This week, we are reframing friendship — or more specifically, the friendship fail. To find out how a deep friendship has the potential to be rehabilitated, we talk with friendship expert Shasta Nelson, who has been called the Brené Brown of friendship. We talk about reframing loneliness, qualities every friendship needs, not downplaying our successes, and so much more. Listen for all the goods — your friendships will thank you.
Shasta Nelson has been studying friendship, both personally and in team environments, for 20 years. Her research has been made accessible for readers in Friendships Don’t Just Happen!, which teaches us how to make new friends as adults, and Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness, which teaches us how to make our closer relationships more meaningful and healthy. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review.
Links:
Follow Shasta on Twitter and Instagram, and check out her website
We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.
If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.
This week, we are reframing friendship — or more specifically, the friendship fail. To find out how a deep friendship has the potential to be rehabilitated, we talk with friendship expert Shasta Nelson, who has been called the Brené Brown of friendship. We talk about reframing loneliness, qualities every friendship needs, not downplaying our successes, and so much more. Listen for all the goods — your friendships will thank you.
Shasta Nelson has been studying friendship, both personally and in team environments, for 20 years. Her research has been made accessible for readers in Friendships Don’t Just Happen!, which teaches us how to make new friends as adults, and Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness, which teaches us how to make our closer relationships more meaningful and healthy. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review.
Links:
Follow Shasta on Twitter and Instagram, and check out her website
We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.
If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.
Natalie
Hey, it’s Nat.
Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers.
Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us — let’s reframe something. This week, we are reframing friendship.
Rebecca
Or could you say the friendship fail — which we both have had, and have wanted to reframe for a while. Haven’t we, Nat?
Natalie
So true. But as we have learned, that friendship fail always has the potential to be rehabilitated — at least, according to our guest, friendship expert Shasta Nelson. And if The New York Times and the Harvard Business Review are calling on her for advice, why not us?
Rebecca
She’s been called the Brené Brown of friendship. I really like her friendship triangle, which every friendship needs: positivity, vulnerability, and consistency.
Natalie
That, and so much more. Listen for all the goods — your friendships will thank you.
Shasta, what exactly is a friendship expert?
Shasta
That’s such a great starting question here. I remember the first time a publicist 10, 12 years ago was, like, calling me, that or somebody in the news — and I was just like, “Oh, wow, what is that?” I had never heard the term before. I mean, it means now that I’ve, like, published three books, I’ve done a ton of research, I’ve been out speaking and teaching on friendship since 2008. And I think back then it was so funny, because it wasn’t really a term, and yet now it’s been so gratifying to see more and more people using that term and, like, realizing that this is a space of content that we haven’t always treated like a subject matter. You know, we have often treated it kind of like this fun, frivolous conversation (“And you should have friends!”) but we really haven’t treated it like there’s science, there’s research, there’s, like, things that you may not intuitively know, there’s books to be read, there’s classes to be taken.
Those of us who are using that term now, it’s like we are people who can help guide and help translate some of that science, and help inspire. And it’s the privilege of being able to hear stories in that space, and talk about that, and just live our lives — obviously caring about all relationships. But when I was starting to do this work, we were so focused on romantic relationships and parent-child relationships — especially as women. We’d go into the bookstore and just buy a hundred books on either of those topics, and yet we weren’t really thinking we needed to learn anything about friendship. So it’s been a really kind of burgeoning topic to be saying, like, “Hmm, maybe there is stuff I can learn there.”
Natalie
And the pandemic really did bring to the fore how loneliness is such a major factor in our overall health — in fact, you describe it as the number one public health issue of our time. So that’s pretty wild — as a friendship expert, how do you guide people towards building up these relational support systems?
Shasta
Yeah — you know, and what’s really nice now is what the pandemic has helped do is, like, highlighted what was the need before. So even pre-pandemic, over 60% of us are reporting lonely on a regular basis. So that means, like, one out of every two of us, at least, are feeling lonely on a regular basis. I define loneliness: loneliness is not the same as being alone. Loneliness is a subjective feeling that: if I don’t feel like I have enough support in my life, if I don’t feel like people really know me, if I don’t feel like I have people to confide in. So it’s a much more subjective sense of, like, “Do I feel like I belong? Do I feel known? Do I feel like there’s people present in my life?” Most of us don’t feel that, and so that’s doing a lot of damage on our bodies. And I’ll just say, here in the United States, we just had Dr. Vivek Murthy, our US Surgeon General, come out in May with an 85 page document talking about how this is the biggest epidemic of our times, too. And so really using language that this is affecting us on every level: in our workplaces, in our schools, in our health. It’s a really big multifaceted issue, and we’re certainly not the first — the UK has been doing this, they’ve had a loneliness minister for a long time, so a lot of countries are leading this, and it’s just a huge worldwide problem.
So my work in that has been to help kind of define loneliness, to help us feel it. I define emotional intelligence as the ability to do two things: accurately identify what you’re feeling is the first one, and only when you’ve done the first one can you do the second one, which is then be able to figure out how to get back to a place of peace or back to a baseline for yourself. And so if you misidentify that first feeling like I used to do — I used to be like, “I can’t be lonely, I have friends.” You know, “I can’t be lonely, I’m outgoing. I can’t be lonely, people like me.” And we have a lot of really silly old myths and stigmas around loneliness. And so sometimes we don’t identify our loneliness. And sometimes we call it hunger, and we go open the fridge. Sometimes we call it boredom, and we stay busy. Sometimes, you know, we call it sad, and we just kind of, like, lose energy and kind of just feel depressed.
And it just takes incredible courage. Part of my work is to just remind us that loneliness isn’t a bad thing. It’s like being hungry. Being hungry is not a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing if you don’t identify it as hunger and don’t have access to food and don’t eat. But feeling hungry isn’t bad. So feeling lonely is not bad, but we have to get better at identifying that feeling and then doing something about it. And so my work is to help, like, normalize that that loneliness does not mean there’s something wrong with you — in fact, that means you’re healthy and paying attention to your needs. And then help people figure out how to get that need met.
Rebecca
So did it really start because you realized you were lonely at one point?
Shasta
Yeah — you know, certainly when I look back on it, for sure. I started, I was doing a bunch of coaching. I was coaching a whole bunch of at the time very impressive, primarily, women. And of course, they all hired me for work stuff or making big decisions about money or deciding whether to have a kid or go through a divorce. And so it was like big, life-changing things. And at the time, because I knew that research of how important friends are and our support systems are to our success in our goals, I just asked a question to each of them at different times — you know, “Who’s supporting you through this decision, other than me? What are your friends saying about this situation? What pressure are you getting or not getting? What support you’re getting or not getting?” And I knew that their success, whether it’s from weight loss or standing in our own power, like that comes down so much to, like, how it’s being reflected to us around us. And I just kept hearing a really common theme of like, “Well, I moved a couple years ago,” like, “You know, I’ve lost touch with those friends but really haven’t made my new friends,” or, “Well, I’m going through a divorce, and all my relationships are kind of up in the air,” or like, “Well, I don’t really confide in anyone about this.” And I just kind of kept hearing this, like, repetitive theme.
I went to bed one night, and I was just like, “Wow — I mean, like, they’re hiring me to talk to me about things that are, like, important, and I have skills that can help, but they’re not talking about this with friends — like, we’ve lost those connections.” So it was really that. And then, of course, I can tap into that in many different times in my life where I can be like, you know, identifying where it felt hard to, you know, feel like you don’t have the support system you have in place. But really, it was just kind of watching this, like, trend. We weren’t talking about it. We weren’t naming it. I had so many publishers and agents over the years that were like, “Maybe we should stop using the word ‘loneliness.’” Like, “It scares people off,” or like, “People don’t really care about friendship, you just need to call it relationships.” And I just kind of was stubborn and just being like, “No, just because people are uncomfortable with it doesn’t mean it’s not loneliness.”
Like, we’ve got to, like, get better at saying, “You know, most of us aren’t lonely because we don’t have any friends. Most of us are lonely because we don’t have deep enough relationships with a few people.” I always say most of us, not all of us. There are some people who are lonely because they’re isolated and they don’t have any connection. But most of us who are lonely, it’s because we don’t lack interaction, we lack intimacy. Most of us who are lonely, it’s not that we need to go meet more people. Like, that’s one of the most common things media asks me — is like, “How do we go make more friends?” And I’m like, “Most of us don’t need to go meet more people — we need to feel more met by the people we already know.” That was just the place where I was just seeing this, like, trend play out. And we weren’t talking about it, so it was kind of just the thread I pulled on to just be like, “What is this that we’re all, like, looking like we have a ton of friends and not feeling close to people?” When did you guys start talking about loneliness or thinking about it in your own lives? I’d love to hear how loneliness and that word has landed for you guys, if you’re willing to share.
Rebecca
Oh my gosh.
Natalie
That’s such an interesting one for me, because as a person who has gone through a divorce… I’ve since remarried, I have a child, all that wonderful stuff, but my experience of the divorce was a very interesting experience with my friendships. Like so many of those women that you talked about, I did experience real change in my friendship circle at the time — even like that experience that people will sort of joke about where it’s like, “Who did you lose in the divorce?” There definitely was some of that for me — that feeling, and reconciling a lot of that. And then Bec, we’ve talked about that on here on the podcast for sure. So it’s funny that when you ask it, I still feel it. You know what I mean? Like, it’s like something that doesn’t just go away.
Shasta
Yeah, yeah. What about you, Bec?
Rebecca
Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, I feel it a lot — kind of during the pandemic, I essentially broke up with my work partner, who was also a really deep friend. And I actually felt like we had a lot of those things that you talk about in your triangle. Maybe what we lost over the pandemic was the consistency, because there wasn’t the same reason to come together. But I’m interested also in: are we afraid to look at some of these things, because we’re afraid that they then will fail? Because in some ways, that’s what happened to me — like, it failed at a certain point, and I thought we had the triangle. So I don’t know what you say to that.
Shasta
Yeah — no, we can certainly talk about that. We probably need to introduce what the triangle is for everybody before we go too deep in, like, what happened there. But I’m happy to go there too, for sure. I mean, I think that the research shows that we replace half our close friends every seven years. And if I had to go on record, I would say I think the pandemic accelerated that — I think we’re probably going faster than every seven years. But that number still catches people off guard often. And I’ll say, “Well, just think about who you’re kind of confiding in right now. Who do you talk to the most? Who knows what’s going on in your life the most? And then think back where you were seven years ago, and, like, just like where you lived, what job you had, what ages your kids were, you know, all that stuff.” And you go back seven years, and chances are high that a couple of those people have shifted.
And that is just a really good reminder to all of us that there’s going to be multiple times in our lives that we feel the need for more connection, where we feel the need to be known in this current stage of our lives, where we feel, you know, that we kind of have the relationships we have here — because to your point, both of you had illustrations of, like, a life change shifts those relationships. And so it’s been kind of like you had a container for certain friendships, and as long as you stayed married, you had all these friends and all these people who did stuff with you as families and as couples or whatever. And then when somebody steps out of that container, out of that form of consistency, or when we step away from a job, or when we move, you know, there’s so many different life phases like that.
And so we lose a form of consistency — the structure that our relationship knew. We lose the pattern. And if you think about it, every relationship you have has a pattern. There’s certain people that you talk to maybe your text every day. There’s other people you would only talk to once a year on the phone. You weigh, like, how often you talk to them? What is it you do with them? Where you spend time with them? Are they the people that come over? Are they the people you go for walks with? Are they people you only see when you go to your religious organization? And you have a pattern with every single person — and when that pattern changes, the friendship often dissolves. And it’s not because we don’t still love each other and want to be friends, it’s that we have to put a new pattern together. We have to, like, create a new structure of consistency.
So if we’re not friends who see each other every day at a job, then now one of us has to actually initiate, and we actually have to be friends who schedule doing things together. Or now we’re friends that if we move away, we’re not friends who just visit on our front lawns, you know, every couple of weeks when we run into each other. But now we’re the friends who actually have to make a phone call to stay in touch with each other. And so it changes the pattern. And we can’t obviously stay friends with every person we’ve ever been friends with. But that invitation is there for all of us to be like, “Which are the relationships I want extending beyond my big life changes — to be those friends who last more than close to seven years, and kind of go through life stages with me? And which of the friends that are, like, for this season or for this time and I’m ok, letting that pattern shift?”
But yeah, that’s a really, really big, big issue. I call it “the drift or the rift.” Most relationships fall apart because of the drift, which is we just drift apart because the routine, the structure, the pattern, the way we’ve spent time together has changed. And it’s not like we had some terrible breakup, or it’s not because we hurt each other, it’s not because we decided we didn’t want to be friends. It’s that a change happened and neither of us or both of us didn’t make a new pattern together. And that’s how most friendships end, for sure. And then there is the rift, of course, where we do get hurt, we have the breakup, we have to walk away. But that drift happens so, so often.
Rebecca
Do you, Shasta, have kind of a friendship failure in your life that you think about, or that sort of haunts you?
Shasta
Oh, yes. I do. In fact, for what it says, my most popular series on YouTube (probably have over a hundred videos on YouTube, teaching videos and stuff) and my most popular series, I think it’s called ‘Getting Dumped,’ — like, I got dumped by a friend, you know, five, six, seven years ago. It would still make me tear up for probably a year or two afterwards, for sure. And I had to wait six months or seven months to film that series, just kind of to do some of the processing and some of the healing and some of the forgiveness and be able to talk about it in a way that was vulnerable, but not in process vulnerable, you know? And so being able to kind of come at it from a place. But yeah, for sure. And I’ve lost a friend, Natalie, to divorce — like, one of my best best best best friends in my 20s. You know, we were just like two couples, we were all best friends and yeah, I lost that relationship to that divorce.
And it’d be easy for me in that situation to say, you know, “They chose him.” But if I’m being really honest, and looking back on that too, I wasn’t as vulnerable with her leading up to it, so the divorce caught her off guard, too. And so it’s easy for her to feel (you know, we haven’t had a chance to like talk about it), but I look back and I’m like, “I could see how she felt betrayed, or felt like I didn’t trust her.” I’ve watched so many other people get their feelings hurt and not feeling like we are being honest with them, and so people get hurt on both sides. And of course, when I was going through it, it was just like all I could see was, like, the pain of my life. But as I get some distance, I can see that I didn’t live up to the friendship I would have wanted to have with her, too, and kept some things from her, and didn’t rely on her. But yeah, that’s a friendship that hurt for a long time, too. So yeah, we all have those relationships. I think it’s hard to be at this age in life, you know, where you haven’t been rejected or hurt or had some really tough, tough scenarios and some broken hearts for sure.
Rebecca
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I listened to a really good podcast on honesty on Hidden Brain — I love that one, because it’s always psychologists talking. But the psychologist was talking about how we underestimate how much honesty the other person can handle. We think they won’t be able to tolerate our honesty, so then we don’t do it. And it sort of just reminded me of your story, Shasta, that in some ways, your friend maybe could have handled more honesty and you didn’t feel she could. And I think about that in, like, my own breakups — like, we think they won’t be able to take a bit. In fact, if you can be honest, the point of that podcast was that it’s very bridge-building if people can take the risk. I mean, I know that’s part of what you’re saying, is that vulnerability is part of the triangle, right?
Shasta
When we study everything that’s out there on healthy relationships (whether it’s healthy teams, healthy marriages, how do we build trust, how do we bond with people), like, there’s so many social studies out there all kind of studying different things. And what they all have in common are three things, and we can use different words for them — and everything else is either an example of one of these three things, or an outcome of these three things. And so these three things that I just kind of summarize really quickly, I teach on a triangle. And so you can picture the foundation of the triangle is positivity — and we can come right back and define all of these, but at the bottom is good feelings. Like, we’re going to gravitate to the people who leave us feeling pleasant feelings.
And then the two arms up the triangle are consistency and vulnerability. And so consistency is what we were talking earlier about, it’s kind of the hours we log together, it’s our shared experiences, it’s how frequently we talk, it’s the history we build, it’s the pattern we set. And this also helps build trust, because as we have history together, trust is our ability to predict how we think you’re going to respond to something in the future. And we can base that based on how you have in the past. And so with this consistent time comes a sense of consistent behaviour and a set of consistent expectations. And vulnerability is our way of sharing and revealing — whenever I ask somebody to define a best friend, it’s like, “They know the good and the bad and the ugly,” you know? And it’s like, “They just get me, and they just know me.” And so there’s that feeling that we all crave of being seen and understood and, like, gotten.
And the core of that is that we want to feel accepted by that. None of us just want to feel naked and revealed and vulnerable, but we want to feel more loved for that, which takes us back to that foundation of positive emotion. And so the most important thing after vulnerability is to, like, then communicate our acceptance of each other, and that we’re not judging each other and that we still love each other. And so these three things just keep working in conjunction. So at the brand new relationship, they all start at the bottom of a triangle, we just have very little consistency, and we should just have very little vulnerability. And as it feels good, we experience a little bit of pleasant emotions, whether that’s, “Oh, that was fun,” or, “I enjoyed that.” Or, like, “I really like her, I think she likes me, we had some big laughs, we felt kind of some connections, some chemistry,” — like, there’s a pleasant feeling there that makes us want to repeat that experience, so we increase the consistency. And each time we spend a little bit of time with each other, so too should we be learning a little bit more about each other. And as we learn more about each other, we should be feeling better and better around each other and more appreciative of each other, which makes us want to spend more time with each other. And those three things just keep working in conjunction with each other.
And so yeah, Bec, I love that — going back to what you’re saying in the Hidden Brain, that psychologist, I had built up a friendship with my friend, the one that I lost in the divorce. We called ourselves best friends, so you would say high consistency, high level of commitment. We spent a lot of time together, we were logging hours. We had made big life changes together — like, we were putting in the time with each other. I didn’t know the triangle back then, but if I, like, kind of projected it backwards, I would say we had high high high consistency. So our new friendships are at the bottom and the more we practice these three things, our relationships can move up to the very top of that triangle where our consistency is the highest, our vulnerability is the highest, and our expressed positive emotions tend to be bigger and more expressive and big up there — and comfortably sharing that love and all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, I wasn’t practicing a high level of vulnerability with her, you know? And so that’s a breakdown of the relationship on my part. My teaching is that you should always try to keep the consistency and the vulnerability as close as possible to each other. And some of us, we get lopsided triangles because we are uncomfortable sharing. And so the consistency goes high, and then people still walk away and they never quite know how we feel. They don’t think we trust them, they trust us, and all this stuff. So the relationship has one side too high for the other side, and the relationship can never go higher than the lowest bar. And so the relationship is never going to be at the top of that triangle if somebody’s withholding.
And the flip side is true, too — a lot of women I work with in depth being too vulnerable too fast. And so even if there’s low consistency, we’ve only met a few times, they’re just like, “Here’s everything. I’m an open book.” And we’re just like, “Nobody wants to read the whole book right now.” Like, “Nobody needs the last chapter right now.” Like there’s a process to this, you know? Like, we want to read chapter by chapter, bit by bit. So for all of us, a good question around vulnerability is, like, “Do I tend to be somebody who needs to practice sharing a little bit more? Or do I tend to be somebody who needs to practice listening and asking questions a little bit more, and like trusting that I don’t need to share it all right now?” Both of those are reactions to us being scared of being rejected. We either share so much — often to, like, test you now almost. Like, “Reject me now, if you’re going to.” Or we share so little because we’re so afraid. But in both cases, it’s like all of us have a call to say a healthy friendship.
And this is my definition of a healthy friendship: is where both people feel seen in a safe and satisfying way. And so we are seen when we practice vulnerability. It feels safe when we have consistency and history, and it feels satisfying when there’s more pleasant and positive emotions than negative emotions. And so we can look at any relationship in our lives and see which one of these three requirements of a relationship might be lagging behind, which one might be kind of missing, which one might need to be repaired. We can look at any relationship that’s not working, or hasn’t worked and identify which one. So in my case, with that friendship, you know, yeah — on the one hand, we lost our consistency, because I was no longer married and we couldn’t get together as couples. We lost vulnerability, and we lost positivity — like, and all of those are repairable if both people are willing to repair. But it ended up feeling like I had hurt her and disappointed her so much. I felt like she’d hurt me not being there for me, you know? And so all three of those got whacked on pretty hard in one fell swoop. And it takes both people to be willing to step in and do the repair work of that.
Natalie
I’m so hearing myself in that story. And it really is interesting, because it’s been so many years — like it’s been 10 years that I’ve been married in a new world, and so that old life feels so long ago. Obviously, one wants to be reflective and retrospective, and those are useful things to do at times. But is there also, like, a point where it’s maybe not super useful to go back? Like, I can try and reach out to some of these folks that perhaps I lost because I wasn’t vulnerable enough. I recognize that as I hear you speaking. And yet, there is this part of me that’s like, “But now people have new lives.”
Shasta
I love love love that, so that’s just a great reflection. I would say two things, Natalie. I would say one, it’s always good for us to sit back and reflect and say, “What could I have done differently? What was that relationship? What kind of broke down?” because we don’t do that often enough, and we aren’t learning. I teach social health the way we would teach physical health. So these are muscles in our bodies that we need to strengthen and build and pay attention to, and that these are all things that we can kind of focus on and increase. And we have had injuries with our social health before — we’ve gotten our hearts broken. And I also teach yes, we have to learn the difference between pulling away — like, if you’re running or lifting weights or doing a yoga stretch, like, whatever it is you do, hopefully you the more you do it, you can like say like, “Oh, that feels like my knee needs a rest.” Like, “That feels like I could be prone to injury,” right? And that’s different than just like, “Oh, I’m tired. I wish I didn’t have to do this today.” And so we want to start learning the difference between pulling away when it’s, like, to protect ourselves, versus pulling away out of fear. And those are different things.
And so I feel like on our social health we often get off the treadmill, so to speak, as soon as we start sweating, or we jump up off the mat as soon as the stretch is a little tight. And the irony is in our physical health, we understand that physical health is on the other side of that physical exertion — like, none of us panic when we start to sweat. None of us are like, “Oh, my goodness, this must be bad for me.” We comprehend that the sweating means it’s working, or the stretching, or the, like, feeling tired means we’re extending our capacity. But in our social health, I watch people left and right, the second they start feeling a little sweaty just pull away, and just be like, “I’m not going to do it. I don’t do drama,” you know? “Toxic.” And we just have all these things that just make us pull away. And so I have so much respect for you, like, being willing to lean in and feel the social sweat a little bit and, like, do that.
And I will say on the consistency thing what’s really interesting is that there’s a study that came out, Dr. Jeffrey Hall from the University of Kansas, and he talks about how it takes 200 hours — we self-report that it takes 200 hours to go from stranger to best friend. So you can think about the bottom of the triangle is like we’re brand new people who have never met, and the very top of that triangle is 200 plus hours, so to speak. And so your relationships with those previous people — like, it would be an interesting question to ask is to be like, “Ok, were some of those people, like, people that I, quote, ‘logged 200 hours’ with?” Like, had made a big investment in each other? In which case, would a couple of potentially awkward hours maybe, to reach out and to kind of reconnect and reacquaint — would a potentially few awkward hours and maybe kind of some honest conversations help me have a greater relationship? Because we already have this amazing history, and if we practice high vulnerability now, like, can we actually have a better, more intimate relationship on the flip side of that — which is certainly easier than going and starting from zero with somebody else, right?
And so there’s, like, an opportunity we all have now to start kind of seeing this as these aren’t just people to walk away from every time — they’re investments we’ve made. In the same way as you make a whole bunch of deposits into a bank account, at some point you don’t want to just walk away from an investment that could really prove to be, like, the one that you want your stocks in. And so it’s a great reflection question for you to be asking, and obviously, we don’t need to go and be best friends with every person we’ve ever been best friends with. But a lot of us are lonely because we just keep starting over and we aren’t doing the hard work of going through tough things with people and building deeper friendships — and so if we just keep having shallow relationships, and kind of what I would just call pseudo-community. And so we’re all nice, we like each other, we have fun, we have girl’s night out, like yada yada yada, but we forget that the second stage of that is, like, a conflict stage.
And it’s only on the other side of the conflict stage that is true community. And so so much unfortunately, if we don’t understand that, then whenever we get to, like, conflict or tough or disappointment or unmet expectations, our brain goes, “Well this isn’t fun, I want to get back to what we were,” thinking that being socially, like, all fun and happy and girl’s night out is the fun, is the ideal — and that’s not the ideal. Like, all of us who have been married, that’s always a good example with marriages: is that we don’t feel safe with them because we’ve never fought with them. We feel safe with them, because we’ve fought with them and we all made it through. And yet in our friendships, we often think that we’re just trying to avoid the fight or avoid the conflict, and we just keep trying to bounce back up and just swallow it and take the high road. We have all this language to, like, romanticize avoiding the issue. And ironically, our best relationships are the ones that we know we can go through the issue and survive it, and come out on the other side understanding each other better. So yeah, there’s a lot that we don’t do well around handling some of that stuff, and it’s kind of up to you whether it’s worth going back to any of them, or just kind of taking the learning from that and going forward — but great reflection questions.
Rebecca
Is it sometimes out of fear that we use the word ‘toxic’? “This is toxic.” Do you think sometimes that’s coming from fear?
Shasta
Oh, totally. It’s coming from fear, it’s coming from the lonelier we are, the more judgmental we are of other people. The lonelier we are, the less empathy we see. The lonelier we are, the more we see threats — like, so this fascinates me: when we walk into a room, and if we’re lonely, we are feeling a little unsafe, and therefore our brain is looking for evidence that we are unsafe. We will be scanning the room and be like, “I think that person is ignoring me. That person kind of gave me a dirty look.” Or like, “They just saw me and then turned away.” And you know, we see the threats to prove to ourselves that we’re not ok. And so we might zero in on the one person that’s kind of the unsafe person, you could argue, or something like that. Whereas if we feel connected and supported and loved, we can walk into the exact same room and our brain is going to look for evidence that we are connected, supported and loved. And we’re going to walk into that exact same room and look at the 99 smiling faces, and that person that da-da-da.
And so what’s crazy is how much our experience is such a vicious cycle, because the lonelier we are, the more we will see other people’s behaviours as harmful, and the more we’ll pull away. And it’s like, you can just see these things working in connection with each other, which is one of the hardest things in this work is, like, trying to break that cycle. There was one study that showed 84% of us say that we have a friend who’s toxic. And what that says to me is that all 84% of us are friends with the same 16% of people who are toxic, or else that means somebody else thinks we’re the toxic one, right? And so we’re throwing this word around a lot — basically, most people just mean it as “anybody who didn’t live up to my standards.” And so it’s not super useful, and I don’t think most of us should be labeling people with that. I don’t think it helps anything.
Natalie
How do you do friendship? I mean, you’re called upon by all these various experts, like The New York Times and The Washington Post. I mean, you’ve got these people who are obviously, like, not pocket dialing you to, like, get ahold of your brain, and they’re asking all this information, but yet you have real life friendships that you are obviously investing in. So you shared with us a little bit about where a couple of them went off the rails, and we really appreciate that. What about what’s working?
Shasta
I feel so so so grateful for the level of relationships I have. I’m not somebody who just travels nonstop, because it’s so important to me to be present to my relationships. So I limit how much I’m on the road speaking — I do a lot of public speaking, but trying to be home for that. But it’s really interesting in the last couple of years, most of my closest friends are long distance friends. And so it’s become almost like the more I travel, the more I get to see them. So it’s interesting — like, but checking in, and who are the people I’m investing my time and energy in. And by long distance, I don’t mean friends I call twice a year. There’s a group of five of us women who there’s some argument on our group of whether it’s been 20 years or 21 years — like, when did we start counting? But yeah, a couple decades ago, we were a girl’s group that got together every single week and, you know, just kind of talked and read books and did life together, and then one by one, we all kind of moved away. And I think we were only together for a year, but we promised to come back together every year for a weekend together.
And so we’ve maintained this amazing deep relationship. And if you’d asked me pre-pandemic, I would have put these women certainly at the top of my triangle in that we did have consistency and then we at least came and spent, you know, four days together just talking nonstop, and we told each other everything. There wasn’t anything we wouldn’t tell each other — so vulnerability. And I felt so loved and supported — so we had positivity. But what was interesting is if you’d asked me whether I would have been able to name this, hopefully I would have, but if I had stopped and said what could make this relationship even more meaningful, it would have been not just being vulnerable in past tense (like telling each other everything we went through in the year before), but what would it look like to increase our consistency, our frequency, where we could actually be vulnerable and support each other in real time?
And the pandemic gave us an amazing excuse to do that — where I don’t know if I would have committed to, like, every Sunday at 4:30 on Zoom pre-pandemic, right? Because I would have been like, “Oh, that’s a lot, and I’m traveling, and I’ve got a busy life.” But I did, and we did. And then that wasn’t even quite enough — we all did Marco Polo too. So we have a Marco Polo thread, which is like a video app that you can do asynchronous where you can kind of have an ongoing conversation with your friends through that — and my husband, like, laughs at me all the time. He’s like, “You guys talk so much.” Like, I’m always doing Marco Polos, and every Sunday at 4:30, those of us who can get on, and we’ve done a really great job, I think, of giving permission and no guilt — like, if you’re out of town, if you can’t do it, like, that’s fine. If there’s only two of us on, it’s going to be a good experience for the two. And just kind of step into that.
But it has changed my relationships and taught me, again, how important it is to not just have the kind of friends that you’re updating, but the kind of friends that you’re, like, living life with, you know? In real time — that you’re sharing. And I feel like so many of our relationships nowadays, it’s like we say, “Well, we can pick up right where we left off.” But we’re leaving off. The more relationships we can have where we’re not leaving off — like, that’s the goal for me, is to have more and more deep, intimate relationships, where it’s like: we know what’s going on in each other’s lives, we feel super connected, we feel like they would be there for us, they have been there for us. I get so much joy knowing that I’ve got my friends. When I moved to a new house, I got a big money tree delivered from all my friends going in on it together wishing me well. I mean, it’s just, like, the moments in life where you just want to feel supported, you want to feel seen, you want to know that they know the fears in your head, that they can celebrate successes with you, you know?
That’s one of the areas of vulnerability that means the most to me, honestly, is we often treat vulnerability like the hard things in our lives, or like the things that we’re ashamed of. But vulnerability, for women especially — one of the hardest areas of vulnerability is talking about what’s going right in our lives and being proud of our lives and celebrating our lives. And so it’s really important to me that I practice that with my friends and give them space to be proud of themselves and, you know, when we get together, “Let’s go around the circle and start lunch with each of us toasting something that we’re celebrating in our lives.” And giving space and time for the joy, too, because that can be almost more vulnerable than commiserating and complaining about what’s not going well. So I genuinely love my friends and feel so much safer going through this life knowing I’m supported by them.
Rebecca
That’s really well said — that the celebration takes vulnerability. Because I think I am someone who likes to downplay my successes, and I think it comes from a place of not willing to be vulnerable. I just want to move on to the next thing. It’s a weird thing that I do. Do you agree, Nat? Do you think when I do that it’s sort of like…
Natalie
Yeah — you’re weird.
Shasta
Well, we’ve been conditioned. We’ve been conditioned to false humility, kind of, you know? And to play modesty, and to give credit to everyone. I mean, I think women especially, but just in our world it’s like we have a lot of really interesting issues around being proud or, like, kind of owning what we’re doing. And I think that’s one of the best places we can practice with our friends — it’s like if I can’t practice owning my success and being proud of myself with my friends then, like, where can I do that? You know, and like, how am I expected to show up in this world as, like, a person who sees her contribution and knows what she’s worth if I can’t even have that mirrored back-and-forth with my friends? So it’s a beautiful thing to, like, kind of own and recognize.
Bec, you’re not alone. I think most of us — one of my favourite questions that I do with my friends, and whenever I lead retreats or lead gatherings, like, if you’re around me for very long, you’ll hear me ask this question, and I just kind of call it the “high low.” And it’s just like: what’s a highlight and what’s a lowlight going on in your life? Like, whether I haven’t seen you in a month or haven’t seen you in five years since our last high school reunion, or if it’s just since last week that we got together, it’s kind of like, “Ok, well, let’s each share whatever, like, you’re most proud of, what you’re celebrating, what’s succeeding, what’s giving you joy, and then also let’s share, like, what’s causing stress right now, what’s kind of a tough thing you’re going through, what’s a hard decision you’re making?” And just, like, being able to hold the spectrum in our relationships for people to share both those things.
And I love asking sharing questions like that for a couple reasons: one, like, that particular one helps hold the space for kind of, like, acknowledging that there’s good things and hard things — and I want to make sure that we talk about both. It also means that when you ask a sharing question, that is something we both or all get to answer. So you don’t have to be victim to somebody who’s doing all the talking and they don’t ask you any questions, or vice versa. So if you kind of have a hard time sharing or you tend to share too much, that question gives a framework that we’re both going to share these things, and so kind of sets that intention. But it also lets the person who’s answering it pick what they want to talk about — like, it’s my job then to say, “What’s the thing I really want to share and be witnessed on?”
You know, like, we can’t ask, like, “How are the kids? How’s the vacation? How’s the marriage? How’s the job?” — like, and then walk away and be like, “I can’t believe she didn’t ask about my mother,” you know? I mean, it’s like, it’s our job to be like, “What’s the important things going on in my life that I want witnessed and want to talk about right now?” so we’re not at risk of spending a whole lunch, you know, asking a bunch of catch up questions or talking about TV shows and then leaving without really talking about what mattered to each of us. So I’m a very big fan of a structure question that kind of gives us both the space and time to share in our lives. And some of us will find the lowlight harder, and some of us will find the highlight harder, but those are both muscles that we need to all practice and flex.
Natalie
And Bec, I wasn’t actually calling you weird at all. In fact, I would say that this is interesting, Shasta — so Rebecca’s my sister. I think I prefaced that at the very beginning. So I’m the older sister, and Rebecca has always been a person who celebrates other people (it’s actually going to make me weep), to the point where she didn’t go to her own prom because she worked a shift at the pool. And so a year later, I said, “I’m throwing this kid a prom.” And so I did a party for her and we got her hair down — it was like a whole thing. And I was just telling my husband this last night, like he didn’t know this story. And Frankie, our nine-year-old was like, “Auntie Becca didn’t go to her prom? What’s a prom?” And it was just this, like, really cute, familial moment. But it was so striking to me thinking ahead to this conversation, because Bec has always pored so deeply into people — and yet, like, what the fuck? Like, that didn’t happen at that time when it was really important. And then she goes into the arts, where for the next, you know, however many decades, it’s all about, like, downplaying your abilities, or celebrating somebody else’s successes. And so what pattern started what? I just think it’s very interesting. Like you say, it’s society, and yes, there is sort of like the larger social structure, but how much of it we have to work at being self-reflective, and sort of fight tendencies or… I don’t know.
Shasta
Totally — yeah, and see them all as muscles that we can build. So some of us might have stronger arm muscles than leg muscles, or abs, or whatever. But, like, some of us will have to look and say, “Ok, for me to share some of the hard things in my life will be the muscle that is the weakest or the flabbiest on me right now.” And for some of us, it’s like, “Ok, this is going to feel so awkward, but I want to share what’s going well in my life. I want to share things that are feeling good, and I need to practice holding that and saying it without apologizing, and saying it without, like, then immediately backtracking, or… you know. So I think it’s just for each of us, it’s an area for all of us where there’s places to keep growing. And I think that’s the beautiful thing.
And I always treat relationships and friendships as, like, “This is the place to do the spiritual growth, the personal growth, the emotional growth in life.” Like, it is in our relationships — like, you can read a book on boundaries, but you can only practice it when you’re in a relationship. You can, like, listen to a sermon on forgiveness, and you have to be in relationship to practice it. Like, everything else we do in this world is all about trying to figure out how, but it’s like the rubber meets the road in relationships, and this is like the health club for our spiritual and personal growth. And so for all of us, it’s like trying to figure out, like, “This is the place. If I can’t do this with my friends, then how am I ever going to build this muscle? Because it’s way harder to do it out in the world than it is, like, with people who claim to love me and we’ve built this history and have made this safe.” And so we just have to be that for each other.
I have to say to my friends, I have one girlfriend who has a really hard time saying no. She’s always helping people. And so I have to say to her, “Practice on me. I’m the person for you to practice saying no to. So I’m going to ask you to do some things, and I’m not going to trust you until you say no to me a couple times — like, I’m the person for you to practice on. Like, I’m the safe person. I will love you no matter what. So say no to me when you can’t do something.” You know? And with other friends, it’s, like, starting to know their thing and be able to say, “Practice on me. Practice bragging — like, stand here, and just tell me how amazing you are.” And they’ll start by saying, “Well, I mean, I’m really proud of my kids.” And I’m like, “No, that’s not bragging. That’s not being proud of yourself. Like, that’s fine — talk about your kids. Tell me what you specifically feel like you’ve done to help make your kids that you’re proud of. Like, tell me how amazing you are as a mom. Like, I just want to make you just brag about yourself. Tell me what you have done.” You know? And they kind of shrivel, but, like, what a gift to be the friend that can say, “Practice on me. I see it in you, I want to know that you see it in you.” So I think it’s such a beautiful role we can play for each other. And I’d love that you guys have examples of doing that for each other, and helping give each other the space to be more expansive than just who you have been.
Rebecca
Shasta, are you a person of faith? You have a master of divinity — degree in personal development. I didn’t even know that degree existed. And if so, how does faith resonate in your life — or does it?
Shasta
Yes, I do have faith, and I am a very spiritual person. That degree is actually a degree to be a pastor, and I pastored in my young 20s before I realized that I think what I’m most passionate about is the idea of community. And so growing up in my life, that was where I saw community and relationship happen. But I am much happier not doing it where we all have to believe the same things, or having to have it take place in these four walls. And so my work in the world, it kind of feels like a little bit broader than that now — to be talking about, like: we all need to belong, we all need to be in community. Every single one of us needs to be asking ourselves, “Am I a more loving person this year than I was last year? Like, do I have more evidence of that? Do I have more compassion this year than I do last year? Do I have evidence of that? Like, where Am I growing? Am I being more accepting of more people this year than I was last year?” Like, I think that’s just personal growth that we all have to do.
Yeah, you’ll still hear the spiritual language come in where I do believe that absolutely all of us become our best people in relationship. I’ve always believed that personal and spiritual growth were just so linked — and emotional growth, and all of them are just a place where we are here to become more loving people. At the end of the day, do I love myself better? Do I love other people better? Am I showing up with more love in this world? And that’s a high value for me, for sure.
Natalie
We recently read an article (that I had bookmarked actually) before we had even connected with you. And so I was very excited to bring this Elle magazine article about friendship, and it was specifically about being ambitious in your friendships. And I thought, “Ooh, I have a really interesting sort of thesis then that this writer has proposed: that it is in fact a way forward to bring to Shasta.” Because it’s, like, really your whole thing, right? That we should be ambitious in our friendships, because it’s about community-building. So, just wondering — like, I mean, we have been doing some live events with our podcast of late. And it’s been really interesting to us that for the first event, for example, we had 12 people show up, and it was really intimate and we sat around the table and everybody got a little bit uncomfortable because of the questions we all asked each other — but kind of loved it, and fell in with it. And then the second event grew. And I wondered if there was something about the ambitious kind of going out and… not forcing it, but crafting a space for friendship that was this live event that brought more people to the table the second time through. But is this possible — that we, in doing the work for the podcast in this way that we talk about community that we’re striving for, that it actually does bring more people to the table?
Shasta
Absolutely. You know, I don’t use the word ‘ambitious,’ but I love it, and I think we should all find out what things that matter in life to be ambitious toward, absolutely. I would use the word ‘intentional,’ for sure — the title of my first book is “Friendships Don’t Just Happen.” I think we all just kind of want them to happen, and they don’t just happen. Like, when you look at the triangle, you can potentially instantly like somebody, or instantly be, like, intrigued by someone or curious about somebody or kind of drawn in by somebody — But that’s just the first spark. No matter what, you still have to, like, spend time figuring out, “What’s our pattern? Are we going to be the friends who text every day, or the friends who call once a week? Are we the friends who go walking? Are we the friends who get together for lunch? Are we the friends that bring our kids along? Are we the friends that…” — you know. Like, you still have to figure out that pattern, and you still have to get to know each other, and, like, “How does this person respond under stress, and what things hurt her, and where is she sensitive? What ways make her feel most supported and loved?” I mean, those are all things that just take time.
It’s so beautiful, what you’re doing by doing so many different elements of it, as it gives people a chance to start feeling like they get to know you guys, they feel like there’s a pattern there. The more you do this the safer it becomes, because people know what to expect. And so, the events will certainly with intention, it’s like you start creating consistency, right? So you’re creating consistent events, and so if I can’t attend this one, I can attend another one. But we start having a sense of, like, “What kind of events do Natalie and Bec put on?” — and that gives me safety, and so that kind of creates a consistency there. Yeah, you’re providing all three of these things.
Like, what I love about the triangle is that we don’t have to leave any of them to chance. Like, we can look back on friendships and say, “Oh, that’s why that friendship felt so good. It had all three of those things.” But, like, going forward, we can actually say, “Ok, so if I want to make new friends, what are the three things I need to be doing here?” And it, like, immediately starts putting into play, like, “Ok, I need consistency.” It’s a really, really big one. It’s impossible to make new friends if you don’t have a way of being consistent. So your only two options are to either join or attend something consistently — so, you know, view the places you are consistent as a place for friends, like workplace, or my kid’s school, or the religious organization I belong to. Or join something that’s consistent, like a regular book club, or a golf group. You know, and so like joining something that’s already being planned, the benefit of that is you don’t all have to be initiating and scheduling, you’re just going to show up and start building relationships.
Because your only other option is to create that consistency yourself, which means if you meet somebody you like, your only choice of ever bonding with them is to follow up with them and get together again, and then follow up with them and then get together again, and then follow up with them and then get together... and you have to keep that ball going. And so what you’re doing is helping create consistency for people that they can step into this and experience what they need to experience, because by far most people have the hardest time doing that step — it’s, like, the scheduling and the reaching out and the planning. It takes a lot of courage and triggers all of our fears around self-rejection. It takes a lot of planning, it takes kind of some serious courage to kind of, like, keep going back and forth on dates, and to plan events. And so what you two are giving in those events is such an incredible gift. And now it takes fear for other people to say yes and come to it, but the more often they come — this is where consistency comes. We can’t just go to something once. We can’t just go to a church once, or go to an association meeting once, or come to your event once, and then be like, “Well, I don’t know. I didn’t make any friends.” Like, that’s not how it works. You have to keep coming regularly to build that level of familiarity. So yeah, what a gift you guys are giving, doing the heavy muscle lifting to help make… and you’re scheduling vulnerability in there, and you can always organize around how to help people feel good and enjoy themselves. And so, yeah, we can guarantee bonding when those three things are present.
Natalie
It’s making me feel, like… pat on the back, Bec.
Shasta
There you go.
Natalie
We’re trying something hard, and it feels scary. You know what I mean?
Shasta
Yeah, for sure.
Natalie
That’s what it is. It feels scary sometimes to be building something from scratch. I mean, that’s really what Reframeables has been, it’s been sort of this two year starting something from scratch. The two of us obviously have this lifelong history, but to sort of put it out into the world is a different deal — so vulnerability is, like, inherent to the whole process. So it’s really very valuable to hear that feedback from you, because it honours something in our own efforts, but it also means that, like, yay to all the friends and folks far and wide, who’ve been participating with us — because, I mean, I think that means that we’re striving for something healthy. And healthy is good.
Rebecca
And we’re staving off our own loneliness. That could mean we’re offering something, but we’re getting something back, and that we are also building this thing for ourselves. I find that just an interesting thing to acknowledge, that we also are at risk of being lonely. It’s not just other people — I mean, that’s sort of obvious, but it’s good for me to say out loud.
Shasta
Yeah, I love that you’re saying that, because women can sometimes get into a martyr syndrome, where we’re just like, “I’m always the one inviting her,” or, “If I didn’t call her, she would never call me,” and we can kind of feel like, “I’m doing this for her.” And I have to say, “Thank you for doing that — and you’re doing it for yourself.” Like, you’re doing it because you want that relationship, and not everybody else knows that three things are a requirement. Not everybody else out there is, like, consistently, like, paying attention and being intentional. But you are, and these steps you’re doing are for yourself — like, so that you have these relationships. So it’s a great thing to name, Bec, for sure.
Rebecca
This is fabulous. This has been such a fabulous conversation. I feel like we could talk for ages.
Shasta
We could, we could. I could do this all day long. I love this stuff.
Natalie
I do have one last question, Shasta, if you don’t mind. When I reached out to you, you said, “I’m not saying yes to a lot of things these days, but I’m going to say yes to this.” Can I just ask, like, what it was that prompted you to say your yes in that moment? Because, you know, there’s obviously an evaluative process for you.
Shasta
You know, I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember the email you sent, or the message that you sent. But I am at the age where I believe in trusting my instinct and trying to listen to that still small, quiet voice faster and faster. So I know there was something in there that just made me be like, “You know what? I’m just going to say yes to this.” So yeah, my default mode, though, because I could be busy all day long and wearing myself out — my default mode is to practice saying no. You know, and I have, like, three things that have to be in place before I say yes, but then I always allow for there to be, you know, the exception. And so, yeah, it was a joy to be with you guys and to have you be one of the exceptions where my body was like, “That sounds fun. Let’s do it.”
Natalie
Well, we’re so grateful you said yes. So thank you, Shasta.
Shasta
Can I end with a few statistics for all of your listeners to kind of just bring home?
Natalie
Yes, please.
Shasta
You know, we were talking about friendship — we probably have touched on some nerves for all of us where we feel a little lonely, where we feel like we hunger for better relationships. And I just kind of want to reiterate how normal it is. It is normal, unfortunately, that more of us are lonely than not. And I was giving some of those statistics earlier — 75% of us wish our relationships were more meaningful. So it’s normal, but let’s not let that be the normal going forward. It’s also normal that a lot of us are sleep deprived and dehydrated, but that doesn’t mean that’s how we’re supposed to be living. And so let’s remind ourselves that this is something we can do. This is something that we can step into. You know, you can go to a gym once and say, “Well, that wasn’t fun. That didn’t work — I didn’t lose any weight, I’m not any stronger.” And in fact, the next day you might just be more sore, but that doesn’t mean that quote going to the gym isn’t the right thing to do for our physical health.
And so yeah, you can go to an event or two, you can reach out once or twice and feel like it’s not working. But I promise you, I hope that today, when you see the consistency, and if you spend time with somebody regularly, see them repeatedly, and as long as you’re getting to know each other during that time and as long as you leave each other feeling positive emotions, I can guarantee you that you can build any relationship. And so we can all do this. We can, like, make sure that we’re letting people leave our presence feeling good about who they are, that we’re sharing a little bit about who we are, we’re listening to them and giving them affirmation, and that we’re following up with them. And these things, we can do this. There are muscles that we can build, they get easier and easier.
And I’ll just end by saying if we don’t answer this hunger, if we stay lonely, that is fatal. You have a 63% chance of dying prematurely. It’s worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It matters more to your health than whether you exercise and what you eat, or whether you live in pollution and smoke. Our friendships are, like, the number one factor to our health, to our longevity, to our mental health. 70% of our happiness comes down to our friendships and our relationships. So it’s virtually impossible — you can get everything else you think you need in life to be happy, and that adds up to 30%. So it’s, like, virtually impossible to live a really happy, healthy life if you don’t have this. So please just want to end with a little bit of push: that you hear something today and you say, “Ok, I’m going to make that phone call, I’m going to reach out. It’s scary. I’m going to follow up on this. I’m going to attend that thing.” Whatever it is. Definitely, there’s very few things that matter more to your life than, like, leaning in and saying yes to this. So wish you all so much that you might all feel seen and safe in satisfying ways. So, thank you so much, Natalie and Bec.
Rebecca
Oh, thank you.