Episode 147: Adult Friendships

Adult Friendships

Friendships can be hard for adults. It can be challenging to make new friends, and our schedules may make it difficult to connect with old friends. The research is clear, however. Adults need meaningful connections. Adults do better both emotionally and physically if they have quality relationships. In this episode of Thanks for Sharing, Jackie Pack talk about how to make friends as an adult.

TRANSCRIPT: Adult Friendships

Jackie

This is the Thanks for Sharing Podcast, the podcast where we explore all things recovery, healing, and relationship. Remember to subscribe and download episodes in the iTunes store, Google Play, or on the Podbean app. And while you’re there, I’d love a review.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Thanks for Sharing. I’m your host Jackie Pack. In today’s episode, I want to talk about friendship. When was the last time you made a new friend, or grabbed an early morning cup of coffee or got together for a lunch with an old friend? As we get older, it can be harder to maintain or make friends and yet plenty of research shows that friendships are important for the overall emotional and physical health of adults. And not just one friend, maybe you’re saying to yourself, “Well, I’m friends with my partner or my spouse,” and that’s great.

However, the research would say that actually isn’t enough for either of you. So why is it so hard for adults to make new friends? Or to keep up on old friendships? Well, the answer is different for males and females. The one thing that is clear is that most adults struggle with friendship, and that friendship in adulthood are important for everyone. So let’s talk for a minute, let’s start talking about female friendships. So a recent study found that when women have children, they drastically reduced the amount of time they spend with their friends.

So it goes from 14 hours a week before having a child down to barely five hours each week once they have a child. And yet friendships are vital to females’ health and happiness. Now, often in adult female friendships, they can be, once you have children, they can be more centered around the children. So for example, you know, I’m friends with the moms of my kids’ friends, or I’m friends with the moms on my son’s basketball team, or my daughter’s soccer team.

And so the people that I’m interacting with have much more to do with my role as mother than with me as a person. Now, this isn’t necessarily something that’s going to block an intimate friendship from developing, but it can be time and energy spent centered on a relationship that isn’t necessarily about you and it’s more about your children, which is not uncommon for females to do that, right? Like females can be overly focused on the needs of others, particularly their children and sacrifice their own needs.

Now, most of the research indicates that female friendships are more gratifying than male friendships because of their emotional intimacy. So a common example of this is the talk around how men want to fix a situation. So this happens, as a female, if you were to talk to a male friend or even as a male, if you are to talk to a male friend, the male’s response is typically more about how to fix that, or what to do about that, and giving them advice, rather than actually asking you how you feel about the situation before they give you any feedback or suggestions about what to do.

So often this talking about in the validating feelings can lead to women empowering other women instead of just solving the problem, which can somewhat feel dismissive to another woman. Like, if I’m just telling you what to do, it can feel like you don’t really believe in me or you don’t think I’m capable and you’re not willing to sit with me and talk through what’s going on and why there are blocks.

So the problem with female friendships that the research says is that the same emotional intimacy that leads to more gratifying relationships among female friends is that’s also the same thing that complicates female friendships. So typically if you are friends, if you’re a female and you have a female friend, females are going to be less likely to be upfront about ending friendships, right? They’re going to be less upfront about something that you did that is causing them a problem.

The other thing about this is the end of a female friendship often is complicated with a lot of factors playing into the termination. So it may just not be about a mismatch or that something went wrong in the friendship, it can be more complex than that. So for example, it could be about insecurity. It could be a pressure from a spouse that’s putting pressure on her to end that friendship. It could be pressure from other family or other friends or even the church situation.

I think part of the reason for this, which is different for women than men, is often in our patriarchal society here in the United States, we still think that women need help or need to be told what to do or that we, our opinion should be what she does. So I think women are more likely to get pressure from outside sources about the friendship than men are.

Now, we’ll talk about men friendships in a minute, but I just want to say here, that doesn’t mean that men sometimes don’t get pressure from their spouse to end a friendship, but also the differences. So why a female spouse may pressure a male not to have a male friend versus why a husband may pressure a woman not to have or his wife or partner not to have a friendship. Oftentimes, he’s upset by maybe time spent with this friend, or maybe this friend feels threatening because his wife shares more with the friend than she actually does with him.

Whereas women tend to pressure their husbands to end male friendships because they don’t like the influence or they don’t see this friend as having integrity.

So, the other thing about female friendships is women are competitive in their friendships. So we think of males as being competitive and they are but when it comes to friendships, females are more competitive in a subtle, less obvious way. So, females tend to be competitive about connection, and who knows what information, who was deemed worthy to be shared certain information that allowed or lead to connection.

Now this can also make females more prone to gossip because if you are competitive and you want people to know that this friend called you first, you’re like, that’s not necessarily going to empower you if everybody else doesn’t really know. So you’re going to have to talk about that, right? And you’ve got to make other people know that they called you above other people. That’s kind of a passive aggressive subtleness, that when you talk to women about it, can do damage to the adult friendships. So, when we run groups at our Utah clinic and they’re female groups, it’s often an issue about the mistrust or the passive aggressive nature, the competitiveness, the gossipy, the catty stuff about women.

And it’s something we have to tackle as an issue right off the bat when we’re starting a group. Many females, whether they’re sex addicts, betrayed partners or have a trauma background, when we’re talking to them about being a part of a female group, they’ll report that one of their hesitations or one of their main resistances to being in a group is that they don’t trust women and they aren’t comfortable with women. One thing that we know is that mean girl culture doesn’t end in junior high or after high school graduation. 

Now let’s switch gears here for a minute and talk about male friendships. So before we talk specifically about male friendships, I first want to talk about socialized messages for males. So you may have heard people talk about toxic masculinity, that’s kind of been a buzz word lately. When we talk about masculinity, masculinity can be construed as not really a performance of what they’re doing that makes them acceptable as a male, but more of what they’re doing to inform others that he’s not a girl.

So when we talk about the man rules, I don’t know if I have done a podcast, maybe I have done a podcast about the man rules and the woman rules. But when we talk about the man rules, like what does it take for you to kind of get your masculine card and to be accepted in the male club by other males and be recognized for being manly, which I have to say, just kind of a side note, this stems from our patriarchal culture. But one of the main lessons when I talk to men about this, there can be a lot of different man rules, like don’t cry, don’t show emotion.

But a lot of times when I’m doing this in a group presentation or even talking to a client one-on-one, one of the things that often comes out is that one of the worst things a male can be called is a girl. They don’t want to be seen as being feminine or girly. So as a result, many men avoid behaviors that would even be considered feminine, and that includes establishing expressive intimacy in friendships and self-disclosing with friends.

Now, Slate tells us that the hidden male crisis is that they need more friends. At the same time, society tells men that friendship is a girly thing and they respond by not having friends. Now, according to the Boston Globe, loneliness, not obesity or smoking is the biggest threat to men’s health.

So, why are men so bad at friendships? Now, some of this we talked about goes into the socialized messages that they receive. Now, on a podcast called Call Your Girlfriend, which is a popular feminist podcast, they had an episode around April and they invited listeners to ask a man anything they’d like. And one of their men who was answering questions was Ezra Klein, and so one of their listeners asked, “Why are men so shit at friendship?” And Klein replied and said, “That’s really an important question because we literally are,” it’s literally the case that men have fewer friends than women and as men get older, we have fewer and fewer and fewer friends. He said, some of us have no friends at all, and the resulting loneliness becomes a huge health risk.

Now, there is empirical evidence that supports Klein’s argument. A 2006 analysis of two decades of survey data on social isolation, which was published in the American sociological review, found that the adult white heterosexual man has the fewest friends of all people in America. Moreover as Occidental Sociologist Lisa Wade explained in Salon the friendships they have if they’re with other men, provide less emotional support and involve lower levels of self-disclosure and trust than other types of friendship.

Now, I’m not going to sidetrack too long on this, but I do want to make a side comment on this. So when we talk about the adult white heterosexual man has a fewest friends of all people in America. I just want to point out that this is also the same category of individuals who are more likely to perpetrate violence against people and violence against women.

So, something to consider there. There may be some relationship and that’s not just me thinking that. There are other people who are looking at that correlation. Now, as your client said that his boyfriend friendships lost their intimacy as he aged, not just because sharing feelings felt girly but also because they were based on activities. And research actually backs this up, they say that same gendered male to male, female to female, same gendered friendships usually look about the same and both genders will equally share things about themselves, about the same rate up until about the age of 15.

And at 15, boy or male friendships really start looking different. Now, one of the things is that as we’ve talked about because at 15 boys are very much kind of in this introductory phase of becoming a man. And so these man rules have even more importance on them now that they’re not boys. Ezra Klein noted that friendships among women in his life are almost always rooted in dialogue, not activity.

So he says, “If you’re able to have conversations on the phone and if the material of your friendship is actually what’s going on in your life and what that means to you and how you feel about that, then distance, right? Like friends moving or attending college, getting married, all of that stuff doesn’t threaten the friendship. But if our friendship is based around getting together and golfing or getting together or playing basketball, then if you move or if we get busy and we have kids and we don’t have the same time in the evening, now we don’t have a friendship because it was around an activity instead of about who you are as a person and what that looks like.

Now, Robert Waldinger did a TED Talk entitled What Makes A Good Life, and its lessons from the longest study on happiness. It’s definitely worth watching.

So, in this talk he builds a context and validation for his statements through his experience as director of the Harvard Study of adult development, which is one of the longest running studies of adult life that’s ever been done. This study tracked the lives of two groups of men for over 75 years, and it now follows their baby boomer children to understand how childhood experience reaches across decades to affect health and wellbeing in middle age and this is again a male study.

So, halfway through Robert’s TED Talk, he starts to make some statements that are absolutely fascinating and relevant when it comes to this discussion on male friendship and male relationships at large. So here are some of the statements that Robert highlighted or I want to highlight that Robert stated.

He said, “So what have we learnt? What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands pages of information that we’ve generated on these lives?” He says, “Well, the lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder.”

The clearest message that we get from this 75 year study is this, “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.” He says, “We’ve learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills.” It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community are happier. They’re physically healthier and they live longer than people who are less well connected.

And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic for human beings. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they feel lonely. Now, we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage. So the second big lesson that they learned from this study that Robert talks about is, it’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship. It’s the quality of your close relationships that matter.

It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health, high conflict marriages, for example, without much affection turn out to be very bad for our health. Perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is actually protective for us as human beings. Now Robert says that once we had followed all men all the way into their ’80s, they wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if they could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn’t.

And when they gathered together everything they knew about them at age 50 it wasn’t their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who are the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80, and good close relationships seem to buffer them from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. Robert said that, “Most happily partnered men and women reported in their ’80s that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy.”

However, the people who were in unhappy relationships on the days when they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain. 

And then the third big lesson that Robert talks about in his TED Talk is what we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don’t just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. So it turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your ’80s is protective. The people who are in relationships where they feel they can really count on the other person in times of need, those people’s memories stayed sharper longer, and the people in relationships where they felt that they really can’t count on the other one. Those were the people who experienced earlier memory decline.

And by the way, he did say in their research that those good relationships, they don’t have to be smooth all of the time, right? That’s not realistic to think that these good relationships had no bumps along the way. Now, we often hear the cliche saying, that we’re only as good as the company we keep or the slightly more specific claim that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Now, these are some sweeping platitudes but it turns out they’re not totally wrong. So when it comes to friendships and romantic partnerships for that matter, I think sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in this belief or this idea of serendipity, where we believe that fate and convenience is going to do the heavy lifting and we just kind of have to sit back and be at the right place at the right time to enjoy, kind of, this good fortune of this person who is a great match for us to be delivered.

And what we learn is that’s not true, right? Like one of the beliefs I have and it comes from life experience, is that anything that is meaningful in life is going to take work. And I think that’s also true with friendships and I think that’s also true with our family relationships and our significant relationships with partners or spouses. 

Now, I’m doing this podcast episode on adult friendship, number one, because I have had several clients in the last couple of weeks, where this has been something that’s come up in their session, whether they met somebody and it looks like it’s going to be a friendship or they’re feeling lonely and missing having a friendship or somebody to lean on or to spend time with and have kind of a companionship with, or also because we’re working through trauma from previous friendships. So, that’s number one. One of the reasons why I thought to do a podcast episode about adult friendships.

But number two, I know for me this is also something I have struggled with and so it’s also something that is kind of been something I’ve been wanting to make more of a priority in my life. But I also am aware there’s a reason why year after year when I’m kind of looking at what I want to focus on for the upcoming new year, there’s a reason it kind of slides further back. And I think part of the reason for that is a couple, not a couple of years ago, actually it was probably about a decade or more ago. I made some friends and it happened to be these friendships came about partly because of where I was living, partly because of who my kids were hanging out with. But, it also seemed that we had some common interests and I mean there were some interests that we had that weren’t necessarily the same, but it seemed like there was something enjoyable about these relationships. And so I became friends with these two people, they were kind of friends prior to me kind of moving into the area but they approached me and offered me friendship.

It seemed like something that would be good for me and I was at a place in my life where I wanted some friendship and we were friends maybe for, gosh, maybe three or four years. And it was the kind of friendship I already mentioned that our kids hung out together, our husbands got along, we enjoyed doing stuff as couples, we enjoyed doing stuff as families, we would go on vacation together, we would also go out on dates together. There were a lot of things that just kind of blended well with these relationships.

And after about three or four years, it really had a horrible ending for me. As far as I know the two of them have continued to be friends but it had a horrible ending for me. And that really created some trauma in my life and it really impacted me in some negative ways. And also at this time my youngest was starting first grade.

So, I think it was easy for me up until that point I was working but I worked two, like 10 hour days. So I was working part time and then I was, you know the days that I worked were long days and then I was home with my kids and doing things around the house that you need to do when you have young kids.

So, when this friendship kind of blew up for me, I was at a place of, my youngest was in first grade, I could increase the hours that I worked and I did. Now, partly just because I think that was something once my kids were getting older, I wanted to focus more on my career and that had been something I’d wanted to do before I had kids and something my husband and I had talked about as we planned our family. But it also was super convenient to do that at the time when this relationship blew up and we still lived by each other, right?

We were still going to run into each other; we were still going to see each other. One of the ways out of our neighborhoods, they were going to drive past my house, and it was just easy for me to make myself unavailable. I’m working, I’m not home, I’m not available. And I did. I made myself unavailable and work seemed like a very legitimate way to do that.

Now, I wouldn’t say that it really crossed into kind of a work addiction, but I was definitely working more hours than I had. And so when I wasn’t working, I had more to do because I was working more hours and so I had more to do at home or wanted to make sure I was spending quality time with my spouse, and wanted to spend quality time with my kids.

And so it filled the time that I had, and I was going to say I didn’t have to sit with the pain of that friendship blowing up. That’s not quite true because I couldn’t really get away from the pain. it was extremely painful for me. And so I’ve been looking at the last several years, I miss having friends and I think I am one who, I have a good relationship and I consider myself friends with my spouse. We were friends before we ever started dating and made it romantic.

So, I am friends with him and I enjoy hanging out with him. He enjoys hanging out with me, I think he’s hilarious. We like spending time together. And you know, my kids are older I have three kids in their 20s and then my youngest is 16 and I think they’re actually all lovely people and I like spending time with them. They make me laugh. We can have conversations that we didn’t have when they were younger. They will want to do things with me and their dad, and that keeps us busy and active. And so that’s great. And so in that way I feel like I am able to be friends with my adult kids and I’m able to be friends with my partner. 

And yet, I think there’s this female friendship that’s lacking. Now, I do have two friends who were my friends in high school, two girlfriends who were my friends in high school. And we get together probably quarterly, our birthdays are kind of spread out so that it’s convenient for us to get together quarterly and we do that and we go out to dinner. And we’ll catch up and that’s great. However, I will say like catching up isn’t exactly the most connecting part of friendship.

And another reason why I wanted to do this podcast episode is just this last week I went to dinner with my girlfriends because one is moving out of state and so that’s definitely going to somewhat impact and change the nature of our friendship. We also talked about at that dinner how as some things about our life are slowing down, things like having young kids. Maybe that could open up some more time to really spend time together as girlfriends.

And I think that’s a possibility, right? I think we can always find reasons why we don’t have friendships and sometimes they are valid reasons. I will say when this relationship, this friendship with the other two women that I was friends with really blew up I had a dinner scheduled with these two high school friends to go to dinner. And as we were catching up, I shared with them like, “This is what’s been going on with me and this is really impacted me.”

And I have to say, we don’t really text, we don’t really talk that often. But when I shared with them what was going on for me, both of them showed up in ways that was really impactful to me. And really in these ways of like, yeah, these are why, even though we don’t spend a lot of time together, this is why these two people from high school are still in my life as I’m approaching 50.

So I think one of the things when we’re looking at friendships and particularly adult friendships, I think we have to understand that number one, we’ve kind of covered some other reasons why these adult friendships are important, both for males, both for females, and how it can be difficult for everybody to have adult friendships. But, I think we also need to maybe push ourselves a little bit like I was just sharing about myself. 

Like I understand why I have not made adult female friendships a priority, I get it. It’s rooted in trauma, it’s rooted in time, it’s rooted in other priorities. Absolutely. Those are all legitimate. And I think I need to push myself more to make myself more available for adult friendships. I think, one of the things that we need to understand as we’re looking at and maybe trying to have more adult friendships is that we’re going to make mistakes when it comes to friendship.

We can promote casual acquaintances to close friendships, and it turns out that they’re actually not a close friend. They were just a casual acquaintance. We can put too much energy or emphasis on group activities, that might make us feel safer because it’s a group but also what we learned is that the group activities or group friendships in terms of large groups do not have the same physical and emotional benefits that one-on-one or, like, very small intimate groups would provide.

And then I think another mistake that we make is we don’t make time for active friendships. That’s one of the things that I’m recognizing with my two high school girlfriends is I didn’t make time for an active friendship, we had a friendship but it was often on hold, right? We picked it up quarterly, we picked it up, it was convenient to schedule it around friends birthdays but it wasn’t necessarily an active friendship. And yeah, I get it, we’re spread thin. We have a lot going on in our lives and so it’s easy not to make that a priority.

So, I want to talk about here at the end, kind of how maybe some ideas that we can have to make friends or to strengthen friendships we have. The reality is we don’t do that over coffee or lunch. We check in with each other, we catch up with each other but typically we don’t deepen our friendships or help move them forward if we’re just meeting up for coffee or meeting up for lunch or playing something together like a sport.

If you want better, more meaningful friendships or you’re just sick of kind of the impersonal nature of like a coffee shop or a restaurant there is many ways to catch up with friends. Now, first of all, I think we might have to as an adult, brush up on our social skills, right? If you’ve been a parent and you’ve worked with your kids on making friends, you talk to your kids about how to, like, send the message that you’re open to make friends, that you’re approachable.

And so there’s things that we might guide our young kids towards that we haven’t necessarily brushed up on ourselves. So we may need to brush up on our social skills. Now, Malcolm Gladwell, he kind of talks about in his book Outliers, he talks about 10,000 hours and he talks about those people who have excellence and success, their excellence and success has less to do with natural born talent and more to do with these 10,000 hours of practice for high achievement.

So we’re going to have to practice being open, we’re going to have to practice our social skills. The other thing we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to be resilient, right? The truth is about nine out of 10 people that we interact with are not going to be that match for us. And that’s something that can be really hard and we can get down on ourselves or we have to say, “Okay, I’m going to have to interact with and socialize with a lot of people before I find that one that actually is going to develop into a deep, meaningful friendship.”

So we’re going to have to be resilient, we’re going to have to be able to keep practicing, keep putting ourselves out there, kind of letting go of what the outcome is going to be and just count it as practice hours. I think we’re going to have to be willing to extend an invitation. We can’t just wait for them to say, “Hey, would you like to get together and do this?” We’re also going to have to be the one who risks that and says, “Oh, I’d love to get together and talk with you about this”. Or, “I’d love to get together and know more about this.”

So we also have to be open to new friendships, right? If one of the things we’re saying is I have these best friends, that person isn’t going to think I’m open for a friendship with them. So we have to recognize in our language, in our body language what is it that communicates that we’re open to making new friendships.

Now, there’s the book, Friendships Don’t Just Happen. The author of those books talks about you need to practice positivity. She says, “You need to smile, you need to get comfortable making eye contact. You need to show curiosity. You need to laugh if it’s funny, right? Like, don’t force a laugh. That never goes well, but you need to like let yourself laugh. You need to ask questions, you need to be interested. You should not think that you know everything or you’ve done everything. You need to be affirming to other people and you need to be able to show gratitude or to say things like, ‘I really appreciated the time today’ or ‘it felt so good that you said this.’ Like we need to get comfortable saying those things to people and seeing where that goes.

And then again, I can’t state this enough, you need to make it a priority. And with making it a priority, you need to be deliberate about that. You can’t sit back and wait for this person to come along, you need to be deliberate, you need to be approaching people, you need to be talking to people. 

Also, along with being deliberate, be determined. Know for yourself, “If I practice this enough I will find friends.” And if I find friends and I continue to practice my social skills and I’m willing to open up and I’m willing to share things about myself and I’m willing to have them share things with themselves with me, then that’s going to deepen the friendship.

So, I think we also, when we’re talking about be determined, I think we also have standards, right? We don’t just accept anybody, it’s more than just about common interests. It’s great if friends can have some common interests, but common interests aren’t actually the key signs of deep, meaningful friendships. I think also we need to categorize the relationships we have.

So, we really kind of need to sit down and do an inventory of, “Okay, here’s the people that I call my friends,” and where do they belong? Maybe I have somebody who is in my inner circle of friendship that actually doesn’t belong there. And so I may have to let go of some friendships that actually aren’t friendships, I might have to let go of some people. I might also have to take a risk with somebody who is maybe further out in my circles of intimacy and I want to try to bring closer and see how that goes.

And then I think it’s also important to identify your criteria, right? Like what is your criteria for a friendship? What are you looking for in a friend? What are you hoping that this friend brings out about you? What do you want to be able to bring out in this other person? So yeah, like make a list, what am I looking for in somebody I would have a friendship with?

And again, it’s not going to be something like super specific, right? Like they must have the same NFL favorite football team that I do. Maybe that’s great, but maybe that’s not necessary. So I will talk about identifying your criteria and doing it in some, maybe, like general ways and let the person define how the details look. So when I make my list of my criteria, of what I’m looking for in a friend I have on my list:

Fun and witty. Demonstrates character. Can be fun and adventurous but can also go deep that they’re aware of themselves. They have insight.  They’re curious. They’re committed to personal growth. They can handle intensity or intimacy, which often feels intense. They’re pursuing their own personal excellence, and that they can allow others to do the same.

So that’s my list of the criteria that I come up with and this is something that I want to push back up higher on my priority list and not just let it fall behind because I’m so busy. But I really do feel like there’s something missing in my life in that aspect, or something that my life would be improved by having a meaningful adult friendship or two or three or four.

So push yourself, we’re in the last quarter of the year. We’re coming up on the end of the year, maybe looking into 2020 is there things that you could work on either with the friends that you do have or with friends you’d like to meet and can you make that a priority? 

Oftentimes there were so many times when my kids were young and growing up that I would talk to them about being that person who others could approach, or we’d talk about being that person who saw somebody and went and was nice or kind to them or just kind of putting yourself out there. My one daughter would talk about, like, you’ve got to diversify, you got to have several friends because sometimes your one friend isn’t always available. And so we frequently would talk in our house about making friendships. And what I’ve come to realize is that it’s not just something we teach kids and that’s not just something that is good for kids. And we know it’s actually also really good for adults both physically and emotionally to have friendships.

At the end of this episode, I want to remind you that your story matters. Remember, there’s something meaningful in every chapter. Don’t wait to share your story until it’s finished. Until next time, Jackie.

The Legal Stuff

This podcast is solely for the purpose of information and entertainment and does not constitute therapy, nor should it replace competent professional help.

The Prayer of the Perfectionist

Nobody has time for perfection we are pursuing progress. Help me to remember the only step I need to focus on is the next right step for me. Help me to remember that life is a journey. Help me to be able to separate all that I am learning from all that I have to do. Help me to remember that I am not alone, I can ask for help. Help me to strive for frequent awakenings, not mastery. I am enough. Amen.

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