It is easy to feel isolated when life is challenging and you are struggling with stressful situations in your life. During times like these, you may want to withdraw from socializing with people and stay by yourself, away from others. You stay out of the public eye. But this is exactly the time when you need friends by your side!! Having meaningful, sharing, healthy relationships help you maintain a positive outlook and helps you stave off feelings of depression, anxiety and anger. Sharing your feelings, concerns, hopes and challenges with others help you stay connected and helps you maintain a healthy level of healthy support and camaraderie. Having other people involved in your life when things are challenging helps provide you with alternative points of view that can help in objective decision making when you may feel that making any decision is too difficult. Friends are an essential part of life.
How do you build and maintain healthy relationships? For a lot of us, the biggest stressors in our lives come from interactions with other people! People can make us mad and upset; they can hurt our feelings; they can let us down. So how can we eliminate the stressful conditions in relationships and develop healthy connections?
Show Respect for Each Other’s Values and Points of View.
The first thing about building a healthy and fulfilling relationship is that you accept people for who they are. Everyone has his/her own unique set of values, beliefs, interests and experiences, just like you. Rather than trying to persuade your friends to all agree with your point of view or change their value system, show a little curiosity. Be curious to find out why your friends believe what they do and how have their experiences shaped their perspectives. Don’t try to change people; learn from them. Accept differences as healthy ingredients for your friendships and relationships. Aila Accad points out in her book, 34