same as simply socializing or being social. It’s figuring out what you need in order to feel connected, that you belong, and to feel fulfilled. How this looks is extremely personal, but the satisfaction must be achieved in order to feel whole. I’m going to cover making a family, being part of a community, friendship, and things other than friendship that are just as meaningful. As an introvert with a complicated history and having lived many years with depression, I have fought long and hard to crack the code on achieving social satisfaction. This is for those of you who may have similar struggles. It’s 100% totally possible and I’m very excited to talk about how!
#6 Create Positive Experiences
You’re probably thinking this is super obvious and basic. But we actually aren’t always good at this. We can get stuck in habits and patterns that no longer serve us or our lives. Or we forget to think about the other person and what they want or what they consider to be a positive experience. Either way, taking the time to think- okay but really what is something positive so and so and I could do together- where we’re not talking about our problems, we’re not stressed, and we’re not doing what we think feels good, but actually isn’t positive for us at all. Seriously. We need to stop and ask – what are positive experiences I want to create with the people in my life? And how can I make it happen.