Hi everyone, welcome to Dr Vicki Writes. I’m Vicki – who nobody ever actually calls Dr Vicki. This is the spoken version of my Substack post Evaluating Your Existing Friendships.
I think that the main reason most of us with social anxiety want to overcome it is because of the negative effects it has on our friendships. We might feel like we can’t make new friends, or even like we might lose our existing friends because we’re flawed and unlikeable in some way.
I’m sure that as humans one of our ultimate in-built fears is ending up alone due to the fact that if we ended up alone back in the hunter-gatherer days, we couldn’t have survived for very long.
So, friendships and other platonic relationships are going to be the subject of my next however many posts.
Before thinking about making new friends, I think it is important to evaluate your current friendships and focus on strengthening those first.
Most of what I have learned about friendships has come from Shasta Nelson’s book Friendships Don’t Just Happen, which I highly recommend. Based on her teachings, I have come up with three categories of friendships:
Situation-specific friends;
Close friends; and
Best friends
Situation-specific friends are those who you only see in certain situations. Say, for example, that you are part of a friendship group, and there are friends within the group who you only see when multiple members of the group get together; you wouldn’t meet up with them alone. Those are situation-specific friends. Another example would be someone who you regularly talk to and have lunch with at work, but who you’ve never met up with outside of work.
Close friends are friends you meet up with in different situations, but who you don’t see that regularly. You might only see them once every couple of months, or even a couple of times a year. This might just be because they don’t live that close to you, for example. It is much easier to meet up regularly with someone who lives within walking distance of your house, say, than someone who lives a 40-minute drive away.
Finally, there are best friends. Best friends are those who you see very regularly – say at least once a week – and who are intertwined with your daily goings-on. These are people who I would class as part of your close-knit daily community, as referred to in my post Fave Fictional Universes: Common Threads Part 1, which I think should ideally include about 20 people. At the moment, I have no best friends in this sense.
Take some time to write down which of your friends fall into each of these categories. Feel free to count family members if they meet the criteria. Including my family, I do have four best friends - my mum and dad, James and Aiyana. Do you have more or less friends in each category than you initially thought?
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