Friend Therapy
Friend therapy is simple: Let your friends help you manage your stress! Research shows that people without social networks and friends often feel lonely, but often won't admit it. Loneliness is stressful. Holding in your feelings is even more stressful.
Some people tend to turn to friends automatically when things get tough. Others tend to isolate themselves during stressful times, just when they could most use a listening ear and a few words of encouragement.
Some people already have a group of friends they can turn to, but when things get stressful, it's often easy to stop calling them. Do you stop returning e-mails, calling your buddies, or going out with your group when you are feeling stressed? Engage in some friend therapy and give those buddies a call. Warn them you are feeling stressed. Ask them to listen without offering advice, if you don't want advice. Or, maybe you do!
If you don't have a ready-to-go group of friends or have lost touch with yours, you may have to start from scratch. One of the easiest ways to make friends is to join something. Take a class, join a club, attend a church, find a support group. You might need to try a few different things before you meet people you can really relate to, but if you keep trying, you'll do it.
Don't use the excuse that you can't fit anything else into your schedule. Set something up with a coworker you like, make an overture to another parent at your child's school during a school event, or call a friend you haven't been in touch with for a while to meet for lunch. You're going to eat lunch anyway, right?
One way to start up a friendship is to ask a favor. Acquaintances and neighbors are often hesitant to ask favors, but asking a favor starts a reciprocal relationship. If you ask your neighbor to borrow her snow shovel or the proverbial cup of sugar, your neighbor will feel easier about asking you for something later on. Asking a favor is more effective than offering a favor “any time” because people are usually more willing to do you a favor than to ask you for one. Go ahead and ask for what you need. You may forge a friendship.
Treating your stress with friend therapy doesn't mean you sit at home alone and wait for your friends to come to you. It means you take the initiative and get out there to make contact. Sometimes, it just takes a few words to find someone who is in the same position as you and needs friend therapy, too.
Friend therapy isn't complicated. All it entails is human contact — not cyber-contact (although that's better than no contact). Phone contact can be helpful, but nothing beats the real thing. Just being with another person — talking (even if it's not about your problems), having fun, taking a break from the daily routine — is a great way to relax, raise your self-esteem, and have the chance to be there for somebody else, too. You don't have to do anything in particular with your friends to make it friend therapy. You just have to get a social life.
Of course, there are limits to what friends can and should do for you. Part of friend therapy is giving as well as taking. A productive friend therapy relationship should certainly be reciprocal. If you use your friends for constant unloading but never allow them to unload on you, they won't be your friends for long!
