How to Make Friends: helpful advice

[XL]

I've noticed a lot of enmeshed and isolated people on here who mentioned not having a social life outside their family. I am quite adjusted in this area. Here is how you make quality friends.

1. Show up. Show up consistently. Pick a club, event, class, whatever. Just keep showing up and chat with the other people who go there. Become a "regular". You will keep seeing the same people every week. Make a point to say hi to the staff and ask how their week has been.

2. Pick a healthy group event that meets regularly. Run club. Yoga class. A sports event at a rec center. Book club. Force yourself to go, even if you don't really feel like it or feel awkward.

3. Push through the awkwardness. Even if you just linger on the periphery of an event, it's still important to show up. Don't be afraid to challenge yourself to try things you're bad at. I took up salsa dancing randomly, and it was so much fun. No one is judging you as much as you think.

4. Go when invited! I have a fear of turning down any invitation. If someone invited you to anything, show up, even for a little bit. Invitations to things aren't that hard to get. It's when you consistently turn them down that people stop calling you.

5. Go to random community events if you don't know where to start. Find a concert, gallery, ANYTHING in a local events page, and just go.

6. Don't be afraid to plan your own event. One of the nicest, most popular girls I know "hunts" down new friends. If you vaguely suggest coffee sometime, she WILL call you to schedule an exact time and place. Actively make specific plans with new people and solidify them.

7. Don't be a downer. Therapy exists for a reason. Keep your new friendships mostly light and funny.

8. Be willing to go to things that might suck. "I hate baby showers". "I don't like that restaurant." etc. So what. Be adaptable. Lighten your standards and cheerfully go anyway.

9. Diversify your friendships. It's a lot easier to keep 50 casual friends than to have a single suffocating relationship with a negative friend.

10. Keep your expectations low. It's ok to have a bunch of acquaintances. They don't have to be great people, or even great friends. You might meet better friends through them eventually.

I hope this helps. It's so much easier to deal with problem families when you feel connected to the outside world. A surplus of positive experiences is necessary when other areas of your life exist in a negative zone.

[AbbyNormal]

Good advice and thanks for taking the time to write all of that up.

I wish I would have had this advice a long time ago. Now I've gotten to a place where I have a few networks of friends and I enjoy them so much. It seems that one has to move past that place of shame that a lot of us live in before we can get to a place of having friends, or at least that was the case for me. Now that I realize I'm not the devil incarnate, I feel like I'm able to have friends. And, a lot of us were taught that there were consequences for our social lives. I've seen it over and over on this board. I definitely had a learned behavior where I was afraid of the fallout from any fun I had outside of the home. If I went to a football game in high school, I would be wondering what my uBPDm was going to do the next day to retaliate. I had to change that pattern by accepting that no one was going to penalize me anymore for having lunch with someone.

[XL]

I was overly social. I kind of scrambled for any friends I could find, because I needed important things like car rides and roommates. Refining that into quality friends has definitely taken effort.

[lipsticklibrarian]

Friendships are incredibly healing, I'm so grateful that I have managed to make and maintain so many in my adult life. My mother used to put me on this weird sort of pedestal when I was a child "Oh you're my perfect baby, you're so unique, you're too cool to hang out with those people." Basically i went through my adolescence thinking I was better than everyone else and also incredibly delusional and lonely.

Now I'm much more communal and I have a lot of friends, they aren't at all competitive and nobody thinks they're better than anyone else, it's perfect, everyone is just so relaxed and free to enjoy one anthers company.

If I have children that's the environment I want to be raised in, where they are loved unconditionally and happy.

[isshebpd]

If you truly want to be someone's friend for life, be there for them in their darkest hour.

I remember my best buddy in University was contemplating suicide after getting dumped by an abusive (and much older) woman. We talked and listened to music for hours. Now we live thousands of miles away now, decades later, and we are still good friends.

When I met my DW she had a breakdown while we were dating (due to her FOO imo) and ended up in the hospital. I brought in take-out and hugs (etc.). She hasn't been in the hospital since, in the last 20 years. 

[ScarletOlive]

Great list, XL. Thanks for writing this.

[chriskell]

I love this list! I've found it very helpful to have lots of friends or acquaintances who do not have anything to do with my family. Most of my friends know simply that my mom has mental health issues. I do not want to talk about BPD with every friend because most of them cannot relate at all. I do have a couple of close friends who understand BPD because of their experiences with family members, and those friends are great to have too.