Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends

M. Scott Peck, author of The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, defines “community,” as a group of people “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in ea

The secret to authenticity, then, is security.

Rebecca Solnit shared, “To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

Don’t take it personally. When our friend brings up an issue, when we invite a new friend out and they turn us down, when we haven’t heard from a friend in a while, it doesn’t mean that we’re unworthy, wrong, or unlovable.

We are left with the sense that these villains need only to confront their scars for their core of goodness to be unleashed.

Maybe villains are more like us than we think. Maybe if we felt loved and accepted, we, like the Grinch, would all be our “real selves,” and our masks would fall to the floor like crunchy leaves from an autumn tree.

Authenticity, however, involves allowing ourselves to feel rejected by the friend who abandoned us, hurt by our friend’s taunts, or incompatible with our childhood friend. It’s a state of internal honesty. It’s who we are underneath these defense mechanisms we’ve constructed for our self-protection.* And when we dislodge these defenses, we find we

Instead of admitting we’ve outgrown a friend, we tell ourselves everything is fine.

Never let them see you sweat. But this advice is better applied to armpits than to vulnerability. Never lettin’ ’em see us sweat doesn’t make us strong. It makes us suppress our weakness, so it is trapped inside us.