Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - The Art of Cultivating Soul Friendships

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Welcome back to another Language of Love Bite!  This week we explore a topic that resonates deeply with many of us: the making and maintaining of soul friendships.You know, those deep, meaningful connections that just light up your life?  I'm going to share with you the emotional healing necessary  to make room for these kinds of friendships. We'll also chat about why knowing your worth and setting boundaries isn't just good for you, but it's essential for nurturing healthy, soulful friendships. I've got some stories from my own life to share, too, because let's face it, we've all been there when a friendship ends. It's tough, but I'll give you some tips on how to handle it with grace and how to spot the real deal soul friends in your life. Try out any of my guided meditations to ground your system and regulate your energy, and then check out my book Quantum Love for a deeper dive into this topic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the last 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Bites, where I tackle your most asked questions and requested topics. These episodes are designed to be fun, quick and to the point. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. One of the things that I am the luckiest with in my life is I have an amazing family of soul friends. Some of them I've known for years, but many of them just for two or three years that I've called in in more recent years. And I've lost many friends through the years, especially in recent years, friend breakups.

So if you've had a friend breakup, make sure to watch the YouTube video I did about that or listen to the podcast I did about that when friends break up. But this episode is about how to make amazing soul friends, how to attract them in, how to connect with them, and how to create a soul family. because for many of us, myself included, our friends are our family. We have the family we born into, and then we have the family we create. And that's not just our nuclear family, our partner or children, that is our friend family. And we're becoming more and more a tribal society again, where community is more important than ever before. So I want to share with you some

of the tools and the techniques that I have found or the strategies that really will build your soul family, okay? And it starts with knowing your own soul, being your true authentic self. You know, in elementary school and adolescence, when we first started really consciously making friends or perhaps struggling to make friends, I have yet to meet an adolescent, really, who doesn't feel like they have to be a certain thing to make friends. They have to be cool. They have to be pretty. They have to be hot. They have to whatever. There's all of this pressure to fit in. And that stays with us. And for many of us, we have operated in our lives well into adulthood, feeling like the only way we can have friends is if we are a certain way. And so we don't

necessarily show our authentic truth to our friends. We don't let our freak flag fully fly. We aren't as ridiculous as we might be. We may not share all of our kooky beliefs or ideas because we feel like they won't be accepted. But the truth is, do you really want friends who don't accept your authentic truth? If you're going to make soul friends who speak to your soul, you better be showing up with your true authentic self. And by the way, the more you do healing in your life, the more you heal from your childhood, from your traumas, from your triggers, the healthier and the more magical the friends you're going to attract in. So I do feel unbelievably blessed and lucky with the community of friends that I have and how amazing they are and what beautiful

souls they are, but I also know that they are a reflection of the healing I've been willing to do in my own life. And so the more you're willing to heal and the more you're willing to show up as your true authentic self, I'm not saying you're a total asshole all the time, but I mean you let your true authentic self be known. That is when you can find out whether someone is really a match for you in any relationship, but especially a friend relationship. The second way is like, where do you meet friends? Right. A lot of people met their friends through parent groups or babies, mommies and me's or at school. Right. But let's say you don't have kids or you're past that stage or you don't want kids or whatever. There are so many ways to make friends. But one of the best

ways to find amazing people is to go out there and do something of service in a group. Okay. So maybe it's a community service. Maybe it's a soup kitchen. Maybe it's a charitable organization. Go out there and join something to be of service that really feels good to you in an area that really interests you. Right. So I'm not saying to go join a knitting circle if you hate knitting, right? Because you're going to meet a lot of knitters. Or to go join a soup kitchen if you feel, you know, uncomfortable around homeless people. Like you've got to go do something that feels in alignment with you. But when you do something of service, not only does it make you feel really, really good, but you are going to meet other people who are soulfully wanting to

do service as well and are interested in the areas you're interested in. So you already have that common denominator. And you're showing up as your authentic self. You're making conversation. Maybe at first just about you have a topic of conversation with the activity that you're doing. You can talk around that. And then you ask questions about their lives and who they are and what excites them. You engage them, right? Most of us have no idea how to move through loss. there's no roadmap to follow when you're trying to navigate grief. And I realized this when I lost my son three years ago. As a therapist who understood grief, a whole new level of pain opened up to me when I lost my 16-year-old son. And since then, I have been building resources

that have allowed me to navigate through loss, not only in a healthy way, but in a way that has transformed me for the better. We can move through the most terrible loss with grace. And that's why I have created the course, Good Grief, Healing from Loss with Love. You can find it on my website, drlauraberman.com, right there on the homepage, as well as free resources letting you know how to support others who are going through loss. None of us has to do this alone. The other thing, ironically, you need to really make sure because you're not just wanting to be attractive to the amazing friends. You're wanting to make sure that those friends are going to be good friends to you, the kind of friends that are soul friends. And by soul friend, I mean

they speak and they connect with your soul. They honor you. You can show up as your true self. You feel safe with them. They protect your heart. They stand up for you. They step up for you. They match you. Right. Those are the kinds of friends you want. And that requires also boundaries. Right. So so often when we desperately want friends, we'll do anything for you. OK, tell me what you need. I'll do anything you want. You know, like, OK, you need me to wake up at two in the morning and drive you to the airport. That's fine. Right. No, I am one of those friends. and I think I'm an amazing friend, but every one of my friends know I am not the one you call if you need a ride to or from the airport. I do not do that even for my own children

or my husband. I do not do airport drop offs and pickups. That's just an absolute full body no to me. Other people, it's not. For me, it is. OK, so you can hold whatever boundary you need and someone who is able to show up for you as a true friend is going to respect that boundary and recognize your worth, not only in spite of that boundary, but because of that boundary, right? Any relationship that's a healthy one is going to respect your boundaries. And if you are going to be able to have a healthy relationship, you have to be able to set those boundaries. And you also have to know that it's really important to not settle for less than you deserve. I mean, it feels like all of these, I'm talking about love, but it's the same thing in friend relationships

as well. Okay. If you are willing to settle for a friend who gossips about other people, you can be guaranteed they're going to gossip about you. You're going to settle for a friend who's a flake and doesn't show up when they say they're going to show up or do what they say they're going to do. Or you're going to settle for a friend that expects you to do or requires that you do all the heavy lifting in the relationship and make all the plans and reach out to them and it's never reciprocated, right? That is not gonna be a good friend, okay?

So not only are you being auditioned as a potential friend, you're also auditioning them. And it's really, it doesn't mean you say to that person, you suck, I don't wanna be your friend, but don't invest energy in people who aren't gonna really show up and match you. And they will show you who they are, a la Maya Angelou's famous line, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. And a lot of people will show you up front who they are or they'll show you over time. And when you go through hard times, that's often when you will lose friends because they will show you who they are. Like when I lost Sammy, friends who I really thought were dear friends of mine were horrible.

I mean, I get it. They had their own issues. They were triggered by the loss or the grief or whatever, but they disappeared. Are they still part of my inner circle? No, I know I can't trust them, right? I know they'll abandon me. That doesn't mean I hate them or don't want to be friends with them, but they are definitely not in my inner circle, right?

And then there were friends who I wasn't even that close to or wouldn't have considered necessarily. Maybe they were newer friends or I didn't know them as well. And so they weren't really people that I were in my deeper inner circle. And they showed up in insane ways, got so much closer to me. And now they are deeper friendships than I ever could have imagined because of what I went through and how they showed up. So people will show you who they are. If you show up as your authentic self and you give it some time and you hold your boundaries and you ask for what you need and you're giving as well as you're receiving, you will find your soul friends. And most of all, keep healing because in all of our relationships, we are going to attract and be attracted to people who are at our same frequency. So the more you heal, the higher your energetic frequency.

The higher your energetic frequency, the more you're a match to other high energy frequencies.