Everybody needs a friend?

The worst kind of punishment is solitary confinement, that is why it is used in prisons when you are too anti-social even for the company of criminals, however it is also the fate of too many good people out of step with society, the odd and usual or just unlucky, a bad divorce or unemployment and you are left on your own. That is the time when you have no choice but to start being your own friend, or even better become friends with yourself whilst you have friends because you are the only one that you can guarantee being on your side no matter what, which can sound a little paranoid and self-defeating, if it was not for the fact that you can only be a friend or an enemy with yourself, there is no middle ground, you can not be indifferent with such a personal relationship, and if you are not friends with yourself, you can not really be friends with anyone else. In the end no matter where you go, you are already there, and even a mild dislike will turn into hatred given enough time, and you are with yourself for forever, so start moving toward love, compassion and understanding for yourself and others.

You can only improve the quality of your relationship with yourself by knowing what it is in the first place, and we do this as we do with all friendships by listening, being ignored or dismissed is never a strong foundation for being friends with someone. If we are not being heard we end up full of resentment, when we are not listened to, when our needs and wants are irrelevant and so unimportant that they are not even worth acknowledging, we feel unseen and unworthy. To change this relationship, we need to be friends with ourselves, it means listening to your thoughts without judgement, and they are not friendly and they not really yours either, they are the concerns and worries of your sub-conscious, and they are not polite or proper, they have no social etiquette, filter or sense of decency, they can be very rude and nasty. It might be better to think of them as a vicious guard dog that forgot that it has a heart of gold, they are there to have your worst thoughts, the thinkable ones, to point out dangers both physical and social, to protect you by taking the worst view of the world and yourself, and it is a good dog just untrained and unloved.

However the dog on it's own is not enough to stop us from saying stupid, inconsiderate things out loud, that is why we have close friends they help to regulate our thoughts (we literally outsource our social regulation), so that we can say the things that we would not say in front of strangers, thoughts that we are not sure we should say but we do feel and need to test out these thoughts with someone non-judgemental or who at least have our best interest at their heart. In our relationship with ourselves we tend not to be so kind or compassionate, our own judgement is often the worst judgement that we could come up with. We rarely agree with someone else's poor judgement of us, and yet we are quite happy to call ourselves stupid, ugly or useless, and if no one was listening it would be bad enough, but there are people listening, our sub-conscious minds (not singular but many).

Our conscious mind is where our sub-conscious minds communicate with each other, it's purpose is to combine all our sensate experiences into a binding moment of consciousness (see the book, the mind illustrated for a full explanation). We tell ourselves a story of what is happening in the moment, based on who we are as determined by our actions up until that moment in our lives and our view of it in relation to our qualities and character. The same event can mean different thing depending on how we see ourselves, losing your phone could be a disaster or a learning experience just by taking a different point of view, that is why stoicism places such importance on taking the right view of events, to reframe our experience in a positive way.

By being a friend to ourselves we are telling a better story to our sub-conscious minds, we are giving our sub-conscious minds a better view, but it takes time, that is why you have to consciously repeat the view before you internalise it, as the sub-conscious takes the aggravated average of your thoughts, you have to change that average. If you have told yourself a thousand times that you are unlovable, just saying that you are loved once is not going to change anything no matter how good it feels to hear and believe that you are truly loved once in the moment, you have to repeat it until it changes the average. Just like any action that you choose to do, you have to practise and learn by doing it wrong a thousand times before it become natural and internalised, habits are what we repeat until it become the lowest energy way of doing things. If you repeatedly bring your broad awareness to the physical feeling of joy (it is in your chest, as I have said deliberately and repeatedly, so it becomes a habit) it will in the end become easier for your awareness to stay with that feeling rather than have the conscious mind force your awareness back there, it becomes the low energy action to stay there, and if you have your choice of states to have your presence with it would be joy, and that seems like the sort of thing a friend would do for themselves if they could, and you can.

However I am not claiming that is easy to be friends with yourself, you are a pain, you are going to have to be compassionate, kind and very patience with yourself, and it will be tiring, change always is, that is why we resist it, even when it costs you energy to do so. You can not stop the tide from turning, change is certain, and yet we always seek rest instead of making the small effort to just readjusting our balance and surf with the waves that hit our lives. Being a friend means pushing ourselves, being the cheerleader, coach and hard nosed owner getting the most out of every moment, taking every opportunity to learn and improve, to know yourself better and live in the moment rather than putting every moment into a story about itself. It is better to experience life without a mind to the future and past, so we can just enjoy what is happening, how it feels without a narrator telling us how we feel.

Constantly having binding moment of consciousness is a good thing for the young, it is part of the learning process of becoming an adult when we are finding our place in the world, a way of being that makes sense within the world as we find it. However at some point we have to arrive and start living in the moment by fully experiencing what is happening without the chatter of the sub-conscious minds in the background, by listening to ourselves will are able to start listening to other with the same stable attention. We do not end ignore what is happening within our internal experience rather it drops into our broad awareness, the best example I have heard is imagining walking through a crowded room with a cup of hot coffee, your stable attention would be on the cup whilst at the same time your awareness would be very broad watching out for small children and clumsy adults.

By being friends to ourselves, it is easier to drop into this balance between attention and awareness, when every random thought does not drag your attention to itself, your awareness can remain broad, you start to notice connections, cause and effect, that negative thoughts lead to negative emotion, that not sleeping makes you moody, sugary food makes you crash and not listening leads to confusion. It gives your narrator a job to do in making sense of the world rather than being over-emotional and reacting with fear to everything that occurs, you can give yourself permission to be kind to yourself, giving you time and distance from problems, it slows down your thoughts as they are being listened to, noted and dealt with, even if you are just accepting that they come from a place of fear rather than reality. At it's root being a friend to yourself is the work of loving yourself for your faults, follies and fancies, there is nothing wrong with you, you are just a human who needs a friend and that is fine, do not worry, you are just one of us, imperfect and trying to be better.