Post No.: 0986
Furrywisepuppy says:
Our attachment style can affect our social happiness – secure types have a tendency to find it easier to be happy in their relationships compared to anxious or avoidant types. Secure types are more trusting and comfortable with intimacy – they’re more optimistic, forgiving, supportive, comfortable with depending on others and being depended on, and they don’t worry about being abandoned or about others getting too close. Anxious types are more insecure about abandonment and are fearful. Avoidant types are more aloof or disinterested and are dismissive.
Early life exposures and experiences – even one-off events if they’re key moments, or at least the balance of good and bad experiences and their consistency and intensity – can have a lasting effect on one’s neurological wiring. Anxious types react more to negative signals, and avoidant types react less to positive signals. One’s genetics and childhood experiences with one’s main caregiver determine one’s attachment style, according to the theory. If a child is attended to and made to feel safe and supported in his/her attempts to try new things independently then he/she will tend to trust more, have a higher self-esteem, and enjoy a greater satisfaction in close relationships.
But whether you have a secure or insecure attachment style – we all benefit from ongoing love, empathy, compassion and emotional care. Anxious types benefit also from constant reassurance, and avoidant types benefit also from practical care. Cultivating a sense of more secure attachment, like reminding a person of a caring figure or time in their life, reduces stress, and can in turn increase compassion and altruism and temporarily enhance a sense of attachment. Plus if you can boost anyone’s sense of security in any way, they’ll be kinder and more compassionate towards you in return.
These are of course broad generalisations but, compared to women, men tend to base their friendships around doing shared activities together and are relatively more transactional, rather than care about personal topics, sharing thoughts, secrets, gossip and feelings or emotional support. This means that as life circumstances change and time for those activities dwindle, a lot of male-male friendships are prone to fall by the wayside.
Female-female friendships do however tend to require more face-to-face or at least frequent contact to keep up-to-date with each other to sustain them, whereas a male-male friendship can potentially go without any kind of contact for months or even years and they’ll still consider each other as close friends. Yet if they’re not seeing each other much, they’re not gaining the benefits of that friendship much either.
Men are more likely to use humour to taunt friends and see this as innocent, and are more likely to remain friends after a heated argument, than women. Women tend to prefer going out with one good friend than hang out in a group.
Just knowing that someone believes your pain or has got your back if you might ever need them is a huge psychological help that reduces one’s anxieties and increases the sense of safety – thus social connectedness (a sense of belonging or the quality of the relationships one has more than the quantity of them) helps to increase the feeling of pain relief.
Caring social touch, like a hug, offers this feeling too. A nice cuddle has pain-relieving qualities hence is positive for our well-being. Some feared that the frequency we touch others through hugs and cuddles would stay decreased even once COVID-19 was under control though.
If you don’t have someone to warmly hug you then snuggling up under a weighted blanket can possibly simulate the feeling and reduce anxiety for you. Or try cuddling a fluffy pet or plush toy to get that soothing tactile pressure :3. Anxious people are hypervigilant, including regarding every little unpleasant niggling sensation they feel inside or on their body, hence feeling less anxious might reduce such hypervigilance and fears of the worst.
Gentle physical touch and eye contact fosters trust, as well as signals safety and therefore reduces stress, boosts health, and helps create bonds – thus those pats on the back or caresses of the arms, etc. are all important socially and for our well-being. They are the primary non-verbal language of compassion. Touch is used in a variety of therapies. Early scientific research is beginning to reveal some benefits to the immune system from massages for instance.
How much touch we receive from birth can have repercussions for our weight, height and any behavioural problems down the line – with every comforting and reassuring touch, a baby’s brain is being restructured for a better chance of more resilient mental health outcomes in their future. Interpersonal touch is the glue for social bonding. How someone touches you reveals how they feel about you. The right kind of touch improves trust, empathy, connection and generosity. If waiters appropriately touch patrons on the upper arm when interacting with them, they’re more likely to receive larger tips in return.
Receiving tender, altruistic, personal attention can also trigger an autonomous sensory meridian response, which most people find pleasant – read Post No.: 0801 for more about ASMR.
The use of verbal (words and tone) and non-verbal (facial expressions and body language) communication with others is universal to express our pain, laughter and other emotions to others. We also sing to express our feelings and to let others join in with our feelings. Your hearing is specifically tuned for listening for the frequencies of human speech, or your voice co-evolved to be tuned with the frequencies of human hearing i.e. it appears that humans evolved to talk and listen to each other more than produce or notice other sounds, like woof!
Most people anticipate that talking on the phone with someone, even a friend, is going to be more awkward and uncomfortable than just texting or emailing them though. But if you want to feel more connected with them then a voice call or video chat (it doesn’t matter which) is much better. Typed messages have their functions but hearing the other person’s voice humanises them. We’ll thus feel closer to them and tend to feel more aglow with the exchange.
Being in-person with someone is most preferable if we want to communicate with them – that’s how humans evolved when it comes to communicating socially. Video calls are a handy option, and are preferred to texts or emails as mentioned above – yet in comparison to being in-person with a colleague, they can lead to fatigue, which we must watch out for. With group videoconferences compared to in-person conferences in particular, everybody is looking at everybody all of the time. Even when one isn’t speaking, a wall of eyes are still seemingly staring at you, which is highly unnatural. The eye contact is often off-centre as people look at the screen rather than into the camera lens too. You usually have a box where you can see your own face, which also makes you feel more self-conscious. This box helps us to know if our face is drifting away from the camera’s view – yet staying rooted to one narrow position for a prolonged time is tiring too, as well as limits our thinking (we sometimes naturally like to get up and move around while we think, and this helps us to think).
The face-to-face setup is quite confrontational too, when collaborating colleagues at the same physical table often sit side-by-side. And when we laugh, the microphone sometimes cuts to only hearing one person laughing at a time, thus it feels like we’re laughing alone. We might have to exaggerate our body language (e.g. our nods or giving thumbs up gestures) to make sure we’re understood. When we look to the side for even just a quick moment, people might think we’re distracted and have stopped paying attention to them. And of course electronic screens can get tiring for the eyes. One partial solution is to hang back further away from the screen and use a wireless microphone, and go to audio-only now and again.
When greeting others in general, many people don’t expect more than a stock answer when they ask someone, “How are you doing?” It’s more a mere formality than a real inquiry into checking how someone is really doing. But maybe we ought to care more about the answers to this question instead of say we’re okay when we’re not, or to assume someone else is okay just because they said so. We must pay attention to how congruent their body language is with their words.
Also, most people, when they meet someone new, treat the encounter as if exchanging CVs/résumés – for instance by interrogating, “Where are you from?” and, “What do you do for a living?” and then that’s mainly it. If you really want to get to know someone better – ask more original or leftfield questions (too) like, “What are you most grateful for at the moment?” or, “Which celebrity would you most like to meet in person?”
When it comes to making and maintaining firm furry friendships – a vital ingredient is giving more time to others. More time for friends leads to making more friends. Logical!
Being interested in, praising, complimenting, spending time with and being affected by your friends is how to make them feel good around you. Appreciate and accept people and you will make friends. Be happy around others and others will be happy to be around you. Friendship is mostly about aiming to have fun and jolly times together!
Keep in touch and regularly communicate or your friendship will wither. You also mustn’t hold back from what you feel inside with a good friendship. Care less about carefully managing your image around them – showing vulnerability and sharing self-disclosures with ease are central. Self-disclosure involves trusting – and friendships deepen through self-disclosures and trust. Try to keep it roughly level in reciprocation though because proper friendships cannot flourish with a heavy imbalance. So try to mirror the same amount of self-disclosure with the other person but take it slightly further in terms of what you reveal about yourself personally without jumping too far ahead of them.
Don’t be fiercely independent – ask for help. When someone helps you – or at least feels honoured and valued enough to be asked a favour from you – they’ll bond more with you. Also help without expectation of return.
Back them regarding their viewpoints and their endeavours and ambitions. You don’t have to agree with everything they forward but aim to uphold their positions when they turn to you for support in the face of a hostile world. Try to share core attitudes. Likeminded people who share the same values (or similar hobbies or they work in the same industries) as you make excellent friends that have plenty in common.
Friendships do require patience and gentle persistence. You cannot force or speed them along. They need to feel natural and naturally betiding. However, don’t cling onto people who make you feel resentful even though they might be conveniently and habitually naturally around.
True friends exhibit loyalty and can keep confidences. They’ll never, say, publicly criticise, slander or betray each other in front of or behind their backs.
Never neglect your friends. When geographical distance comes between you and a friend – try to set aside a special day or two each year for a physical reunion and contact. You both will then get into the routine of keeping those days clear for each other.
Yet never ultimately give up on the valued friends you haven’t heard from for a long while. A message or card will instantly re-ignite the friendship. Friendship is a stellar gift for others so be generous and nigh on unconditional with it. Know that you are a valuable and good friend to them hence they won’t squander the opportunity to rekindle that friendship.
Woof! Please use the Twitter comment button below if you wish to share your own wisdom on keeping amicable bonds active.
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