Friends Abroad Relationship School

You can enjoy the weekend or an outing without alcohol. Its not the alcohol. It's your mindset that matters!

After trauma, it's possible to get emotionally stuck at the age it happened. But with mental health support, it's possible to get unstuck.

Action on your own behalf is the antidote to traumatic feelings of helplessness.
Lindsay C. Gibson,

Emotional unavailability

When you are insecure attached, you are also emotionally unavailable.

Why do you end up emotionally unavailable?
These include attachment styles developed in childhood
Trauma.
Mental health conditions
History in relationships

Healthy and mature people certainly need help sometimes too. But they go about it differently. When they ask for help, they consider the other person’s circumstances.
Lindsay C. Gibson

What behaviours turn you off in relationships?

Not every rejection needs a follow-up. Sometimes seeking closure from the people who’ve rejected you can hurt you even more.
Mitta Xinindlu

Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.
Seneca
#stoicism
#stoicreflection

To leave a trauma bond

Be intentional
Write why leaving matters
Start active healing for dichotomy of control

Selfcare to improve emotional baseline
Self-regulation tool to tune in to emotions
Accountability person to reach out to instead of your trauma mate.
Replacement exercises on three levels

Emotionally immature people who are otherwise intelligent can think conceptually and show insight as long as they don’t feel too threatened in the moment.

Their intellectual objectivity is limited to topics that aren’t emotionally arousing to them.
Lindsay C. Gibson

I used to spend much time reacting & responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems & wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was ok for me to think about & identify what I wanted, remarkable things began to take place in life.
Melody Beattie

Even years later, you recall that you knew all along that something was a bad idea. Yet instead, you followed the insistent voice telling you that you must do otherwise, regardless of how you felt or what you knew.
Lindsay C. Gibson,

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
Seneca

Certain things in life will cut you open like a knife. When that happens—at that exposing moment—the world gets a glimpse of what’s truly inside you.

So what will be revealed when you’re sliced open by tension and pressure?
Iron?
Or air?
Or bullshit?
Ryan Holiday

#stoicism
#stoicreflection

Let me be crystal clear: focus on the outcome, not the relationship. As soon as you focus on the relationship and try to improve it or change it at an emotional level, an interaction with an emotionally immature person will deteriorate.
Lindsay C. Gibson,

Empathy is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty: withholding our natural inclination to feel with another allows us to treat the other as an It.
Daniel Goleman

Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Seneca