A benefit of getting healthier: your friends stick around.
Like most people, our friends span an eclectic mix of personalities and backgrounds. Being a more reactive person, there have been times I wished for something more predictable or less dysfunctional in our friends.
They are all roughly as dysfunctional as we are, thereabouts I imagine. We perform well in society but have doubts, personality flaws, relationship challenges, life events. If I think about it, most of us have trauma that's shaping us in some way, often unacknowledged.
When I began both putting boundaries into play as well as seeing my own flaws, the issues of my friends greatly diminished. Non-dual consciousness places more emphasis on living your own life while extending more compassion to others. Win. Win.
I found my voice and use it more frequently. I speak my mind in casual conversation and no one is shocked or has abandoned me/us. I suspect everyone exists with a higher tolerance for some dysfunction in friendships than I have.
I imagine the gaps in my life had I just kept cutting people out. I would miss out on them, and they for me.
There are a few people where friendship wasn't possible due to our drastically different ways of living that evolved over time. There are others where we spent more time together than we do now and that's also quite okay.
Less reactivity frees up time to be with myself more comfortably and my imperfect friends and family. It's keeping me humble with my own need for growth, but eliminates the self-loathing that also pushes people away.
I've yet to see a downside for getting serious about healing. Aside from the hours. And the money. Yeah that. But I can't think of a single thing I could buy or an experience I could have, anyone I could help, that could do more to transform my own life like this has.
So we just. Keep. Going.
Alrighty then.