Episode 103 - Dealing with Loneliness - Live from Wild Goose

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[Applause] listen it is so good to be at the goose oh my gosh sweat and awe it is good to be at wild goose with you all and uh we thought you know since we're all together we're all feeling good we might talk about really sad things for the next hour and that would be the best thing let's just get in our feelings and in our bodies and then try to act like normal people right that's that's life so uh we've been talking a lot about why we have a podcast at all if you know our work you know we started out of a simple origin story of mutual loneliness uh the two of us went through a faith transition both of which were varying degrees of public and in the process of that faith transition kind of lost like our entire social communities um and we became friends just because somebody else was as weird as we were theologically which is a word like we didn't believe in anymore and i've always thought that like what makes the liturgist podcast great is the way we try to de-escalate different topics and really move into them and i've recently been looking at kind of the data about why people listen to this show and what i'm learning is you actually listen because you also feel that sense of loneliness and that in fact when i look at data beyond the liturgist podcast i see that right now you could make a data driven case that the west is in the greatest loneliness epidemic in human history so there's been this really wonderful beautiful and necessary thing that we've all been doing together and that's trying to tear down the bullshit institutions that oppress people and that is important work and that is necessary work and it is vital ultimately for human flourishing but as we have made a collective unparalleled exodus from institutions and i don't just mean the church i mean civic institutions i mean charitable institutions modern people don't institutionalize but the problem is those oppressive structures once provided for us some excuse to make friends with other people right as bori like who would want to go objectively to a sunday night church service and listen to like a pretty mediocre white guy talk about the scriptures like really deep into four verses and make up what he thinks he knows about the hebrew language as he goes why do people do that because afterwards there was casserole right and then you met people you actually met people so the common thread you know there's so many different kinds of people that listen to this show absolutely post-evangelicals make up a big block but everyone who listens to the liturgists is posts something and in that transition something got lost what you gained in freedom and in liberation you lost in ready-made community and belonging and my concern and all of our concern is that often that might even lead to a net negative in your mental health and so what we want to talk about together today is how we respond to loneliness because do you know the most frequently requested topic that you ask us for when you email us or post on social media is how do we build community together and even more common as a variation is how on earth can i make friends as an adult and the stakes are high because our collective loneliness and our shift towards digital communication as our primary way of knowing other people is driving anxiety to record highs it's driving depression to record highs and it's even driving suicide and suicidality to unprecedented levels historically our epidemic of loneliness is truly a matter of life and of death wow i was just yeah i was just in japan on a solitude retreat um for like 10 days by myself and i i'm a dad um this is michael gunger by the way we should we should remember to identify did you identify this science background i'm science mike we're trying to remember like for people that just start listening to the program sometimes we don't introduce ourselves like who's talking um hi i'm michael gunger and on this solitude retreat um [Music] it was weird in japan it was actually worse than in america as far as the isolation like you go into a train station or something and there'd be thousands of people silent and literally like almost every person you get on the subway like every person it was weird like a sci-fi movie um there's a whole train silent absolutely silent every single person and we see traces of that in america too i mean not just traces of it we're going there it seems like but to see it it seems even more so like that there and it was weird to feel after 10 days as a person who feels normally inundated with humanity um i live in a pretty crowded and loud household and it's beautiful and we have lots of friends and people around all the time um so ten days in this this a single person that can't really speak they can't speak their language and just being in the sea of humanity that was also very isolated was one of the more lonely experiences that i've ever had even though i was surrounded by people by the end i was literally kind of like fantasizing about just hugging a stranger i was just like can someone look at me and tell me they love me you know it's just like i just want to be touched i just want to be loved and i think we all feel that and i was just what you were saying mike really just struck me and when i think about um friendship as an adult you know when we grow up in school and we grow up in all these structures usually that there are other people around that are natural friendships and then our society seems to the way that we build society then you move into like family time stage where you find a partner you have kids this is kind of the general script that people are handed right this is a uh and then you focus on that and then what like when i look at my parents and this is not data but my parents and all their friends um they're all pretty lonely because all the kids now are out of the house and they don't they don't seem to have super close-knit friendships the people that are involved in churches they have their church friends and stuff um but it's made me kind of sad seeing some of my parents age friends that like how the movement of life has left them in this really lonely isolated place as empty nesters and so i've wondered like what's what drives that and what can i do to to not end up there or just end up in these like isolated lonely places what's going on i don't that's all just anecdote anybody got any data or anything for us hillary maybe you're a good as you're talking i was thinking about this group that i run i'm finishing up my residency right now and i run a therapeutic group called a process group and instead of like a psycho education group where people come in and we say here are the few things that cause depression do things differently when you leave this room a process group is about people connecting with themselves and exploring the patterns of how they connect to other people so we actually talk the entire time about what's happening in the room as it's happening which when i told you about it mike you were like that sounds terrifying because sometimes we do this for like up to eight hours those are called like immersive psychodynamic like process groups but the idea is that you're exploring your inner barriers to connection and as you're doing that other people will say things like well you know so and so you haven't said anything this group why haven't you said anything and people will kind of call you out on the way that you pull yourself back and disconnect as a strategy and at the end of this group i just finished another cycle we had someone in the group kind of head in hands crying saying i've met you for eight weeks now once a week and i have never felt this close with any of my friends and so what is it about friendship that that we're not doing the kind of work that we need to with each other to let ourselves be seen and i think that if we step back before we even get to the point where we're you know spending time with someone extended periods of time or letting them into our pain or struggles i think about something called social identity theory which is a way of understanding like how we categorize and group people based on when we first encounter them and we have data that shows under a minute after meeting someone you have already decided if they're in your in group or out group and you might not even know any information about their life this a lot of times has to do with how they look how they hold themselves their mannerisms their gait how they dress if they gesticulate so yeah that's a funny word how you how you express yourself with your hands how you gesture although i had a friend in high school say if this is gesticulating are these your gesticles as she points to her hands yes i just thought i'd drop that in there but the idea is that within a few seconds of meeting someone we're deciding am i like you or am i not like you and what we see over time is that when we decide that someone is in our out group when someone is not like us that we have some sort of barrier between connection that our assessment of the differences between us and them grow over time so nothing actually changes but our perception of how different we are increases and interestingly a similar phenomena is that in-group bias increases so who you think you are like you're in group your perception of how much you are like them also increases over time so over time we are creating these divides between them and us and that all of that happens before we even meet a person and get to know them so think about what happens then if we're actually getting to the point where we're in a conversation we have already overcome a huge amount of barrier just to say that we are like someone but my challenge is how can we see that more people are like us what is it like to say my instinct says you were in my out group but to say on the inside there is something bigger that connects us that means that just because you are alive you are in my in-group there is this thing that happened um when i started grad school so anyone who is a therapist or has done any like social work counseling training you know that we practice doing therapy on each other so i started grad school and i had done lots and lots of therapy in my own life but there's all sorts of new challenges that come up when you are learning to enter a profession that you're hoping helps other people where you're expecting other people to let you see their vulnerability and i remember at the end of the first semester i came home and said to my husband oh my you know my best friend kelsey is coming over and he's like best friend you've known this girl three months like this is not your best friend and i remember saying to him but but we're doing things in our relationship with each other that have taken you years to do with your friends which is that we're letting ourselves be seen and not just in the things that we think are interesting and trying to convince each other of how good we are and how much we should be liked but in in the painful places and asking for help asking for help of each other so we think about some of the barriers to connection there's the in-group out-group bias but there's there's also like how much am i willing to let myself be seen and to see other people am i trying so hard to make friends and be liked that i'm talking all the time or i'm just talking about the best parts of me and can we share in a common experience of risk taking that would allow us to maybe create a a sense of commonality that goes beyond some of the things we normally think of as being the in-group out-group bias so that's how i see it from a clinical perspective but to take it out of like the the therapy land what i was wondering about william is um i know you've had some people in your life who've been really important to you and do you want to set this up like me yeah what we were talking about at lunch or yeah because we were talking about we're just we tr it's funny when we talk about the conversation beforehand we're always kind of like we try to pay attention to where the we don't want to get too much juice we're like stop we'll talk about that later but we want enough to like where we're gonna go um and one of the things that kind of came up in the conversation was the difference when we're talking about adult friendships between somebody who's in like a family situation like i am or william um who's single he's an adult living in this huge city of los angeles i was curious about how friendship has changed as you've gotten older um even though your living situation because i don't know how much of the difficulty in making friendship is based on just family and all that stuff versus like people getting older lives changing and then just what is it like for you now versus what it was like you know when you're a kid or yeah making friends well i think there's something basic about trying to make friends that makes you feel like you're back in the second grade you know that feeling where you're like hi my name is so-and-so i'm like oh nice to meet you and like you say all those like judgments are kind of like you're sizing them up and what do they look like and are they the type of person you would hang out with or are you attracted to them are you not attracted to them like all those like feelings uh feelings sorry uh all those things happen i think for me as i'm 35 and i'm single um i the one thing i've had to cope with as being in my 30s and single is that the majority of my friends got married and so their priorities changed and so it's like i not only have to love them i have to love their spouse and i don't not only have to love their spouse i have to love their children or their dogs like right like it's it's a whole thing it's like it's always a package are you trying to say something about my dog william i'm just saying there are a lot of dogs in my life [Laughter] my dog loves william more than most of my other family members yeah your dog loves me but i'm gonna be honest there's about five other couples in la that have the same story he gets around what can i say wow wow um i'm a dog favorite in l.a ouch william yeah will is not the only dog in my life uh no that's her name is actually willa too um not after me though that was a whole weird conversation me and your daughter had to have um i was like she turned her after me she was like no because i knew another dog named willa and i was like all right okay okay she couldn't lie to me i felt like i was seven years old at that moment like just lie to me homily i lied to me uh but to answer this question i don't know how we got on the stream um i've had to cope with the fact that my friends have like relationships like marriages and and partners and kids and like so now when i show up like people think i live this like little party lifestyle in la i'm like i'm mostly going to kids birthday parties i feel like and i just had to accept that as a 35 year old like my life is my friend's kid's birthday parties but i know there's always going to be alcohol there so i'm definitely like hey and so truthfully there is a there's like i'm laughing about it but there's a real pain attached to that because you're like i mean there's especially like like like male-to-male platonic friends it's like wait a second like we just can't even be that close because you're giving all your vulnerability to your wife and then you just don't really have a lot left over and i just found that that a lot of like my married male friends like that's a real struggle for them because men in general you know they're they're vulnerability relation tanks like this anyway and so when they have to like give you know to their kids or to their wife they have very they're very tapped out so i've i've found my relational dynamics changing a lot in my 30s based on accessibility and then i don't want to be that weird 30 something single guy complaining about his problems when like your kid just had the flu all night long you know like or like everything just kind of pales in comparison maybe i should find single friends i'm just as i'm talking right now i need more single friends singles we hear you lit singles and we love you i don't know if that answers any of your questions at all but it sucks but the beautiful thing about it is my heart has grown by learning to love i've always loved families but definitely now that the majority of my friends have families like learning to love everyone and like creating family space and especially in a city like los angeles where people it doesn't always give off the family vibe it's really cool to know that the majority of my friends have kids or great dogs and we do stuff like with their families so like i'm missing props uh daughter's birthday party this week in seoul to be here and he yeah like they they wanted me to come and i'll yeah so anyway i feel that it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using betterhelp that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists i think it's really interesting how like universal that experience is of i like may i have some friends why aren't they more like me why are life stations so different um and you know we went from this place where we had in the context of an institution like pre-packaged vehicles for connecting with other people in a similar life station which is also kind of fucking insular right like it's it's it's at the same time like easy mode for relationships and also so easy to become this hermetically sealed bubble where people aren't sharing the incredible life insights that exist precisely because of the difference in your life station right so i'm not saying it was all a panacea but i'm saying what's interesting is we go from easy ready-made cookie-cutter homogeneous community inside of an institution that in some way was just everybody believed the same stuff that was literally the measure of like do you belong or not is do you believe the same stuff and that's the relational skills so many of us bring to the table we don't know how to talk across living situations and relationship arrangements and god help us political orientations like that's impossible different theological beliefs and so we we have this perpetual fear even in our loneliness at least i do of reaching out for fear of not being heard and not being understood and for me that becomes so disempowering and it can make me feel hopeless i'm wondering like what stories and experiences do we have like in a post-institutional context where friendship really starts to work there's a few different kinds of friendship too right there's friendship we're just here at the same time experiencing the same thing and so we have something in common that we can reference later we went to school at the same time we were at the same soccer camp and those threads can be enough to create a relationship and then there's the other kind of friendship which is like like i said before i am like you in some way we have similar values so there's this uh this assumption that we don't have to talk about or negotiate the hard things uh just to find a way to connect like oh i can assume that you are like me on all of these really fundamental fundamental things but i started thinking about friendship differently probably about 10 years ago and i started asking myself what if friendship yes i have friends in my life who create a sense of belonging for me where i go oh i feel seen i can relax into your presence but there's also something about friendship that we miss which is when someone is different from us and they enter into our lives what gets added that wasn't there before and what do we get what what how do we grow when we are challenged to see world see the world in a different way so i started thinking about friendship as this avenue to expand my world and i don't want that to sound like i was trying to objectify people and to use them for my own personal growth but rather like i need some different world views to see more that i can't see on my own so my husband and i made a really difficult decision um probably about eight years ago to go to a church with people that we don't agree with to intentionally become part of a community and set down roots with people who had very different theological ideas than we did and it was really really really hard but it continued to remind me that i don't have to only relate to you because you are like me or that i can find ways that we are like each other that transcend all of the old stories that i thought had to be there for us to be connected so it makes me want to challenge this idea that relationship has to be comfortable for it to be good although i think that having relationships where we're seeing and where we feel safe matters we need those that's actually part of our flourishing when we feel lonely we know that cognitive processing speed decreases that our brain actually works slower when we're lonely so we know it has a huge impact on our nervous system but when we have the ability to see friendship as this thing that adds to our life instead of something that we just use to create comfort or to pass the time it helps us see how other people who are different than us can add richness to our life so for me when i think about it going well i think about seeing relationship with people who are different than me as this huge gift in my life that has helped me negotiate some of the the strain and challenge that comes with being different from someone i love all that so much and honestly part of me is like the enneagram 5 introvert uh part of me goes like cool for you yeah i didn't want to say that i felt the same thing not my life like if i could be hilary mcbride and go into a situation meaning you're charming and hilarious and brilliant and outgoing and can go into any scenario and kind of like make it work um that's my perception of you i've seen you in different scenarios i'm like wow that was amazing and i feel like i'm all thumbs with my whole body just a big thumb just i can literally see it hi are you interested in thumbs up because that's what i can talk about you've got to change your twitter bio to sew into thumbs but that's not to so in saying that though i've i've been able to receive enough of that from people like from you and lisa and different people in my life who i i'm always in total admiration of how they can go into any social scene and like be there in a in a way that makes everybody feel loved and special and seen and um but i've been able to take some of that wisdom and at least love the presence of the other person if i can't i don't i don't have the ability for a lot of people to be able to like find something we can talk about and keep the spark going um you know like i can't just keep the the the vibe going at some point shit this man has a dated self-conception y'all he is talking out of his past and not his present and i have to call you out on it okay that's a read if you want to see someone who does not know how to meet new people and tap how to encounter people it me right here okay i don't have any clue what to do in social interactions this is literally me like recently we went to like a la party in the hills i felt so weird so my response was literally to go to the farthest corner of the space where there was like a hundred people in the living room and sit alone on a sofa fully suited up too in a full suit no one else in a tie i'm in a full suit black suit black tie white shirt whole thing i think people thought i was like a server or a butler and so i would go and i would just like sit on the couch and look at the ground and surely someone's gonna come talk to me because that's what you do to signal people that you're open and receptive to conversation is you sit alone on a couch and you look at the fucking ground so unlike captain of oneness and light who walks into the space open-hearted and this goes up to people and is like would you like to eye gaze and no no no no here's the fuck the thing people are like yes strangers i look over and it's just and then the next thing you know they're like this deep soul bond and he just keeps collecting more and more friends which hold on is great for me my entire social world consists of people who listen to the liturgist podcast and therefore can push through my awkwardness and second hand vishnu friends you know how to make friends [Music] i i hope you guys have a look now at what i have to deal with when i go out in public with these two [Laughter] that's all i'm going to say william acts like a human person a lot yeah at lunch we had like we were sitting it was i was sitting next to hillary and jamie finch and lisa and i was like there is such like this feminine divine energy around me right now and they're all like tapped into it and like circled me well here let's just give you some mother love and i'm like literally weeping literally this is in the the restaurant here in hot springs mike i think normal people doing normal things but william walked in and uh helped us see the situation from like what human people think about interactions that's normally my response i'm like what the hell doing what is happening right now i love it though i love it well okay so i i will acknowledge that my social life is quite it's quite drastically different than it ever has been in my life um some of that though um speaking of the lunch conversation another one of the conversations that came up with jamie was uh we're talking about the river actually here and and how a river is something that's constantly it doesn't take the the water for itself like a puddle is like mine we better not get rid of any of this we need to save all this energy up because what happens then that's the real five um tendency for me for most of my life is like here's relational energy whatever kind of energy that i have and i gotta protect it because if that goes then what i've got nothing and really learning to let that go and give it away to give the little puddle away uh has put me in a bigger flow of energy if that makes any sense so it's not as exhausting when i don't need to like get something from somebody to keep and and i'm not going to that objectifying thing where hillary which is what i used to do like oh you're somebody that can give me something that i can really hoard here and hold on to for my own goodies but if it's like i can find a way to enter the flow of your energy and of your life and you into mine um in this very esoteric sounding but it really what it feels like is just laying down in a river um and then it keeps the river keeps giving itself away and just more and more and the energy just keeps flowing and flowing there's endless there's just this endless flow of life and energy and so one thing practically for me that that has helped i think is i've just tried to pay attention to that energy flow not just with friendships but just in my life and i'm like am i am i in a space that is giving that i'm feeling that flow of life and energy through me in a good way so uh if i'm in a relate if i'm if there's a relationship that just i i'm paying attention to what i feels like to be with that person and it feels like the energy's going this way in this way and we can't ever find uh i just don't i try to honor and value that person but i don't put much value in that relationship i don't like make that relationship a priority if there's anything that i find in my life a relationship a podcast a book whatever is the the thing that i'm finding that that juice that energy that life in i just make it a priority to like swim in it as much as i can um so i love seeing the people the people that are in the liturgist so many of us have been lonely and then when you come to like the events that we do the gatherings and it's funny and amazing to see how little you care about us on the stage a lot of times uh and you're just finding each other because there's just like this you know that you're here for a comment there's a common energy that brought you to this room and now you get to flow together and you find this i think that's really inspiring people that like go to the places put their money on the line put their time on the line to go into the spaces that they can feel that that flow of energy of life of love and the more that i've just done that with my life i've just found that i'm less lonely i it hasn't been that i've sought out friendships or have any really great practical first here's your icebreakers i got none of that shit i still feel awkward honestly a lot of times but if my heart just opens into the flow of of that moment i just found myself over time being less lonely i love that um i think what mike's saying is so true because it's like you got to find friendship where there's love and where there's commonality but yes there are differences and i often found people that i have strong differences with is where i've often found some of the most love which is really surprising because you think it's the opposite sometimes and we can be very different in personality but but share a common like love energy for each other um and so i don't know my motto is find the love and follow it wherever that leads you and and and i'm saying this as well to myself as i'm saying it to you stop stop looking for people who are not showing you love stop following or trying to like after people even if they were former friends who just sort of moved on like let them go leave them they don't love you maybe they do but they just don't love you in that moment and so find the people that you uh feel the love from wherever that is and oftentimes you do find it when you put yourself in very different scenarios and i just know if you do that you're you're not going to be lacking of love like michael said go with where the flow and the energy is leading you and if the flow of your life is leading you in a certain direction with friends it doesn't matter if you wish to be over there with those people be with the people who just love you and want to be with you and uh i don't know i think it's really that simple for me i think about um how when we're really longing for something and we get it there's like a desperation that makes us want to close our fist around it like you read of mice and men and lenny has the mice or the rabbits or whatever they are and he squeezes them to death because he loves them so much that when there's something that we're longing for it can be so painful in that moment to get it and to know it's gonna end and so one of the strategies and i think this resonates with what you're saying both of you is is when we're feeling connection whether it turns into friendship or not it's our job to not start telling a story about how it's going to be over and how awful that is and then remember that experience of connection and the only memory that we has have of that connection was that we knew it was going to be over right so when we're with something trying to really be with it when we glimpse somebody's eye at the grocery store and they say how are you and we look back and we really see them for that moment allowing ourselves to be with that glimpse of connection and to stay with it in a way that doesn't then tell stories about what isn't there to really honor the experiences connection as we see them and what's beautiful about that is when we do that we start noticing them all over the place i think that one of my primary strategies in working with people who experience depression is to support them to become detectives of joy there is pain everywhere there is loneliness everywhere it is actually i would say a guarantee in life for there to be pain and ache and longing and wounding what we can do though is start looking and being curious for the places of connection when they do show up and starting to really treasure them and savor them without squishing them to death when they do happen yeah don't you think that there's like an element of making that a priority for you how important is that how important it is for me is it for me to build relationship or how do i do that yeah i mean again here's coming from five land but from five land i it's more natural for me to put like ideas and work and i'm not naturally like human connection that's where i need to prioritize in my life but the more that i have prioritized it it's changed a bit and i'm just wondering it seems more natural for it seems from my perspective more natural to you but do you think about it as like uh i'm going to prioritize this or does it just feel more natural oh that's such an important question that i feel like i'm constantly wrestling with because my job is relationships too like as a therapist the currency of my skill is to help people feel seen and yet in the process i disappear right like i'm with people connecting all day but none of them know anything about me so it creates a challenge uh for me in terms of feeling seen and and when i am seen and this is reinforced kind of a shame story that i've worked through in my life they see me because i've helped them and praised me for that and so it it can feel like the only way to connect is to give everyone else what they need so for me finding spaces where i feel seen is a priority when i feel seen by somebody and i feel like there's the synchronistic spark and energy it feels to me like that moves to the top of my list and what i've noticed is that when those those relationships aren't there that my behavior and my inner landscape becomes increasingly unhealthy that it's easy for me to work longer hours and to write more papers and to get stuck doing all sorts of things that might look great um and might feel meaningful especially if let's say i'm you know i'm doing some research project everyone's like that's gonna change the way we do treatment for something i'm like oh it's very meaningful enough to do it but then the people in my life can't say hey you're you're working too much so the relationships that i have actually although they in some ways take time it takes time to build relationship it takes time to invest they're the the people who keep me the healthiest they help me see things and parts of myself that i don't i don't normally see but one of the things that i've learned in being a therapist is that my my life my life energy a lot of my life's work is sitting across from people with no distractions i'm not on my phone at all i'm not checking email i'm trying to hear everything that's said and unsaid and i think that the training that that gives me is that when i'm with someone i try to really be with them not to be there and somewhere else and i think that makes it easier to feel that connection that i was talking about to be at the grocery store and to see someone's eyes as they're bagging your groceries and go oh we see each other because i have spent a lot of my time and work over years learning to put the distractions aside when there is somebody in front of me and then i think it means that meditation is a kind of relationship that when you are with someone there is or sorry relationship is a kind of meditation that when you are with someone and you are fully present um that you can really be with whatever is happening so putting phones away right so when you say you see someone in the grocery store you see them or do you see them what does that mean you know what i mean no ask it differently because you know that either you type them or see them i see them what does that mean does anyone know are you spelling these words differently i see them you see them what do you mean no tell me again try again i'm just i'm just saying sometimes it's not always the thing is not always platonic okay sometimes folks are just seeing you hillary would be the one to be like oh my god we had a loving congential connection i'm like no that dude was checking you out it's very it's very different you might have had that like energy it's weird when people are lonely and you pay them attention they're like i love you like i don't love you but i also love you but not that way used to tell me that all the time [Laughter] uh hillary in this like discussion of relationship and loneliness and how hard that is you know i'm reflecting on how shitty the tool set people who grew up in white christian context were given for relationship building you know we get this like our relationships are as deep as the casserole dish they were formed over right like oh it's something to do other than watch tv talk to another person about sports how good casserole is and whether yay right there's not in bible yeah there's not this like deep deep well and i've been so guilty of that in my life you know the the kind of arc that led to my first book finding gone the way is available everywhere was me reading and learning from books but like the last few years of my life all the great things have not come from books they've come from people right like i mean michael and everything i think that is weird about me that i should be ashamed of michael things are fucking amazing like and laughs about and that gave me such self-confidence that like maybe i'm not bizarre maybe i'm okay and then i meet william and william uh is um not about the white nonsense of friendship william's like what if and and just and just try this what if we're not just like mutually self-sufficient with each other what if we're in relationship what if part of being in relationship is you sharing some of that vulnerability tank with me and if your vulnerability tank is all the time why don't we do the work together of getting a bigger vulnerability tank it's not a finite resource and friendship right like being friends with william has fundamentally changed my posture towards being not only in community but in friendship and then i met hillary and everything i thought about me that was warped or wrong or broken hillary just by her gracious and kind presence showed me that some of the things i hate about myself are the things that kept me alive through a really difficult childhood and hillary's constant encouragement and acceptance of the times that i'm coming unglued right humpty dumpty has to fall before he can be put back together sometimes that gentle patient assurance helped me grow but i didn't have the tool set to form those relationships and i wonder hillary if you could just tell us like what are some things people can do to start the process of moving into greater relationship you just showed us some of them right like what i want to say is i'm so deeply touched and and i would like to for your sake produce tears after mike said that to show you how much it meant to me but the truth is he tells me that all the time right he's really really vocal about how he feels about us and i think one of the things there it is there it is is that part of the way that we have i think not just mike in each of us individually but the four of us built a friendship around things that i mean intersecting identities and life experiences that might make us seem like a kind of weird bunch is that we tell each other all the time how we feel about each other and what we're learning from each other and i think that's one of the things that helps us build friendship is seeing goodness in the other people and acknowledging it and letting them know you have impacted me you matter to me telling people that we don't have to be so afraid and we also don't have to say that and expect anything back as if it needs to be in exchange of vulnerability it is okay to tell people that they matter to you just because it's good for them to know not because you need to hear it back too so when we think about wrapping this up and some of the skills that help us move into relationship into connection i want to circle back to some of the things that i said already that that when we meet people instead of seeing how am i different than you asking ourselves how am i like you what is there what is here that draws a thread of connection that allows me to see that you have worth and value and could believe the same about me and i don't think that means that we only ever connect with people just because we have everything the same but rather seeing some bigger story of connectivity that because we're human and we're alive and we have life experiences that have shaped us and teach us to see the world in a unique way that we all have something to offer to each other there is no other place we would go and sweat this hard and love it so much you have no idea how instrumental wild goose has been in the work we do and the way that we feel and the open-hearted spirit that's here is beautiful and teaches us how to be in good relationship as well wow goose we love you so much and thanks for spending time with us today thank you you