Misery Buddies

Misery Buddies

I was at a big event recently where I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen this century. I recognized faces as being very familiar to me from my yesteryear, but mostly found no names coming to mind. What I did find was a nice lift at seeing the faces. I’ll take it.

Why am I glad to see you? How do I connect? What makes me open my heart?

When I choose to engage with you lots of interesting things become available to me. For one, my life gets bigger. For two, I get to have a bigger love exchange; more coming in, more going out. That keeps my spirit healthy and happy. For three, I get more experience. More joys, more fun, and more sadness, too, as we share life things.

I joke around about being a gregarious introvert. There are lots of thoughts out there about what makes an introvert. I love spending time with people, but I recharge on alone time. Good to know.

The other thing that’s good to know is what a huge impact we can have on each other’s outlook, point of view, attitude, opinions, and so on. We can encourage each other to be our best selves, or, um, not.

I used to be a wonderful misery buddy. Now, I will say, I appreciate that we all have stuff, I have stuff. I find it useful to talk about that stuff to find solutions. Complaining, whining, being offended, running a litany of what’s wrong with whatever, or whomever, negative emotional judgments about stuff, feeling either superior or inferior, paying a lot of attention to the negative, brushing off the positive, you know, for example, all work to keep us feeling miserable.

As with so much of our daily lives, misery is a habit. We start in the dawn of time, maybe as hungry or tired babies whining to go home while our mom was running errands. Then we get in the habit of feeling whiny at the store, or in the car. In NLP, we call that “anchoring,” when we attach a feeling to a situation. We are supposed to grow out of it, but sometimes we get stuck.

Giving up those things is part of becoming a grownup.

It’s kind of like we all begin by out looking for the bad stuff. Maybe it’s an old survival thing, but we all mostly do it, like it’s our starting point. It’s easy to see the crap.

As we grow up, we learn that being happy is way better for us is a lot of ways. We sleep better, we have more energy, we stay healthier, we have more fun, we connect more deeply, we find more things to enjoy, we take ourselves both more and less seriously.

Why do I want to be connected? What makes my relationships mutually supportive? How do I engage with you?

We learn to look inside, and we learn that connecting with each other, establishing bonds of intimacy, makes everything nicer, easier, more fun, more profound.

Connecting with each other from a place of positivity, love, and support is so nice. When we have really strong connections with each other, we don’t even need to be in each other’s company to feel supported, we have that history with our loved ones. Our world is bigger, and cozier.

How have I changed from having misery buddies to enjoying grownup relationships?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 01132014