Friendship Knows No Age
Friendship is one of the best psychotherapeutic relations and the reward of it– reciprocity.
When you are trying to make each other happy, you are friends. If you help each other overcome and withstand serious life troubles, you become real friends.
According to my personal and professional experience, I can tell that friendship is important and it has psychotherapeutic influence. There are four aspects:
1. Sharing of overall values and experiences
If you share values of polar opposites then talking, sharing of feelings to each other becomes difficult. It is easy to listen to but really difficult to have empathy.
It is not always our values are similar to the values of others. On one hand, it is not necessary to be friends with everyone. But on the other hand it is a question: Can we accept the worldview of another person? And to accept a person doesn’t mean that we have to label their views as ‘good\bad’, ‘better\worse’, ‘evil\kind’ et cetera. Our views and preferences are different, like, I have less interest to a particular music genre which my friend likes, but both of us like to read in the same way. So, we should not judge just because we share differences.
When empathy is shared with others, we become sure that we are not alone in our emotions and we have a right to having such emotions and thoughts though we can overcome them independently regardless. And if we can’t, then friends may help us!
2. Understand that you are good and we are similar
The positive approach of a talk with a person stimulates him to bring up the best qualities. Friends often sense good, kind and happy vibes in each other. Such kind of friendship is strong, durable and essential for psychological development.
Johann von Goethe said. “If we take man as he is, we make him worse, But if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be.” In other words, it is important to see a person as something more, better than what is seen of him. It is important to see his potential, to see how he develops.
3. We are alive
The stapled cement of friendship is an interest to ideas, each other and sharing of emotional experience. Emotions, memories allow us to feel alive. Feel yourself as full-fledged part of this life. And this is wonderful!
4. Friendship and bullying
Bullying is an aggressive pursuit of a person from the collective bunch of people. And, yes, to offer a friendship through cheeky insult or teasing is weird and unusual. You may also build friendships by using the criteria of friends’ relationships:
1) Find out what kind of pain person has and why is he stalking you or another person. It helps to see not aggression but pain — something deep inside of the person. And it is a first step to build educational work (if you are planning to do it) or just to find a way to make normal communication with that person.
2) Find out similarities.
3) Find out the mutual activity that can decrease the gap between you and the other. It sounds paradoxical but it works well.
4) Try to be interested in his personality: What makes him angry? Can you help him? It will be important if you want to continue or improve connection with him.
Let’s be friends!
Text Ilya Blagov
Edited by Afiq Makkana, Reshma Durai
