Intentional community = Better health (Part 2)

I am always taken aback at how a family, a group of neighbours, a church group, etc, can come together during a time of crisis. It always blows my mind how people can rally around each other in times of need.

Many of us find ourselves living in challenging economic situations, which means that people are working more, have more troubles and are spending less time with the people they care about.

Intentional efforts to cultivate relationships is of significant importance, particularly in our current climate. Looking online, my sense is that this is a popular perspective. However, my sense is that there aren’t many who make intentional acts towards this.

Helping to strengthen your network is therapy done well

When working with clients, I spend a lot of time telling them to open their phone’s calendar app and book time in to see a friend. More time than one might imagine.

I am not trying to minimise the complexity of what happens in the clinic space. However, spending time with people you care about feels good and it is clearly supported by psychological research. Therefore, I see it as my responsibility to reinforce your social circle. Doing so, is good psychology in practice.

A peek at the research:

Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010), Steptoe et al. (2013) and Choi et al. (2020) exploring the impact of relationship across the US and UK. Their findings indicate that people with friends and close confidants in their lives survive longer and are less likely to die from heart problems and cardio-vascular diseases.

Guohao et al. (2021) researching service industries in Pakistan found that workplace friendship had positive outcomes on workplace productivity and fostered feelings of commitment between supervisors and supervisees. Serious stuff.

 Insights into the clinic room: ‘What if I don’t have friends?’:

Don’t have any friends? Familial relationships gone?

In the clinic, I tend to be quite ‘action-oriented’ when it comes to meeting goals, so the work then becomes about enabling clients to connect with people and identifying personal barriers that get in the way.

Usually, I start by asking: ‘what do you do for fun?’

Often people struggle to answer that question.

So then the next question typically is: ‘what did you do yesterday?’

Somewhere in that answer tends to be some combination of ‘work, watch TV, maybe exercise’.

We dig deeper.

I’d probably ask, ‘what do you tend to watch?’. I’m looking for something specific.

Somewhere in the discussion, I might say, ‘do you spend time on YouTube or any social media?’
If the answer is yes (it commonly is), clients can start to feel a little bit uncomfortable, but the point isn’t to create discomfort.

So then I might ask them to look at their YouTube history, or Instagram explore page. At this point I would ask, ‘what are the common things that you watched or were recommended to you?’ And there we have the gold.

It can be cooking, dogs, dating, faith, philosophy, travel, nature, and so on and so forth.

Websites like: meetup.com or eventbrite.com now come in handy.

We find a free or low-cost event, that the client is willing to go to (depending on your location, this isn’t that hard to do). If they are internet savvy, there are spaces online for this.

It’s hard to build relationships from just going to an event, but at this stage, the goal is to make the idea of being around others with a shared interest feel easier. I’d be trying to remove barriers to accessing like-minded people as much as possible.

The goal from here, would then be to encourage the client to keep doing this and monitor their attendance at the event(s). So they would hopefully move from being an attendee, to being a member of a community. All the while, supporting them to become more emotionally ready to welcome meaningful relationships into their life.

Sounds straightforward right? It is. However, I find that sometimes folks need to be reminded that this needs to take priority in their lives. Sometimes, I find that they could do with a bit of encouragement too.

If being emotionally ready to welcome these types of relationships in your life is a challenge for you and you want to make a change, you might want to consider having personal therapy. You will learn a lot about yourself in the process and be helped towards your goals.

Round up

As my peers and others have found themselves focusing more on their families, their work and other pressures, it is so easy to see how one can look up and realise that their friendships have fizzled out.

I think the strongest way to combat this is to intentionally meet and connect with others.

Join a local football group.

Start a local football group.

Host a dinner party each month/quarter where someone brings a dish, so no one has to be too out of pocket.

Go to that gig. Invite a colleague.

Call up that old friend.

You know you’ll feel better afterwards. Various cultures across the world have built it into their customs. Years of psychological research have already established it.

So. What are you doing this evening?