Friends Are A Gift We Give Ourselves
They say that a friend is a relative that you choose yourself. While our parents, brothers and grandparents are chosen by chance or fate. Thus, friends are those companions in life who, without sharing any degree of consanguinity, accept us as we are : they love us with our virtues and despite our defects.
Many times we forget the enormous importance of friendship. We are obsessed with looking for the perfect partner, in achieving romantic love and we do not realize that the word love does not always imply a sentimental partner, but that in friends we can also find that affection and that company that we long for.
Friends are great treasures, they are gifts that we have made ourselves to make our existence more pleasant, fun or rewarding. For this reason it is very important to know how to conserve them, something that is not easy if we take into account that sometimes we are going to get carried away by our ego, so that we generate misunderstandings with them or we end up moving away due to the demands of the circumstances or out of routine.
Friends and happiness
It is true that there is nothing external that directly makes us happier. We are tired of repeating that neither money, nor fame, nor the couple, nor beauty alone generate the desired happiness. But in the case of friendship things change a bit. According to the latest research, people who have more true friends are much happier than the average and also healthier physically and mentally.
Friends activate us at all levels, because when we are sad they give us that little push to get out of the pothole and disconnect from our negative thoughts. In turn, they act as powerful reinforcers since with them we carry out the plans and activities that interest us and carry out the most.
Friends generate in us feelings of belonging and unconditional acceptance that make us feel authentic, without defensive barriers and in harmony. They confer the necessary social support so that the stress of our daily life is less since friendship constitutes a powerful buffer against negative life experiences.
Cultivate a healthy friendship
For Carl Rogers, a well-known humanistic psychotherapist, healthy friendship, the real one, is based on communication, understanding, mutual support and affection.
According to this author, friends have to be authentic to each other, so that in the relationship the feelings of each other are expressed as they are, honestly, without masks. Something that goes hand in hand with authenticity is another of the characteristics of good friendship that Rogers points out: unconditional acceptance. Without acceptance, there is no true friendship.
We all have flaws and our friends are not going to be less. But “despite” and “thanks to” these defects, we accept and love them. A true friend does not demand anything from another because he does not intend to change him, or turn him into another person that he is not, since as we have commented, the choice has been his own.
Another essential characteristic is empathy: we cannot cultivate a friendship if we are not able to put ourselves in the shoes of our friend, to understand their feelings. Only by practicing empathy, we can give the best of ourselves to our friend, which will, in turn, be returned to us by him.
The last characteristic that Carl Rogers points out is the disposition of openness towards the other, that is, of absolute surrender. The fact of sharing with him, of being by his side in good times and also in bad times, and of doing it the same or better than we do with ourselves.
Friendship heals the soul of those who are lucky enough to experience it. You cannot call anything friendship. As we have pointed out, true friendship has a series of characteristics that must be present. But the most important – and most difficult – step is to maintain that friendship; For this you have to dedicate time, as an element -of a special value- that needs to be taken care of: spend time with your friends, as much as you can, worry about them and their family, be grateful and above all, be very loyal.
