Feeling Secure - part 2 - Finding Good Friends

We are social animals. We need other people to feel secure.

I was asked to write about how to feel secure. How to nurture close relations and to treat them well. Or rather, why we should nurture our close relationships and treat them well.

I have a program called Planning for Personal Success (https://humanistlearning.com/planforpersonalsuccess/) that was originally created for a group of college athletes as an orientation. The goal was to help these new student athletes learn how to better navigate social situations and make better decisions about drug use.

A big part of the program is actually about ethics in decision making. What ethics are, why they are important and why you should actively use your ethics when you make decisions.

This is especially important in your interpersonal relationships.  We are social animals We need other people to feel secure.  Social inclusion helps us feel secure and social exclusion is felt as physical pain. This probably has to do with our evolutionary past where social exclusion  - being drive away from the tribe – usually result in death.

However, it happened, it’s important to accept the reality that social relationships, good or bad, impact our mental health. If you want to maximize the good, you need good people around you who will help you feel secure in your relationships with them.

This means two things.

1) don’t hang out with people who don’t make you feel secure. I realize that it is scary to let go and seek other friends. That’s the whole – social exclusion is felt as pain and irrational fear of death thing going on. The reality is we can pick and choose our friends and you should be looking for people who will support you, not tear you down.  Big bullies don’t control the tribe anymore so even if they exclude you, you aren’t going to die even though it may feel that way. That’s because our “tribes” are now so big we have choices. Don’t let your fears hold you back. Find good people. (And if you need help on this get my book The Bully Vaccine (http://thebullyvaccine.com)

2) Good people don’t like to hang out with bad people. So, if you want good people around you, you need to be a good person yourself and that means it’s in your best interest to be honest, compassionate and responsible.

Your well being is tied to your sense of security. When it comes to friends, understand that a bunch of shallow friends won’t give you the same sense of security that close friends and family do. So look for quality, not quantity.  Don’t feel like you need to be part of the “in” group to feel secure. If someone ostracizes you – understand that you will NEVER feel secure around them and trying to curry their favor is only going to create stress for you. Look around and find the other “ostracized people” and reach out to them in friendship. You will be glad you did.

The benefits of critical thinking.

5 Reasons to make the effort to think critically.

1) Better decisions. Basing your decisions on facts yields better outcomes. To make sure what you think you know is actually so requires a little critical thinking.

2) Better strategies. In order to have an effective strategy you have to know what all your options are and you have to weigh the pros and cons of all of them to choose the one that will give you the best chance of success. Again, this requires thinking

3) You won’t waste your time on proxy problems. A lot of people fail because they try to solve the problem they think needs to be solved when what they are really working on is a proxy problem that is standing in for their real problem. And because they never bother to question the assumptions they made about which problem needs to be solved, they never realize that they are working on the wrong problem. Critical thinking, questioning why you are solving this particular problem will help you avoid wasting time and energy on proxy problems.

4) Better relationships. We all make assumptions. But if you never bother to find out if your assumptions are true, you may be making a mistake. This is especially true when your assumptions are about other people. Taking the time to recognize that other people don’t think like you and aren’t necessarily motivated the same way you are allows you to figure out what really is motivating them. Again, the challenging of your assumptions IS the art of critical thinking.

5) You won’t get taken in by charlatans. Charlatans and scam artists make their money from people who don’t bother to check their claims to make sure what they are saying is true. Don’t be duped. Learn how to question and challenge claims being made.

Happily Married – What’s My Secret?

If you want to learn how to have a happy marriage, get your advice from someone who is happily married.

I have been happily married for over 10 years now. I don't think of marriage as a job. I think of it as an investment of my time. Time I gladly give to it because of the benefits I get from it. We've been through rough patches. What gets us through is respect for each other as individuals and a commitment to stay together even though things have been tough.

At this point, given what all we have been through - I feel REALLY secure in the relationship and I've extremely happy - despite the difficulties of our current financial situation - which can tear relationships apart - I feel like we've only gotten stronger.

Anyway - In order to have him there for me - I have to nurture him and be there for him. It's a reciprocity thing. Yeah - it's harder to do when a kid is taking up your time, but I still try to make sure I tell him regularly how much I appreciate the fact he is in my life. I don't do that for him. I do it for myself to remind myself how lucky I actually am to have him in my life so that I don't take him for granted. I don't need or expect him to reciprocate, though he usually does.

Anyway - because it's something I do for me, it doesn't feel like work. It makes me happy to remember why I married him. It makes me happy to think of how lucky I am he is in my life. It isn't work, but it is something I have to remind myself to do regularly to make it a habit.

I also take an operant conditioning approach and actively reward my hubby with good boy rewards (not sex - verbal rewards - literally - thank you for helping me) to encourage him to pay attention to and appreciate me as well. It works and no - I don't feel like I am manipulating him. It's the use of behavioral science to ensure we are both happy in the relationship.

How do you keep your marriage healthy and happy? 

Great Advice for Interpersonal Relationships

Understanding how our own views are biased and distorted can help us improve our relationships to others.

As I’ve gotten more involved in the anti-bullying community, I’ve had the opportunity to meet some amazing people and groups. One group is EyePat out of England. They focus on online or cyberbullying issues.

They sent me a link to their pdf understanding the bully -  http://www.eyepat.org/login/uploaded/Understanding%20the%20Bully%20by%20EyePAT.pdf

I was really impressed with it. It is seriously one of the most excellent things I have read in ages. And I’m reading Eleanor Roosevelt right now so that is saying something.

What I want to talk about here isn’t bullying though. I want to talk about how this information about bullies can actually help you with all your relationships. You see, they aren’t just talking about how bullies think. They are talking about how we all think.

Here is the problem. We all have more information coming in through our senses than we can use. This information is filtered and anything not useful is basically deleted. We then might distort the remaining facts to fit our understanding of the world and our emotional state and beliefs and other things and what is left is our understanding of reality.  Which when you realize how far removed what we think we experience is from what we actually experience, you begin to understand why and how conflicts arise between people.

The distortion and generalization effects are why I keep telling people that when someone behaves poorly – it’s not about you. It’s about them and their experiences and their perceptions and their distortions.  While you can’t do anything about how the other person distorts and reacts, you can do something about how you respond to what you think you are experiencing. Your responsibility is to overcome your own distortions so that you can better choose your actions.

Anyway – as Humanists, part of our mission is to better understand our basic limitations so that we can more effectively work around them and not be limited by them. This is one of those things that it is helpful to understand. It turns out, just realizing that you distort reality to fit your reality filters helps provide just enough distance to think more clearly.  I also really liked their graphics.