Building Relationships

The importance of real-world social skills and building lasting relationships.

Why Building Healthy Relationships is Important for Our Health

What Healthy Relationships Looks Like?

• Call back to social attachment pressure from reduced tribe size. 
• Polygamy vs. monogamy and the anthropology of human relationships (only instances of many wives when the man has a lot of resources, even though the man is usually not pleased about it)
• The nature of jealousy and why it exists
• Identifying victimhood and being motivated to transition out of it (the motivation to become a victim has served its purpose beyond its function and has become detrimental). Using it as a short-term mechanism to gain support in order to recover from an insult. Excess usage wears down those around you and the “coping mechanism” becomes the new norm. A way to demand attention by using guilt and weakness as a weapon. Often not intentionally carried out by the wielder of victimhood, but cognitive dissonance prevents them from confronting it. The act of being confronted or confronting it themselves is met with perceived threat and the cycle starts again. 
  • If a relationship has 2 victims, they will both attempt to demand sympathy & attention until one or both of them no longer receive enough. Their hunger for attention becomes insatiable and they chase it elsewhere (online or in situations like pubs/nightclubs where new contacts are made and sympathy is fresh). People may look to “fix” these victims (due to finding value in helping them – often those who received little attention in their youth) and end up enabling them and making the victim more addicted. Periods of “improvement” tend to occur when the danger of losing the enabler (often caused by the victim attacking the fixer when their sympathy expectations are no longer met). The danger of losing their source of attention causes enough of a threat to encourage them to improve momentarily. That is until the victim has noticed the threat of abandonment has been reduced and the path of least resistance usually leads them back to searching for quick and unhealthy relational attention (infidelity, online victimhood for “likes”, drug addiction, gossip, etc.). When a relationship like this goes on for long enough, the enabler may become apathetic, depressed, and develop low self-esteem (which is usually already a cause of “broken wing syndrome” in the first place). If they are depressed for long enough, they may learn the victimhood techniques passively, and end up using similar tactics. Resulting in a 2-person victimhood relationship. A recipe for toxic relationships.   
  • The only remedy is to leave these relationships once the pattern is detected. Both parties need to improve their self-awareness and develop personal autonomy so that they can learn to teach themselves that they are not under threat and build relationships that don’t rely on the other person solving their problems for them. This goes for friendships too. 
  • No party member is a good guy or bad guy. They both often understand their faults and believe themselves not being worth any better than their current situation. Resulting in the fear of being alone if the friendships and relationships die. It becomes apparent that “fixing” the person is impossible as they become dependent on the fixer and don’t learn how to build antifragility, let alone recover from their high stress state. Reduce stress and high threat perception first (self-discovery and autonomy), build antifragility and resilience, then learning to maintain healthy relationships is possible.  

Knowing How Much Responsibility to Take and When a Friendship No Longer Serves Anybody